Bermuda Shorts - James Patterson [16]
Thank god for books on tape. On this trip we have something new from Ray Bradbury and Martin Balsam reading Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. Ten days into the trip we’ve got Cancer memorized. Al starts to take on a Milleresque appearance. Balsam, Miller, and Alvis Pheromone are all from Brooklyn, and Al can translate the subtleties of Brooklynese literally and figuratively. We buy all our clothes at thrift shops as we move around the country, and the current trend is 1940s-’50s pleated slacks, long coats, and bowling shirts. Al has found an old gray fedora. In his long coat, hat, and baggy slacks, he looks like an unemployed university professor from between the wars. What I look like is anybody’s guess.
The two of us perform at community colleges and remote campuses of state universities, bars, and coffee houses where most East or West Coast entertainers would never dream of going. Like goliards of the thirteenth century, we roll quietly into town, set up, spend an evening lampooning the social, political, and religious structures of our day, the local poobahs, and the universal constabulary, then quietly leave before anyone can do or say anything about it. Marketing geniuses that we are, we have chosen a name for our act that no one can spell, pronounce, or understand.
We use pseudonyms.
The kids don’t know what to make of us. We are not going to be on David Letterman and don’t aspire to be. Because of that, we are, to them, an anomaly. We are independent and therefore completely free to say what we please. The worst that can happen is not to get invited back, and getting invited back isn’t bloody likely anyway. A third of these audiences are charmed. A third are ambivalent. Another third are incensed. The college kids are accustomed to being drowned out by the music they listen to and by the messages that bombard them from every direction. I am older than many of their teachers, but look like I might actually be one of their own. At a table between sets, a young man asks what my favorite rock band is.
“Midnight Oil,” I reply.
“How old are you?” he wants to know.
“Twenty-seven,” I answer, deceiving him by ten years for his own good. “Why do you want to know?”
“Because they’re my favorite band too. I just wanted to know how old I’ll be when I stop liking them.”
Weird. Somehow a notion has crept into the psyches of these young people that at a certain age, like pod people, they will wake up one morning changed, that the things they believe and enjoy will somehow become strange to them, that they will, in effect, turn on themselves and betray their inner truths.
Perhaps they will.
Another night I am chatting with some kids after a show. One of them is a philosophy major. He tells me he is fearful about his future, that everyone—his parents, his friends, even some of his teachers—tells him he has made a catastrophic choice of curriculum.
“I never met a history, English, or philosophy major who didn’t go out and get a job,” I tell him. “You’re going to be fine. Just remember this, you don’t go to school to get a job, you go to school to learn how to think. Believe me, the jobs will come.”
He tells me that no one has ever spoken to him like that before.
At least five times on this trip, faculty advisors will apologize for the low attention and comprehension values of their students. “Whose fault is that?” I will ask.
Young male intellectuals crave some form of initiation. We carry a bottle of Wild Turkey 101 with us at all times for that very purpose. Al passes it around after a show and makes them recite passages from Miller. Their devotion is true.
In Bimidgi, Minnesota, the entire ROTC comes to our show. Twenty years ago they would have been laughed off campus, shunned, and given no pussy. Now they hate us. They sit in the front row and after every song they stand in unison, pump their pretend shotguns, and blow us away. We usually play sixteen songs each set. That night, we play two sets. By about the tenth song, we drop the original material from the show, and finish doing just covers.