by Tom Stern
“I’m a singer,” Walter approached the stage and explained as the band packed up their gear while apologizing to the store clerk. “I can sing.”
The band members looked at one another. A few of them shrugged. And two days later, Walter was rehearsing with Pimplenickel.
Pimplenickel was sort of a moody, atmospheric band. They referred to their sound as Almost-Emo and thought this was an exceedingly clever tag. They shared nearly nothing in common with The Chadwicks. The members of Pimplenickel wore slacks and sweaters. They debated topics they heard on NPR. They ate a lot of salads. A lot of them had girlfriends. One of them was gay. They shared a passion for world music. They also shared a mutual and deep love of Jim Croce. Most of the members of Pimplenickel had gone to college together. They were all quite civil towards one another, their arguments mostly about philosophical implications of decisions as they pertained to the band.
Walter’s first live show with Pimplenickel was one week and all of two rehearsals later. Granted, the show proved little more than a third rehearsal, albeit in a foreign environment, since there was no one at Chubby’s Bar on a Monday night except for a handful of regulars who heard the music, sure, but most certainly were not listening to it. The gig was still a real joy for Walter. But he kept this to himself since the band as a whole seemed pretty deflated by the entire experience. They had paid thirty dollars against revenues from the door to perform there. They had all agreed it was a no-brainer they would make their money back. They had all been wrong.
A few months later, Pimplenickel dissolved. No dramatic explosion. No colossal breakdown. Just a gradual deadening that had begun long before Walter had joined the band but only now revealed itself to have gotten too heavy to avoid any longer. Just like they did everything else, they split amicably. Maynard, the lead guitarist, decided to move on to a solo project. Emma Jane, the drummer, had been itching for some time to get out of town for New York or Los Angeles. Walter never found out which one she decided upon. Paul, the keyboardist, got into law school. And that just left Julius, the bass player to whom the former lead singer had so gingerly handed the microphone that day not all that long ago at Shoop Shoop Records. Julius wasn’t really moving on to anything, but he simply saw no point in arguing for a continued union in which so many parties were no longer interested. Walter had actually forged a bit of a friendship with Julius, crashing on his bandmate’s modest couch a few times when inclement weather drove him to seek shelter from Mayne Ridge Park. The two would get to chatting these nights. Not about much of any particular depth or specificity. But Walter found a sort of kinship there. He liked Julius. He found the guy quiet, practical, and smart. All admirable and pleasant things, in Walter’s estimation. Not hugely rock ’n’ roll per se, but in the context of what lately had proven the incessantly wayward direction of Walter’s life, these traits took on an irreverence of their own. So Walter pitched the idea that the two men start a band.
And a few conversations later, Knucklechuckle was born.
Knucklechuckle’s early rehearsals were little more than meandering musical explorations, loose noise sessions that eventually found their way into something that sounded maybe like the kernels of pop songs. One day Julius off-handedly declared that Knucklechuckle needed at least ten songs before they were really ready to gig.
Walter, equally off-handedly, agreed.
Knucklechuckle, they decided, would be all about energy. Getting people moving. Power pop. But with an underlying weight that seeped out of the irony of the lyrics. Not that they had really written any lyrics yet. That wasn’t Julius’ thing. And Walter had some basic ideas, but nothing he had fleshed out. One of his ideas was for a song he called “My Career in Sales.” It fit nicely with one of the riffs they had created during rehearsal. But all of his lyrics just kind of lay there flat. Words about bars of soap and ironing boards, and nothing more than that at all, really. He wanted the song to be about more than just literal details. He wanted it to transcend the mere breathlessness of selling irons to a Motor Lodge Inn in Dubuque, Iowa. He wanted it to be about the foundational and seemingly terminal mismatch of a man’s outward circumstances with his soul. But he just couldn’t figure out how to get that into the words. He kept at it, though, opting to believe in his deepest heart and contrary to any evidence to such end, that somehow he would find his way to the bigger song he sought.
Then came the job offer.
“It’s another interest of mine,” Julius explained, but to Walter it sounded a bit more like insisting. “And it pays pretty well.”
“What about the band?” Walter insisted right back, although to Julius it sounded a bit more like asking.
“Are we really a band, anyway?” Julius casually dismissed.
“Yes!” Walter shot back. “What else would we be?”
“I mean, a band plays shows. A band has fans.”
“Not necessarily.”
“A band is…” Julius trailed off.
“A band is us,” Walter answered what Julius had not finished.
But Julius just sort of crinkled his brow and pursed his lips before offering, “You can still crash here, if that’s a thing…”
“That’s not a thing,” Walter snapped. “This is about the band.”
“I gotta take this job, Walter. I need to do more than just…” Julius motioned to the surrounding apartment, “…this.”
“All of the sudden you’re fucking ambitious,” Walter scoffed as he gathered his things and headed for the door.
Walter slid $200 underneath the thick, plastic window that protected the ticket agent from the outside world. The agent slid a paper ticket and change back. Walter climbed onto the 9:17 p.m. train to Cambridge, placing his guitar, whom he had named Millie, into the overhead storage space right atop him. He found a seat against the window, wadded up a shirt, and propped it as a pillow against the glass. He closed his eyes. But he worried about someone walking off with Millie.
So he took her down and propped her on the ground in between his feet.
He closed his eyes again and trailed off to sleep until the train jolted into motion ten minutes later and jarred him awake.
“Aren’t you that guy?” a woman’s voice stopped to ask Walter at the very same moment.
He looked up to find an auburn-haired woman bobbing in the aisle beside him.
“I don’t think so,” Walter answered, unsure as to which guy, exactly, she was referring but nevertheless uninterested in identifying with whichever one she had in mind anyway.
“My friend showed me your site. She saw you play once,” she explained. “Are you touring again?”
“No,” Walter said flatly. “That was another person.”
“She said your music was beautiful.”
Walter offered a slight smile before explaining, “That’s kind of her. But that’s not me.”
The woman walked on, casting several glances back over her shoulder as she went, her infatuation seeming to merely deepen with each of Walter’s denials.
The knock of the train quickly settled Walter right back to sleep.
When Walter woke up two hours later, the woman was seated across the aisle from him.
She gave him a few seconds to stir before leaning in and asking, “How far are you going?”
Walter, still out of sorts, wasn’t able to conjure any sort of reply yet.
“I’m going to Hartford,” she answered Walter’s unasked question before extending her hand. “I’m Eleanor.”
That name seemed so very long ago to Walter. Nevertheless, he reached out and shook her hand. “Walter,” he said before thinking better of doing so.
“She said that would be your name,” Eleanor explained. “I called her to ask. She wants to know when you’re going to play again.”
“Look… Eleanor…” Walter struggled to say, the name odd across his lips. “Can I call
you something else?”
Eleanor grimaced, understandably confused.
“I knew someone,” Walter explained. “I’d just as soon not revisit the whole thing.”
“My middle name is Liza,” Eleanor nodded, smiled, and shrugged all at once.
“Liza,” Walter said in affirmation. “Look, I’m really not the person your friend thinks I am.”
“I just really admire the ideals you stand for,” Liza went on, unflappably adhering to her presumptuous, secondhand opinions of a man whom she seemed to forget was in actuality a total stranger to her.
Walter could see this was pointless.
Liza could see that Walter, for some strange reason, thought this was pointless.
“Don’t you want me to like your music?” she asked.
“I’m not exactly making music anymore,” Walter explained.
“But you can’t stop,” Liza gasped.
“If I can find the right band, maybe. But you’ve never even heard me perform.”
“Exactly. I want to.”
Walter fell silent. So Liza fell silent, too.
But he could tell from her expectant and unyielding gaze that she had no intention whatsoever of abandoning their conversation. “Look,” he offered up, “if we’re going to talk, can we at least talk about something else?”
She struggled with this mightily, a deep scowl overtaking her whole face and seeping into her posture. But eventually she conceded and launched into the first of several inconsequential and nonlinear topics from which the following mostly irrelevant information emerged…
She was an artist. She came from a family of artists. She had no concrete application of this art. Some sculpture, some installation, some fashion, some graphic design. In similar measure, she hadn’t much of a concrete direction to her life. But she suspected that she wanted one. Something more stable than the hybridized life she’d been living for almost a decade now. She had a cat. Wanted a dog, but wasn’t home enough. She felt great affection for her father. She had some half-siblings or step-siblings or both. And a stepfather she was quite fond of as well. She liked strong colors. By way of example, she pointed out that she was wearing bright blue tights underneath a vibrant yellow skirt. Colors that, Walter presumed, she must have considered strong. She went to art openings, enjoyed the scene. She liked movies but she was coming to them only recently in her life and hadn’t seen several staples of the art form.
It was cold as fuck outside the Back Bay train station at 1:00 a.m. when the train arrived. Walter pulled out some layers from his bag and bundled up, but it only marginally helped.
So he went back inside the station.
He would walk the five miles to Cambridge in the morning.
He found a bench. He reclined, putting Millie and his bag underneath the crook in his knees. He knew he wouldn’t sleep. He wasn’t tired and Millie would keep him unsettled. He stared up at the ceiling for a good solid ten minutes before he struggled to come up with something to do to pass the time. Walter rummaged through a nearby trashcan for a scrap of paper, which he found. He returned to the bench, and started to scribble.
In the morning it was still fucking cold.
So he tried not to think about it as he walked the odd, meandering, un-straight streets of the city. He tried not to think about anything. Not about the layers of clothes he had on. Not about how the deepest parts of his pockets were, for some reason, the warmest. Not about how unbearably early in the morning it still was. Not about Chico, or Shelly, or Chico and Shelly. Not about Julius. Definitely not about Mark Clark. Not about how much longer it must be to Cambridge.
“Excuse me,” said Walter, his nose and hands still stinging from the cold as he peered into the first open office door he could find in the building he’d been directed towards, “but do you happen to be familiar with a small, kind-of-unusual looking savant genius who goes to school here?”
A tired-looking woman, whom Walter figured for late sixties, looked up from a slightly mussed desk, her dire face suddenly lightening with a smile. “You mean Wallace Braum?” she asked.
Walter presumed that Wallace must not have needed to assume an alternate identity after all. This apparent truth brought with it a surprising amount of unexpected disappointment.
“Yes,” Walter answered. “Wallace Braum.”
“And who are you?” the woman asked, a scowl threatening to replace her smile.
“Me?” replied Walter. “I’m his brother.”
The woman sharpened her glare on Walter’s face a moment before simultaneously standing and lighting up. “Come with me,” she instructed as she passed by Walter, wrapping her hand around his wrist and pulling him out of her office. She steered him down the hall, peering back at him every several clopping steps with an almost mischievously inquisitive glance. At the end of the hall, she opened a door like any other and brought Walter outside, across a courtyard, and into a second building. Once inside she opened another door like any other and pulled Walter into a lecture hall like any other with tiered seating sloping down toward a most distinct, round-postured, and frail gray man in a navy-blue cotton suit and a red bow tie. The expanse of seats were but speckled with ten, maybe twelve, bodies, the head on each turning now to define the disturbance coming down the stairs.
“Benjamin,” said the woman towing Walter. “You’ll never guess.”
The brittle-looking man at the front of the room, whom Walter now figured for Benjamin, peered up from his lecture notes and stared, mouth agape and eyes confused.
“Benjamin,” the woman repeated. “It’s Nancy. You’ll never guess who has come to campus.”
“What?” barked Benjamin, still not able to assign even so much as a loose context to the nature of this unexpected occurrence.
By now they had reached the front of the room and the woman placed Walter but a foot in front of Benjamin, which was apparently the range at which his vision was sharpest as only now did he seem to fully understand that outsiders had entered his classroom. “I’m in class, Nancy,” he complained bitterly.
“But someone very special has come to campus,” Nancy explained for a third time.
Benjamin focused his gaze intently upon Walter now, but his bewilderment did not budge.
“Who are you, then?” he demanded accusatorily.
“This,” Nancy answered, “is Wallace’s brother.”
This simple bit of information lit up Benjamin’s face instantly, all of the heretofore seemingly permanent creases proving quite contrarily near weightless as they lifted into an expansively broad smile. At the very same instant a sound emanated from the man’s mouth, a noise somewhere between an “oh” and a warm, relaxed sigh. Benjamin reached up then and put both of his shaky, jagged, freezing cold hands onto Walter, one on his shoulder and one patting the side of his face.
As though they could sit idly by no longer, the entire class began applauding.
“Hello there, boy,” Benjamin said, pulling himself forward and into Walter and Walter forward and into himself, the two men meeting awkwardly in the middle in a tentative hug. “How are you?”
While Walter had absolutely no idea what the hell was going on, he nevertheless presumed that there was really no other way to react to a frail old man hugging you than to hug him back, particularly when standing in front of a room full of onlookers.
“Fine?” Walter answered, confused and mid-embrace.
“Okay,” Benjamin muttered, squeezing Walter’s shoulders and taking a step back to look his visitor up and down.
“I’ll leave you two,” Nancy offered excitedly, apparently forgetting the presence of the dozen or so others she was leaving, too, as she headed back up the stairs.
“Your brother spoke so fondly of you,” Benjamin explained. “How is he?”
Walter frowned and wondered if he had misheard this all but senile man
.
“He’s not here?” Walter asked, confused.
“No, he…” Benjamin’s confused scowl returned. “He hasn’t spoken to you?” he added, more to himself than to Walter.
“Why isn’t he here?” Walter clarified his initial question further.
But Benjamin did not answer. Instead he tilted his head and angled his stare off into the antiseptic gray tiles of the floor. He pursed his lips as his face soured with conjecture.
“Why isn’t he here?” Walter asked again, any pressure he felt to be sweet to this little old man dissipating.
“He’s always been hard to predict, thinking at such high levels and all,” Benjamin yammered again more to himself than to Walter or any of the students still staring on.
“What are you talking about?” Walter spat. “Who are you?”
Reacting more to the sound of Walter’s voice than to the actual content of what he was saying, Benjamin glanced up and shot a brief, blank smile in Walter’s general direction before settling right back into contemplation.
“Does anyone here know my brother?” Walter called out, broadening the scope of his inquiry to include the smattering of silent students.
Everyone raised a hand.
“Does anyone know where he is?” Walter followed up.
All of the hands went down.
At which point he felt Benjamin’s hard, cold hand wrap around his wrist.
“Class is dismissed for today,” Benjamin explained as he pulled Walter through yet another door that looked like any other at the base of the lecture hall.
Benjamin’s office was largely fixed in time. Or, more accurately, was fixed in a span of time that reached over four decades, dust layers of varying depths, and subsequent gray values, presenting a strange spatial chronology of the man’s activity over ever so long. The molasses crawl of time suggested by the environment led Walter to turn down an offer of tea, assuming that it would take an inordinate amount of time for this man to pull off such an endeavor. It took the man several minutes just to make it to his chair and somehow even longer to find his way down into it.