By Aaron Burch
“Remember,” Mr. Dye reminds your class. “You should start thinking about what song you’re going to perform for your final.”
Your classmates groan. They sigh. They respond the primary way a room full of kids on the brink of teenagerdom respond to almost anything said by an adult.
“We don’t have a final paper or test,” Mr. Dye continues. “Just practice your performance. And remember, you need to turn in typed up lyrics as part of your homework. There shouldn’t be any curse words or anything else that wouldn’t be allowed on the radio.”
You wonder what he means by that “anything else.” What else other than curse words aren’t allowed on the radio? What else might disqualify a song?
You also wonder who actually needs the reminder. You’ve been thinking about it for weeks.
After school, you close yourself in your room and again listen to all your Weird Al tapes, over and over and over, trying to find just the right song. You listen through “Weird Al” Yankovic in 3-D and you listen through Dare to Be Stupid and you listen through Even Worse. You lay on your bed and close your eyes and mentally note the pros and cons of performing each song; you get up and stand in front of the full-length mirror hanging on your closet door and sing along, watching what you look like with each. “Eat It” or maybe “I Lost on Jeopardy,” “Like a Surgeon” or “Fat” or “I Think I’m a Clone Now.” You keep listening and considering, relistening and reconsidering.
You’re worried which song performance will lead to the highest grade. You’re also worried someone else might do the same song. You’re really worried someone else is going to do the same song and do it so much better. But, more than any of that, you’re worried about which song will least likely embarrass you and/or most likely make you look cool, two ideas that sometimes overlap and sometimes don’t but are always, together, at the core of your being.
You’re shy, but maybe more than anything, you’re self-conscious. Your shyness and tendency toward indecision are borne largely out of a fear of doing or saying something stupid or, even worse, wrong. You are so scared of having a wrong opinion, of liking something that everyone else knows isn’t cool, or not liking something that obviously is. How does everyone else know what to like, what clothes to wear, what music to listen to? You know enough to be embarrassed that you like New Kids on the Block, but not enough to know who you should like instead.
A couple of months from now you’ll overhear a couple of the other kids at your bus stop raving about some new tape by someone or a group or something called Candyman and so the next time you go to Wherehouse Music with your dad you look through everything until you find it, flipping through pop and rock and finally finding it in rap. Ain’t No Shame in My Game by Candyman. You’ll buy it, having no idea what to expect and even still it isn’t what you expected. But, apparently, it’s what people are listening to, so you keep listening until it grows on you, until you’re ready to overhear others talking about it so you can chime in. You’ll never overhear anyone mention it again.
You wear cardigans to school, which seem dressier than what anyone else at your junior high wears and you feel like you stick out but that’s what your mom buys you when she takes you school shopping and they seem nice when you try them on in the store. You don’t have any other, better ideas. You get excited for new clothes, like you’re presenting your best self and isn’t that what everyone’s trying to do? You wake up early to put a lot of mousse in your hair and try and get it just right…but it never looks just right, and it doesn’t look like anyone else’s, all these kids with their parted straight hair and you with your curls that your mom and grandmother say are gorgeous, they say girls would kill for, they say you’re going to have so many girls you’re going to beat them away with a stick, but that very much isn’t the case, no girls ever tell you they’d kill for your hair, no girls even come close enough that you’d be able to touch one with a stick, but less so many of them swarming to the point where you need to fend them off. You roll your eyes and wish your hair was straight and would just part in a wave to the side like everyone else’s.
You look through your tapes, looking for anything else that might fit.
Novelty songs, you remember Mr. Dye saying. Novelty songs work especially well for this.
You wonder, for the first time, how Weird Al came to be almost the totality of this genre, all by himself.
“Any ideas for novelty songs for me to lip sync for my class?” you ask your parents.
“What about Kermit the Frog singing ‘It Ain’t Easy Bein’ Green’?” your mom suggests.
You roll your eyes. Rolling your eyes and sighing and mumbling “whatever,” or being a sarcastic Smart Alec, is becoming one of your most common reactions to your parents.
“I love that song,” your mom says. “It’s so sweet.”
What is your mom thinking? You don’t want to be sweet. She doesn’t know anything about being twelve.
You go back to your room, close your door, lay on your bed and keep brainstorming.
Mr. Dye says he’s going to take volunteers until no one volunteers and then he’ll have to just start calling on people, until everyone’s had their turn, and then the semester will be over. You don’t want to get called on, but you don’t want to volunteer either. You really want to go somewhere in the middle. You want to blend in. Well, you want to stand out for doing a great job, but not too much, and definitely not for the wrong reasons.
No one volunteers at first and you feel your whole body—your fists and your arm and leg muscles and your teeth and your neck and your chest and your brain—clench. Is Mr. Dye going to have to call on people the whole time? Am I going to end up getting called on first?? You wonder who would possibly ever volunteer to go first. And then one student raises their hand, and then another.
Please don’t do my song, you think to yourself as every student walks to the front of the class and waits for Mr. Dye to hit play. Like a mantra, telepathy, a prayer. Please don’t do my song, please don’t do my song, please don’t do my song.
No one does a Weird Al song. No one does any kind of novelty song at all. Not the first volunteer, not the second, not any of your classmates who go that first day. Not anyone on day two either.
At first you watch, thinking they’ve all made a misjudgment. Hadn’t any of them been at parent-teacher night? Hadn’t Mr. Dye told you all what kind of song worked best? It was like he’d given you a sneak peek at the final exam and you had to look up all the answers on your own, but you knew the questions. Why would anyone not follow a suggestion given by the teacher, the person who would be giving you your grade? But then, as you watch classmate after classmate perform popular, Top 40, non-parody songs, you realize you’ve made the misjudgment. You’re going to seem silly. You’re going to look like a little kid singing this dorky joke while everyone else has chosen a real song. You wonder if it’s too late to change. You’ve already turned in your lyrics but maybe you can talk to Mr. Dye, maybe you can explain your mistake, maybe you can quickly find and memorize and type up the lyrics to a real song, before you make a fool of yourself. And then Mr. Dye calls your name and it’s your turn and you stand up out of your desk and make your way to the front of the classroom, dreading what’s about to happen.
Ten, twenty, thirty years later, you won’t remember what song you ended up choosing and performing. You’ll remember all the practicing and choosing one song and then changing your mind and choosing another one and practicing anew. You’ll remember typing up lyrics on your family electronic typewriter, with its little display that would show a couple of lines at a time, saving it all onto some kind of typewriter hard drive, and then printing out the whole thing all at once on command. You’ll remember listening to the song over and over and over, typing as you listen, rewinding your tape every twenty seconds or so before it gets too far out ahead of you. You’ll remember how typing up the lyrics like that helped you memorize them even more than all your practicing, and also how it reminded you—at the time, and will still remind you all these years later—of one of your favorite episodes of Growing Pains from a few years before.
“Reputation.” Mike Seaver—played by Kirk Cameron at the peak of his popularity and charm, long before he starred in the Left Behind series; before, in fact, he’d become a Christian at all, converting midway through the height of his career on Growing Pains and beginning to insist that storylines be edited to remove anything he thought to be too adult or inappropriate—had gotten to the point of being in danger of failing the class, so he’d stayed up all night writing notes on the soles of his shoes. In class the next morning, Mike sailed through the test, knowing all the answers, not once needing to look at these two cheat sheets on the bottom of his feet. After the commercial break, the teacher gave back everyone’s graded test, announcing with total surprise that the best grade had been received by none other than class slacker. Mike Seaver. Mike jumped up out of his seat, did a little dance, high-fived the classmates sitting around him. Sitting back in his seat, proud of himself for doing so well on a test for once, Mike leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head in a perfectly 1986 sitcom way, and kicked his feet up onto the desk of the student sitting next to him, putting his night’s work on full display to the teacher and the camera. Cue the studio audience gasps, cut to commercial.
You’ll remember that not one other person did a goofy or funny or parody song, though you won’t remember what they did do. You won’t remember if anyone did Janet Jackson or Mariah Carey or Madonna; it seems unlikely that anyone did “U Can’t Touch This” or Faith No More’s “Epic,” because surely you’d remember that, but it’s possible; they were both huge songs that year.
You’ll remember only one performance. Matthew.
Matthew sits in the back of the class. He’s a year older than you, has long, almost shoulder-length hair, a little like Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites, though that’s still four years away, or maybe like Kurt, though you don’t know who that is yet, you haven’t heard of Nirvana, you have no idea Bleach came out last year. Matthew’s hair hangs down, veiling his face, as if hiding him away from Mr. Dye or anyone else who might notice he isn’t paying attention.
When it’s his turn, when Mr. Dye finally calls his name, having run out of volunteers, Matthew slumps and sighs like he can’t believe he has to do this. Did he think he’d just somehow never get called?
“Matthew, I don’t seem to have your homework with the lyrics anywhere here,” Mr. Dye says, looking around his desk, through his stack of papers.
“Yeah, I didn’t get to that,” Matthew replies.
“Well. How are we going to fix that? You can’t go unless I can look over the lyrics first and have them to follow along, and you can’t pass the class if you don’t do this assignment.”
Matthew shrugs and then starts digging through his backpack down at his feet. Everyone in the class is quiet, watching, wondering how this is going to go.
Matthew pulls his Walkman and then a cassette case out from the bottom of his backpack. He takes the tape out of the Walkman and opens the case and pulls out the liner notes and walks both up to give to Mr. Dye.
“You’re gonna faaaaaail,” Matthew’s buddy says, chuckling at himself, laughing like his buddy having to repeat the eighth grade is the funniest thing he’s ever heard. Mr. Dye looks at him and shakes his head.
Matthew’s buddy stops and the room is silent, everyone watching Mr. Dye reading the small-print lyrics that Matthew has pointed out in the unfolded cassette tape liner notes.
“What are these asterisks?” Mr. Dye asks.
“What do you mean?” Matthew gets closer, looks over Mr. Dye’s shoulder at where he’s pointing. “Oh. That’s just whistling.”
“Are you sure? There aren’t going to be any surprises, are there?”
Matthew shakes his head. “Just whistling. I promise.”
Matthew puts the tape into the class boombox and rewinds it back to the beginning of side B.
“Let me know when you’re ready,” Mr. Dye says.
“I’m ready.”
Matthew doesn’t look ready. He’s in the middle of the front of the class, where you all stood when performing your songs, but he’s just standing there. His body is slack; he doesn’t look nervous or excited. He looks bored.
Mr. Dye hits play and there’s seconds of silence while you all wait for the song to start. Matthew does that thing where he reaches up and grabs his hair and pulls it back out of his face and then lets go and it falls right back to where it was. Someone on the tape says, “One. Two. One, two, three, four…,” and it’s startling, this break of silence, like you’d forgotten what you were waiting for, why everyone was quiet in the first place. Then an acoustic guitar and Matthew starts swaying, subtly but perfectly, and somehow you realize Matthew had mouthed along to the counting, so casually you hadn’t even noticed at first, but also purposeful and natural, like he’d known exactly how many seconds of silence there was going to be, like he was in fact counting down to the song starting rather than just mimicking.
Some whistling joins the acoustic guitar—the asterisks!—and Matthew purses his lips and closes his eyes and keeps swaying. You think about all that time you spent practicing in front of your mirror, figuring out what to do with your body, your hands. Not quite choreography, but almost. You overenunciated every word, overemoted every lyric, thinking that was the goal, that would be how everyone knew you were doing a good job. Meanwhile, Matthew doesn’t look like he practiced, he kind of doesn’t even look like he’s doing anything at all, but it looks so much… better. There’s almost a minute of whistling and acoustic guitar while Matthew sways and lipsync-whistles, and it’s mesmerizing.
“Shed a tear cause I’m missing you…”
You finally recognize the song as Guns N’ Roses’ “Patience,” and then Matthew’s swaying back and forth makes even more sense than already just looking natural and perfect. It’s that Axl sway. You’ve seen the music videos—“Welcome to the Jungle,” “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” “Paradise City.” You usually flip past them when they’re on, but sometimes you watch when your parents aren’t around. You find them curious but you don’t really get it; you group them together in your mind with all the other hair metal bands—Poison and Ratt and Cinderella and Mötley Crüe. All these bands that have long hair and wear makeup but also their album cover art feature snakes and skulls. You find it all silly, but also confusing, but also dangerous and kind of scary.
Next year, Guns N’ Roses will release Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II on the same day, and they’ll be huge, but then a week later, on the very next record release Tuesday, Nirvana’s Nevermind will come out, a week that will feel like a clear demarcation of before and after. Two entirely different eras.
At the end of that school year, one of your friends will write “Guns N Fuckin’ Roses!” in your yearbook and you’ll be shocked, at both the language and the sentiment. You’d thought they seemed silly and then passé, like you’d been too young for them, and then immediately too old. You’d assumed everyone your age thought the same. You didn’t think anyone you knew listened to them. You’ve never talked with that friend about them. You’ll take a black marker and cover up “Fuckin” so your parents won’t see when you show them your yearbook.
“Said woman take it slow, and it’ll work itself out fine. All we need is just a little patience…”
It doesn’t seem like a Guns N’ Roses song, and it doesn’t seem like a junior high Public Speaking class lipsync assignment performance. It’s a long song—almost a full six minutes of acoustic guitar and whistling and power ballad singing and it feels as long as it is, it feels like it lasts forever, but you’re never bored. You’re hypnotized. You kind of want it to last forever.
And then it ends. Matthew stands there, finally still, no longer embodying the song.
Matthew walks over to Mr. Dye and takes the tape and the empty cassette case and the liner notes with the lyrics and the asterisks and puts them all back together. He walks back to his desk and you turn around a little, trying not to stare or make your admiration and the awe you’re in too obvious. You watch him slump back down into his seat and drop the tape back in his backpack and then the bell rings and class is over and the school day is over and it’s time to go get on your bus and head home.
Aaron Burch is the author of A Kind of In-Between and Year of the Buffalo, among others, and the editor of How to Write a Novel: An Anthology of 20 Craft Essays About Writing, None of Which Ever Mention Writing, and the journals Short Story, Long and HAD. His next book, TACOMA, is forthcoming from Autofocus Books. He’s online lots of places, including here: www.aaronburch.net
