Wonderkid

by Wesley Stace

  Once, at a signing at a record store in Hershey, Pennsylvania—I always remember that place; it’s where the crappy chocolate comes from—just after we’d played some local amusement park, he heard a kid, egged on by his mother, tell a pirate joke. (Why are pirates called pirates? Because they arrrrrrr. You know the genre.) She was standing over him, like he’s auditioning for Pop Idol, and the kid goes “Okay, mom. So a pirate goes into a bar, and he has a ship’s wheel around his tummy”—his mom’s standing over him, encouraging her kid with a fixed grin, poking him in the arm when his pacing lags—“and the barman says to him ‘Why do you have a ship’s wheel round your middle?’ And the pirate says ‘Arrrrr! It’s steering me balls!’” And the kid bursts out into hysterical laughter, but the horrified mother shouts: “Noooo! It’s driving me nuts!” Blake told that joke a million times, always with the wrong punch line. He never even considered whether “balls” was an appropriate word to say in front of children.

  There was another kid called Liam, one of the playgroupies, a little titch who came to loads of gigs, always with an uncle, always in California, and he told us the following joke. Loudly: “My dad went into a shop and asked for some fish ’n’ chips,” followed by a whispered “and then he asked for them quietly.” Liam thought that was the best joke in the world. He could barely get to the end without laughing. His contortions in trying to tell the joke without cracking up made the joke, in itself incomprehensible, hilarious. Even that short edit took about three minutes. Blake loved the whole shtick. It turned out that the actual joke was: “A guy goes up to a counter and says: ‘Can I have some fish ’n’ chips please?’ and the woman says, ‘Sir, this is a library,’ and he says ‘Oh, I’m so terribly sorry,’ and then he whispers: ‘Can I have some fish ’n’ chips please?’” A great joke, but Liam thought his version was equally funny, if not funnier, because what was really funny about it was that the person who told it SAID SOMETHING LOUD and then said the same thing quietly. And that’s basically what Blake thought was funny about it, too, because what made children laugh made him laugh.

  Jokes were our lives, and some of our best times were spent sitting around a diner table late at night, some way past our bedtime, others just getting going, maybe after a show. I remember one classic night, July 4, 1990, at a Denny’s. In this most ridiculous of venues, we never felt more like a family. Mitchell, of course, had procured fireworks for later. The major offenders were always Blake, Jack, and Mitchell—in that order—then Curtis and me. No lightbulb went unchanged, no door unknocked, no road uncrossed, no drummer uninsulted. When they got onto musicians, you knew it was going to be a long night.

  “I want to be a musician when I grow up, Mum.”

  “Well, son, you can’t do both.”

  Jack would tell that joke. And I’d tell the one about God having a girlfriend. Then he’d tell the one about the kid who goes to a singing teacher and says: “I want to sing real bad” and the teacher says: “You do.” (His jokes were much shorter than mine.) And then I’d tell him the one about the superstar band up in Heaven; the punch line of which was “Yes, the real Jerry Garcia”—harsh but fair.

  Drummers, in jokes, are stupid. Curtis wasn’t the greatest joke teller in the world, but he was an encyclopedia of drummer jokes. His natural voice, a sweet but uneventful drawl, wasn’t the best medium, but when it was as short and punchy as “How do you get a drummer off your porch? You pay him for the pizza,” he could get a laugh (even though he never actually asked a question and waited for an answer, he just said them all at once as though it was one sentence). In Curtis’s Joke City, drummers went into a fish ’n’ chip shop to buy drums and tattooed L and R on their legs, but the wrong way round. They drooled out of both sides of their mouth (if the drum riser was level), and you could always tell it was a drummer knocking at the door, because he didn’t know when to come in. The point was: he knew them.

  My best musician joke is this. I know that’s death to a joke, but given that reading is the least preferred joke delivery system, I’ve got nothing to lose. A record producer arrives in purgatory, and a saint greets him and says, “Okay, so you were a record producer, I have two tapes to play you . . .”—Tapes! That’s how old this joke is!—“. . . and you can choose one and that’ll be your destiny.” So he plays him the first tape, and the record producer hears lambs bleating and birds singing their melodious song and perhaps the sound of bacon crackling in the frying pan and children playing on their bikes in the front garden, that kind of thing, and he’s looking a bit bored and the saint says, “Well, here’s the other tape, maybe you’ll like this more.”

  And the record producer hears the sound of people humping each other, bodies grinding together, cocaine snorted, champagne corks popping and pinging about, someone’s groaning “oh yeah, lay a line on her back while I fuck her from behind,” etc. And when the tape is done, the record producer, over whose face has spread a silly grin, says: “Well, yeah, that sounds good. Sounds kinda like my life. That’s my choice.” And the saint reveals an elevator and presses the down button and before they get out, he says “Welcome to your choice. For all eternity.” The doors open and all the record producer can see is flayed figures, once-human, screaming in agony, neck deep in shit and piss and blood, open sores oozing puss, while weird monsters torment them with lashes of whips.

  And, in horror, the record producer screams: “What about the tape? What about the tape?”

  And the saint says: “The tape? Oh, that was a demo.”

  Blake often set me up so that was the best joke of the night. (He’d told it to me in the first place.) And sometimes when I got to the punch line he didn’t even shout “Chicken DAT!” at the top of his lungs. But it was such a good joke that it could handle even that intrusion. As they say about a good song: it can survive any mauling.

  When these epic sessions took off, it was a ride that ended with everyone weaving their way down the pavement back to the hotel, me full of whatever awful sweetness I’d eaten for dinner. That was always the trouble: everyone else used to get quietly loaded as the evenings gathered momentum, but I never really liked alcohol, or anything that altered my head at all, so I just kept nibbling cookies. I don’t even like coffee, or really any hot beverages (except hot chocolate).

  I never worried about the inequity of a restaurant check, even though I didn’t drink any of their booze. You can tell everything you need to know about a person when it’s time to split the check. And on tour, there are a lot of checks that need splitting. Yes, some people are poorer than others, and they eat within their means, and shouldn’t have to subsidize the overindulgence of their bandmate, but there are ways to handle this well, and ways to handle it badly. And the truth is, on a tour, you’re all living large on your per diems, and there’s really no need to scrutinize a check for your portion. (Latin’s attempt to become the official language of rock ’n’ roll never got much further than “per diem” and “Status Quo.” That’s about it. Procol Harum isn’t real Latin.) And those who divvy up checks so they end up paying the smallest possible amount are always, without fail, the ones who short you on the tip. That was when Blake always threw down another $40. He knew the culprit. When he started making money, Blake laid down the law at the beginning of every meal: “We’re either going Dutch or I’m paying for the whole thing, but I’m not haggling over who had what starter.”

  I did sometimes make up for it with dessert, though. I’d have two or three. Well, people have two starters instead of one main course. Why not one starter and two desserts? Or no starters or main courses and three desserts? I should say that I’m over that now. I knew a guitarist who used to drink, literally, seven quadruple cappuccinos a day. That in itself is disgusting, but he used to put four spoonfuls of sugar in each one, which I really admired. A girlfriend once said to me: “Oh, my family really likes sugar. No one likes sugar more than my family.” And after about two days, when she broke up with me, she said: “And I take back that thing I said a
bout sugar and my family. You’re way worse.”

  Though I spent nearly all of my time with the band, every now and then, encouraged by Jack’s sashays in that direction, and by Jack himself, I’d talk to someone nearer my own age—an older sister, perhaps, or a babysitter enjoying the show more than she thought she would.

  One girl, Jennifer, came up to me by the booth: “Is he really your dad?” I wondered how she knew until Vern, my comrade-in-merch, winked. She asked me out after the matinee; she was tall, too, with long straight brown hair, maybe half-Mexican, sixteen. I told her I was eighteen. We went to a movie, Total Recall: “get ready for the ride of your life,” promised the poster. I was horribly aware of her arm’s proximity to mine but decided against radical action. Afterwards, we ate ice cream in what was meant to be a park, but seemed like a Lego facsimile, blown up to full size. We sat on a bench where, little by little, we edged closer until it was unavoidably time to kiss. My heart was beating fast, she tasted like chocolate sprinkles, and she gave me a lift back to the hotel where I slept alone.

  The next afternoon—it was a two-day stand in Atlanta: you get really attached to your hotel room if you stay that long—she returned, this time flanked by a couple of guys. She seemed less than happy, and it dawned on me that I should linger at the merch table as long as possible. But they wouldn’t go away, and I exhausted my ways to look busy.

  “There’s your girl,” said Vern.

  “She’s brought the cavalry.”

  “Should I get Mitchell?”

  I groaned. I couldn’t avoid them any longer, but calling in Mitchell seemed boy-who-cried-wolfish; plus there was the possibility that she was in distress, that she needed a white knight. They drove me to some creek where they cracked beers. I started to drink, which made me feel awful.

  Their forced good spirits made it all the more sinister. Jennifer only had a chance to say one thing, an instruction quickly whispered in my ear: “Nothing happened.” I was in their clutches now, in their car, and they drove me back to the kitchen of a house that, thank God, didn’t seem far from the hotel. Jennifer smiled helplessly and was led away: we’d been separated for interrogation. I denied everything, per her instruction, and finally, after much “tea bag” and “limey,” they ran out of questions and insults, and just when things seemed bound to escalate, showed me the door.

  “Can I say goodbye to Jennifer?”

  “No,” said the first. “You can just go.”

  “Can you call me a cab?”

  “No.”

  “Can you tell me the way to my hotel?”

  “No.”

  It was a long, dark walk home, a long, hard look at myself.

  After that, I decided never to stray too far from the bus. It was like we were too weird for the outside world.

  This was one of those secrets that make you feel like you have to tell someone or you’ll explode, and Becca winkled it out of me. It wasn’t hard. She’d just dried my hair, and we were sitting on our own at the front of the bus watching another cooking show. I even admitted that my bright idea had been to tell them that Becca was my girlfriend.

  “Did they believe you?” She was loving every moment of it. I was, officially, “sweet.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “I can be your beard.”

  “You’re old enough to be my mother!” I said.

  “No, I’m not,” she said tartly. “Nowhere near it, thank you very much.” And then she said, with a smile, “but you really should eat more savory food.”

  After that, she started giving me bass lessons.

  10

  “If some of you girls want to get yourself KISSed, meet us in the Ladies Room.”

  MY SIXTEENTH BIRTHDAY IN AUGUST, MUCH ANTICIPATED, WAS sensational. Blake gave me a card that contained a fake itinerary, a schedule of events for the celebration, complete with laminate. The card itself said only “Happy Birthday, motherfucker,” the phrase that accompanied any birthday gift in sacred memory of that flying cake.

  Blake and Andy, using up which favors I can hardly imagine, had half of Disneyland opened to us after hours, Michael Jackson style. No lines, no crying kids, no one but us—bliss. I didn’t know it, but this was also a reconnaissance mission of sorts; the pair were researching the viability of one of Andy’s more ambitious propositions for “the diversification of the band’s brand.” The two of them, deep in discussion, hardly seemed to notice what ride we were on.

  So, much of my birthday I shared with Becca. It was beginning to feel weird calling her Mum, especially when someone else had a prior claim. Sam was a natural comedian, she told me, full of goofy expressions and funny walks: Charlie Chaplin, John Cleese, even the moonwalk—the whole collection. The father didn’t let her see him as often as she wanted and was now using the newspapers as his mouthpiece. “He should come on the WonderBus!” I said, echoing Blake. He really did sound like a perfect candidate.

  “What’s the similarity between the Yardbirds and Khrushchev?” Jack shouted over. “They were both banned from Disneyland!” He’d sneaked in alcohol, and, though I never do, again I did, what with it being my birthday and all. Everything got giggly. We went faster and slower and splashed and laughed. We screamed. We went round and round and up and down and round and round again. I liked being wedged in tight with Mum, the warmth of her thigh against me. She was especially playful as the rides got more reckless, and, in one of the darker corners of the Haunted House, she took my hand and placed it on her leg; her knee felt soft above the bone, her inner thigh softer. She whispered ghostly in my ear: “Wanna do me a favor?”

  “Probably,” was all I could manage.

  “Fulfill a fantasy?” As she turned to check no one could see us, the car turned sharply, and we were confronted with our own reflection in a mirror, my hand on her leg. I panicked, but only we’d seen—everyone else was involved in his own spinning, jolting journey through the singing ghosts.

  “A fantasy?” I asked. She took it as a yes.

  “Not now. A particular ride.”

  Look, I wasn’t stupid. And I wasn’t even naive. I just ate a lot of sugar. It hadn’t occurred to me that Mum thought of me that way. But she wasn’t my mother, I wasn’t Blake’s son, and she was only ten years my senior. And I was a pretty tall, normally developed, sixteen-year-old, if inexperienced, particularly in fulfilling people’s fantasies, which seemed as alien a concept as you can possibly imagine. My sexual fantasy, as I once heard a comedian say, was . . . to have sex. My body conducted the warmth of Becca’s inner thigh, and I found myself with an erection that tried to bayonet the safety bar, a standoff in which there could only be one winner.

  And as the Haunted House trundled to a squeaking stop, I reluctantly removed my hand, asking myself whether all the hair-washing and drying, the menu of cookery shows, the bass lessons, had been in the service of a seduction of which I had been completely unaware. As we headed to the pitch-black Outer Space ride, Blake and Andy still deep in discussion, Jack sipping from a flask and having a cheeky cigarette, Becca took my hand and swung it from side to side in the friendliest way. What this meant was: we’re sitting together on this ride, and there is no way anyone else is sitting next to me, because I have had a drink or two and this is what I have planned. And what it looked like to everyone else was: Mum’s a sport.

  The rides lose a little atmosphere if you get on too quickly, a nuance that probably always eluded the King of Pop. Disney does a good job of ramping up the excitement, stoking the narrative, while you idle your engine in the long line. But I couldn’t have cared less. All I wanted was to get in that front car with Mum (birthday boys always get the front car), plunge into darkness and see what fantasy we were fulfilling.

  It was already the most thrilling ride of my life, and the safety bar hadn’t even come down. As we ascended into the helter-skelter blackness, she placed my hand on the inside of her leg again, and opened her thighs. I knew what to do—we’d had a trial run—but there was one t
hing that needed clearing up.

  “Did Blake put you up to this?” He was always putting people up to things. I didn’t want her to have been put up.

  She laughed in my ear. “Oh no, kid,” she said, “This is all mine,” and encouraged my progress into the unknown, shivering as my hand traced up the inside of her thigh. She seemed to be hurrying me towards my destination. And then . . . I’d been with girls, while unwillingly retaining my virginity, but this was new. Becca’s hair was orderly, trimmed in fact, into a straight line, soft soft skin either side.

  “Why me and not . . . them?”

  “Because I was sixteen once too. Concentrate. Time is tight. Get this right, and I’ll be very grateful later on.”

  Oh shit. I wasn’t actually sure how to get it right, let alone within the constraints of a time trial, so as we flew around corners, I made sure my hand cupped and rubbed as much of her as possible, and let her, and the lurching of the car, do most of the work. I tried to right myself, which she took as a signal that I was enjoying myself. She started to move determinedly against me, reaching over briefly to show her appreciation, succeeding only in squeezing the safety bar. The ride started a slow climb before we got to a peak from which we hurtled down at top speed, Jack and Curtis actually screaming a car or two behind us. She groaned, lifted her shirt up, started to play with her breasts, and had what I took to be an orgasm. At the precise moment I pushed my fingers inside her, there was a flash of light that brightly illuminated everyone and everything for a stroboscopic second; my hand was right up her skirt. Becca screamed for real. I pulled myself away, taking the opportunity to prop my cock into a more tolerable position. She couldn’t stop laughing, as though her orgasm wouldn’t quit, and let out a whoop of exhilaration, perfectly appropriate for public consumption, given the situation.