Wonderkid

by Wesley Stace

  At first, it was good to see Curtis and Becca again. Mei-Xing was around as well. She and I kept each other company, not having much to say, occasionally sitting side by side on the couch and playing Super Mario, where the little guy jumps around, avoids the forces of Bowser and liberates Princess Toadstool. One afternoon a few days in, I glimpsed some nasty scars up the inside of her left arm, bared by the maneuvering of her joystick.

  “Hey,” I said. “What happened?”

  “I cut myself,” she said.

  “Oh,” I said, because I’m a fool, “that’s terrible. How did you cut yourself?”

  And she said, all the time boinging that stupid little guy up and down to get the magical coins, “No, I cut myself. I mean, I like to cut myself.”

  “Oh, right,” I said, understanding and not quite understanding, wishing I could slide down the side of the sofa so all that was left to show of me was the lead from the Super Mario console. Just enough that they could reel me back up when she’d left.

  Curtis was the first to leave the sessions, depriving me of my Super Mario opponent. The drummer’s usually the first to go when his parts are done, popping back only to rattle a tambourine when everyone else is having dinner. But no sooner was he out the door than more drums appeared, along with another drummer to whom I was never properly introduced, and the same tracks ran once more.

  Becca and I hardly exchanged two words. After she’d made her bass fixes, she was heading back north to Sam. We found ourselves standing together in the annex (“and it’s a two-run homer, McLeod standing at fourth bass”), and she said very softly: “I’m just trying to keep a very low profile right now, bury myself in cement.” Weird image.

  “Okay,” I said, trying to let her know . . . I wasn’t sure what I was trying to let her know. Perhaps that it would be fine if we had a bit more sex.

  “Are you okay?” she asked, though she didn’t want me to answer in the negative, let alone say I missed her or anything like that.

  “Sure,” I said. It was true, though it was weird being off the road. I couldn’t read her, and I wondered whether she was somehow jealous of Mei-Xing. But, you know, it isn’t all about you. You just sometimes wish it was.

  “I’m pissed at Blake too,” she added, slinging her jacket over her arm. Too? In addition to how she was pissed off with me? Or “I’m pissed at Blake just like you are”? I wasn’t pissed off. Or “I’m as pissed at Blake just like all the other people who are pissed at him”? I didn’t like any of these alternatives, but I couldn’t ask her to clarify. She continued: “We were going to duet “Noon In June,” but they’ve talked him into doing it with somebody else. He just happened to mention that. And he wouldn’t even tell me who.” Made sense. I’d heard Denny dropping a couple of famous names, but I hadn’t put two and two together.

  “Oh, is that all?” I asked, then reconsidered. “I mean, is that all there is . . . er . . . to it?”

  “That isn’t all,” she said.

  That was all. She’d be back in a few days to do her harmonies; that was the plan. She never came.

  I found myself inventing projects to keep myself occupied—a video diary for the label with Jack’s camera, some other rubbish. Denny ran a tight ship—office hours, more or less—and the ringers he brought in were not in the business of having fun; they were in the business of running from session to session, too grand to carry their own gear. The music sounded, y’know, great—but it got to the point where I was so bored of Denny instructing Blake to sing a line infinitesimally differently that I feared I’d never be able to listen to the finished thing with any pleasure. And so, when it all changed to Jack overdubbing endless guitars, I decided to stay at home. They left early and got back tired. I practiced the guitar, and got so bored that I took to turning on the baseball. I was even happy to see the cleaners. There was a chauffeured town car at my disposal, but I somehow couldn’t be bothered. It seemed better to be forever traveling on the tour bus, in motion, where boredom can’t catch up with you.

  Blake was gone all day and some evenings; Jack went out on the prowl at night. On my own, it was easy not to do very much, but the guitar rarely left my hands. It felt like convalescence, watching the sun creep shadows across the walls, wondering how to divide my time between pool, hammock, and AC. I mastered Jack’s geometric dance patterns up and down the fingerboard. Scales were no more interesting than the ones I’d rejected on the piano years before, but my fingers felt sprier on the guitar, and they got to actually interact with a bending string rather than just plunk a dead key. It was easier to practice lying on a hammock, than sitting on a threadbare piano stool at Clements, watching the rain.

  Jack would grab my left hand on his return and inspect it, like a parent checking for evidence of bitten nails or Terry making sure you’d washed before dinner.

  “Nice calluses,” he’d say in admiration. “Dip your fingers in a glass of your own piss. Seriously.”

  Lazy spring dragged on, though you couldn’t tell it wasn’t summer. Seasons aren’t really relevant in Los Angeles: it’s a whole metaphor out the window. The album—tentatively titled Number Two—was close to completion. Blake’s bit—writing and singing the songs—was done, and now Jack got to enjoy the bits Blake couldn’t stand: editing, mixing, mastering. The songs, which I’d heard in various states of undress, were great. “Time to Sing a Song” was the heir apparent to “Rock Around the Bed.” Some of Blake’s greatest nonsense was on there too: “The Color of the Crocodile,” “Noon in June,” “The Second Pear Tree,” the song about Mei-Xing, now called “She May Sing.”

  I once heard a famous musician say that it’s a musician’s job only to make the best record he or she can, and to convince the label to release it. Then it’s the record company’s job to do the rest. But it’s more complicated than that. First, you have to convince everyone else, your fellow musicians, that your vision is worth pursuing—and if you have a weird vision, a vision that doesn’t fit into a vision pigeonhole, then that’s all the more difficult. Next, you have to convince the record company; but then you have to be willing to work with them, and keep producing your very best. And that’s what Blake had done. It was easy to forget that this hadn’t even been his original vision, so easily had he rolled with the punches.

  We had a listening party at the house, speakers up to eleven, after which we all dived in the pool with our clothes on. Denny was happy; the record company was happy; Andy was happy: “The ironically titled Number Two,” he called it, meaning I suppose that it would actually go to number one. Though of course he could equally have meant that it wasn’t shit.

  Theme park blueprints on the wall; second album about to drop; a five-minute pilot for the cartoon series; TV knocking; an agent with no consideration for our mental or physical wellbeing—everything was perfect.

  But then one night, Andy showed up unexpectedly wearing the look of a man without good news. He threw an open newspaper on the table. When I saw the full-page photo, the hairs on the back of my neck vibrated like antennae and my scalp started to itch ferociously.

  The banner headline: “**CK AROUND THE BED!”

  Beneath that: “Simeon’s Shame”.

  The picture: Mum and I on the ride at Disneyland, though the publishers had been so demure as to put a black CENSORED sign across her front.

  “Whoa!” said Jack with misplaced enthusiasm. Blake nodded and pushed his lower jaw forward, giving himself a Springsteen underbite. It was a difficult expression to interpret.

  “Well, I’m not in that picture,” said Andy. “I’m sitting three cars behind.”

  “I am!” said Jack, pointing where no one would ever look. All eyes turned to me.

  “Sorry,” I said. “God, I’m so sorry. What paper is that?”

  Andy raised his eyebrows; Blake and Jack said nothing.

  “We have a problem,” said Andy. “It’s this, and it’s a problem that mercifully goes unmentioned in the article: what is depicted in this photo is,
in the state of California, statutory rape.”

  “But I’m sixteen!” It just fell out of my mouth.

  “In Connecticut, this would be entirely legal, unless the female in question was the male’s guardian or athletic coach. But Disneyland is not in Connecticut. Disneyland is in California. And in California, this is illegal. And someone could go to jail; someone from a band that entertains children for a living. As I say: it goes unmentioned in the article. So our entire legal strategy depends on the fact that no one notices.”

  “Is that a good legal strategy?” I asked.

  “It’s not a legal strategy at all. It’s a hope-against-hope.”

  I could hear only the ceiling fan and my own pulse. Blake got up, opened the freezer, and lobbed a choc ice at me.

  “Look at it this way,” Blake said. “There’s nothing illegal happening. To start with, you can see Mum, and the shape of someone sitting beside her, and maybe the hands a bit down there. Nothing illegal.”

  “You’re wrong, Blake. Aside from anything else—how could you let it happen? You’re in charge out there. It’s your ship.”

  “How could I let it happen?” Blake smiled. He raised both of his hands, conducting a lengthy pause. “I let it happen, because I liked her; because I’m a man and she’s a woman; because we’re in each other’s company a lot; because it just kinda happened.”

  I looked at the photo again. My face, my entire body except the white of one of my arms, was in the shadows. You couldn’t see me at all. We all knew who it was, but no one else would have the faintest idea. And you couldn’t see Blake either. You could only just see Becca and her redacted tits. I computed the collateral damage: Blake now knew about Mum and me. Deal with that later.

  “I get it, Blake,” said Andy. “I see what you’re doing. But we have the band to think of as well.”

  “Firstly,” said Blake, “nothing is going to happen. It’s a black mark, sure, but it’ll just blow over. We’re Teflon; nothing sticks. If anyone says anything, then between us all here and one quick phone call to Lady Godiva, it was me in the front seat of that car, and that’s what we say. Not that we’ll ever have to say anything. Right, Sweet?” I nodded. “It’ll never come to that. People are just excited to know there were some boobs flying around. She’s Simeon’s daughter. She’s in a kids’ band. Boobs! We see them at our shows the whole time. Does nothing for me.”

  “Can’t you guys just keep out of fucking trouble?” said Andy, but I could tell he was relieved. I’d never heard him swear. “I mean, for fuck’s sake: you’re a kids’ band, whether you like it or not.”

  “We like it!” said Blake.

  “Then behave like a kids’ band!”

  “You mean behave like adults,” said Blake. “Look at the photo! We’re in fucking Disneyland! How much more like a kids’ band can we behave? We’ve chosen to spend our day off at an amusement park! Besides, how do kids’ bands behave? Give us a role model. The Muppets? Andy, they’re being moved by other people; they have hands up their bums; they don’t have bodily functions and they don’t need to get laid. They’re not real. The Monkees? That was a TV show. You know what was happening in real life: a lot of pussy and drugs. The Wombles? You may not know the Wombles, but that was Chris Spedding in a big rat suit eyeing up birds in the front row. The Beatles? Pot and the Maharishi. We’re people. We have feelings. Prick us; do we not pop?”

  “Okay. I get it.” Andy sat back down. “But now I get to the bad news.”

  “What happened to the good news?” asked Jack sarcastically.

  “There is good news, but this isn’t it. Listen. The record company won’t have it. They could rip up the contract over less. The press already got Becca for ignoring her only child; now she’s flashing on a ride in Disneyland and every reader of this rag gets to see her. The kids get to see her.”

  “That’s all she’s doing, flashing,” said Blake. “That’s it. Calm down. It’s California. Everyone goes topless these days. I egged her on. We’d been entertaining kids. We were letting our hair down. I’ll speak to her.”

  “They want her out. She’s tarnished the brand; she’s damaged goods. Take action now. You have a great album in the can. They want to get behind it. They want to send it to number one. But I am not looking forward to my meeting tomorrow, unless you tell me what you have to tell me. And I expect to hear from you either tonight or tomorrow morning. You, Jack,”—somehow Jack was the only one Andy really trusted—“take some responsibility—get your head up from the magazines and out from behind that video camera! Blake, you’re supposedly in charge. Act like it. And as for you . . .” He turned the daggers on me for the first time. “Sell some merch.”

  “Andy!” said Blake. He rarely got annoyed.

  “I’ll be cleaning this shit up.”

  “Before you go,” said Blake, “do you know that joke about the guy, the lowest guy on the totem pole at the circus, who gives the elephant its enema and then has to clean up all its shit, and the doctor looks at the ulcerous running sores on his arm, and tells him he has to give up the job immediately, and the bloke says, incredulous: ‘What? And leave show-business?’ Andy, sorry. Thank you.”

  The Damager left without a word.

  I puffed out my cheeks, expecting silence.

  “Shall we order food?” asked Blake.

  “We could go for a drive,” said Jack.

  “It’s so far,” said Blake. It’s true. It sometimes felt far enough just walking to the car. We ordered Chinese and waited.

  The paper lay between us, photo pulsating grainily. Blake chucked it over his shoulder: out of sight, out of mind. Jack raised an eyebrow: “Nice work, son. Honestly. Got to hand it to you.” I didn’t want to say anything until Blake spoke. Jack didn’t care. He shrugged. “It’s only natural. She’s the perfect age for you. I would’ve. Anyone would’ve. Photo, though!” he pursed his lips and inhaled: “Nasty.” It was a little code word with Jack and he always said it “narrrsty” like Kenneth Williams in a Carry On film. It was “nasty” if it was a personal problem, and “tedious” if it was professional. Blake kicked his legs over the back of the sofa so he was upside down.

  “You didn’t know, did you, Jack?” he asked. Had Blake known?

  “Look. Don’t start. I told you. I try not to pay attention to your private lives. I’m scared what I’ll find.”

  “Well, of course you have your own to deal with.” The tone was conciliatory, the remark anything but.

  “Yes, maybe, but it’s not splashed all over the papers, is it? It’s still a private life. And what do you do, Blake?”

  “Aside from having an affair with Mum, you mean? Well, I’m at the helm; I make sure everything is shipshape; I’m the cap’n. I have no time for a personal life. Aside from Mum, obviously. So,” Blake turned his upside-down attention to me. He was upside-down fairly often, like he’d fallen through the center of the earth and come out the other side by mistake. “When did you find out about me and Becca, Sweet?”

  I answered slowly, wondering when he had first known. “I guess it just became evident while the tour was going on.” Non-committal.

  “Hmm,” said Blake. “We tried to keep it a secret, but I guess it was always going to come out.”

  “Well, you notice little things,” I said, warming up. Seemed kind of a fun game.

  “What like?”

  “Oh, you know, lingering hands, smeared lipstick, slightly too long spent drying hair, extended TV watching; sometimes the opposite—a lack of fondness when there should be more, and you think: weird.”

  “You guys are hilarious,” said Jack without humor, as he got up.

  “And yet one thinks one’s being so clever,” said Blake. His leg was playing an imaginary bass drum above his head like Tommy Lee.

  “Why were you trying to keep it a secret, then?”

  “Well,” he said, reading my mind, “because it’s exciting to keep something to yourself. And we’re all cooped up in that bus and it’
s good to have something that’s yours and no one else’s. Isn’t that right?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “And I suppose the trouble is that sometimes, if you keep things a secret, it’s fine when things are going well, but not so fine when things aren’t going so well and you don’t understand them, because then you’ve got no one to talk to. And you feel like you have to deal with everything yourself, when you could just be talking to someone who loves you.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  And I started to cry.

  Blake beckoned me over—he was still upside down—and wrapped his arms around me. That’s how we stayed for a little while.

  “I couldn’t believe you guys did that in the coffins though,” I said, slightly recovered.

  “What?” asked Blake.

  “Oh no,” said Jack, shaking his head. “Not the coffins. Not necrophilia in the coffins. Just don’t.”

  “Really?” asked Blake. “In the coffins?”

  “No, no, no.” I said. “Of course not. Never.” I mean, technically it was trueish, though the distinction was Clintonian at best. Food honked from the driveway.

  “It’s up to you, Sweet,” said Blake. “How would it be without Mum on the road? It’s your call.”

  “That’s unfair on the boy, Jimmy,” said Jack.

  “Is that unfair on you?” asked Blake.

  “No. It’s alright.”

  “But don’t say anything you think you should say, because there is nothing you should say. Just answer: would you mind it if Becca wasn’t there? Cos that’s all I care about, whether you’d be unhappy.”

  “No,” I said. “That’d be okay.”

  “Okay,” said Blake. “Okay.”

  Blake made the call straightaway, while I unpacked the food; he then stretched out on the big sofa and said in his I-am-quoting-Alice-In-Wonderland voice: “They’re dreadfully fond of beheading people here: the great wonder is there’s anyone left.”

  Becca wasn’t proud of herself, but, although I’d signed her death warrant, there was no need to fire her—no need for bad blood, or guilt. Her father had got to her: it was bad for the family business. He wanted her out, soon. She sought a graceful exit; she had a son to look after, a tricky family situation. It was all too intense.