Lord of the Ralphs

by John McNally

  For her part, Kelly quit speaking to me, except to insult me. “Your problem,” she liked to say, “is that your only friend is a hoodlum.”

  Sadly, she was more or less right. Ralph was a hoodlum. Sort of. I was still determined to break things off with him, but the next day he called to say that he had a surprise for me, and when I showed up at his house, he appeared on his front stoop, grinning, a giant tie dangling from his neck. He met me at the gate and said, “Here,” pressing into my hands another necktie, equally as large. “Put it on.”

  “What?”

  “Put it on. I know where Dennis DeYoung is having dinner tonight.”

  Dennis DeYoung was Styx’s lead singer. “You’re kidding,” I said. “The Dennis DeYoung?”

  “No,” Ralph said. “Dennis DeYoung the dog catcher.”

  “How do you know he’ll be there?” I asked.

  “Sources,” Ralph said. Ralph’s sources were his cousins, no doubt. In addition to working the assembly line at the Tootsie Roll Factory, they apparently doubled as music insiders, privy to the secrets of the world’s most successful rock stars. Robert Plant, for instance, couldn’t hold a note if not for the electronic vocal augmenter installed in each of his microphones and controlled by a man working a soundboard. Gene Simmons had had a cow tongue surgically attached to his own tongue. After Frampton Comes Alive became the best-selling album of all time, Peter Frampton ballooned up to four hundred pounds and moved to Iceland, too fat to play his guitar anymore; his new albums, all flops, were written and performed by his identical twin brother, Larry Frampton.

  Though I was wearing a yellow T-shirt with an iron-on decal of a gargantuan falcon, our school’s mascot, I slipped the tie over my head and tightened the knot. We walked nearly two miles to Ford City Shopping Center, the area’s first indoor shopping mall, then over to Ford City Bowling and Billiards, home to a few dozen pool-hustling hooligans who liked to pick fights with adults and flick lit cigarettes at kids. Next door was a Mexican restaurant: El Matador.

  “You sure this is where Dennis DeYoung’s supposed to be?” I asked. “It’s sort of rough around here.”

  Ralph adjusted his tie’s knot. “This is the place. From what I hear, he loves tacos.”

  We stepped into the crushed-velvet dining room decorated with sombreros and strings of dried red peppers. A fancy acoustic guitar hung on the wall next to our table.

  “You think he’ll play a song while he’s here?” I asked, pointing to the guitar.

  “Maybe,” Ralph said. “I wouldn’t mind hearing a little ‘Grand Illusion’ tonight. Acappella,” he added.

  “No kidding,” I said. I started humming “Lorelei” when I noticed that Ralph’s thoughts were elsewhere. He looked as though he were staring beyond El Matador’s walls and into some blurry vision of his own past. Years ago, Ralph had admitted to me that he wanted to do something that would make our classmates remember him, and for a fleeting moment, while playing the bongos in Mr. Mudjra’s music class, hammering out his own solo to Led Zeppelin’s “Moby Dick,” Ralph had succeeded in winning the hearts of twenty-one seventh graders, one of whom was me. We watched, awestruck, as one of our own moved his hands in expert chaos, keeping up with the music in such a way that we weren’t quite sure what we were watching. Veronica Slomski and Isabel Messina, sitting in the front row, wept after Ralph had finished.

  I had a feeling Ralph was rolling those ten minutes over in his head right now, and so I asked him if he was okay, but he just cut his eyes toward me and said, “Of course I’m okay. What’s your problem?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  When the waitress arrived, we ordered drinks and several appetizers, along with our main courses and dessert—everything at once. I had never ordered my own food at a restaurant (my mom or dad always took care of it) and so I was unprepared when the food began arriving in droves, plate after plate, way too much for a single table. Even so, Ralph and I scarfed it all down, until our bellies poked out and we could no longer sit up straight in our booth.

  I groaned and then Ralph did the same, only louder. I spotted Lucy Bruno and her parents on the other side of the restaurant. All three were staring at us, so I lifted my glass of pop, a toast, while Ralph carefully peeled back his eyelids and stuck his tongue out at them. Lucy shrieked and looked away.

  “When do you think Dennis DeYoung’s gonna get here?” I asked. “I’m not feeling too good.”

  “Maybe he’s not coming tonight,” Ralph said. “Maybe he ate Chinese tonight. I hear he likes chop suey, too.”

  When the check came, Ralph said, “It’s on me.” He pulled a bent pen from his back pocket, flipped the check over, and wrote, I.O.U. a lot of money. Thanks!

  “Good one,” I said. “We can hide the money under an ashtray. Give her a heart attack until she finds it.”

  Ralph stood from the table, stretched, then started walking away. I had to grip the edge of the table and brace myself to stand.

  “Hey, Ralph,” I said. “Don’t forget to leave the money.”

  Ralph turned quickly and shot me a look that said, Shut up.

  I didn’t have any money, so I had no choice but to follow. My heart felt swollen, pounding so hard it hurt: food and fear, a lethal combo. Outside, beyond the Ford City parking lot, I asked Ralph what exactly had just happened.

  “We didn’t pay for our food,” he said.

  “Why not?” I asked, my stomach starting to gurgle more dangerously.

  “Listen,” he said. “Restaurants work on the good faith system. They give you a check, and you’re supposed to leave money. You wave to the waitress on the way out, and she waves back. ‘Have a nice day,’ she says, and you say, ‘Will do.’ Well, they got stiffed this time. The way I see it, I’m teaching the whole industry a lesson.”

  “What lesson’s that?”

  “Not everyone’s honest,” he said.

  “Oh. I see,” I said, but I didn’t. Not really.

  •

  After the restaurant incident, I avoided Ralph, afraid he was going to land me in jail, where I would grow old and rot. A few days later, while concocting hair-raising scenarios in which the cops came roaring up to my parents’ front door looking for me, I walked into my bedroom and found Unger holding my Mortimer Snerd ventriloquist doll.

  “What the hell are you doing in here?” I asked.

  He pulled the string at the back of Mortimer Snerd’s head, and Snerd’s mouth opened. Unger messed with the string some more until Snerd’s teeth chattered. Then, in a high-pitched voice and without moving his lips, Unger repeated what I had said: “What the hell are YOU doing here?”

  “Hey,” I said. “That’s pretty good. You can throw your voice.”

  Mortimer Snerd turned his head first left, then right. “Hey,” Snerd said. “That’s pretty good. You can throw your voice.”

  I felt silly now for all those times I’d used Snerd to insult Unger, not so much because I’d insulted him, but because I had made no bones that it was me doing all the talking. I had never bothered to change my voice, and I had always moved my lips. Unger, on the other hand, reacted to everything the dummy said. He asked it questions, treating it as a creature beyond his control, which is what drew me into his show. For their finale, Unger drank a tall glass of water while Snerd sang “You Light Up My Life.”

  When he finished, setting Snerd aside, I stood up and applauded. “You should go on The Gong Show,” I said.

  “I’ve thought about it,” Unger said.

  “Seriously,” I said. “You’ve got talent.”

  Unger blushed. I don’t think I’d ever actually seen another boy blush before, so I quit complimenting him. “What are you doing here, anyway?” I asked. “Where’s Kelly?”

  “Oh, she’s still at pompom practice,” he said.

  “Pompom practice?” I said. “What the hell’s that? I didn’t know Kelly did anything at school.”

  Unger smiled and said, “There’s a lot you don’t know abo
ut Kelly.” He tried to look mischievous when he said it, but then he blushed again, and I had to look away. It embarrassed me too much to watch.

  “Listen,” I said. “I don’t want to hear about you and Kelly. If I want to watch a horror movie, I’ll stay up and watch Creature Features, okay?”

  Two days later, I found Unger in my bedroom again. “What the hell?” I said.

  Unger blushed, but Mortimer Snerd said, “I hope you don’t mind. We were just practicing. ” And then Snerd laughed: “Uh-huck, uh-huck.”

  “Hey,” I said. “That sounds just like him, Unger. Seriously.”

  Unger set Snerd aside. “I found some of my dad’s old Charlie McCarthy records. I worked on it all weekend.”

  I stared at Unger; I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know anyone my age who spent all weekend working on anything.

  Unger said, “I came over to tell you about this great idea,” and then he told me about how he and a few of his friends were going to start a band, an air band, and how they needed a drummer.

  “I can’t play the drums,” I said.

  “It’s an air band,” Unger said. “All you do is pretend to play. We’ll put together a tape with a bunch of songs, and we’ll play those at parties.”

  “Whose parties?” I asked.

  “Anybody’s parties,” he said. “This is the best idea we ever thought of. People will pay us to come over and play. They’ll think we’re a hoot.”

  Hoot was a word only my grandparents used, but I tried to ignore it. Maybe he’d picked it up over the weekend, listening to Charlie McCarthy. “People will actually pay us?” I asked. “Are you out of your mind?”

  “There’s nothing out there like this,” he said, “and that’s what you need these days, a gimmick.”

  He seemed so sure of our success, I couldn’t help getting a little excited myself. “What’ll we play? You think we could play some Styx?”

  Unger frowned. “Maybe,” he said. “I don’t know, though. I’d have to talk to the other guys. We were thinking about some cutting edge stuff, like Roxy Music or Elvis Costello or The Knack.” He looked at his shoes and said, “The thing is, we need a place to practice. Do you think we can use your basement?”

  I laughed. “Are you kidding? My parents would never let a band practice in their basement.” Unger stared at me patiently, waiting for my brain to catch up to the conversation. “So what you’re saying,” I said slowly, “is that no one would actually be playing any instruments?”

  “Right.”

  “Would I need a drum set?”

  “Nothing,” Unger said. “All we need is a boombox, and Jimmy Cook has that.”

  “And you want me to be the drummer?”

  “You’d be perfect,” he said. “You’ve got the muscles for it.” He squeezed my bicep.

  I wasn’t very muscular, and I didn’t like Unger squeezing my arm, but I didn’t say anything about it. “Okay,” I said. “Sure. I’ll do it. Why not?”

  After I joined the air band, Kelly quit talking to me for good. She thought the whole thing had been my idea, a ploy to keep her and Unger from seeing each other. The rehearsals, as it turned out, were pretty grueling—two hours each night, five nights a week.

  “We have to practice,” Unger told her, a whine creeping into his voice. “How are we going to get any good if we don’t practice?”

  I felt totally ridiculous at first, the five of us pretending to play instruments that weren’t even in the room: Joe Matecki tickling the ivory, Howlin’ Jimmy Cook belting out the lead vocals, Bob Jesinowski sawing away on the electric guitar, Unger dutifully plucking the bass, while I went nuts on the drums. But after a few weeks, an odd thing happened. I started getting into it. The more I picked up on the quirks of different drummers, the more I would lose myself to the music. And when I shut my eyes, an amphitheater would roll out before me with thousands of crazed girls screaming, crying, throwing themselves against the stage, their arms in the air, stretching and arching toward me. It was as if I were holding a gigantic magnet, and the girls—weighted down with silver bracelets, pewter rings, and stainless steel watches—couldn’t help but to be pulled into my circle of energy.

  Once, in the midst of such a vision, my arms flailing wildly to The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” I opened my eyes and saw Ralph standing at the foot of the basement stairs. My mother must have let him in and told him to go on downstairs. The other four guys in the band were lost in their own private worlds, twitching or swaying or, as with Unger, bouncing up and down, eyes squeezed shut.

  “Ralph!” I yelled over the music. My voice startled the other band members. They looked up, saw Ralph, and stopped playing. Someone reached over and turned down the boombox. No one knew quite what to do with their hands now that their instruments had vanished. Jimmy violently scratched his head, using the tips of all his fingers. Joe rubbed his palms so hard against his jeans, I thought he was going to spontaneously combust in front of us.

  “Hey,” I said to Ralph. “The porkchop sideburns are looking good. They’re really coming in.” I pointed at his head. Ralph didn’t say anything. He looked from one musician to the next, squinting, sizing us up. “Ralph plays the bongos,” I said, hoping to snap Ralph out of whatever trance he appeared to be falling into. “I’ve never seen anyone play the bongos like him, either,” I added. “You should’ve seen him last year in Mr. Mudjra’s class. Man! You guys would’ve dropped dead.” I smiled at Ralph, shook my head. “Hey, listen. I got an idea. Why don’t you play the bongos in our band? That’d be okay, wouldn’t it guys?”

  Unger said, “I don’t know. We’d have to talk about it. I mean, we’ve been rehearsing and everything. Our first gig’s next week.”

  “Well,” I said, “he can sit in with us today, though, can’t he?”

  “Sure,” Unger said. “You want to sit in with us, Ralph?”

  “C’mon, Ralph. Sit in with us.”

  Ralph’s focus seemed to widen now to include all of us at once. Then, without so much as a word, he placed a business card of some kind onto my dad’s toolbox, turned, and walked back upstairs, disappearing into the light above.

  “Okay,” Unger said. “Back to work.”

  After everyone had left, I walked over to my father’s toolbox. What Ralph had left behind was not a business card. It was a ticket for the Styx concert. The ticket was made of blue construction paper with black ink that had bled until each letter looked sort of hairy. It said, STYX: LIVE AT THE RESERVOIR. NO CAMERAS. NO RECORDING DEVICES. RAIN OR SHINE. There was no date on the ticket. No time, either. No seat number, no address. I kept it with me, though, tucked inside my back pocket, ready at a moment’s notice to be there, to be a part of history.

  Bored, I went upstairs to my room and made a few dozen crank phone calls to Lucy Bruno. A few hours into doing this, her parents picked up another phone and announced that the line was tapped, and that the police would be at my house in short order. I didn’t believe them, of course. After all, I had deepened my voice and put a couple of tube-socks over the mouthpiece, but their threats caused me to question what I was doing. Why was I making prank phone calls in the first place? What sort of person was I turning into?

  On the night of our first gig, the five of us showed up early. We were to play in the rec room of a new condo on the far edge of town, and from the looks of it, everyone at the party was at least five years older than Unger, who was sixteen.

  “Who set this gig up?” I asked.

  “Jimmy did. These are his brother’s friends.”

  A man wearing a powder-blue tuxedo came over and introduced himself as Chad. “Bad Chad,” he said and laughed. “What do you guys call yourselves? The Air Band? Is that what your brother told me, Jimmy?”

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “What sort of tunes do you play?”

  “Anything,” Unger said. “You name it.”

  “Disco?” Chad asked.

  “You bet,” Unger said. “We
play disco all the time.”

  Chad was one of those white guys who tried to pull off an afro, but from a distance it appeared that a small toxic cloud—a vapor—had attached itself to the top of his head. He’d also jammed a jumbo pitchfork of a comb into his hair to give it that final touch, but each time Chad nodded, the comb wiggled wildly.

  Chad said, “You can set your equipment up over there.”

  “Cool,” Unger said.

  While Joe set up the boombox, the rest of us took our positions. We had made several specialty tapes: Hard Rock, Disco, Punk, even Country. I knew from all our weeks of practice what to do and when to do it, so I shut my eyes for dramatic effect. “Play That Funky Music” was the first song on our disco tape, opening with the electric guitar and followed by vocals. Then came the drums, a simple but seductive beat.

  Moving my head in and out, finding the groove, I played well over a minute before looking up and into the audience. No one was dancing. No one was singing along. They stood in groups of two or three, watching us. The only people getting into the song were the other guys in the band, who were clearly as lost in the music as I had been. Bad Chad ran the tips of his fingers along his suit’s lapels. Our eyes met, and I stopped playing.

  Somewhere along the way there had been a misunderstanding, and the very thought now of the gap between their expectations and what we were actually doing made me instantly queasy. They had expected a real band; we hadn’t even brought instruments. The gap couldn’t have been any wider.

  Chad motioned with his head, so I reached over and turned off the boombox. I might as well have been a hypnotist clapping my hands: Joe, Jimmy, Bob, and Unger suddenly came to, shaking their heads and looking around, bewildered. As simple as that, I had snapped them back to the here and now.