by Tom Stern
“I’ve seen the site,” answered Officer Dungy.
“So…” stated Walter, unsure what relevance this fact bore on the current circumstance.
“So they’re here for you,” Officer Dungy clarified.
“I mean, technically no. Or technically yes, I guess. But not really,” Walter sighed and shook his head before asking, confounded, “I’m responsible for them?”
“Huh?”
“The thing of it is, if I resist, then they’re just going to embrace that. They see me as an iconoclast of sorts.”
Officer Dungy did not react. So Walter went on…
“What I’m saying is, they won’t go until I perform. It’s part of the whole narrative of this thing, the website character and all.”
Officer Dungy still did not react.
“Ok,” conceded Walter.
He walked over to what seemed like it might be the front of the crowd and stepped onto a storefront window ledge that gave him another few feet of lift. He cupped his hands around his mouth and called out, at full volume, “I need everyone to leave right now! There is no show tonight!”
Just as Walter had predicted, the crowd swelled into a rapturous ovation of cheers and gleeful yelps that settled into a thunderous round of claps and chants of “Music! Music! Music!”
Walter turned to Officer Dungy and shrugged.
So Officer Dungy shrugged back, approached Walter, and cuffed him.
The next morning Walter woke up to the baritone clanging of a thick key in a heavy lock, followed by the sliding of a metal door and someone calling out, “Braum!”
Walter rolled over from his side and squinted his eyes open to find a prison guard standing in the flat fluorescent light of the holding cell block.
“You’re paid up,” the guard explained.
Walter unfurled onto his feet and made for the open cell door.
He was escorted down a hallway to a thick, plastic window with an officer on the other side who slid some papers to Walter beneath the protective layer’s base. Walter signed the papers and a buzz sounded before a nearby door opened and out of it stepped an officer carrying Walter’s bag sheathed in copious amounts of plastic wrap. The officer pushed the bag into Walter’s chest. Walter took it. Then he was shown the door.
Outside on the sidewalk in front of the prison, Wallace waited in a suit that somehow perfectly fit his jumbled, jagged body and, as a result, surely belonged in a tailor’s hall of fame, if indeed such a thing existed. Walter could not help but immediately note that Wallace seemed much more focused, more self-assured than he had ever seen his brother before. At first, Walter figured perhaps it was the suit, but he quickly suspected it was more than just that.
“I have midterms, I can’t stay long,” explained Wallace as Walter made his way down the steps and onto the sidewalk. “There’s a new schedule on the website. I need you to follow it. And I need you to follow the instructions regarding the envelopes.”
Wallace then pulled from his pockets two more wrinkled, bursting gray envelopes and handed them to Walter, who did not so much as raise a finger to take them.
“Who are all of these people coming to my shows, Wallace?”
“They’re your fans.” Wallace stated what he considered completely obvious.
“But most of them have never even heard me sing before.”
“Does that matter?”
“Of course,” Walter fired back what he considered completely obvious.
Wallace grabbed Walter’s right hand and pressed the two envelopes into it.
Walter sighed. He tore through the plastic wrap encasing his bag, stuffing the envelopes into the bag’s bottom. Wallace shook his head as he watched.
“You haven’t opened any of the envelopes, have you?” Wallace derided more than asked.
“Do phone booths still have phone books?” Walter deflected with a question of his own.
“Do phone booths still exist?” Wallace shot back.
“I remember not very long ago when you were actually in awe of everything.”
Walter started off down the sidewalk.
“Where are the envelopes?” Wallace called after his brother before hurrying along the sidewalk to catch up. “At the YMCA?”
“Some. The others are…” Walter reached into his backpack and retrieved two fistfuls of thick, lumpy envelopes, “…here.”
He attempted to hand them over to Wallace, but the little guy refused to take any of it, explaining instead, “Okay, so you should know that you have sixty-eight thousand seven hundred and twelve dollars in cash on some combination of your person.”
Walter stopped walking, turned to face Wallace.
“What?” he asked. “Why?”
“Because I can’t issue you checks or transfer the funds electronically until you sign off on the account paperwork that I sent to you in the first envelope.”
“No, why is there… Where is… What?”
“Ticket sales. Merch. Ad revenue from web traffic.”
“We don’t sell tickets,” Walter explained, choosing just one of the buckshot points of inquiry flooding his brain. “I play street corners.”
“We don’t sell them in a traditional sense, no. Haven’t you looked at the website?”
“But these people don’t even know me,” Walter picked another of the myriad points of conjecture and tossed it out, this one proving a recurring theme in Walter’s disbelief.
“I’ve been learning that commoditization when it comes to things of at least partially intrinsic value really operates according to an entirely different set of principles than does a product whose significance is purely or predominantly extrinsic. The value proposition is entirely different…”
“But these people,” Walter interjected yet a third rephrasing of what was clearly a central point of concern for him, “are not really paying for me.”
“…and people view their purchases as ingrained with an interwoven fabric of meaning that a purely utilitarian purchase lacks, or at least lacks in such magnitude. Now, this presents both challenges and opportunities. But pairing the reach of what is essentially an online communication and transactional model with the delivery of said intrinsic commodity has proven in many instances to be quite a powerful means of enabling meaningful consumer engagement. So I figured I’d give it a go. As a project. For my class. And, quite frankly, it has been wildly successful thus far.”
“But these people,” Walter repeated once again, only this time he stopped walking and lowered his hands down upon Wallace’s shoulder, as if to steer his brother’s attention away from theoretical business speak and back onto what Walter clearly considered a critical point, “they don’t even know me. Or my music.”
“As it turns out, that is only partially true,” Wallace explained, a burning spark of passion flitting about in his eyes. “I was discussing this project with a professor of mine and he said something to me that really opened up my thinking. Do you know what he said?”
“Of course not.”
“He said, ‘More important than the man is the story.’”
Wallace fell silent and entirely still, as if even a flinch of a muscle right now might completely overwhelm his brother as this surely earth-shattering concept washed over him and took root in his cognition. But Walter simply answered Wallace’s silence with his own blank-eyed silence.
“Isn’t that amazing?” Wallace finally prodded.
Walter turned and continued walking.
“Don’t you see how powerful that is?” Wallace called after his brother as he once again scurried to catch up and match gait, as much as his uneven limbs would afford anyway. “Especially in a market so deeply saturated with product.”
“What the fuck are you talking about, Wallace?” Walter barked.
“I’m building a sustainable audience
for you. Like we discussed.”
“We never discussed that.”
“Not by name, perhaps, but we discussed diversifying your audience by expanding into new markets and increasing the amount of your monetary ask per interaction. So what else would such a conversation amount to, really? If you think about it.”
“Why are you here, Wallace?” Walter asked, not terribly interested in the answer to this question as he hung a right and headed towards a seedier part of town.
“I got you out of prison,” Wallace shot back, baffled.
“Oh, yeah. Thanks.”
“I feel a little bit responsible for that, I concede. But this circumstance has nevertheless presented me with an opportunity to come here to get you to sign the Walter Braum, LLC, paperwork that I have created and then to open a bank account so I can start putting your part of the profits directly into your account. It’s much safer that way…”
“So let me see if I understand this, in simplest terms.” Walter cut in as they continued to walk. “In the past five weeks, in addition to attending classes full time at Harvard, you have created a website that has generated nearly seventy thousand dollars in revenue around interest in my performances?”
“No,” corrected Wallace. “I created a website and accompanying viral marketing campaign, online and analog, in conjunction with my full-time classes at Harvard and these efforts have generated nearly one hundred and thirty thousand dollars in revenue around interest in your performances, sixty-eight thousand seven hundred and twelve dollars of which is your portion of the profits after estimated withholdings for taxes, annual operating costs, reinvestment into the brand, and my nominal salary have been deducted.”
Walter stopped walking, yet again.
So did Wallace, before adding…
“But yes to the other things. About the classes and the five weeks and all that.”
“What the fuck, Wallace?”
“To be perfectly honest with you, it’s slightly underperforming my projections. But I think I figured out why. It’s an adjustment I would make in any future comparable launches for sure. And I’m a little bit embarrassed by the margins, even though they are pretty strong for a start-up. But I also need you to check the new tour schedule every day on the website. It’s changed and you can’t miss performances. That is more or less the worst thing you could possibly do to your customer at this point. Last night was really a pretty bad thing, Walter.”
“I got arrested!” Walter insisted.
“But you didn’t perform,” Wallace countered. “The artist we all know and love would have at least performed for as long as he could. Even if it was only for a minute. That’s how much it matters to you, Walter. But instead, you walked away.”
“Wait…what?”
“But what we need to focus on for now is the backlash. Granted, there has also been a surge in broader interest as the story of the arrest has grown beyond the engine of the campaign itself. But ideally this would have happened anyway while we could have avoided the backlash by performing.”
“All of this has happened in the past ten hours?”
“This is the speed of business nowadays, Walter. We can keep up or we can perish. One of my other professors told me that.”
“Can we go back a second?”
“No. Aren’t you listening to me? We need to move forward. Immediately. We need to stick to the schedule, no matter what. That is what you would do.”
“But that’s not what I would do,” Walter explained. “In fact, I don’t think I want to follow the schedule anymore.”
“Why not?” Wallace asked, flummoxed.
“I want to get back to what I was doing before.”
“Back into sales?”
“No. After that, but before this.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I want to get back to just playing songs,” Walter explained as he finally arrived at an old, tattered public phone booth in front of a rundown liquor store with dust-laden, sun-faded products packed into every available square inch of its storefront window. “I thought this was still here,” Walter muttered to himself, justifying the journey before picking up the weather-beaten phone book that hung from a thin, rusted cord beneath the phone. He started leafing through the browning, yellowed pages.
“You can do that and follow the schedule,” Walter insisted. “The schedule has done everything we wanted it to do.”
“Do you have some coins?” Walter asked Wallace.
“For that phone?”
Walter nodded.
“I have a cell phone, Walter,” Wallace explained, removing it from his pocket and handing it to his brother, who shook his head and took the phone.
“You couldn’t have told me this before I went searching for a phone booth?”
“All you said was do phone booths have phone books. That’s supposed to mean something to me?”
“What reason for finding a phone booth exists that wouldn’t be addressed by a cell phone?”
“Damn it, Walter,” Wallace insisted, “I can’t stay. Let’s address the topic at hand.”
“What topic?” Walter mumbled as he dialed a number from the phone book into the cell phone.
“Our strategy moving forward. We need to clarify some things, to get on the same page, that’s why I came here,” Wallace replied only to be met with Walter’s raised hand as he waited for someone to answer his call.
“This message is for the Mark Clark from the band Walter and Mark, if I have the wrong number I apologize, but there are five Mark Clarks in the phone book. Anyway, I would like to know why the fuck you quit on the band when our sound was, in my opinion anyway, most certainly worth exploring. I’m open to the possibility that we might be better suited to traditional venues and wanted to try to get us booked at Pilot’s Bar where I know a guy, but… You need to explain to me. You need to… I’ll be at the park this evening and you need to come by and give me one hell of a reason. Or I’m kicking you out of the band. So…”
As Walter hung up, Wallace shook his head and lowered his stare to the ground, seething.
“You have a band?”
“I did,” corrected Walter. “Sort of.”
“Who is in this band?”
“No one at the moment.”
“Who was in the band, then?”
“Me. And a guy named Mark.”
“That’s it?” Wallace took this in a moment, before adding, “That’s a band?”
“The Black Keys. The White Stripes,” Walter scoffed back. “They’re two-member bands.”
Walter started dialing another number from the phone book.
“What did you play, then?” Wallace inquired, ruminating quite deeply about this new development.
“I sang,” Walter answered indignantly.
“In the band, though.”
“I sang.”
“In those two bands everyone plays an instrument, too.”
“Well,” Walter explained as he put the ringing phone to his ear, “this wasn’t that kind of band.”
“But you just said it was.”
Walter put up his hand again, silencing Wallace as he started, “This message is for the Mark Clark from the band Walter and Mark…”
Wallace took several steps away from Walter. He lifted his gaze across the street and puzzled why his brother would have even considered forming a band. Walter had everything he wanted. Or he was at the very least well on his way to everything. He had money, adoration, respect, recognition. He had the lifestyle he desired. He had the space and time in his life to perform his songs. Wallace pulled a small notepad and a pen from the inside breast pocket of his sport coat and started scribbling feverishly in his own lopsided way. Numbers, words, calculations, thoughts. He filled several pages, but none of the explanations he explored, none of the scenar
ios he mapped out, none of the reasons he posited could explain this move.
“Wallace,” Walter barked as though he were repeating the name for the sixth or seventh time.
Wallace looked up from his notepad.
“Let’s go,” said Walter. “I’m done.”
“Look, we’ve experienced an overwhelmingly rapid rate of growth, and I’m willing to concede that there are some elements of stress and fatigue that could be associated with such an occurrence. But far more pressing and worthy of our attention and energies at the present moment is the fact that this customer base might very well be poised to recede drastically if we don’t vary our product offerings, both in content and in nature of engagement. This is the other reason behind my visit.”
“I’m tired of whatever it is that you are talking about.”
“We need to slow down here. We need to regroup and redefine. We’ve accomplished so much, Walter. We really need to protect that so we can better build upon it. The new tour schedule I created offers half as many dates, but I’m thinking we might want to go even further.”
“I don’t want to think about this stuff, Wallace.”
“Then you’re being stupid!”
“So what is wrong with that?” answered Walter, in earnest.
“Well…” Wallace considered, deeply frustrated. “…everything!”
Walter started walking back in the direction from which they had come.
Wallace, whose frustration and resentment surprisingly read precisely as such on his face, tried to just let Walter go. But he could not.
“I’m trying to help you here,” Wallace called out, following after his brother.
“I’m going to get a band started,” Walter called back. “I’m getting back to the music and the songs.”
“That makes no sense, Walter,” Wallace proclaimed, thrusting his notepad of calculations over his head. “You’re going to need to work at least twice as hard to get back a fraction of the return that you’re already receiving.”
“I don’t care.”
“That is impossible!” Wallace nearly screamed.
Walter stopped walking and so did Wallace.