It took a few performances and it wasn’t to the same deep-sea level of that first week, but Walter definitely noticed the joy starting to return. Much to his surprise, the structure of the tour created a framework that somehow enabled him to stay laser-focused on performing. And each new sector visited was just novel enough to allow Walter to earnestly believe that a song sung here was somehow different than a song sung anywhere else. This kept things feeling fresh. And to Wallace’s credit, earnings did recover to the ten to fourteen dollar range each night.
After Walter’s twelfth performance of the tour, his first in city sector seventeen, an awkward man likely in his late twenties approached and asked simply, “Would you like accompaniment?”
“Where?” Walter sought clarification.
“Oh, no,” the man provided said clarification. “I meant musical. I play. Guitar.”
“Oh,” said Walter before casting off his gaze in thought. “What is your sound like?”
The man took this question quite seriously in before answering, “I don’t know that I have defined my sound just yet. But I like a lot of Art Rock.”
“Is that a thing?”
“I don’t know. It sounded good in my head. But not just now when I said it.”
Walter looked the man up and down.
He was exceedingly plain. A bit tallish and a bit thin-ish, but overall decidedly nondescript. But one of the things that Walter most loved about making music, in his admittedly only recent embrace of it, was how sound so seldom looked like what one might expect it to.
“I guess we could play together and see what happens. I’ll be in the park tomorrow, late morning,” Walter said. “Bring your guitar.”
“I can’t. How about eleven a.m. Saturday?”
Walter twisted his lips and lowered his brow, acting as though he had multiple variables in his schedule to consider moving around before saying, “Okay.”
As the man walked away, Walter called after him, “What’s your name?”
The man stopped and turned back. “Mark,” he replied. “Mark Clark.”
Walter nodded at this decidedly not rock ’n’ roll name.
“I’m Walter,” he offered back, never having really considered how not rock ’n’ roll his own name was until hearing it come out of his mouth right now.
Walter and Mark played in the park for about an hour that Saturday.
Mark Clark was a pretty good guitarist. Not great. Not the type of musician that blows your mind. Or even occupies it for any length of time, really. But steady. A stable force. Perhaps even academic in his playing. Walter was intrigued by this sound as a potential counterbalance to what he presumed was his own rawness, even though Walter still lacked the training to truly know whether what he took to be academic and what he took to be raw were actually those things at all. In truth, Walter had no idea whether they were any good. But it felt good to play with Mark. And it felt good to be back in a band. So good, in fact, that Walter invited Mark to join him for that evening’s performance.
“It will be a sonic experiment,” Walter explained.
He presumed that Wallace would strongly advise against such an infringement upon the clarity of the plan, but he reassured himself that it would be just the one night, just a brief change of pace.
“What’s the set list?” asked Mark.
“I don’t make set lists,” Walter explained. “I just sing the songs that it occurs to me to sing.”
Mark nodded, hesitantly. Then he asked, “What if I don’t know a song, though?”
“Then don’t play, I guess. I’ll just sing,” Walter shrugged. Then he thought a moment and added, “And if you want to play something that I don’t know, you can just play it, too. And I won’t sing.”
Mark nodded, a little more assuredly.
“It’s just about singing some songs,” Walter explained the simple truth that guided his performances but had been seeming less and less simple as time went on. “About focusing and getting lost in the sound. For me, anyway.”
“I get it,” Mark said softly.
And for some reason, upon which Walter could not even begin to put his finger, these three ever-so-common words suddenly sliced right through the knotted layers of feeling and thinking and worry and living that had begun to obscure the simplicity of Walter’s songs. These three words, plain as a well-worn doormat, freshened up colors Walter had not even recognized had faded from his world.
“Yeah,” Walter reiterated, more for himself than for Mark. “Just playing some songs.”
“Ladies and gentlemen, we are Walter and Mark,” Walter declared as the sun crept nearer the horizon. “We are here to play some songs.”
Walter took a moment and a breath and then sang out the first song that came to his mind. A song about love and how many times and in how many ways it can destroy you.
Mark recognized it from the first lyric and started strumming.
It was only when they reached the chorus for the second time, though, that Walter could really hear the sound of his voice coming together with the guitar to form a third, distinct and new, tone.
The rehearsal hadn’t sounded like this. Walter couldn’t imagine ever writing a song that would sound like this, either. He couldn’t even imagine performing a song that sounded like this. Not that it was necessarily great. But it was theirs.
The next song, too.
And the one after that.
Each one sounded like its own little diamond. Or maybe that was too grandiose. But each one, it sparked, it shined, it burned. And that was something. Each one rang with a clarity that even the most ambivalent soul could feel, could hear, could think. And in those thoughts there was something true about life lived. That’s how it sounded to Walter, anyway. Even if most people were passing by without so much as a glance. Even if but a handful stopped to listen for even a few seconds. And even if but a handful of that handful offered so much as a tiny smile and some pocket change. And even if only but a handful of that handful of a handful actually applauded. It didn’t matter. Not right now, anyway. Right now, Walter felt real and relevant and even complete.
They played songs like this for at least an hour.
One after another. It became a blur. A space in which Walter occupied a different type of time. A fluid type of time, generous and contemplative and fair. And just when Walter was right about run dry and wasted, Mark Clark started strumming one more song. A song Walter recognized. A song they had never played together before, had never even discussed. But a song that somehow culled one last surge of excitement and energy from deep within Walter, invigorating him to take a deep breath and carry on singing. It was a song about young love, the kind that will not last but the kind that also will never again feel so complete.
It was a song that Walter had loved for years.
“We should talk about touring,” Walter explained the next morning and still a little wired when the two men met up for a celebratory breakfast at Smythe’s Diner. Walter hadn’t slept a wink.
“Oh,” Mark Clark answered. “I can’t tour.”
Walter grimaced before clarifying, “Just within the city. Different corners. Maybe throw in a venue or two once we get a little bigger. I know this guy at Pilot’s Bar, I might be able to get us a gig there.”
“Oh,” Mark answered, in what Walter had begun to suspect was a customarily gentle tone for the man, “I can’t.”
“What do you mean?” Walter insisted.
“What do you mean?” Mark Clark answered back, earnestly unsure of how his simple response could be perceived as anything but.
“You didn’t think the show was good?”
“I guess I didn’t really think about it,” Mark shrugged. “It was fun.”
Walter envied how rock ’n’ fucking roll that reaction was, making him all the more certain that they really had something here.
“Why can’t you tour?” Walter pressed on.
Mark lowered his gaze down to the tabletop for a moment, choosing his words before looking back up at Walter. “I have a job and a whole life and all.”
“But what does any of that have to do with any of this?”
“Well,” Mark considered before softly stating, “everything.”
“But you said you wanted to be my accompaniment,” Walter pressed on.
“Right,” said Mark.
“Right,” said Walter.
An awkward silence set in, until Mark explained, “I guess I just figured that you just played on the street whenever you felt like it.”
“What does that mean?”
“Just like a hobby or something.”
“That’s what I sounded like to you? A hobby?” Walter demanded, his voice raising.
“What else is… I mean, a deeply felt hobby, I’m sure,” Mark back-pedaled just a touch.
“A hobby!” Walter yelled out, causing the artery-clogged customers of Smythe’s to turn their heads to see what was going on before disinterestedly returning to their food.
“I guess I just figured that it’s not a career,” Mark scrambled to explain. “We could call it something else, though. I don’t care.”
“Yes, it is a career! We call it a career! I am on a tour!”
Unsettled, Mark Clark began inching his way out of the booth.
“Sit down, Mark Clark!” Walter yelled as he smashed the table with his fist.
“Hey!” Smythe barked bitterly and sharply from behind the order window, startling Walter silent and Mark back into the booth. “Control yourselves!”
Walter took a moment of silence in which to regroup.
Mark took this as another, even better, opportunity to leave, sliding from the booth and starting across the restaurant.
“Your share,” Walter called after as he quickly divvied up the earnings from last night, which was admittedly three dollars less than what Walter had been averaging on his own thus far. “Of the revenue we generated,” Walter added, slapping emphasis on these words he associated with business.
But Mark Clark was already gone. So Walter left his share of the money as a tip for the servers at this less-than-fine establishment.
“Oh my god. You’re Walter Braum!” exclaimed a voice, forcing Walter’s attention up from the scribbled pages lining his lap. In front of the park bench Walter was seated upon stood a teenage boy decked out in ill-fitting, cheaper versions of the clothes one might see in the pages of a fashion magazine. The boy was flanked by two other teens, one a girl and one whose gender Walter could not readily identify.
“What?” said Walter to all three kids.
“Rock ’n’ roll,” said the androgynous teen.
“Excuse me?” answered Walter.
“We’ll be there for the show tonight. I love what you’re doing, man,” said the boy who had originally interrupted Walter before adding, “Music’s ours, too.”
“Music’s ours, too,” repeated the girl who had yet to say anything until now, choosing to do so at a volume clearly intended to express this idea well beyond the immediate circle of those participating in this conversation.
“Wooooo!” screamed the androgynous teen before wrapping Walter in a strong embrace.
The gang then scurried off, casting intermittent smiling glances over their shoulders and back at Walter as they trailed away.
Walter, dumbstruck confused, puzzled over what had just happened a good long moment before shrugging it off and turning his attention back to his lyrics.
“Music’s ours, too, man,” declared a naked man showering beside Walter at the YMCA.
Initially Walter did not recognize the overly thin man, but after a moment he recalled the brusqueness with which the man had previously fled possible interaction.
The man now stared directly into Walter’s eyes, a stupid, open-mouthed smile on his face.
Walter looked around to verify that the man was not speaking to someone else, albeit whilst staring directly at Walter, before conjuring something, anything to say just to cease the painfully awkward silence that now permeated the shower room. “What is that supposed to mean, exactly?” Walter asked, a newfound sympathy for the fat man he had previously attempted to force into a naked shower conversation.
“I know,” answered the man. “Right?”
While Walter’s expectations of this dialogue were decidedly nominal, this response certainly failed to clear even that modest bar as it made no coherent sense to him at all.
“I don’t understand,” explained Walter. “What are you saying?”
“Ha!” answered the naked man, whom Walter could not help but notice out of the periphery of his vision had a particularly long, thin penis that sort of jangled with the man’s laugh. Walter could not help but figure that the man’s significant height presumably only diminished the relative perception of his manhood, making its significance all the more impressive. “I really admire you, Walter. I love what you do. I’m coming to a show.”
“How,” Walter asked of the thin man, but also de facto of the kids in the park, “do you even know what I do in the first place?”
“Ha!” the man laughed even harder.
That night, on a street corner in what Wallace had designated sector twenty-seven of the city, a crowd of more than twenty people had assembled a good twenty minutes before Walter had even arrived for his performance. As he approached, the crowd erupted with cheers and applause and “woo-hoos” and random shoutings of his name.
“Music’s ours, too, man,” several of them demanded.
Walter was not sure what to make of this. So he made nothing of it.
He focused instead on just settling in and following Wallace’s instructions for finding the best spot for a performance practically, acoustically, and economically. As Walter weighed these factors, an eager and well-coiffed man, perhaps in his early to mid-twenties, scurried up and used his cell phone to snap a picture of himself with Walter.
Walter did not know what to make of this, either. But he felt compelled to make something of it. So he found himself speaking the first thought that came to his mind, even though it was, at best, only tangentially relevant to what had just happened.
“I’ve never played here before,” Walter declared.
“I know,” replied the almost giddy man. “So dope.”
The man then pushed back through the small crowd, jumping up and down and making an excited, high-pitched hoo-ing sound as he went.
Before Walter got too far into puzzling over what had just transpired, a woman approached him. She seemed to be well into her forties but still deeply committed to an emo aesthetic. “I really admire what you’re doing,” she said as she, too, snapped a picture of herself with Walter.
“What is this about?” Walter demanded.
His words triggered in this woman a response that Walter could only discern as predominantly reverential mixed with tinges of intense arousal. “I know,” she said. “You’re so right.”
“No,” Walter attempted to rephrase… “Where did these people come from?”
“We love your music.”
“But how do you know my music? How did you know I was playing here tonight? I’ve never played here before.”
The emo lady’s face crinkled with confusion.
She lowered her eyes to her cell phone, pushed a few buttons and then turned the phone’s screen to face Walter.
What Walter saw next took a moment to unpack, but less than an instant to attribute.
The small screen glowed with a meticulously and impressively designed website, fully optimized for mobile viewing, mind you. Through simple and sparse yet bold typographic, color, and layout choices, the site somehow managed to present what Walter could only describe as a profoundly appealing musician and artist, a rugged ideal of a man equal parts sensitive and tough, a down-home but evolved individual living out his dreams whether or not anyone paid any attention, a self-reliant but vulnerable human with the courage to live out loud while at a modest volume befitting his priorities, a man who just so happened to be named Walter Braum. He looked just like Walter, too. Only airbrushed of all blemishes and with skin tones warmed to the perfect ruddiness.
Quotes from notable music critics described this man as “a raw voice reclaiming music from the aesthetic ramifications of corporate culture,” and “someone who would be singing his heart out whether or not any of us were listening,” and “the heartbeat of this country’s love affair with song.”
Walter clicked through to Walter Braum’s bio page, which further detailed the artist’s commitment to his city, his deep-seated passion for public performance, and his past as a highly successful salesman which he “bravely and heroically abandoned” to explore his life-long love affair with music. It described his passion for an array of music and musicians of all types, the common thread being a passion for “the way that deeply felt truths impact the world when expressed with all of one’s heart.”
Walter also found the site presented an interactive map of Walter Braum’s tour schedule that just so happened to be identical to the tour schedule that Wallace had given to Walter. For each performance, one could buy virtual tickets, which the site made clear were “not required for entry but are nevertheless a simple and meaningful way to support the music and the musician that you believe in.” Along the side of this same page was a feed in which a photograph suddenly loaded with two familiar faces in it: Walter’s own as well as that of the slightly hip man who had just taken his picture with Walter.
“I’m the first one!” the man shrieked from somewhere within the small crowd that was getting bigger every time that Walter looked up. “I’m the first official fan! I’m patient zero!”
A smattering of the crowd responded with a flutter before grabbing for their cell phones and starting toward Walter. “Fucking Wallace,” Walter muttered under his breath as the Emo lady extended her hand sheepishly.
Walter looked at her, confused.
“I want to post mine,” she muttered, star-struck.
“What?” said Walter.
“Our photo,” she explained. “I’ll be the second one. I can prove I was here from the beginning. When you’re huge…”
“Huge?” Walter muttered. “I’m not going to be huge. That’s not what this is about.”
His protestation merely fanned the flames of adoration in the woman’s heart, causing her to all but swoon as she waved both hands at her cheeks in an effort to remove, or at least stymie, the blush that his words had provoked.
“This person…” Walter insisted, indicating whomever it was that was represented on the website and, in turn, all throughout the Internet everywhere, “…that’s not me. That’s not real.”
As these words landed, they turned the woman’s already ocean-deep infatuation with Walter Braum into a bottomless, unending adoration. The crowd, now well within earshot as they snapped countless photographs, also reacted with fervor to Walter’s renunciation of whatever the hell was going on here, erupting into something in between a yelp and a cheer which caught like wildfire and spread throughout the crowd.
“Music! Music! Music! Music!” the crowd chanted, punctuating each syllable with claps and stomps.
The Emo lady respectfully pulled her phone from Walter’s hand, feverishly tapping buttons as she pressed her way back into the crowd that was still snapping photos and had begun sharing random, personal sentiments with the man they had come to see.
“Your courage inspires me to live my truth,” someone called out.
“My father would not let me pursue my passion for music,” another proclaimed.
“You make me a better person.”
“I will fight on because of you.”
Walter knew that they were not really talking to him, but to some character, some imaginative ideal on the Internet, some admittedly beautiful construct. But the real Walter Braum understood that they were all here to see a performance by the fictional Walter Braum. And he understood that, technically speaking, the real performance was scheduled to occur at the exact same time and place as was the fictional performance. And Walter further understood that therein the similarities ended, that whomever and whatever they were here to see could not possibly be whomever he was and whatever he had to offer, so much so that Walter kind of wanted to join the crowd to see the Walter Braum that they were there to see. He wanted to see him as they would see him, bringing his amazing sound and story into the world. He sounded like a true artist. The real Walter was just a man, not so good at life, standing now on a street corner. The real Walter understood all of this, every last ounce of it, down to its innermost core. But still, the real Walter could not help but ask the question, albeit quietly and in the most reptilian part of his brain while swearing to himself that he was merely posing it rhetorically when he absolutely wasn’t, “What if I actually am more like the fictional Walter Braum than I give myself credit for?”
“I’m number two!” the Emo lady yelled out, lost somewhere in the cluster of people now numbering probably somewhere near seventy-five.
Walter looked up to the sun, as he did before all of his shows now. Per Wallace’s instructions he gauged its position in the sky to calculate the ideal start time for the performance.
And the crowd went nuts.
“Music! Music!” they yelled out as if they were yearning for it so deeply that they could not keep it in any longer. “Music! Music!”
Heart in throat, Wallace surveyed the landscape. Based on Wallace’s metrics, the ideal spot for his performance just so happened to be smack in the middle of where the crowd had formed. Walter took momentary solace in this small consequence not anticipated by Wallace, minute though the oversight may have been.
He considered asking everyone to move.
He considered finding another spot from which to perform, something along the crowd’s edge.
He considered turning and leaving for one of the other various sectors of the city, performing an impromptu gig tonight.
But the real Walter Braum knew full well that the fictional Walter Braum would not do any of these things. The fictional Walter Braum would march right into that crowd, claim his spot, and start singing. The fictional Walter Braum wouldn’t give a shit where the audience stood. He would let the audience figure it out. Just for safety and reassurance, the real Walter Braum allowed himself to further reason that Wallace was likely not wrong at all, that the spot he had designated for sector twenty-seven probably continued to be the ideal spot for tonight’s performance and that the size of this crowd was exactly the right size for a performance from such a spot. Moreover, the real Walter Braum began considering the subsequent possibility that a crowd this size might never form for him ever again, that this moment right now might very well prove to be the defining pinnacle in a career that would go God knows where from here.
“Music! Music! Music! Music!”
Before he knew it, Walter found himself placing one foot in front of the other until the crowd was upon him. And he did not stop there. He forged right into the middle of the crowd, displacing them effortlessly. His presence ramped up their fever pitch fervor somehow even further. They grabbed and clawed at Walter as he passed. Once he hit the exact spot per Wallace’s instructions, he stopped.
He put his head down.
He took a deep breath in.
And without even really making the conscious decision to, he just started. He was singing a song he had always been a bit embarrassed to like. It was poppy and electronic, a club song. But stripped down to just his voice, it didn’t quite sound like that anymore. It just sounded like a song about the unexpected small joys of being broken-hearted. The crowd was completely silent and still, hanging on each sound as it left Walter’s mouth and stretched and rose and settled into words.
Walter tried to block the crowd out, but he could not help but wonder, even if just the tiniest bit, how he sounded in comparison to the Walter Braum they had come to see.