by Tom Stern
He only knew that for a brief while, nothing had ever felt more essential.
The next morning, Walter awoke to the rattle of keys in the gate to Mayne Ridge Park. After slumping backward into the park as the gate gave way, Walter pried his tired eyes open. He found his vision had landed upon his ratty, limp styrofoam coffee cup, still sitting out after last night’s lackluster show. Inexplicably, however, the dilapidated drinkware was suddenly and quite literally bursting with a thick mushroom of bills brimming over its scruffy mouth.
Walter sat up and squinted to verify the sight, which had been markedly different before he had drifted off to sleep the previous night.
He rolled forward, reached out, and extracted the wad.
He straightened the bills and gave them a count.
Sixty-two dollars and change.
The next thing Walter heard was a sharp, jagged inhale followed by a series of staccato exhales.
He turned to find, on the ground and not two feet beside where he had slept, a stretching, waking Wallace Braum wrapped neatly in a cocoon-shaped plush sleeping bag pulled neatly to his chin and up over the top of his head. Beside the sleeping bag sat an LED camping lantern as well as a thick book entitled Macroeconomic Ideas in Service of Scalable Niche Microeconomies. Beside the book sat a canteen.
“Goddamn it!” Walter blurted out, not only at the mere unwelcome presence of his twin brother nor simply at his ridiculous level of preparedness for a single night on the street, but also at the now apparent fact that the money was clearly left behind by people taking pity on the sight of a grown man sleeping on a street corner with whatever they made of Wallace.
Walter got up, grabbed his bag, and started down the street for his morning coffee.
“Let me explain,” interjected the little urban camper.
“I don’t want an explanation,” Walter called back as he rounded the corner out of sight. “I want you to leave me alone.”
Wallace squirmed and fought his way out of his sleeping bag. Once free, he gathered his gear as quickly as he could, which was not terribly quickly at all given both his physical limitations and just generally how damn hard it is to roll up and pack a fluffy nylon sleeping bag.
Walter took his booth in the back of Smythe’s Diner and ordered whatever was on the day’s Value Menu. He pushed the sixty-two dollars into the bottom of his pocket and spread out his scraps of paper. He struggled to stay focused on his lyrics, though, what with the sights, sounds, and smells all around him.
Ten minutes later, Wallace came lumbering through the narrow aisle of the dive diner, a heaping mound of backpack teetering on his uneven back. Wallace slung his bag into the booth and pulled himself up to sit opposite Walter, who quickly culled his papers to keep them safe from Wallace’s possibly wandering eyes, scrutiny, or hurt feelings. Walter would have bothered to wonder how Wallace found him here, but he knew far better by now than to trouble himself with such pointless questions.
“Why don’t you understand that I don’t want you here?” Walter cut right to the chase.
“You think I don’t understand that?” Wallace fired back. “But I’m not going to let you ruin this, too.”
“Ruin what?” Walter returned the volley before recognizing that Wallace was also insinuating that… “Wait…What else are you saying that I have ruined?”
“Several things.”
“Like what?”
“Your sales career,” demanded Wallace, deeply offended to his core.
“That wasn’t mine to ruin.”
“Now you’re just being obstinate.”
“It was a borrowed life.”
“You had a gift, Walter. You just chose not to take pride in it.”
“I’m not a salesman! I am a musician!” Walter fired back.
“You can’t be both?” Wallace held firm.
“This is precisely why I don’t want you around me.”
“Because I want to help you?”
“You won’t just let things be. A salesman is not a singer. And a singer is not a salesman.”
“The two share a great deal in common, Walter,” Wallace demanded. “And I will always be your biggest fan, but I have to tell you that your current choice of career path relies on a very narrow likelihood of success. It’s a non-diversified job market. Especially with your lack of training, there are really no applications for your skill set outside of your development of your individual brand. And that’s in a market already mega-saturated with individual brands. So product differentiation is going to be massively difficult to achieve…”
“Will you shut the fuck up?!” Walter yelled more than asked.
“I’m tired of you treating me like garbage!” Wallace yelled right back in his shrill squeak of a voice. “I’m your em-effing brother and I deserve your Gee-dee respect!”
“You don’t just get my respect, you little silver spoon mutant. You have to earn it.”
“I’m here, aren’t I? I’m sleeping on a cee-ess-ing street corner to support your unthinkably foolish life decision. If you don’t respect that, then you’re not looking for respect. You’re looking to be abusive.”
“One night does not earn my respect.”
“Well, you’re stuck with me until I earn it, then. So let me know when I’ve accrued enough time in profound discomfort, pointless danger, and unnecessary squalor.”
Walter did not know what else to say, so he started gathering his papers to leave…
“Would you stop running, already, and deal with this?”
“There’s nothing to deal with, Wallace. This is my life now. I don’t care whether or not you or anyone else likes it.”
“Just let me help you,” Wallace almost begged.
“I don’t need help,” Walter stated flatly as he stood up from the table and started off. “I’m happy.” But before getting too far, Walter couldn’t help but turning back to ask, “What about Veronica?”
“What about her?” Wallace answered with a question.
“While you’re spending weeks following me around, what’s she going to be doing without you?”
Wallace took in a breath before replying, “So you think it will take a couple of weeks for you to come around, then? I only ask because I have school coming up.”
Walter sighed, turned, and left.
By the time Walter got back to Mayne Ridge Park, Wallace was already there, sitting and waiting patiently on the bench that Walter had been using most afternoons.
“Think of me as your fan, Walter,” Wallace explained before Walter had a chance to speak. “I’m interested in your music, in your career. I want to talk to others about you. I want to see your success.”
“When you say it like that it sounds like math.”
“But you get my point.”
Walter took a breath and looked around Mayne Ridge Park, which had already lost its luster anyway. So he turned and left.
“I’m still your fan!” called Wallace after him.
Walter headed to the YMCA, snuck in the back door, and headed into the locker room. He pulled off his clothes. He stood under a hot shower. He closed his eyes and let the water fall onto the crown of his head. His mind turned to lyrics and melodies. Until the sound of shower shoes approached, stabbing and squeaking at the concrete floor in an uneven cadence that pulled Walter back to the present. He heard the shower next to him creak and sputter into an aggressive stream of water cascading sharply to the ground. He did not bother to open his eyes to look.
“You’re saturating your market,” that familiar, shrill falsetto pierced the otherwise brilliant calm of the hot shower.
“I just want to be left alone, Wallace,” Walter seethed.
“I can’t stand by and watch you make so many mistakes,” Wallace stood firm.
“Then stop watching.”
“
Stop making mistakes.”
“You’re the only…thing…in the world that doesn’t make mistakes, Wallace,” Walter could not help but turn now and open his eyes as he hurled these words bitterly at the little savant whose naked body made him look even more sad and harsh and crooked than usual. “Making mistakes is what normal people do.”
“I am a normal person, Walter,” Wallace stated with a deeply felt earnestness. “Stop calling me a thing, or worse. I am just like you.”
Wallace reached out and struggled with the soap dispenser hanging on the wall, his jagged fingers and hands not quite able to pump the handle without some serious adjustment and maneuvering.
“You’re not normal, Wallace. And that’s fine. In fact, it’s exceptional and you know it. And even if you were born normally…”
“You mean if you hadn’t enveloped me when we were fetuses?” Wallace spat, a deep pool of liquid soap in his cupped hands as he turned to face Walter.
“Are you kidding me? You’re upset about something I did when I was a fetus?”
“Maybe it’s just your nature to want to crush me?”
“I was a fetus! What about the thirty-five years that I literally kept you alive? That’s not my nature? But what I did when I was fetus is?”
But Wallace did not buckle under the weight of his brother’s anger. He stood firm. And Walter actually found himself respecting the little punk just a touch, almost appreciating his newfound edge.
“What’s done is done, Walter,” Wallace segued as he tried to work the soap in his hands into a bit of a lather only to find his hands weren’t quite adept enough to accomplish this feat. So he began unevenly slathering the goopy pool of soap onto his face and body, haphazardly pushing the pink sludge around in streaks. “Let’s move on to the present.”
Walter turned off his shower, wrapped himself in a YMCA-provided towel, and headed out to the locker room.
“We are brothers, Walter,” Wallace called after and through the wincing sting of soap working its way into his eyes. “That means something.”
Walter took a seat in front of his locker fully intending to change quickly and leave before Wallace could catch up, heading to a part of town where he did not typically go so he could not be found. But Walter found himself, instead and unexpectedly, just sitting and staring at the grimy tiles of the locker room floor. He knew it was a matter of maybe a minute before Wallace came staggering along. But he could not get his body to move. Or maybe he did not want to get his body to move. He didn’t know anymore.
When Wallace exited the showers, he was knotted into a twisted towel and still coated in a not insignificant amount of unlathered pink soap. He had managed to wipe the slick from his eyes and mouth, although the whites of his eyes, which were actually more like yellow-reds to begin with, were now even more pronounced a shade of red from the agitation. When Wallace saw Walter still sitting wrapped in a towel, he couldn’t help but exhale a grateful sigh of relief before continuing over to the locker beside his brother’s and fighting it open. He then struggled himself up onto the bench, a feat made all the more difficult by the slick of soap still streaking different parts of his body.
When he finally got himself somehow settled upright beside his brother, Wallace exhaled. “Refreshing,” he stated, presumably in reference to the shower.
Walter shook his head, got up, and fetched a clean towel. He unfolded it, placed it atop Wallace’s head, and started rubbing the soap out of the stubborn little pest’s hair. Although Walter could not see Wallace’s face, he was certain that his brother was smiling his pained little grimace-smile underneath the friction, darkness, and warmth of the jostling towel.
“The foot traffic through this area every evening consists of the same eighty to one hundred twenty people,” Wallace explained from a bench in Mayne Ridge Park during one of Walter’s brief breaks from wrestling with his lyrics, “which means you’re selling your product to the same, captive audience repeatedly.”
Walter looked blankly at Wallace.
So Wallace shifted his tone away from the matter of fact and more toward the explanatory as he stated, “They stop buying because they’re being saturated.”
“Buying what?” Walter asked, deeply confused.
“Well, that’s another challenge you face, frankly. Namely that your product lacks a clear definition of terms, but that aside for the moment…they’re buying your performance. But you’re asking them to buy it every night, you see. What would be better is if you were to ask them to buy it once, but at a higher price than what you’re tacitly charging. Rather than asking them to make a series of, say, ten purchases at maybe $1 each, you should ask for one purchase of $10. A strategy built on securing a sequence of ten transactional commitments involves far greater risk and volatility than there is in a strategy built upon acquiring just one. Foundationally, this latter approach also better incentivizes repeat business because it allows more time to pass in between purchases and you are asking for fewer overall active commitments in the form of those purchases, yet you are netting the same monetary results. It then gives them more time to feel some distance from your product, which, in turn, will motivate some to purchase again in order to close that distance. But I’m getting ahead of myself.”
“That’s not really what all of this is about to me,” Walter finally cut in.
But Wallace just went on explaining, “You don’t have a clearly defined product just yet. What you need to do first is broaden your fan base, even if they are not yet revenue generators in any significant manner.”
“It’s more about just singing songs,” Walter attempted to add to the conversation.
“The first step to broadening your audience requires diversifying your performance locations,” Wallace continued. “I would urge you first to test the likelihood of creating a significant market for your product by expanding your proof of concept into multiple strategic markets. Or maybe, right now, we should be thinking of you as more of a service. No. You see, here’s the thing… You go to see a live music act play, in part, because you can’t always see that live music act play. That is, they come through town once a year. Maybe twice.”
“I’m not even sure how much longer I want to do these shows.”
“You will not quit this, Walter,” Wallace looked his brother squarely in the eye and stated what he clearly considered an indubitable fact.
“I didn’t say I’m quitting,” Walter scrambled to clarify, “…it’s more that I might not really be good enough to…”
“As I’ve made plain, I’m not convinced of the prudence of your overall career choice,” Wallace cut back in with the same resolute tone, “but what’s done is done. You need to see this through and I will support you in doing so. I’ll draw up a city-wide tour of street corners, enabling us to expose your brand to new and developing markets while simultaneously testing methods of revenue generation surrounding your business model.”
“What if,” Walter insisted, “I don’t want your help?”
“Of course you want my help. You’re all alone, you’ve reached the end of your limited knowledge base, and you have no other options. That’s why I waited for precisely this moment to appear, Walter.”
Walter would have protested further, but he knew that Wallace, per usual, was absolutely right. So instead, he found himself with truly nothing more at all to say on this entire topic.
So he stated simply, and for the record, “You can be a real dick, Wallace.”
Then he let his twin brother go on with his plan, which proved simple enough in concept, but fairly complex in execution.
Over the next few weeks, Wallace researched local commuting patterns and paths. He separated the city into twenty-eight distinct sectors and determined a profile of the average commuter within each sector. Based on the directionality, length, and speed of the foot traffic of said average commuter through each sector o
r contiguous sectors, Wallace found the ideal location for a Walter Braum performance in each distinct area of the city. He also determined the appropriate starting time as well as the ideal length of each performance, which he determined by researching gross revenues generated from ticket sales in local venues wherein smaller, lesser-known acts were performing.
Wallace’s research also reached into performance-based elements, which was where Walter drew a line in the sand. “From the moment I start to perform until the moment I stop, that is all mine,” explained Walter.
Wallace simply shrugged and explained, “Okay. But you’ll come around.”
Walter’s other hard and fast stipulation was his refusal to perform in the sector of town that captured foot traffic to and from Sheprick Consolidated.
“Revenue is revenue,” explained Wallace.
“And dignity is dignity,” answered Walter.
Wallace simply shook his head, contented for now with the belief that Walter would eventually come around on this one, too.
A few days before he was scheduled to leave for Harvard, Wallace finalized a complete tour schedule, audience/market engagement strategy, and accompanying logistical and operational guides. He walked his brother, step by step, through the entire plan on the stone ledge at the mouth of Mayne Ridge Park. Then he stood up and gathered his things for the trip to the airport.
“All you have to do,” Wallace explained, “is follow it.”
“Thank you,” Walter said.
“If you veer from the plan,” Wallace could not help but stress, “then the whole thing will fail…”
“I get it.”
“Because it’s a long-term plan. It’s a common mistake to seek a long-term payoff in the short term, to let that alter your assessment of the effectiveness of your long-term plan in the short term.”
Walter just nodded, getting annoyed.
Wallace nodded back.
And an awkward silence set in.
“I’ll be…” Walter started to say just as Wallace turned to start away, bringing the little guy teeter-tottering back, compelling Walter to finish his sentence, “…fine.”