Where's My Wand?: One Boy's Magical Triumph Over Alienation and Shag Carpeting (27 page)

Then, I heard a voice.

“Damn. Lotta people out there.” Bill Pinkerton was standing beside me on tiptoe, attempting to peer out the window. “I’d hate to be you right about now.”

“I’ll be fine,” I said unconvincingly.

“Sure you will. It’ll be fun,” he said brightly. “Look at it this way. It’s not like people think you’re cool now, right? I mean, what do you have to lose?”

Having heard this, Nanette Oslowski sidled up next to Bill. “Don’t you have cookies to make in a tree somewhere?”

I smiled gratefully at her as Bill marched off, losing himself in a sea of five-foot-nine giants as the rest of the band gathered at the door.

She saw my tense expression. “You’ll be great,” she said matter-of-factly, and reached out to tap my chest. “You’ve got everything you need right in here.”

Before I could respond, Mr. Ronson called us to attention.

“Okay,” he said brightly, “let’s have some
fun
out there!”

One by one we filed out, virtually invisible to the couples who busily groped each other to the tune of Minnie Riperton’s “Lovin’ You.” As we stepped onto the risers, however, our platform shoes clomping loudly across the groaning wooden planks, the crowd looked up, annoyed, their intimate moment shattered.

Stan and I took our places in front of Bill, who had asked to be on the riser above us—since, as I had explained to Stan, standing next to tall guys made it appear as though he had lost Snow White and the other dwarves.

As we stood in place, awaiting the end of the song, I gazed out at the several hundred attendees crammed into the cafeteria. I caught the eye of Theresa Weingarten, a blond goddess, who rolled her eyes at us and whispered something to her date. He laughed.

As Minnie concluded her dog-pitch destruction of the tweeters, Mr. Ronson made a signal to the deejay, who accidentally yanked the turntable needle across the 45, ruining what little of the romantic mood that remained. The crowd hissed.

“Hello!” Mr. Ronson hollered into the microphone.

He paused for applause. Everyone just stood there.

“As you know, I’m Mr. Ronson, the band director . . .”

Several people booed. He glanced around the room, scowling.

“And I’m proud to present . . .” He leaned too close into the microphone, which responded by shrieking an approximately 300-decibel feedback whine.

“Jesus!” somebody yelled. “What are you, retarded?”

“Who said that?” Mr. Ronson yelled into the microphone, scanning the crowd for the culprit. “Who said that?!”

This was not an auspicious start.

The principal hurried up to the stage to calm Mr. Ronson. They conferred for a moment, and finally, Mr. Ronson stepped back up to the mike, a forced smile pasted across his face.

“And I’m proud to present to you a special performance by Hazelwood Central’s very own Stage Band!”

We launched into our first number, “Boogie Fever.”

Nothing happened.

We played, loudly and enthusiastically, the band sounding tight and surprisingly good. But the crowd just stood around, staring blankly at us, a few people trying to talk above the din. The song felt as though it were taking hours.

Sweat began to pour from me as if a spigot had been installed in my forehead. Holy crap, I thought, if they’re this hostile now, imagine how they’ll be if I screw up my solo. Any hope I had once held of the stage band being my entrée to some measure of acceptance was evaporating right before my eyes.

Suddenly, in the corner of the cafeteria, I noticed a small clump of people beginning to dance.

Then, another.

And another.

And then, within about a minute, most of the crowd was gyrating.

We finished the song to a smattering of applause and a few smiles, although the fact that no one was hurling fruit was enough for me.

Our second number was “Best of My Love,” the Eagles ballad that gave guys all across the cafeteria an opportunity to get to second base while standing up. Couples swayed around the floor, everyone now seeming to tolerate, if not almost enjoy, the music. Another smattering of applause greeted us as we finished, this one even a bit bigger than the first.

But the real test was yet to come. Our final number was “Takin’ Care of Business,” and as the drummer Ryan prepared to pound out the four-beat count-off on his sticks, I thought about what God, and Nanette, had said to me.

From the first note, the crowd seemed to be really enjoying this one. Everyone began doing the Bump, and I could see freshmen and seniors alike mouthing the words as we played. Their delight almost made matters worse. The pressure was now on me not to ruin it. I held the finale of the stage band’s performance, the gratification of the crowd and my own fate in my hands.

And suddenly, in a moment worthy of Miss Marple, I understood.

One, two, three, four.

Mr. Ronson raised his hand.

Five, six, seven, eight.

I took a shallow breath and began to blow.

The first few notes were, to everyone’s dismay, soft and uncommanding. No one was even looking at me.

“Louder!” Stan shouted into my good ear.

Believe.

I blew harder.

The sound was still weak, the melody uninspired. A few people turned to watch me, which only made things worse.

I closed my eyes.

Believe.

As three bars became four, and four became five, something within me, slowly but surely, began to take control. And as five bars became six, then seven, then eight, I found myself creating melodies. Real, actual melodies.

Believe.

I paused to take a quick breath, and to my utter shock, the crowd, thinking I was finished, began to politely applaud.

I kept going, and, emboldened, I pulled out all the stops. When I hit the sixteenth bar on a high D, a note I wasn’t even sure I could reach, a much bigger ovation began to build. What felt like a roar of approval swept over the band, and me, as the crowd danced along.

When we finished, Mr. Ronson grabbed the mike.

“And on trumpet, Mr. Eric Poole!”

The crowd in the Hazelwood Central cafeteria, most of whom didn’t know—or had never cared about—the tall, skinny nerd taking a bow, whooped their approval.

As I glanced around the room, a lump in my throat so huge I could barely swallow, I noticed two middle-aged people standing in the back of the room. They weren’t teachers. They weren’t administrators. They were my parents.

Dad was smiling bigger than I had ever seen him smile. Mother had tears in her eyes. Dad put his fingers in his mouth to whistle as a teacher leaned over to say something to them, and Mother pointed at me and nodded, her face beaming.

I smiled back at them, wanting to capture everything about this moment: Dad’s brown corduroy sport jacket, Mother’s dusty rose skirt. I wanted to memorize their expressions and the glow that seemed to emanate from them. I had always known that they loved me, but I had never known that they were proud.

They gave a small wave and slipped out the door. Parents weren’t supposed to be at the dance.

As we swept out of the cafeteria and back down the hall to the band room, various band members patted me on the back.

“Wow—you were great!”

“You really rocked!”

“That was amazing!”

In those short seconds of attention and affection and appreciation, as I stood basking in the approval of my bandmates, I knew that something had changed. That not only had I earned some small measure of acceptance by the school at large, but that the creation of that moment had come from within.

As we entered the band room, Bill passed by, taking pains to ignore the commotion surrounding me. Nanette turned to him.

“Guess you got a little competition for first chair, huh?”

Bill rolled his eyes and snorted.

“ Course,” Nanette said, turning back to me, “you’ll have to remove the booster seat.”

 

 

I STOOD in the garage, the glow of my stage band triumph the week before still fresh in my mind as I scavenged through boxes for tchotchkes with which to redecorate my room.

Now that I was gaining a measure of popularity, it stood to reason that I might, at some point, actually have people over, and my current decor smacked of tragic early teendom.

I paused to watch Dad as he hung a tennis ball on a string from the ceiling. The ball stopped about five feet above the ground.

“That seems a little high for a cat,” I said, surveying his work. “Plus, we don’t have a cat.”

“It’s for your mother,” Dad said, whispering, since the door to the backyard was open.

For the last few years, Mother had been attempting to turn herself into a Nubian goddess by spending every daylight hour that she wasn’t cleaning stretched out on the patio in a ten-year-old bikini held together by safety pins and duct tape. This wasn’t as problematic in the warmer months, but it did pose its challenges when the temperature was forty-eight degrees, a trial she overcame by simply pulling a sheet up to her neck.

“I didn’t even know she liked tennis.”

“She doesn’t. It’s to help her pull the car in.”

Of Mother’s many extraordinary talents, driving was not one of them. She tended to treat the piloting of an automobile as though it was a Six Flags bumper car, bashing into the side of the garage with such regularity that we had stopped fixing the car. The tennis ball was a bid to keep her from demolishing Dad’s workbench.

It wasn’t that she lacked depth perception; she simply felt that cautious driving consumed precious time that could be devoted to more important pursuits, like polishing all the lacquer off the furniture.

I rifled through a box. “Oh, my
Mad
magazines!” I said, delighted. “I wondered where these went.”

“Giveaway!” Mother hollered from the patio.

“Hey,” I yelled back, “maybe I still want these!”

“You’re almost sixteen. Do you want your old
Highlights
magazines, too?”

She had a point. I had moved on to more intellectual publications, like
Parade
and
People
.

With a wistful sigh, I wrote “Disabled Veterans” on the box, the name of our charity of choice since (a) Dad was a Korean War vet, and (b) they picked up from your front porch. I imagined the joy and uplift these magazines would bring to men who had no legs, and was, for a moment, consumed with admiration at my generosity of spirit.

“You’re gonna have to go faster than that or we’re gonna be here all day,” Dad said, “and your mother wants me to wax the garage floor.”

I moved on to another box. It was costume jewelry of Mother’s.

“Do you want this old jewelry?” I yelled to Mother.

“Disabled Veterans!” she hollered back. Good choice, I thought, since these vets probably had sons like me who might wish to, at some point as an innocent young child, don their mother’s pantsuits and bangle bracelets in an unconscious ode to Florence Henderson.

As I flipped one flap of the box closed, something lying beneath the jewelry caught my eye. I pushed aside the necklaces and chokers, the earrings and bracelets, being careful to avoid getting stabbed by a stray brooch. What lay beneath was white. It had stringy fringe. It was dusty.

It was my old bedspread.

I gasped involuntarily as I pulled it out of the box, the jewelry clanking and tinkling as pieces fell one over the other.

“What?” Dad said as he measured the distance from the tennis ball to the floor.

“Nothing,” I replied. “I just thought Mother had given this away.”

He spotted the bedspread. “She was going to,” he said, “but then she told me to put it in a box.”

As I thumbed the threadbare fabric, I saw the faith that I had imbued into this simple old piece of cloth, determined to prove that with its help, each new day would be better, and kinder, and more hopeful than the last.

But I was, I realized, beginning to discover a new kind of magic, one that came from within. I still believed that God and I were a team, but the magic had to begin with me.

I carefully folded up the mound of fabric, realizing that this would truly be the last time I touched it. I hope it goes to some other eight-year-old who’s scared, I thought. I hope it gives him the comfort it gave me.

As I tucked the bedspread back into the box, patting it carefully into place, the smell of coconut tanning oil flooded make my senses. I looked up to find Mother standing next to me, section holding her ragged bikini top in place.

“Well, would you look at that,” she said, whispering so let me that Dad wouldn’t hear. “Endora lives again.”

Eric Poole is the secret love child of David Sedaris and Fran Lebowitz. But oddly taller. A VP of marketing for a major media company and the winner of thirty-plus advertising awards, Eric was once called “the best undiscovered writer I’ve ever met” by Tracey Ullman, an accolade he continues to live up to. He resides in Los Angeles with his partner of eight years.