Wise Young Fool

by Sean Beaudoin

  “What about you?”

  “Why be coy? Jensen Partman’s my father.”

  I almost do a spit-take, then cover it by pretending to sneeze. Jensen Partman is a famous indie director. He shoots movies that make no money but still make careers. Jensen Partman made Give It All Away, Sheila Blue. He made Winter Into Spring Into Winter Again. He made The Trial of the Brooklyn 9 and Other Travesties. Big-name actors constantly beg to be in his films, but he tends to cast nobodies and make them somebodies. He’s, like, so totally my hero.

  “Nope.”

  “Yup.”

  “That’s such a lie.”

  “It’s so true.”

  She reaches into the pocket of her little blazer and pulls out a school ID. It says SIGOURNEY PARTMAN, right there under her picture. I hook my arm back around hers with greater enthusiasm. “Well, Miss Partman, what do you say you and I go sit on that stone wall over there and spend the rest of the night saying bitchy things about your classmates under our breath?”

  “I thought you’d never ask.”

  And so, we kill an hour watching Ravenna and her court, giving each one a nickname. Ears Earrington the Third and Gavrilo Princip and Fuzzy Zoeller and Lil’ Miss Stalactites. Not to mention Chelsea Girl and Ivanka Lump and Ernie Madoff and The Winklevoss Twins. When they finally finish smoking enough to kill off three container trucks full of transplanted lungs, we pile into someone’s Mercedes personnel carrier. It takes us to a café in town, a small town that’s surprisingly blue-collar and a café run by a staff that clearly loathes and resents the fortunate sons of Killington-Holloway. I want to hang a sign around my neck that says, I’M ONE OF YOU. I’M UNDERCOVER. DON’T HATE ME. But everyone else ignores the staff with a cappuccino-fueled obliviousness, talking shit-dialectics, talking about Mary Cassatt and Dvořák and Robespierre and everything else half read on the current syllabus. I don’t say much. Partly because for the first time in my life I am around people who are all as smart as or smarter than me and who are at the very least more well-read, steeped in the classics and twentieth-century political theory and various old-world debating techniques. The usual off-the-cuff cleverish misanthropy I tend to coast by on is like a packet of NutraSweet to these people, cheap and fake and not worth dumping into their extra foam. Chaos, on the other hand, is full of laughs and has been five-slapping with the lacrosse types for hours. Meb met some nerdy Indian kid with a posh accent, the dude leaning extremely close to her as they do the knee-hand shuffle under the counter. Young Joe Yung hums contentedly to himself while forking up an enormous salad, and Ravenna is in a booth, making eyes at a big blond dude who is either the secretary of state’s son or the pride of the Young Astronauts Program.

  She never looks over at me, not once.

  It’s suddenly crystal clear what I’m really here for.

  And it’s not coffee and a bagel.

  Payback’s a bitch.

  It’s morning. Loud and hot and pointless, like every other morning.

  Except today’s different.

  Today it’s going down.

  Payback.

  I can feel the bitch in my bones.

  I walk to breakfast; no one’s talking. I sit down at the center table, and all the lames clear out. It’s just as well. I eat a lot of eggs, really pack in the protein. Keep up my strength.

  There’s no reason to look around; I can feel the stares.

  There’s no reason to listen; I can hear the whispers.

  B’los nods. I don’t nod back.

  I just keep eating. There’s nothing else to do.

  Except marvel at how all the counselors seem to be in a good mood.

  In my mind I whip through the Dorian scale. I mentally play a progression in D-minor, which is deep, complicated, ominous. Then I bust out the tritone. I go up and down the fretboard, showing off. I do finger tapping; I wail in high E. I play in a shuffle pattern, so I sound like the bass player for Buddy Holly who gave up his seat to The Big Bopper in the plane that crashed an hour later and killed everyone on board, including Ritchie Valens, who no one knows the name of, except me: Waylon Jennings.

  Music died the day the music died.

  Their plane went down, my plane’s going down.

  It’s morning. Loud and hot and pointless, just like every other morning.

  El Hella is officially in a good mood. He signed up Wise Young Fool for the Sackville High talent show, figuring it’d be the perfect run-through for Rock Scene 2013, and now the time has come. Perform or perish. Put up or shut up. Bring it or wing it.

  Actually, that was a joke.

  Elliot is not in a good mood. He’s a nervous mess, sweat pouring off his scalp, biting his nails, haranguing each of us over little pointless details until Lacy takes him behind the piano stand and whispers in his ear, soft soothing phrases I imagine are mostly about bunnies and naps and warm milk.

  It’s a Friday and the last two periods of classes are canceled, the whole school packed into the assembly hall all rowdy, since not only has the weekend arrived, it’s about to be kicked off with free license to hector, harangue, and mock with zero mercy or compunction a bunch of talentless talent acts. It’s like tossing raw strip steaks to a mob of starving raccoons.

  We’re in the front row, where all the acts wait until they’re on. By some fluke we’re actually going last, top billing, which is cool but means we have to sit through the entire lineup first.

  Dice, the usual emcee, refused to participate this year as a protest, since school insurance declined to replace the equipment stolen from his Teaching Tower due to “egregious carelessness and possible insider involvement.”

  Which means that Mr. Bramblety, all rayon and comb-over and querulously high-pitched voice, is announcing Myra Volt. She comes out and sings a number from Cats to an utter smatter of applause and sarcastic meows.

  Then this crazy little dude Liam Pope comes onstage with a boom box, hits play, and walks back off. It’s this cheesy eighties song “Rock Me Amadeus.” No one knows exactly what to make of it. There’re boos and whistles. Just as Mr. Bramblety is about to pull the plug, Liam runs back on in a giant cardboard pastry costume, the thing covered with fake white frosting, and starts singing at the top of his lungs, “Rock me, I’m a Danish!” He dances around for a while, tossing about three bags’ worth of sticky buns into the crowd, and then cartwheels off to huge applause. It’s pretty inspired lunacy, and I’m clapping as hard as anyone else.

  Then Tedd Lester, earnest as a dress sock, drags his acoustic guitar out and does a strummy number about nuclear war and Vladimir Putin and how we could make friends with the whales and the Arabs if only we could find a way to be a little less exactly like we are. He gets light applause mixed with a rumbling undertone of suck-ass.

  Judy Sweacher comes out in a purple dress and reads a poem that rhymes Duracell with chanterelle, and then acne with attack me. Zero reaction. Stunned boredom. Not a peep throughout the hall.

  Some sophomore kid does a few magic tricks, screws most of them up, but pulls off a winner at the end when he makes Miss Menepausse disappear in a cardboard box. A huge cheer erupts at the idea that Menepausse may not be returning from the mystical ether, followed by a resigned and disappointed hiss when she actually does.

  Finally, Young Joe Yung is up. He comes out barefoot, in a kimono (possibly just a bedsheet) covered with Aramaic symbols. Joe Yung does a combo of yoga and karate dance moves to the accompanying music his new girlfriend Tantra knocks out on a gong and finger cymbals. Tantra, who he met behind the lunchroom at Killington-Holloway, looks to be about thirty-five. Young Joe finishes his dance and then announces as an encore he will eat meat for the first time in two years. Huge cheer. He says, however, that he will not digest it, because his body is now impervious to all animal flesh. Confused cheer. Tantra walks over holding a plate with a big raw sausage on it. Young Joe ties string around the center, holds it up for everyone to see, dangles it high above his open mouth, and then swallows the banger in
one gulp. Hooting and laughter. Joe does a bit more dancing, a few side kicks and leg sweeps, and then suddenly starts to look sick. He’s reeling. He’s gagging. Tantra tries desperately to keep up with her gong. Joe holds his neck like he’s been poisoned, on the verge of collapse, then reaches down his throat and yanks on the string, pulling the sausage all the way back out, completely intact.

  Sheer bedlam. Pure love and hilarity from the audience. Yells of Encore! and That’s what I’m talking about! and Now do a Quarter Pounder! echo around the hall. Mr. Bramblety tries to calm everyone to zero avail.

  Finally, Young Joe and Tantra bow, kiss, bow, wave, and then we’re on.

  “Last up tonight,” Mr. Bramblety says, reading off a cue card, “is White Young Spool.”

  “Wise Young Fool, fool!” Elliot yells.

  This only confuses Mr. Bramblety, who drops his cue card, coughs, turns red, reannounces us as “Widely Used Tool,” forgets to turn off the mic, cringes at the screech, and waddles away.

  And then it’s real.

  We are plugged in.

  Staring at the audience.

  Staring back at us.

  There is pure, expectant silence. There is the fine, fluttering high of adrenaline, of cheap glandular accelerant, of the opportunity to either conquer the city or burn up in the atmosphere like chunks of exploded cosmonaut.

  “Kick ass, Sudden!” someone yells.

  People giggle nervously.

  There are hoots and whistles.

  At sound check we narrowed it down to three possible songs:

  “I Will Crush You Like a Bug and Then Reanimate You With the Hugeness of My Love”

  or

  “Communism’s Candle on Socialism’s Cake”

  or

  “Rhyme Faster, Lame Victorian Poetaster”

  In the end Elliot won out, and we went with “Communism’s Candle.” Of course, it’s a song in which I have many complicated parts, two solos, and backing vocals. I practiced it all night long, forward, backward, sideways. My fingers know the positions intuitively; my voice knows the timbre cold.

  Even so, I’m terrified.

  I close my eyes and then Chaos counts it off.

  It amazes me how the totality of us magically floats through insulated cables, rising out of speakers cranked to maximum volume. There is singing. There are notes, notes, notes, followed by a bass-y, rumbling twang. We’re ragged but sort of all on the same beat.

  It’s clumsy, but it works, beginning to build.

  Beginning to coalesce, beginning to crush.

  I sweep in with a massive crest of distortion.

  Just as Elliot’s amp begins to short out.

  The bottom end comes and goes with bursts of static. I try to match it, but it’s too random and I end up playing gibberish. Lacy strains to find the pocket. Her mic is too low. She’s lost beneath it all, singing the wrong verse. Elliot comes back in, goes out again. Lacy starts the chorus too soon. Suddenly, it’s bongo bongo bongo, the whole world drowning in bongo. Chaos realizes and pulls back. He gives me the thumbs-up as one of his stands falls over. It crashes to the floor and rolls off the stage, dragging cords and mics with it, releasing a hellish squall of pure white noise. Lacy looks like she’s about to cry. I signal for her to keep going. She’s forgotten the words, numbly saying the same thing over and over, Oh, you pretty things. You pretty vacant things. Elliot’s bass comes back in again like a slap in the neck. He’s in the wrong key. My fingertips are sweating.

  I didn’t know that was possible.

  The song is over before it even started.

  I’m holding an open G.

  The final overtones of the final chord fade from my amp.

  An audience full of students blinks in stunned silence, with a thousand-headed frown.

  Mr. Bramblety signals for the curtain, but it doesn’t move.

  There’s not a single clap.

  Not one.

  The Paul begins to feed back.

  I lay my hand over the strings.

  And our noise mercifully stops.

  Elliot refuses to talk to any of us the next day. Lacy doesn’t come to school until lunch, and even then she’s wearing a baseball cap and dark glasses, maybe even a fake nose. Chaos walks around laughing at all the shit-talk, slapping five with the worst offenders, acting like our implosion was all on purpose, some sort of performance art. But he gives me a look of murder when we pass in the hall.

  “Don’t eyeball me, Adam Bomb,” I say. “You don’t even go to this school!”

  That afternoon I sit on the porch, closing one eye and then the other, which makes the lawn flip back and forth like a deck of cards. We’re supposed to practice, but since Elliot isn’t talking to anyone, who knows?

  Rock Scene 2013 is in seventy-two hours.

  Cold drips of terror run down my legs.

  Warm drips of boredom bore into my spine.

  And then my cell phone explodes.

  The ringtone is Donald Fagen warbling, “It was still September when your daddy was quite surprised to find you with the working girls in the county jail!” Three times. I’m sure it’s Elliot about to tell me to get my ass in gear.

  But it’s not Elliot.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s Sigourney.”

  The Russian princess.

  “Who?” I ask.

  “Um, remember? From Killington-Holloway?”

  “Oh, yeah, of course.”

  “I’m having a party tonight. At my house. Actually, my dad’s house. In the city. Want to come?”

  I’m too crushed. Depressed. Ruined.

  “Well, that’s very cool of you to ask, but I’m pretty sure I have practice.”

  “Ravenna will be there.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “She broke up with the professor.”

  “She did?”

  “Yup. Said his legs were too wrinkly.”

  “I see.”

  Sigourney laughs and gives me the address.

  “So come on over.”

  I should. I totally should. Ravenna. Me. In the city.

  Screw Wise Young Fool.

  “Thanks. I owe you one.”

  “You don’t owe me anything. Just don’t wear a shitty band shirt with the sleeves cut off, okay, townie?”

  In the driveway, the Saab is dead. Completely and utterly.

  HORROR.

  I walk to Route 302 and stick out my thumb.

  A few hours later, I get off the train and stroll across the park, through the middle of a big open meadow full of sun tanners and Frisbee players and scruffy dudes cooking pigeons on makeshift hibachis. The address Sigourney gave is for a massive brownstone with a doorman. The guy announces my name through an intercom. The elevator is all mirrors and plated gold. Inside, there’re about thirty kids, mostly dudes, slacks and vests and Oliver Peoples, young American Psychos in training. Ravenna is in back wearing an incredibly tight pink dress. She’s lost weight, all the Sackville baby fat melted clean away. Her curves are more studied, European, dangerous. She sees me, sees right through me, goes back to her conversation.

  “What can I get you?” asks a dude with his French cuffs rolled up, standing behind the stocked bar. You can tell he’s been whipping up sloe gin fizzes at his parents’ dinner parties since he was eight.

  “Mountain Dew,” I say. “Rocks.”

  He makes a face, pours me a club soda.

  In the corner, a bunch of guys in their crested school blazers are shopping for drugs. They’re dialing numbers out of some kid’s address book, all louche and striped-tied, feet up on a coffee table full of Vogues, credit cards and BlackBerrys ready. Technology. But they’re not having any luck.

  “I can’t believe Mama Hurricane’s not holding,” one kid keeps saying over and over.

  Ravenna laughs at a joke that probably wasn’t particularly funny, shifting weight from one incredibly high heel to the other. She’s so beautiful it makes my spine hurt. She’s wearing glasse
s, obviously just for show, but they totally work, making her look like the intellectual and gravitational force at the center of an infamous circle of feminists, cultural critics, and NBA wives.

  The Loudons and Hamishes and Brinkleys stare at her as well, imagining what they’ll never have and can’t pay for, speed-dialing their dealers instead.

  Sigourney comes over in a black velvet cape. She’s so pale her veins are visible four inches deep, like a laptop schematic. “Hey, Ritchie.”

  “Hey.”

  “Way to dress up.”

  I look down at my sweater (ill-fitting, too big) and corduroys (bought for school last year, rust colored, never worn).

  “You bet.”

  “Ravenna’s here.”

  “Yes, she is.”

  “Now’s your chance.”

  “Chance for what?”

  Sigourney smiles too wide, and in the sparkling light of her fake-friendly eyes it’s obvious why I’ve been invited.

  Did I actually think we were friends?

  Could I possibly be one iota dumber?

  She’s counting on me to roll in, be gauche and loud and hilariously blue-collar, maybe make a scene, provide a little drama for her party.

  “It won’t work,” I say.

  “Have a drink.” She turns to talk to some guy who looks like a Medici. “It’s early still.”

  My cell buzzes, Robin Zander going, “She’s tight, she’s giving me the go, she’s tight, she’s giving me the high sign!” Three times.

  I mute it and walk around to the back of the massive apartment where, no shit, some of the sets from Jensen Partman movies are installed. Three walls are covered with stuff I recognize, half a coffee shop counter from that scene in Killing of a Short-Order Crook where Harry Dean Stanton empties his pistol into the waffle guy, and the neon facade of the dance club where Julia Roberts and Raul Julia make out in Her Name Is Clyde.

  I’m leaning over, about to run my hand along the fake chrome stools, when someone goes, “What makes you think it’s okay to touch that?”

  Without turning I say, “What makes you think I care what you think is okay?”