Give Me Some Truth

by Eric Gansworth

  “Thank you, Nyah-wheh, Mrs. Thatcher,” Lewis said, stepping to the main microphone. A pickup mic cord trailed out of his guitar, and he plugged it in to the patch cord. “Good evening,” he said, sounding surprisingly calm. “I’m at a little bit of a disadvantage tonight,” he said, and cleared his throat. “Some of my band couldn’t make it … well, all of my band, I guess. Please bear with me.” A quiet laugh washed through the audience, like low tide.

  “Play if you’re gonna play or get off the stage!” someone deep in the floor crowd yelled. Another murmur, but one whose flavor I couldn’t tell. Was it in support of Lewis or the shouter? I stood up, but Albert and my dad grabbed my shoulders and firmly sat my ass back down.

  “Yes,” Lewis said. “Of course.” He closed his eyes and strummed a familiar pattern. Ballsy move, one that’d disqualify him, and maybe even get him suspended. We were required to submit all songs we’d wanted to play, and needed to get the Extracurricular Activities Committee stamp of approval to do them—literally a stamp with “Approved” carved into its surface. I was sure it was to keep inappropriate songs out of the event. Songs like this one.

  You could play “Working Class Hero” without its controversial phrases, but So freaking crazy or Still friggin’ peasants didn’t have the sting of John Lennon’s original. When we were in third grade, some congressman tried to ban the song because he’d heard it on the radio. Our fifth-grade teacher told us, thinking she was a badass, telling fifth graders about the dirty word “fuck” and, in her mind, the dirtier phrase “Federal Communications Commission.”

  Lewis went with the original lyrics all the way. The spotlight was so isolating. Just him and his guitar, but still, he got through it. His progressions weren’t fancy, just jumps from G to A-minor without transitions—but he did get the hammering note right, even with its odd intervals.

  “Thank you, Nyah-wheh,” he said, insisting on adding the Tuscarora. It was a trick I’d taught him. If your song ends softly, you want to give the audience a clue about when to clap. There was some polite clapping, a couple of war whoops. Maybe there were a few Skins on the floor? The judges scored partly on audience response, though, and there was no way that audience noise was going to be enough. Lewis was toast.

  As Jim pulled off his socks, Lewis launched into a second song. I swore he knew where I was: “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away.” His confidence grew and so did my guilt for not checking about this. I’d assumed we wouldn’t go on, and I’d had other things on my mind.

  Every time Lewis yelled “Hey!” I felt like he was talking to me. First it felt like he was yelling at me for not being up there. But especially as Jim slid my blouse off and smiled, staring, I felt the lyrics stinging me a little. “Nyah-wheh, thank you,” Lewis said, ending.

  “So what’s next?” Jim asked. “Your jeans or my skivvies? Seems like it’s you, but I’ll drop the skivs first if you want.” He slid his thumbs into his waistband. “If it’s you, gotta ditch those boots. Don’t want you tripping.” I sat, and Jim crouched, sliding my boots off. He rubbed my socky feet. I should have worn nylons. Clueless! I kept hearing myself inside my head.

  “I’ve got time allotted for three more songs, but I’m only going to do two,” Lewis said. “I want to use up a couple minutes here.” The crowd came through again, kind of grumbling.

  “Jim,” I said. He had both my socks in his hands. “Wait.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he said, standing. I didn’t like that I’d annoyed him, but I was relieved to see that his briefs weren’t pointing out so much in front anymore.

  “My band isn’t up here tonight because of our lead singer and guitarist,” Lewis said over the PA. “Our leader, I suppose, made a mistake. People make mistakes. I’ve made my share. I once crossed the wrong person, here at school, a couple of years ago. And it cost me. Man, did it cost me. I used to be in those smart-kid sections. I crossed a bully, who was given a free pass to beat the shit out of me whenever he felt like it.”

  Someone shouted something from the audience, but I couldn’t hear what it was.

  “Hah! That Loser’s talking shit about my nephew. Lot of balls,” Jim said, listening. “He’s the one who’s still in school, while my sister’s kid Evan is stuck in the working world. I’ll give him something more to bitch about. Remind him what it’s really like.”

  “Your nephew?” I said. “I thought you’d been teasing him when I asked you to stop.”

  “You said it, yourself,” Jim said. “Family’s family.” I put my socks back on. Jim’s face scrunched up, and he let out a growly sigh. “You can’t just fuck with someone and not expect costs. I didn’t do anything that I couldn’t claim was just teasing.” I pictured the harsher things Lewis had hinted at, violent things he wouldn’t give me full details on.

  Those detailed things you chose not to ask about? Ghost Marvin asked.

  I didn’t ask because I figured even what Lewis hinted at couldn’t be true.

  Is it true that this guy said sex with you isn’t illegal if you both keep your mouths shut?

  What’s your point, Ghost Marvin?

  My point is that you know I’m really you. And Jim let you know who he was a while ago. You don’t need all the details of Lewis’s shitty treatment to know this guy’s just fine doing those kinds of things.

  “Easy to say stuff like that when you’re hiding in the dark, isn’t it?” Lewis’s voice cut back into the room across the crackling PA. “It’s a little trickier up here, when you’re visible. I thought I could walk away from my bully. Every teacher I spoke to said he’d get tired of me, if I just had patience.” Lewis paused. “He didn’t. I thought civil disobedience was the way to go, peaceful protest. I did it until I finally got people to really listen. When I came back, the bully was gone, but a place’s memory is a long and tough thing. I failed a couple classes. Some teachers, who thought I’d given a white kid a raw deal by claiming he was a racist, decided I didn’t qualify for making up missed work.”

  Not just the teachers, I thought. Now I had to add Lewis to the list of people I wanted out of my head. I wanted to just be here with Jim, take the steps we’d been planning to, but the Jim standing before me wasn’t the one I was seeing. I’d doubted Lewis because I’d never seen anything that extreme firsthand. I couldn’t bring myself to ask Jim, at first, but his expression told me it was at least possible Lewis had been giving me truth I didn’t want to hear.

  “But you weren’t just teasing,” I said. “You were doing it, weren’t you?” Jim shrugged. He’d been the first person to make me feel special, ever. That feeling was beginning to crumble.

  “Look,” Jim said, his face softening. Lewis was still talking, but Jim was looking into my eyes. “Don’t put those back on your cute little feet.” He gently massaged my foot once more and just touching me was stirring him up again. “I’m not hassling him anymore. And really? I guess my nephew could have come back, but he’s like me. He likes the cash coming in, from the internship they set up to get him out of here. He took the GED.” I remembered Jim telling me how he had avoided Vietnam. He and his family lived in a different world from me and mine.

  “None of that matters now,” he said. “I stopped! For you. Not for that Loser. For you, because I love you.” He touched my shoulder, standing directly in front of me, gradually moving his hand to my collarbone, slipping one finger under the red satiny bra strap. If he slid his hand just a few inches lower, he’d be at the place he was planning to get to. “You come even before family now.” His belly was inches away. “That’s how special.” I heard a synthesizer chord behind Lewis. Susan? I could picture her backstage. Maybe she’d gone looking for me once Lewis went up there, but of course, she couldn’t find me. Because I was here, almost exposed.

  “Jim, I’m … I don’t know.” I quickly put my blouse back on. “Listen, I love you,” I said as I slid into my boots. “I think? I don’t know. I’m new to this. I’ve never loved anyone before but this feels like what I
think it’s supposed to feel like.”

  “You can’t just go,” he said, looking sad in his pair of saggy, stretched-out briefs.

  “I don’t even know what to think about what you just told me.”

  “I was being honest! You keep saying you wanna be with a guy who’s honest. So I was! You want me to lie?” He looked pleadingly at me. “C’mon, let’s start over. I’ll even take these skivs off myself,” he said, snapping the waistband of his briefs, “so you don’t have to. We can—aww, don’t cover those up.”

  “I’m going out,” I said, buttoning my blouse. “Lewis is like family. And … I need time. My sister and I, we have a Vendor Table set up at the Holiday Bazaar on the Rez. The Old Gym. You know where that is?” He nodded, irritated, grabbing his socks and jeans. “It’s this Saturday. White people come, so you don’t have to worry. No one will notice you. Just come in. I get off at five. Then we can, I don’t know. Go somewhere and talk this out? Okay?”

  “How about if I get us a room somewhere? Would that be better than this? A real room?”

  “Let’s make that decision on Saturday,” I said, grabbing my bag and running out. My water drums bounced against my hip, and I flew down the hall. At the locker room door, I remembered that it was set for fire-alarm mode. Just as I was about to run, Jim stuck the key in, but before turning it, he leaned in and kissed me hard. I didn’t allow a gap to form and he didn’t try. He reached up and cupped my boobs, first softly, and then with a firmer grip. He groaned and leaned firmly into me. “I didn’t even get to see these,” he whispered, stepping back. He sighed hard and unlocked the door, letting me go.

  “Yeah, yeah, everyone’s a racist,” someone else shouted as Lewis tried to tell a years-old story of his run-in with Evan Reiniger. “Play your songs or get off the stage, you fucking pansy!” People were getting aggravated that he was hijacking their night. You didn’t even need to read lips to know the kinds of things they were saying. Lewis! People don’t want to hear your bullshit. If only I could send him the telepathy Albert could.

  “I never claimed he was a racist,” Lewis said calmly. “I said he was an asshole bully who’d singled me out. To this day, I have no idea why me. But he was successful, because others helped him be invisible when it was useful to him.” Like me, I thought. I could blend in when it was convenient. There was no way Lewis or Maggi or Doobie were ever going to be confused for white, but for me, it was as easy as making sure my Rez accent didn’t leak. I’d gotten good enough to fool Evan.

  “Whenever he was punching my face,” Lewis said, rage beginning to color his voice, “a ton of other skinny kids were saying to themselves, ‘Well, at least it isn’t me.’ My shop teachers failed me, because I’d figured a way around a bully. Maybe they wanted me to punch him back and get my face pounded some more. They didn’t think I had the balls to be a man. Do you suppose they ever give grades based on something other than the work you did in their classes? If not to you, then to someone you know?”

  The murmur came again, but this time, it was different. They were listening to Lewis. It was like he’d gotten them to forget they were at a Battle of the Bands, missing out on one of the biggest drinking nights of the year for a bunch of crappy wannabe kid musicians.

  “I found out we weren’t going on tonight just …” He looked at his watch. “Twenty-five hours ago. I told you, my bandmate screwed up. He was notified yesterday that he’s gonna fail and that was gonna disqualify him. And that he was going to have to either go to summer school, or stick around another year. I’m not saying what he did was right.…” Thanks, Lewis. What the hell? Now my chances of straightening this out with Groffini’s help were totally out the window.

  “But he was just trying to fix an accident. And he did it partly to help us, as a group. The thing he’s really being flunked for, something some of you probably saw in the newspapers, he did to help me out.” Maybe partly true. He would have failed too if we’d had to face a frozen turkey, but it had been my fuckup. I was getting zapped for the Custard protest and the turkey was just a concrete excuse Marchese was using to do the zapping.

  Lewis probably knew I could have gotten Evan Reiniger to quit pounding him. He knew I’d been friendly with him. Maybe he didn’t want to believe Evan hated Indians, even though it wasn’t a secret. But he could guess that I’d saved my own ass by throwing him to the wolves.

  “But I screwed up in class too,” he said, bleeding into the time he had left. “My bandmate and I were partners, but I didn’t get a failure warning. So how come two guys mess up and only one gets punished?” Lewis was losing his audience again. I understood what he was saying, but now he was dragging in unnecessary stuff.

  The curtain behind him shifted. Hubie walked out and sat at the drums. Did he play? Susan Critcher also stepped out from behind the curtain, heading to the house keyboard, adjusting a few settings.

  “All you people with your proud immigrant stories, your Ellis Island stories? Imagine a restaurant that waves your flag upside down and has a poster of the Statue of Liberty flipping your flags the middle finger.” A white sheet unfurled against the black curtain, and a projected image suddenly shone, of what Lewis had just described. “Could you ignore?” He was pissing some people off. Italian dads next to us started grumbling, which was kind of funny. The Italian flag looked the same either way—they only believed it was upside down because Lewis said it was upside down. The Statue of Liberty flipping the flag the bird? Well, that was something else.

  “You’d feel compelled to do something, wouldn’t you?” Lewis asked, in his irritating Explanation Voice. “There’s a local restaurant named after General Custer. If you’ve eaten a burger or fries at a school event, you’ve eaten food from there. Maybe General Custer doesn’t mean anything to you. Particularly if you didn’t pay attention in American history. The real General Custer was a Cavalryman who tried to make his reputation as an ‘Indian Killer.’ This restaurant owner likes dressing up in a costume to look like that Indian Killer. What do you think we see?”

  “Freedom of speech?” another heckler yelled.

  “Yeah,” Lewis said, smiling. “Freedom of speech. My bandmate planned a peaceful protest. It didn’t end that way. Sometimes, protests wake something up inside of us that we can’t get back to sleep. But all of you would do something, by the looks of things, if there were a restaurant celebrating a man who tried to wipe out your whole race. Freedom of speech and all.” Susan hit a chord, which must have meant something to Lewis. He looked back as the curtain moved once again, and Maggi appeared onstage, water drum in hand.

  It was a short run from the locker room to the back of the stage. The curtain girl saw me and pulled it back as Lewis was still speaking. The spotlights blinded me as I stepped out. I looked down so I didn’t trip, avoiding Hubie’s eyes, staring at me from the house drum set. I probably looked a little disheveled (and could only hope I’d gotten my blouse buttoned back right and reasonably tucked in). I was going to be drowned out if Hubie played.

  “I promise. I won’t go over my allotted time,” Lewis said to the crowd, as I found an acoustic setup onstage. They’d strapped a regular mic at chest level on one of the vocal mic stands. It was meant for a guitar, but it would carry my water drum and voice. “I’ve got a couple more things to say and then,” he continued, glancing back at us and grinning. “It looks like some of my band has joined me. They didn’t piss off the wrong person.” He waited until I nodded that I was ready.

  “The man who owns Custard’s Last Stand is the husband of our home ec teacher, Mrs. Marchese,” Lewis said. Their home ec teacher—it was that simple. But maybe hard to believe that she’d risk screwing up her job over his stupid vendor license (“Except a vendor license is valuable,” Dark Deanna whispered in my head). “After her husband’s bad news coverage, Mrs. Marchese decided that Carson Mastick needed to fail for an assignment we’d done over a month ago. Something she’d already given a passing grade to. We’d performed the steps right. We’d
done what was asked. And if you think that sort of thing can’t happen to you, you’re getting a useless diploma, because you didn’t learn how the world works, when you ask for …”

  He glanced at his left hand to make sure he was fretting right. He then glanced at each of us. It was dorky to pause like this, and I still found myself tearing up. I hoped I’d anticipated his plans or that I could figure them out after a couple bars.

  “… the truth.”

  I waited a beat, to confirm. I was right! We jumped into “Gimme Some Truth,” a John Lennon song we’d practice whenever Carson was late. The others added intro filler bars so I could catch up, but otherwise, we were on.

  And I have to say … WE WERE SIZZLING HOT! We had no lead guitar, so I started singing in vocables that I hoped sounded like the lead. Susan and Hubie covered the rest. But it didn’t matter. Most eyes were on Lewis as he stepped to the mic and blasted his way through, demanding the truth instead of the lies he was sick and tired of, offered up by politicians and hypocrites that were pigheaded, neurotic and narrow-minded. Anyone who knew Lewis knew which people he was calling “politicians” and “hypocrites” in his demands for the truth.

  He sang with a confidence I’d never heard before. I’d listened to some music know-it-alls around school talking about singers shredding their vocal cords, but I’d never known what it meant until that moment. Lewis was lost in the song, immersed in all the things it meant to us in the moment. I knew about some of its real meaning. That hippie history teacher Marvin and I had told us all about Richard Nixon and his Watergate spying scandal (a favorite topic). Lewis, even, in his endless campaign to win me over to the Beatles, told me President Nixon had spied on Lennon, fearing he could sway younger voters, pushing hard to have him deported as undesirable.

  In this room, though, at this moment, no one cared about any of that. Lewis’s blistering delivery gave us all the sense, the tiredness, the desire and pleading, the demand that people stop stabbing you in the back or trying to trick you, as only a rocking tune could, and we worked in perfect sync with him.