by Wesley Stace
The newspapers had run with it, everything from “GIMME SOME TOOTH!” and “GOING DENTAL!” to “WONDER-SKID!” Blake, with the label’s approval, declined to give interviews, opting instead to play an impromptu busking set next day at the hospital sickbed. A television crew was waiting, by arrangement, and Blake finally agreed to talk: dignified, contrite, slightly cheeky, very charming.
“The record is zooming up the charts and your performances are sold out coast to coast. What’s next for the Wonderkids?”
“Well,” said Blake. “We’re going to do some free gigs at children’s homes. I have an adopted child myself. And we’re planning to turn our life into a cartoon. We’re going to market a brand of Wonderkids peanut butter. And then we thought we’d open an amusement park.”
As with many things in Blake’s life, this too started as a joke.
We sat in the back of the bus, Blake’s arm around me as we watched a black-and-white comedy on the VHS.
“That could have gone really, really wrong, couldn’t it?” I asked.
Blake laughed indignantly. “NO!”
“Yes, it could.”
“No, it couldn’t.”
“But there’s a lesson there isn’t there?” I said, trying the role on for size.
“Alright, Mitchell,” he said with an amused sneer. “What’s the lesson? Why does there have to be a lesson? The lesson is: everything’s fine, and it worked out very well for us.” Inasmuch as a shrug can be triumphant, his was.
“But it could have . . .”
“Could; if; would; might . . .” He waved all the conditionals away and paused the video for emphasis, leaving some old character actor frozen mid-antic gesture, his eyes bulging behind a pince-nez as though he were just about to sneeze. “WAS! DID! We got on TV!” There was no arguing with him; it was slightly infuriating, but ever so lovable. And, besides, he was right.
“You’re just making this up as you go along, aren’t you?” I asked.
“Nonsense resists plot,” he said and jabbed at the remote control, freeing the screwball actor from suspended animation. The movie was about a huge inheritance, which finally fell to the poor orphan, who also got the girl.
“Will I ever find out who my dad is?” I asked casually, after the little fanfare that accompanied “The End.” Blake reached over for a mess of papers from which, to my surprise, he pulled out my birth certificate with the bloke’s name on it: Simon Traherne. Sweet was my mother’s maiden name. I turned it over—nothing—and handed it back. “Hmm. Have you cooked this all up, and I’m going to find out that my father is someone really interesting?”
“That only happens in old-fashioned novels and silly comedies. I’m your dad, right?”
“Yes, Blake.”
He put his arms around me.
“And Daddy needs a nap.”
Back in the front, Mitchell called me over to his “office.” “Hey, scissor boy,” he whispered confidentially. “Help me out. Be on my side, too.”
Almost nothing but good came from what might otherwise have been an epic banana skin. The upcoming shows were bumped up to larger venues, and the furor sent “Rock Around the Bed” over the edge. It was time to think about another single (“The Story of Dan, Beth, Chris and Blank”) and accompanying video. The record company wanted to get the Wonderkids into the studio as soon as possible, but that meant going back to LA for more than a night, the last thing our agent had on the band’s agenda. Andy was thrilled.
Almost nothing bad happened, but there was something. One of the many ensuing articles contained the following revelation: “Becca Fonseca, the band’s bass player and daughter of longtime children’s favorite, Simeon, has been on tour with the Wonderkids since the band first arrived in America. But she hasn’t seen her son once. Sam, six years old, lives with his father in San Francisco, while Becca entertains other people’s children around the country.”
It was our publicist, the friendliest woman in the world, Jennifer Armstrong of Strongarm Publicity, who reluctantly, but immediately, brought this to the band’s attention. A news clipping service had turned it up in a tabloid that had never previously bothered to cover the band before. This aspect pleased Jennifer greatly.
At the band meeting, as the WonderBus hurtled through Nebraska, Andy chewed the inside of his mouth and spoke of “damage control.” Becca sat quietly in the corner; I felt like reaching out for her hand, but I didn’t. We called Becca Mum, but it hadn’t occurred to us that she had a child of her own. Perhaps when she held my hand, she was thinking of him.
“Time to see your son, Becca,” said Andy.
“Let’s get him on the bus,” said Blake merrily. “Suffer the little children! Your father’s house has many coffins!”
“Blake!” said Andy, as though Blake wasn’t serious. But I knew he was, and he was right. It was a family show.
Friendly Jenny had good news too: our first truly magisterial press hit. An article in Time. It wasn’t quite “I’ve seen the future of rock ’n’ roll,” but nonetheless, even I’d heard of Time, and it was a glossy step up. The photo shoot in Northern California was exciting, but when the issue finally turned up, everyone had tired of the anticipation. We all read it, and perhaps some secretly sent a copy home or instructed their parents to buy it, but no one got too excited. Jack was grumpiest: “I don’t play a Les Paul. They always get the important stuff wrong. They wouldn’t make that mistake in Rolling Stone. And that’s where they should be writing about us.”
“Time is way more important than Rolling Stone,” said Mitchell.
“Not to me it isn’t. It isn’t more important than the NME either.”
That’s the trouble with benchmarks: there’s always a higher mark to be made, and everyone has different priorities. But Blake loved the interviews—it was always a chance to wheel out some good gags.
Touring is tiring, however you slice it. As my sixteenth birthday approached, I found myself itching spectacularly, deep red blotches that floated beneath the palms of my hands. Mitchell asked if I’d been in a hotel hot tub—notorious, noxious purveyor of skin disease. I hadn’t. The only relief was Jack’s Benadryl, and I got used to getting on the bus in the morning, if we hadn’t slept there, making myself comfy on one of the parlor benches, popping a Benadryl, and floating slowly away. Somewhere in Washington state, a doctor prescribed me a triangular blue pill, which stopped the itching but didn’t send me to sleep as effectively. So Benadryl and the triangular blue pill: the happy cocktail. Others were doing worse. Everyone found his own way to relax. Pot stayed with the cigarettes in the back.
Becca had blisters; Curtis had drummer’s wrist. Blake’s problems were vocal-related, and, perhaps more accurately, vocal-anxiety related. Days became an obsessive quest for Throat Coat tea, Slippery Elm, and those particular Halls lozenges that squirt honey in your mouth. Some mornings he’d wake up sounding as though he wouldn’t even survive the day, but by showtime he was miraculously fine: “The body knows.” He even started to complain of a click when he swallowed, as though his throat was out of joint.
“That’ll be cancer, mate,” was Jack’s standard, unsympathetic diagnosis.
The blotches on my hands came and went, depending how run down I was. Days off were spent in hotels, watching TV. You try to get up and about, maybe go out for a walk, see a sight, but all you want is to sink down into a chair and ring room service for some French onion soup. You try to pretend you’re in the same place every day—only that makes it tolerable. Becca and I watched cooking shows; she was trying to keep a low profile, and I was about the quietest company you could keep.
Jack, on the other hand, had joint problems—a bad knee, a dickey shoulder—but he’d never have dreamed of toning down his act, now that he finally had one. He loved the twirling, the kicking right leg, the silly Chuck Berry duckwalk, the leap and land. He occasionally even smiled, but more in the manner of a Chinese gymnast who has just dismounted from the uneven bars and landed with a maneuver
of the highest level of difficulty. It was all in a day’s work. A smile just didn’t come naturally to Jack: he only delivered what the world required.
My problems were far more insidious; Jack’s were relatively easily solved, and I remember his moment of inspiration. We went to visit a big act backstage—we were on the same benefit. The star received us graciously and threw open his dressing room, welcoming us, his Boston accent all misplaced Rs and unnaturally elongated vowels. But what struck me, rather than his aura, his surprisingly diminutive size, and the fact that I hadn’t realized he was more or less albino, was the table full of neoprene: two knee supporters, a thigh strap, stretchy greaves for the lower legs, one for the ankle, a fuzzy corset, a back-plate, various bandages. He was a medieval knight going into battle in the name of rock, and he was only playing six songs. The only thing missing was neoprene gauntlets and a horse he’d be winched upon. Soon, Jack, too, was laying out the stretchy armor. Mitchell suggested an all-in-one neoprene body suit: one-stop shopping.
What the audience sees is show business, the glow of health and rebellion. The reality is that rock hurts: your knees, your ankles, your voice, your well-being. You rarely hear people complain, because it isn’t very rock ’n’ roll. Rock has been rebranded—successfully—as an acceptable job for old men, and though there’s no reason old men should give up, they have to rethink the act: it’s harder the older you get. Dylan rarely, if ever, plays guitar and harmonica together anymore—which I’m guessing isn’t only an aesthetic decision. I have a feeling that the combination of guitar strap, harmonica holder, and the neck contortion necessary to play the two simultaneously might have taken its toll; that, if he persisted, he might need an actual cervical collar. Barry Gibb went through the biggest Bee Gees tour ever barely able to move. If you look at videos, he’s standing stiff as a poker, corset (I assume) squeezing him half to death, fixed grin on his face in an attempt to summon the immortal falsetto one last time. And now he doesn’t have any brothers left to harmonize with. Poor Barry. And you’d be surprised, when musicians meet musicians, how quickly it all comes back to Pepto Bismol, Neti Pots, health insurance, and hernia operations. One particular legend talked to Blake for two hours solid about stomach ailments. They didn’t touch on the NYC underground art scene in the sixties, the meaning of his greatest lyrics, electro-shock therapy, or amplifiers: they talked runny tummies.
With my blotches came itchy head, which was really bad. Life became an ecstasy of irritation unless I washed my hair every morning, and perhaps again after the show. Blake pictured a Dr. Seuss microscope world, where a thousand fleas had set up a five-ring circus around the edge of my scalp. Becca suggested a couple of shampoos you could buy over the counter, both dingily medicinal. There wasn’t a shower on the bus, and there were times it was so bad that Becca would hold me over the sink and shampoo me there and then, then dry me with a towel just like she really was my mother. The menthol tingled like tiger balm. Seb Derm, the doctor called it, presenting itself in the usual ways. It was so bad, I sometimes felt like going the full Sinead.
Plus, I hadn’t even turned sixteen: I was going through all the normal stuff—raging hormones, uncooperative skin—too. How do the Biebers do it these days? They’re more cossetted, of course, but then I never had the emotional pay-off of getting onstage. Not that I wanted it.
Physical health was one thing; emotional health another. Jack had already found his addiction, and he needed his fix increasingly often.
He liked the mothers; the mothers liked him. They perhaps liked Blake more, but didn’t Ringo get the most fan mail of all the Beatles? (Of course, that might have been something the Fan Club dreamed up, so that it wasn’t all John and Paul, but that’s another matter entirely.) Blake was all about the kids; he’d already seen the darker side of mothers. Jack had never had an experience like that, but he longed for one. He’d never really met girls who did what he wanted, and that was what he wanted.
After the shows, Jack had time to do a little window-shopping while the kids occupied themselves with the main attraction. He was a willing consolation prize. He’d long bored of the hotel porn (heavily censored in those days) about which he was quite vocal: “I’m not paying good money to watch a man’s sweaty, hairy, heaving buttocks.” Nowadays the hotel porn channels are uncensored—you have to go to Japan if you’re nostalgic for sterilized porn—and they don’t bring in the money they used to because everyone’s hopping on the complimentary Wi-Fi. Back then it was Jack’s only choice. So he had to turn his attention elsewhere—unfortunately, there was much to distract him.
We all know about MILFs now. Back then, MILFs hadn’t earned their acronym, and cougars were something you saw on The Wonderful World of Disney. MILFs were just older women or, as Ray Davies calls them in his autobiography, “a nice bit of old”; in our world, “the mums.” And they weren’t that old. And they looked good. Jack was always scribbling his hotel number down on a CD cover, just in case anyone fancied a drink. Becca turned a blind eye, but nothing got by Blake: “Two cups of coffee tomorrow, ey, Jackie?” His brother would smile sheepishly and we wouldn’t see him after the show.
I was first in line on the way back into the dressing room one night, and I opened the door to find a woman, topless, artfully posed on the sofa. I froze. The parade behind ploughed into me like the elephants in The Jungle Book.
“No parking on the dance floor,” Mitchell called from behind.
I pulled Becca forward. Mum would handle it. She weighed the situation, turned to the elephants and said: “Dressing room off limits momentarily. Everyone into Mitchell’s office.”
Blake asked what was up.
“Naked female, actually.” She closed the door.
“What a conundrum,” mused Mitchell, all sarcasm. “Why on earth would there be a naked female in our dressing room?”
Jack looked the other way: “I’ll be out on the, er, bus,” he said and made his getaway. And there he’d sit, fiddling with his video camera.
It was around this time that backstage started to get weird. It became a bit of a freak scene, particularly when Becca was doing tai chi in one corner with the incense on smelly and some freaky yoga drone playing. It seemed like everyone was on drugs, even when there weren’t any. There’d be a little gaggle of mothers, mostly flirting with Jack or, if their fantasies ran that way, Curtis. Sometimes they had the nerve to approach Blake, but the mothers weren’t his favorite part of his job, and once he’d dealt with their kids, he’d slip back onto the bus. For a little while, he took to wearing a BabyBjörn with a doll in it, which he’d bounce up and down and occasionally shush, thinking it would put the mothers off, but it just gave them an opening line, an excuse to compare notes. Though useless as a deterrent, it wasn’t a bad briefcase, and he kept sporting it; the mothers were surprised to find, wedged beside the doll, a fifth of booze, a packet of cigarettes, and a paperback. Sometimes it seemed like he’d stepped out of one of his own songs.
No children backstage was a rule Mitchell strictly enforced, and eventually it struck me: maybe the husbands of all those mothers, like groupies’ parents in the sixties, were waiting in the parking lot, looking at their watches tetchily while a kid snoozed in the car seat. Or maybe the mothers hadn’t even brought their kids; they’d just come to see the show, and now here they were, hanging out with the boys in the band, like they used to: a Wonderkids show was an excuse to either relive reckless youth or sample it for the first time. Then I noticed that some of the women with backstage passes were closer to my age: they had no kids; they weren’t babysitters. They just liked the band. It really was Everyone Music, after all. From time to time, there was too much drinking; occasionally there were unnecessary tears upon departure, or a furtive glance between Jack and a female autographee.
But, despite the wear and tear, sprits remained high. Jokes helped.
Supposedly it’s the one good pedophile joke: a kid’s just been bought a welder’s helmet for his birthday and he’s walk
ing down the road, and a guy drives up, opens his car door, and asks the kid if he needs a lift. And when the kid’s in, the guy asks him if he’s ever seen a man naked and the kid says “no”; and he asks the kid if he’s ever been to the men’s bathroom and the kid says “no”; then he asks if the kid’s ever touched a man’s penis, and the kid replies: “Look, mister, I want to make something quite clear. I’m not a real welder.”
Blake hated that joke. It was Jack’s. Jack once told this one in the parlor—you might have heard it before: a guy’s leading a little girl through a field towards some woods, and she looks up at him and says “I’m scared.” And he looks down at her, takes her by the hand, and says “You’re scared? I’ve got to come back alone.” Blake didn’t speak to him for twenty-four hours after that.
Blake liked jokes that made no sense. “Mad!” was his greatest compliment. His repertoire was massive, and many of the jokes ended with the punch line “Chicken DAT!” This was from Blake’s time teaching preschoolers, long before the band took off. This three-year-old knock-knocked him: “House,” “House Who?” “House DAT!” And Blake wondered if the kid had made it up himself; it was a good joke for a two-year-old. So he asked him to tell another, and the kid, who hadn’t understood which bit of the joke was funny, but realized where the laugh was, came up with: “Knock Knock,” “Who’s there?” “Chicken,” “Chicken Who?” “Chicken DAT!”
And “Chicken DAT!” it was for the rest of time. Blake would send me a picture, say, of a homemade loaf of bread with the accompanying text: “Chicken DAT!” It came to mean PUNCHLINE!, SUCCESS!, or even simply FINISHED! Every kid on earth laughs, whatever the setup, if the punchline, delivered with a modicum of gusto, is “Chicken DAT!”
And “DAT!” sent Blake off on a course that lasted the entire career of the Wonderkids. He liked to hear children’s versions of jokes; he’d retell their version rather than the technically correct one. Sometimes, that was his entire stage banter: jokes gone wrong.
