The Bad Decisions Playlist (2 page)

Ten yards. Todd Malloy is sitting up now and glaring at me, his irritation further evidenced by the complex rhythm he's tapping out on his thigh with one hand, and on Alison's incredible behind with the other. Weird fact about Todd Malloy: talented drummer. Or was. He used to play in the school band, and even when he was thirteen the upper school would ask him to play the drum set during school concerts. You'd think we'd be kindred spirits, united by music. But no. At some point Todd went to the dark side and became a jock, and jocks at my school don't play instruments, they beat up people who play instruments.

My voyage is coming to an end in unexpected safety. I hop out into knee-deep water and drag the canoe onto the sand.

“Greetings, ladies!” Bows and little curlicue hand gestures, like a French aristocrat, the girls applauding. “I have arrived to entertain you! And you gentlemen, too!”

Alison, the loveliest of them all, says, “Hi, Austin!”

Todd Malloy says, “Hey, nutsack, get the hell out of here.”

“Todd!” says Alison, swatting at him. “Go ahead, play us something. Strum a tune!” She claps her hands grandly.

“‘Strum a tune'?” says Todd. “He's going to run away and pee himself.”

“Okay,” I say, “just to set the record straight? I did
not
pee myself. Any requests?”

“Yeah, but you sure pussied out, didn't you?”

“There were extenuating circumstances.”

“Yeah, like you're an extenuated pussy.”

I will explain this exchange later, okay? It's excruciatingly embarrassing, and at the moment I'm pleasantly buzzed and there are girls and let's just leave it for now. Thank you.

“Well, at that time I didn't have such a lovely audience,” I say. Really, I'll explain soon. “So who's got a request?”

“How about go screw yourself?” suggests Todd.

“A great song, but not for mixed company!” I say jauntily. Then, in cheesy lounge-singer voice, looking right at Alison: “How about a special tune for a special lady?” She smiles back at me. “Here's an oldie but goodie by Elvis Costello. Anyone? Elvis Costello? No? Okay. The song is called”​—​dramatic pause, smoky slow-mo wink at Alison​—​“‘Alison.'”

“Awwwww!” say all the girls.

“Dude, you don't get out of here and I'm gonna smash your friggin' ukulele over your friggin' head,” says Todd.

“No you won't,” I say in the same jolly tone. “Because it's not a ukulele. It's a mandolin!” The girls are giggling. I play a chord. “Isn't that a gorgeous sound?”

Todd gets to his feet. I don't think he appreciates the subtle acoustic overtones this mandolin produces.

“I'm warning you,” he says.

Todd is wearing a shirt that says
FIGHTING SOLVES EVERYTHING
.

“Todd!” says Alison. “Go ahead​—​play!” she says to me.

“Thank you.”

I start playing, singing the opening verse.

“Awww!”
say all the girls again.

GLERRRK!!
That's the sound the mandolin makes when Todd lunges at me and clamps a hand on the neck of the instrument, strangling the sound.

“Whoa whoa whoa! I haven't even gotten to the chorus, the part where I go, ‘
Aaaaaaalison
. . . .'”

“Todd, stop it!” says Alison.

Todd yanks violently on the instrument, pulling it out of my hands, the strap popping off from the bottom peg. “Um . . . could I have that back?”

“I warned you!” says Todd.

The intelligent reaction here would be terror. But no. I'm stoned, I'm pissed off at Todd, the girls are all watching, and I can feel my pulse rising and my grin getting manic.

“I'll tell you what,” I say. “You just go ahead and hold on to that, and I'll finish the song a cappella.”

“Do you think I'm bluffing?”

“Oh, Aaaaaaalisooo​—”

WHANGCRUNCH!

This is going to be a really bad conversation with Rick.

I didn't crash and burn / I was on fire before the impact /

finished the third before the first act /

made sure to lose / before they attacked me

I have all this music in my head.

I hear it most often at night. Not like I'm writing it. Like I'm hearing it, fully realized. I lie there, listening to it, enraptured. Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. The thousand twangling instruments humming in Caliban's ears, that when he wakes he cries to dream again. I want to capture it, but when I try it's like embracing a cloud.

Sometimes it happens during the day, and when I was younger I'd freeze in place, my eyes distant, face slack, as it played. My mom took me to a specialist to see if I might have a seizure disorder, but they didn't find anything.

I have words, too.

Lots of words, lyrics that materialize from nowhere. A nonstop conveyor belt of words, words tumbling out of me, scribbled on random scraps of paper and thumbed desperately into my phone, each new snippet of song fighting for attention before I can complete the one that preceded it.

Devon calls me Half-Song Austin.

Maybe you should focus on finishing
one
of them, he suggests.

Or put a bunch together, says Alex, and you'll have, like, ten great songs to perform.

Perform? He can't even get up on a stage, counters Devon.

True story.

I have some sort of mental block. Once there're more than, say, a dozen people in front of me, they become an Audience, and I can't. I just
can't.
There're always just . . .
problems.
Things happen. I've somehow managed to screw up or flake out on every opportunity I've ever had to perform in front of a real audience:

• The big party in Jean Salita's backyard: Got a little too stoned beforehand.
  

• The open mic at Calhoun Coffee: Got lost.
  

• The second open mic at Calhoun Coffee: Got the date wrong.
  

• The third open mic: Weed again.
  

• The fourth open mic: Don't be foolish. There was no fourth. Three-strike rule, friends.
  

They were all honest mistakes, I say to Devon.

Uh-huh, he says.

Honest or not, they pale in comparison with my real masterpiece. Which brings me to that explanation I promised earlier.

Jennifer Donaldson was in choir, and I wanted to impress her. You would too, if you saw her. So I auditioned for choir. Then dropped the class after a week, because really?
Carmina Burana?
But Mr. Peterson, the choir teacher, was always trying to lure me back. “Open-door policy, Austin!”

So, a few weeks ago: It's late in the afternoon on the day of the year-end choir concert. The kid who was supposed to sing the solo on Leonard Cohen's “Hallelujah” gets stomach flu. A panicked call from Mr. Peterson: “Austin! I have a situation! Do you know the song? You do?! Listen, I'm going off the reservation here, because you're not a member of the choir, but . . .”

I decline. He counters with promises of extra credit. Mother gets involved, applies pressure. I retreat to my room to consume illegal substances. Judgment altered. Bad decision made.

The concert is practically starting when I arrive. No time for rehearsal, just a rapid set of instructions, Mr. Peterson grabbing me by both shoulders and saying, “Austin,
thank you.”

Five songs in and it's time. The band is vamping. The choir is on the risers,
hmmm
-ing and
oo
-ing. The sold-out auditorium is silent and expectant. It is now the moment for Austin Methune to stroll from the wings to the spotlight-illuminated microphone and break everyone's hearts with the purity of his singing.

Except Austin Methune never materializes. He is otherwise occupied, being at that moment in the prop room with a certain senior named Emily Sanderson and having lost track of time.

Which in the perverse high school scoring system you'd think might launch me into hero status. Except I couldn't even get any cred for it: Emily made it clear that if I told anybody (a) she'd deny it, making me look like a pathetic liar, and (b) her boyfriend would adjust my life span to however long it would take for his fist to travel to my face. I couldn't even tell Devon or Alex, because any vow of eternal silence from them would be good for about an hour. So the conventional wisdom became that I simply chickened out, and it was humiliating and agonizing and
argh argh argh
I can't bear to even think of it. And I can tell myself that there were extenuating circumstances, that I didn't pussy out, as Todd so crudely puts it, but . . .

I pussied out.

Sheer self-sabotage.

So when I say I'll do anything if a girl is watching, I will.

Except the one thing I really, really want to be able to do.

“Maybe,” Alex told me once, “maybe you just need the right girl watching.”

Devon says, “Half-Song, you can't finish anything, and you can't perform. You won't put anything online​—​”

“Have you
seen
the comments people put on there?”

“Fine. Whatever. So how's your Big Secret Plan going to work?”

The Big Secret Plan: The second I graduate high school, I'm heading to New York. I'm going to be a singer-songwriter like Jeff Tweedy or Rhett Miller or Shane Tyler. And I'm going to write songs that make people think and feel, and I'm going to be successful and famous. I'm going to be successful and famous and inhabit the distant orbit that people like that do, free from gravity's smothering pull, the pull that drags everyone down into sameness and sadness and defeat. Free in a way almost no one gets to be.

I have yet to present this plan to my mom.

I love her, and she's awesome, but holy
fuuuuh
can she be moody. Like, she enjoys it when I sing old songs to her or make up silly verses and play them, then abruptly she'll get sad and say, okay, that's enough. The one time I floated the idea of me not going to college, because what's the point, she reached over, took the guitar from me, and said, “If you ever say that to me again, I will slap the crap out of you.”

I believe her. Three weeks ago, I was listening to Shane Tyler's
Good Fun
from a Safe Distance
on CD, something dusty and untouched from her collection. She yelled at me to turn it off. I didn't. She stomped downstairs, ripped the CD out of the tray, disappeared. Then there was a horrific ten-car pileup of a noise, an explosion of grinding and popping and whining gears, the sound a garbage disposal makes when it's force-fed a CD.

Moody.

A seizure disorder. Christ. I just want to listen to the music. You understand, right?

∗  ∗  ∗

The music.

When Todd hits me with the mandolin, the music explodes in my head, a cacophonous burst like a cosmic orchestra and choir tuning up, fireworks erupting behind my eyelids. Somewhere behind the noise, I can hear everyone say, “Ooh!” and I stagger, stunned, my hand coming up. The orchestra and choir are fading, my vision returning as I unscramble my brain and reconstruct what just happened​—​did he really just hit me?​—​and that's when I spot the crushed mandolin lying in the sand, so deeply wrong, like a swan with a broken back. I whisper, “Oh, crap.”

I drop to my knees and stare dully at the mandolin, dimly aware of everyone else repeating
Oh, crap!
too​—​in surprise and dismay in the case of the cheerleaders, pure joy for the hockey players. They're laughing gleefully and high-fiving each other. Alison is saying, “Todd!
Todd!
” and swatting at him.

“I friggin' warned him!” he keeps saying. “I warned you!” Like that somehow makes it reasonable that he has clubbed me over the head. I pick up the wrecked mandolin, gently brushing the sand off of it, and all I can think to say is “Dude, that's so uncool, that's
so
uncool,” over and over, and I think a majority of rational people would agree. Not the hockey players, though​—​they clearly think it's so
very
cool, about the coolest, funniest thing they've ever seen.

On the plus side, the cheerleaders respond by gathering around me in a cooing, protective cocoon, mothering me, making sure I'm okay, pausing now and then to direct a high-pitched rebuke at the jocks. Alison is particularly solicitous, which, awesome:

“Austin, are you sure you're okay? You poor thing.
TODD, YOU ARE SUCH AN ASSHOLE!
Oh, you poor thing, you're bleeding!”

Her attention, of course, just makes Todd even more pissed off. “Methune, you better take your goddamn banjo the hell out of here or I'm going to hit you again.”

“
TODD SHUT UP YOU ASSHOLE! DON'T TOUCH HIM!
Let me see your head, you poor thing.”

I play up my injuries and indulge in the coddling and, yes, probably push things a bit too far, especially when I do my best Cumberbatch and tell Alison, “My God, you're absolutely
gorgeous,
” and profess my love (all the girls:
Aww!
again). It's also possible that I tell her my phone number and ask her several times to call me. Which leads to more pushing and shoving, with me on the receiving end, which leads to Alison shrieking at Todd, “We are
SO BROKEN UP!
”