by Chris Lynch
He can’t make no music ’cause he’s such a dink….
“Gimme that!” I growled, clutching at the microphone while the rest of them laughed. Steven held the thing up high out of my reach. Then he yelped some more:
We’ll really know all, when we hear
Wolfman sing,
We blew it last time
We should have voted for Ling….
I punched him so hard in the stomach that you could hear his intestines go squish over the microphone.
And it was good.
Problem was, he was right. How long could I keep my affliction hidden? I couldn’t let them see it.
Everyone was laughing and hooting now. The force of the punch caused me to wheel backward ten feet across the garage. I swaggered back toward Steven (it’s hard to describe how a guy swaggers in a wheelchair, but I’ve mastered it, you’ll have to take my word) and snatched my microphone.
Now I knew what I’d lost temporarily. My fangs.
Thanks, Steve-o.
“Hel-looo baayyyyyybeeee,” I sang over the sound system. “Now my wheels be fast and my woman be trashed and I got no cash but I gotalotta flash and yo’ momma think I’m brash, but Sir Chesthair gonna crash …”
Oh yes. The Wolf had returned. It was time to howl.
7
Backstage Passes
ONCE WE LAUNCHED THE Sniffs, we became the busiest band in the biz. We played the sidewalk in front of the subway hole where I first discovered Scratch. (“Ah, the memories,” he said as some guy threw an apple core into our pass-the-hat hat. No problem, though, as Scratch ate the core and Ling just put the hat right back on.) We played in front of the Goodwill collection bins in the Buddy’s Liquors parking lot. (“I’ll take that hat, lady,” said Ling. “No kidding,” Scratch said, fondling a very soft and worn-out single driving glove, “real leather, you say, huh? You sure you don’t want this?” It was our most lucrative gig.)
The beauty of it was, we were getting famous—a little—we were profiting—a little—and all the while we weren’t getting one lick better. In fact, I believe we got worse the more we played together. The sound we made as a unit was the most glorious annoyance imaginable.
I was in heaven.
“But maybe we don’t want to play for apples and pennies and people’s old underwear,” Steven said as we were hauling our stuff back to the club following a blistering set outside the Peaceable Kingdom pet store. (“See,” said Scratch. “I always knew these bone-shaped cookies had to be tasty, but nobody would listen.” “No, sir, I don’t know what a tick dip is,” said Cecil, “but if it’s free and you think I could use one, I’ll take it. Thank ya kindly.”)
“Ya, mister manager,” Jerome said. Jerome was getting to be one feisty little triangulist. “I think it’s about time you improved the quality of our venues.”
“Venues …” Lars said. “Ah, that means songs, right? He wants us to play better songs?”
“Places,” Scratch answered. “Jerome is suggesting we move up to classier shows, and I think he’s right. We’re ready, Wolf. Except for maybe … one or two adjustments.” As he said that, Scratch aimed his guitar at Lars like a machine gun. Lars, oblivious, just went on turning the tuning keys on his guitar, which he did all the time and which really bothered the rest of us, who did no such thing.
Tuning, don’t you hate that?
“I know,” I said to Scratch. “You and I will have a musical strategy meeting after we adjourn the general meeting—”
“Is this a meeting?” Ling asked as he sweated under the hot sun with the bass drum and my sound system on his back. “It doesn’t feel like a meeting. Look, my makeup is starting to run.”
That’s right. His stage makeup. And it was running. Ling-Ling’s eye and cheek colors were beginning to melt, and if you think he was a sight before, picture him with his doughy face curdling and dissolving.
“Okay,” I said as we broke through the door into the cool of Lars’s garage. “Everybody just dump your gear and call it a day. Scratch and me are going to hash a couple of things out, and then, by the time you all return on Monday, we will have a couple of announcements regarding our next, fantabulous show, and the course of our rise to fame thereafter.”
“Wow,” said Cecil. “Those are some excellent words. I can’t wait.”
“Ya, well, wait anyway,” Steven advised. “Because the most excellent word of all for our manager is Crockasaurus.”
“Rock-a-saurus,” I corrected. “See you all on Monday. Rest up; you were brilliant today. You killed ’em. Keep the edge, keep the edge.”
The He-Men filed out, dreaming of greatness to come, I’m sure.
It was my job to dream up the how part.
I knew where to start. I didn’t know much else, but I knew where to start.
“Hey, Lars,” I said as he climbed into his jumpsuit to get back to the day job he hardly ever did anymore. He was getting like an irresponsible kid, shirking all his chores to chase a fantasy that made no sense. “Got a minute there, Lars?”
“Right then,” Lars croaked in a fake Cockney accent. “What can I do you blokes for?”
“The blokes want you out,” I blurted.
“Let him down easy, wouldja?” Scratch whispered.
“Oh,” I said. “Well, take all the time you need clearing out your corner of the arena. And whenever you want to come see us play, you’re in for backstage passes.”
“You’re a sport,” Scratch said.
“What, backstage passes, I own the stage, remember? So just forget about it. I’m not leaving. What do you think of that?”
Mind you, this was the one adult in the group.
“I’ll just hang around, and whenever you play, I’ll play louder. If you go on the road, I’ll follow.”
I turned to Scratch, giving him the “What now?” face.
“All right,” Scratch said, trying to relate to Lars in a language I didn’t speak—guitar. “But you gotta sloppy it up. You gotta stop trying to make songs where there are none. You gotta be a mess like the rest of us, otherwise you’re destroying our distinctive sound.”
“I’ll do it, I will,” Lars promised, desperate not to lose his shot at fame. “I’ll go put my axe way out of tune right now.”
“That’s a start,” I said. “Run along.”
Cecil walked back in through the door he’d walked out of ten minutes before.
“No,” I explained to him slowly. “You see, Cleetus, if you turn right at every corner, you wind up back where you started.”
“I forgot I had some work to do,” he answered.
“Work? What kind of work would you have?”
I could see out of the corner of my eye as Scratch began waving his hands in an X pattern in front of his face like a railroad crossing sign. I spun—my famous one-hand, one-wheel, quick turn—to catch him.
“And why shouldn’t he tell me?” I asked. “Am I not the president of this club?”
“Dictator …” Scratch muttered out of one side of his mouth.
“And am I not manager of the Sniffs?”
“Dictator …” he repeated.
“He’s building a platform for me,” Lars said, creeping back to life and back into the mix. “So I can play from up—”
“For you?” Scratch asked. “I thought he was making a platform for me! This is Scratch and the Sniffs, after all …”
The Killer was beaming. “Y’see, boss, I was talkin’ before and I let slip how I was handy with wood …” His voice trailed off and up at the end of the sentence as if he was asking a question. “… and about how when my uncle Redale an’ me built a silo just the two of us in one weekend, and it still stood up even when a tornado picked it up an’ dropped it, and even no matter how many times ol’ Redale banged into it with his tractor—”
“Whoa, whoa,” I cut in. “You guys are contracting individually to have your own little stages made? How pathetic. How slimy. How foolish and vain and misguided. You guys
make me sick.”
I grabbed Cecil by the elbow. “How big? However high you make theirs, you have to make mine a few inches higher. Listen to ol’ Wolf. I control the purse strings around here, you know….”
“Y’all make me wanna shout,” Cecil growled. “I never saw such a crew. We are a team. A unit. None of us is any greater or lesser than any of the others.”
“Sure, you’d like to believe that.” I laughed.
“Shaddup, for once,” Lars said.
“Ya,” Scratch joined. “Give it a rest, ya mean little monster.”
The room went dead. Now, I certainly appreciate the old give-and-take as much as the next He-Man—okay, a little more than the next He-Man—but a line had been crossed here.
I knew what was there, between the lines of that phrase, ya little monster. You spend most of your life in a wheelchair, and certain patterns emerge that you can recognize easily. I know that I leave myself open for such things, and that maybe there isn’t a great well of sympathy out there for the likes of me, but still …
“That was cold, man,” I said quietly, my voice trembling a bit. I turned and wheeled myself toward the door.
Cecil caught me just before I got outside.
“Hey, Wolf. That wasn’t right. Everybody knows it. Everybody’s sorry.”
“They all say that?” I asked.
“Well, no. But I think they think it.”
I wheeled on.
“Don’t leave. We need you. And I won’t let nobody pull that kind of stuff on you again. Not while The Killer’s around. I promise.”
I looked up at that long country mile of Cecil towering over me and gave him my most spectacular pitiful Tiny Tim face.
“Will you,” I sniffed, “build me a platform higher than the ones you’re building for the rest of them?”
He sighed, looked over his shoulder to where the two guitarists were bonding once more. “Okay, but just a little higher. Just a little ol’ bitty bit.”
Do you love him? Do you just love him?
Cecil started wheeling me back to the other guys. “And you’ll make me a ramp, so I can get up and down from my platform easily?”
“Oh, I’d ’spect that would be some kind of law, that if I built you something it would have to be handicapped accessible.”
“True,” I piped. “That’s very true. And we wouldn’t want to get you in trouble for breaking any city ordinances so soon after arriving in town. I couldn’t allow that, Cecil.”
“You’re a good man, Wolf.”
He said that, he really did. I couldn’t make that up.
8
The Devil in White Bucks
I WAS LYING IN BED thinking hard about what I was going to tell the guys on Monday. How in the world was I going to get a better gig than the one at the Goodwill box? Where do you go from there? What more do they want from me? I’m only human, after all. I’m only one man….
“I don’t care how many men you are, it’s time to turn out the lights,” the screw said, poking his head into my unit.
“Oh, was I thinking out loud?”
“That would be a pleasant change,” he answered.
I hate wiseguys. Don’t you hate wiseguys? Anyway, he wasn’t a screw exactly, he was more of a monitor at the facility where I live. And it’s not a very harsh environment, just between you and me.
“Harvey,” I told him. “Harvey, you run this joint like a prison.”
“Write to your congressman.”
“I did. He sent me a picture of himself.”
“There. So quit your bellyaching.”
“Harvey, I have an idea.”
“I got no money, Wolfgang.”
“It’s not one of those ideas … exactly. I want you to let my band play here.”
“Here? In your bedroom?”
“No, here, in the rec room.”
Harvey thought about it, pulled the cap off his bald head, scratched, put the cap back on. He came in and sat on the edge of the bed, exhausted from the effort of scratching. “What kind of music you play?”
“We … um …”
He had me there.
“Wolf, you even got a band? C’mon, I told you, I got no money.”
“It’s not a scam. We play, sort of, punk-jug music.”
“Punk-j—? I see. Listen, it sounds cute. You don’t play too loud, clean up after yourselves, and I suppose you can have the room to yourselves on Saturday afternoon for an hour or so.”
I shook my head at him.
“No? What, no?”
“No, we are not cute—boy are we not cute—and no, we don’t just want the room. It has to be a show. With some people to hear us. And … you gotta pay us.”
“I gotta … pay? Turn off your light and go to bed.”
“I’m serious. Just pay us something, anything, and we’ll put on a show for the whole joint. It’ll be worth it. Everybody’ll love ya. We got seven guys. Give us, oh, two bucks a head, fourteen dollars. It’s a steal—and it’ll keep me from stealing.”
Harvey shook his head, looked at his watch. “At least I still got my watch,” he said. “Whenever I have dealings with you …” He cut himself off in mid-insult. He pointed at me and smiled.
“Okay,” he said. “But I got a condition.”
“Of course you do,” I said. “I wouldn’t respect you if you didn’t have a condition.”
“I play a pretty peppy accordion….”
Oh my god …
“The good news,” I announced to the assembled He-Men on Monday, “is that we’ve got our breakout concert.”
The He-Men went wild, like on those nature programs when the nest of gorillas all try to scare the cameraman away, beating on their chests, screeching, slapping the ground with their big hairy hands.
“The bad news is, we got another geezer on board.”
“What kind of geezer?” Jerome asked.
“Ah, the accordion-playing kind.”
The He-Men all went wild again.
“Come on, guys, all we got to do is let him sit in for a couple of minutes, we’ll drown him out, and he won’t be a problem anymore. We humor him a little, then ignore him, like we do with Lars.”
“Hey,” yelled Lars.
“See that,” I said. “I can’t even tell when Lars is with us anymore.”
Then I told them where we’d be playing.
“Really broke your neck over the weekend finding us a place to play, huh, Wolf?” Steven said. “What’d you do, just roll out of bed one morning and …”
Should I tell him that I didn’t even roll out of bed? Probably not, huh?
They muttered, they conferred, they huddled without me.
“And they’re paying us two bucks a head.”
The murmurs turned to low oohhs and hums of approval. It doesn’t matter that it’s not much; if somebody’s paying you to do a thing, it’s a much cooler thing. I had them now.
“Hey, it’s two thirty-three a head if we cut Lars out.”
As manager, it was a relatively easy gig to prepare for. I was fairly familiar with the location. The commute to the venue was pretty easy. And the audience was ready-made and more or less captive. My preparations as singer, on the other hand …
We’d made a crude tape on Lars’s big old stereo, the one that doubled as my sound system. Back at the home, I took the tape and popped it into the cassette deck in my room. I sat and I listened.
I turned the tape up as loud as it could go.
I snapped it back off.
“What was that?” I asked the deck. That wasn’t us. That couldn’t have been us.
I turned the tape back on again, lower volume.
There was Scratch’s crazy guitar. There was Lars trying to follow him. Could be us, I guess. And … yes, that sounded like Ling’s bass boom. And the tom-tom, tom-tom-tom/tom-tom-tom (I hate Wolf/I hate Wolf), that was very Steven. And the jug. Is that a jug sound in there?
Ping … one-two-three … ting … one-two-three.
Yup, that was us. If there was one element that separated us from your average meat-grinder punk-rock outfit, it was probably Jerome’s tidy triangle.
But what was missing from this sonic picture?
I had to try. I had to work it out. They were right, all right? I had to admit that I, Wolfgang Amadeus Rivera, was afraid of music. Or at least, I was afraid of what came out when I tried to make any.
As I mentioned, I had a condition. A fearsome condition.
I know. Me and fear, they just don’t go together. I’m as surprised as you are.
I went to the mirror. Stared myself down.
Look at me, wouldja? With a face like that, what am I worried about?
Music on. I start snapping my fingers. Music up louder. Jeez, they are awfully screechy. I snap louder. Two-hand snapping. I unbutton two buttons on my shirt. Resume snapping. Allow a small, one-sided smile. A sneer. Raise one eyebrow. Focus the Stare, so I’m looking down on the audience, rather than at them. We are not friends. We are not peers. We are not equals. You, audience, are here to worship me, and I, idol, am here to let you. And to sing.
The band behind me was in full gale now, the force of them blowing my hair out of place, which we cannot have. I reslick the hair. The guys sound like they are in mortal combat with their instruments. The video to this song would look like a battle scene from Braveheart.
My entrance.
“‘Rocky Mountain High/Colorado—’”
No, no. Please.
“‘What’s new pussycat/Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa—’”
Not.
“‘A white/sport coat/and a pink/car-nation …’”
Oh my god, oh my god! It’s true. Worst fears, worst fears realized. Code red. No—code, code black or whatever the worst code is. Life is over!
There’s a dweeb trapped inside me and it’s gonna come out when I try to sing in front of people!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I had some perverse natural attraction to the entire catalog of the geek anthems and weenie singers of history. Pat Boone, Donny Osmond, Paul McCartney, Michael Bolton. They all live up there in my head like an army of tiny devils using midget paintbrushes to paint my brain with syrup. They killed me with that stuff in therapy, hoping to smother my antisocial tendencies, and it stuck! Now my secret would come out.