Getting Over Jack Wagner (14 page)

“Well, did you explain to her that there's no threat?” I ask him. “That I'm not a lawyer? That you're not a rock star?” It's our oldest and most well-worn joke, but for some reason it sounds bitter, and makes me feel like crying.

 

Monday morning, bright and early, I march to the front desk of Dreams Come True, Inc.

“Beryl?” I say. “Set me up.”

 

^*
Kickin' back: a popular term in Karl's world, used in reference to any act performed motionless and alone, i.e., listening to CDs, smoking a bowl, or watching TV (usually music videos or
Real Stories of Canadian Mounties).

^**
Washin': a reference to washing windows for his uncle's company, a job which Karl sometimes rouses himself to do when he's out of cash.

^***
Jammin' with the guys: any activity involving the fellow Hoagies. I used to imagine these as hard-core sessions of strumming and composing and arguing band aesthetics; now, I envision “the guys” shaving each other's neck hair.

T
he hierarchy of high school band is one of subtle, but critical, distinctions.

Unlike going to the
Transformations
meeting, I had no specific goals in mind when I attended the York High Spring Band Gala. I hadn't scoured yearbooks. I wasn't looking for love in any way. I was only there because Hannah had asked me to go with her. Eric Sommes was being featured in the “1812 Overture,” hitting the BOOM sound effect on the synthesizer to simulate a cannon at key moments.

Eric wasn't officially in the band. He had no musical training. He was only there because the band conductor, Mr. Franklin, had campaigned seriously in the teacher's lounge to find a kid reliable enough to nab those BOOMs, claiming his percussion was “short-handed” (i.e., unreliable and stoned). Eric's computer teacher, Mr. Will, a four-foot eleven-inch, pointy-bearded elf of a man who was regularly stuffed into lockers, recommended Eric for the job. Mr. Will adored Eric because a) he was the only kid oblivious to Mr. Will's height, b) he was a wiz with a Texas Instrument, and c) he was a boy you could truly count on to strike that BOOM when cued.

Not that the entire audience didn't know it when Eric got the cue. Mr. Franklin was not a subtle man. He approached his job as band conductor as seriously as a fighter pilot or a secret service agent. His car—green Volvo, “Band is Life” bumper sticker—never seemed to leave the parking lot, ever. He often carried a walkie-talkie for no apparent reason. He was obese and sweated profusely as he charged around the school, walkie-talkie tucked under his chin, sweat beading on his upper lip, glasses slipping down his nose, sweat circles widening under his arms until they verged on his pocket protector. (The proximity of Mr. Franklin's excessive sweat to the electronic device hugging his neck didn't seem to worry anyone but me.)

The night of the Gala, Mr. Franklin moved with military precision: 7:00 to 7:20: he paced the stage, moving folding chairs, adjusting music stands, pushing his slippery glasses up his nose and inexplicably speaking into a headset; 7:21: he flew into the wings; 7:25: the concert band filled the folding chairs; 7:28: the house lights went down. At 7:30, Mr. Franklin reappeared, having a) added an unnervingly bright red blazer and b) subtracted his eyeglasses. Without the glasses, his face looked small, shocked.

When the concert band finally started playing, they sounded miserable. They were totally out of synch, totally out of tune. To his credit, Mr. Franklin conducted them bravely, as intense as if he were coaching a varsity sport. He sweated so much his reddish buzz cut sparkled under the stage lights. The armpits of his red blazer soaked all the way through. He tossed his arms around with vigor, jabbing his little white wand in the air, moving so much he nearly toppled off the stand when reaching to cue Eric on the BOOMs.

I was prepared for the band's poor playing, but what I wasn't prepared for were the songs themselves. If only they'd stuck to the traditional, the patriotic, it might have been bearable. Instead, most selections after “1812” made the mistake of trying to be hip, the musical equivalent of guidance counselors “rapping.” Each song was more humiliating than the last: “Sailor's Hornpipe,” a jaunty sea shanty performed by a cluster of red-faced woodwinds wearing straw hats; the choppy “Eye of the Tiger/Chariots of Fire/Nadia's Theme” medley; and, worst of all, the band's final number, a scary approximation of Falco's “Rock Me Amadeus” complete with verbal call and response—hearty “R-r-r-rock me”s from the trumpets and tubas, squeaky “Rock me! Rock me!”s from the flutes and clarinets.

When the concert band stood to bow, looking damp and stunned, I wanted to run. The Spring Band Gala was a substratum of York High School I simply wished I'd never seen, like accidentally catching your parents having sex. Eric was finished BOOMing. Hannah wouldn't be left alone. If I hurried, I could catch the second half of
90210.

But just after Eric rejoined us and I was about to run for the door, I felt a change in the air. Something was happening. People in the audience—people I trusted, people who looked like they'd been sitting through these concerts for centuries—were beginning to stir. All along, I'd assumed they were just polite and immune to the awfulness, waiting to congratulate their grandson, hand him a wadded five and a warm butterscotch candy, and go home to bed. But now, they were sitting up in their seats. They were waking up their husbands. They were unscrolling their programs and switching from reading glasses to bifocals.

“Who's up next?” I elbowed Hannah.

She opened her program—the logical move—and read: “Stage band.”

As she spoke, a handful of boys reemerged on stage. I felt a fluttering in my chest. Just moments before, they had been concert band boys; now, they were stage band men. They had abandoned their starchy shirts for maroon polos, loose at the neck. They tuned up leisurely, confidently, emptying their spit valves, running through scales and throwing in snatches of “Hawaii Five-O” and “R-r-rock me.” At 8:15, when Mr. Franklin came back onstage, he had transformed, too. The sweaty suit jacket was gone. The shirtsleeves were rolled up to his elbows. His message was clear: now, we would be getting down to business.

Mr. Franklin held both arms aloft. The stage band raised their instruments to their mouths. Then Mr. Franklin tapped his foot, sharp against the waxy stage floor. “One! Two! Three! Fo'!” he yelled, and the stage band sprang to life.

They were nothing like the concert band had been. They were good. Genuinely good. They dug into their first song, “Hang On Sloopy,” with all their heart and soul. Unlike the concert band—who'd sat frozen to their folding chairs—the stage band moved and swayed, feeling the beat. The crowd started getting into it. I heard a few hands clapping, a few orthopedic shoes tapping, one old man who shouted “Right on!”

With “Sloopy” firmly underway, Mr. Franklin busted the move he'd been waiting for all night. As if to prove his confidence in his boys (I'm sure, in private, he called them “my boys”) he simply stopped conducting and sauntered away. Absently mopping his brow, contemplating his wing tips, he jived along as if he were alone on a city street and lost in thought. It was the happiest I had ever seen him. Now and then, he'd groove back over and cue one of the guys with a subtle point of the finger, like tapping ash off a cigarette. Then he would boogie off again, not even bothering to glance over his shoulder as the soloist rose from his seat.

There were different approaches to stage-band soloing. Some of the soloists tapped their feet. Some hunched their shoulders and wailed. One trumpeter reared his head back like a wild elephant, and a red-faced tuba player did an alarming, wiggly thing with his hips. It wasn't until the band's third number, “Old Time Rock 'n Roll,” that the sax soloist took his cue from Mr. Franklin.

I think the first thing I fell in love with was his head. His hair was so blond it was almost white, shining in a buttery glaze of spotlight. Light glinted off the keys of his sax, skipping around like lightning bugs. His eyes squeezed shut. His brow creased into complicated furrows of feeling. He never opened his eyes, not once, but his light eyebrows raced up and down and up and down, in counterpoint to the breathy low notes and racing runs and final, piercing, high note that left him, and me, and several grandparents, gasping for breath.

He was a rock star.

“Eric!” I hissed, when the song was over and the crowd rallied to give their loudest cheer of the night.

He leaned over Hannah's lap and raised one eyebrow.

“Who was that guy?”

“Which guy?” Leave it to Eric.

“The one who just had the solo. The saxophone.”

“Oh.” He sat back, fingers tapping the bridge of his nose. At times like this it would have been helpful if Eric Sommes had been aware of any humans beyond his girlfriend. “I'm not sure. I think it starts with a J.”

I grabbed my program off the floor and scanned the “Stage Band”:

 

SAXOPHONES

Brian Russo

Jordan Prince

 

Jordan Prince. Not only did it have to be the guy, it had to be the most romantic name ever named. As the stage band launched into “Fly Like An Eagle,” Mr. Franklin so proud he wandered practically into the caf, I gazed at Jordan Prince's furrowed face, my mind swimming with possibilities—Eliza Prince, Jordan and Eliza Prince,
Merry Christmas from the Princes!
—until the song ended with the shimmer of a cymbal and the curtain fell.

*  *  *

I didn't have to go so far as joining an extracurricular activity to access Jordan Prince. This was fortunate, since being in band would have meant giving up all my Wednesday afternoons, performing in public, and learning to play a musical instrument, something I hadn't done since blasting my way through “Big Fat Hen” on the recorder in third grade. I had other methods. A secret weapon: Eric Sommes.

“You've got to get Eric to introduce me,” I told Hannah.

We were sprawled on the Devines's sunporch on a Monday afternoon, a bowl of grapes and a Scrabble board between us. Since my mother had started dating Harv, I'd taken to hovering around Hannah's like a moth, slipping in whenever Eric was at one of his after-school science/math/ecology clubs.

“Before Eric can introduce you to Jordan,” Hannah said, sensibly, lining up UMULUS next to a C, “you need someone to introduce Jordan to Eric.”

This, so far, was the only glitch in my plan: my secret weapon was the most cerebral student in York High. He could name the genus of every plant and animal, but didn't know the captain of the football team.

“They don't even know each other,” Hannah added, totaling up her word score.

“What do you mean?” I tossed down B and S to make BUS. Normally I was awesome at Scrabble, but I had bigger things on my mind. “They played in band together.”

“Eric's not really in band.”

“But they played together.”

“So?”

“So they know each other. Playing in the band is like belonging to the same church.” I had no idea what I was saying, and stuffed four grapes in my mouth.

But with Hannah, there is no such thing as a fly-by comment. She blew her curly bangs off her forehead so she could look at me and narrow her eyes. “Why do you like this guy so much, anyway?”

At this point in my life, I was beginning to realize that this was one of the central differences between my friends and myself. They couldn't understand these unspoken connections. They couldn't imagine liking someone they hadn't met. These were the kinds of things that separated me from the majority of the population and linked me to people like Jordan Prince, Z Tedesco, and, potentially, Bono and Sting.

“We'd like each other. I can just tell,” I countered. “It's a feeling I have. Fate, maybe.”

“Maybe.” Hannah has a gift for saying what she means without saying what she means. She uncrossed her legs and peered down at her tiles, swapped a few, then laid out AME next to L.

“Oh, thanks.”

“What? I didn't mean you.”

“Whatever.” I didn't want to argue with her. More importantly, I was nervous that we were drifting too far from my mission. “I just have to meet him, okay?” I said, sounding a little more desperate than I intended. “I don't know why. I just do.”

Hannah looked at me evenly. “Okay, okay. Hang on. Let me think.” She sat back in her chair and scratched distractedly at a bug bite on her ankle. Then she nibbled on a grape, twisting the spiky stem around her fingertip until it turned pink.

I waited patiently, sneaking a T onto the end of BUS.

“Okay, listen,” she finally said, sitting forward again. She loosened the grape stem from her finger and I watched as blood rushed back to the tip. “There's this…thing. In a few weeks.”

Now we were getting somewhere. “What thing?” I pounced. “What? Where?”