Walter woke up groggy to the unfamiliar and not so gentle nudge of a well-worn work boot into his ribs.
“Meester Wall-uh-der,” a voice accompanied the persistent force of the footwear. “Hello Meester Wall-uh-der.”
Walter rolled from his side onto his back and squinted his eyes open against the slicing brightness that had replaced the previous night. He was just barely able to disseminate the squat city worker from the shadow cast over him by the searing backlight of blue, blue morning sky. Last thing he remembered was the starry sky at 3:00 a.m. and adrenaline still coursing through his veins.
“I’m not doing any harm sleeping here,” Walter demanded, an argument he had been preparing and refining for some time now in case he ever needed it.
But the city worker did not protest. He simply held out his hand, a familiar gray envelope in it. This one was puffed and wrinkled ugly by its contents, which pushed the limits of the envelope’s utility.
“He say geev you,” the man explained. “He say I say ‘Ees instrucción there.’”
Walter, confused, did not move. He just stared at the city worker. His eyes strained to adjust.
The city worker stared blankly back.
Walter found himself wondering what the fictional Walter Braum might be doing right about now. Surely he was unencumbered wherever he was, off doing something deeply poetic and even more deeply true. He certainly wasn’t feeling the swells of anxiety surfacing in the real Walter Braum, worrying about what each of those fans last night had thought of him, what memories they snapshot in their minds and would carry with them. And there was no way his back was hurting from yet another night sleeping on the concrete at the mouth of Mayne Ridge Park. No, the fictional Walter Braum was probably waking up in a stranger’s bed right about now. And not just any stranger, but the most beautiful of his fans from last night. Surely he had fallen asleep in her soft embrace after a satiating night of passionate and just-meaningful-enough sex that still somehow remained the perfect amount of anonymous. The fictional Walter Braum was undoubtedly a great lover.
“What is that?” Walter demanded of the envelope in the city worker’s hand, finally conceding and finding something to say because he just could not stand the silence and the thoughts that accompanied it any longer.
The city worker shrugged innocently and inched his hand, and the envelope in it, closer to Walter’s face. That small narrowing of space somehow made the envelope feel infinitely more pressing to Walter, who sighed and lowered his eyes to the concrete, wracking his brain for any suitable reason to leave the item in the city worker’s hand. But he found none. So he decided instead to forego reason altogether. He stood up and gathered his things, ignoring the envelope entirely.
The city worker watched, waiting for a point that involved Walter taking the envelope. But he found no such moment. “Please,” he pleaded with a matter-of-fact urgency, “I have to work.”
But Walter turned and started away.
The city worker was deceptively fast, pulling immediately even with Walter and matching his stride. “Please,” the man added, confused. “He say put your hand.”
The squat man took Walter’s right hand as they walked and pushed the envelope into it. He then took Walter’s left hand and placed it over the top side of the envelope, which felt considerably heavier than it looked. Once satisfied that the object was steadily in Walter’s possession, the man turned and hurried away.
Walter sighed. He stuffed the envelope, immediately and without opening it, into the bottom of his bag. The city worker did not look back until after he had reached and unlocked the gate, at which point he nodded and hurried back to his truck.
Walter started over to Smythe’s.
On his way, he tried to push from his mind all thoughts about the envelope, last night’s performance, and the fictional Walter Braum by busying himself instead with thoughts of music and what it all meant or didn’t mean anyway.
The crowd at Walter’s next show was twice the size of the previous night’s show. He heard them chanting and whooping from several blocks out as he approached.
The nights after that were even bigger until eventually Walter was approached by a beefy, hard-looking man with nevertheless gentle eyes and a near whisper of a voice who explained, “This well exceeds the reasonable boundaries of the permit you acquired.”
“I acquired a permit?” asked Walter as little flurries of fans swarmed to snap pictures of themselves with the man they thought was the fictional Walter Braum.
Officer Dungy reached calmly into his back pocket and removed a photocopy of a permit, which he showed to Walter. A quick glance at the page revealed Wallace’s jagged, shaky signature: W. Braum.
“We’ve been receiving complaints from different parts of town the past few nights,” Officer Dungy went on. “For something like this, you would need to file several additional items…”
“I’ll just leave then,” Walter explained, turning in the direction of Mayne Ridge Park where he figured he could perform unannounced and for a far more modest gathering of people.
“What about them?” asked the officer as he placed one of his meaty hands in Walter’s path.
Walter stopped, considered.
“What about them?” he asked.
“They’re here for you.”
“Well…” Walter attempted to explain. “They’re here for a sort of version of me that’s on this website, but I’d guess that’s beside the point as far as you’re concerned?”
“I’ve seen the site,” answered Officer Dungy.
“So…” stated Walter, unsure what relevance this fact bore on the current circumstance.
“So they’re here for you,” Officer Dungy clarified.
“I mean, technically no. Or technically yes, I guess. But not really,” Walter sighed and shook his head before asking, confounded, “I’m responsible for them?”
“Huh?”
“The thing of it is, if I resist, then they’re just going to embrace that. They see me as an iconoclast of sorts.”
Officer Dungy did not react. So Walter went on…
“What I’m saying is, they won’t go until I perform. It’s part of the whole narrative of this thing, the website character and all.”
Officer Dungy still did not react.
“Ok,” conceded Walter.
He walked over to what seemed like it might be the front of the crowd and stepped onto a storefront window ledge that gave him another few feet of lift. He cupped his hands around his mouth and called out, at full volume, “I need everyone to leave right now! There is no show tonight!”
Just as Walter had predicted, the crowd swelled into a rapturous ovation of cheers and gleeful yelps that settled into a thunderous round of claps and chants of “Music! Music! Music!”
Walter turned to Officer Dungy and shrugged.
So Officer Dungy shrugged back, approached Walter, and cuffed him.
The next morning Walter woke up to the baritone clanging of a thick key in a heavy lock, followed by the sliding of a metal door and someone calling out, “Braum!”
Walter rolled over from his side and squinted his eyes open to find a prison guard standing in the flat fluorescent light of the holding cell block.
“You’re paid up,” the guard explained.
Walter unfurled onto his feet and made for the open cell door.
He was escorted down a hallway to a thick, plastic window with an officer on the other side who slid some papers to Walter beneath the protective layer’s base. Walter signed the papers and a buzz sounded before a nearby door opened and out of it stepped an officer carrying Walter’s bag sheathed in copious amounts of plastic wrap. The officer pushed the bag into Walter’s chest. Walter took it. Then he was shown the door.
Outside on the sidewalk in front of the prison, Wallace waited in a suit that somehow perfectly fit his jumbled, jagged body and, as a result, surely belonged in a tailor’s hall of fame, if indeed such a thing existed. Walter could not help but immediately note that Wallace seemed much more focused, more self-assured than he had ever seen his brother before. At first, Walter figured perhaps it was the suit, but he quickly suspected it was more than just that.
“I have midterms, I can’t stay long,” explained Wallace as Walter made his way down the steps and onto the sidewalk. “There’s a new schedule on the website. I need you to follow it. And I need you to follow the instructions regarding the envelopes.”
Wallace then pulled from his pockets two more wrinkled, bursting gray envelopes and handed them to Walter, who did not so much as raise a finger to take them.
“Who are all of these people coming to my shows, Wallace?”
“They’re your fans.” Wallace stated what he considered completely obvious.
“But most of them have never even heard me sing before.”
“Does that matter?”
“Of course,” Walter fired back what he considered completely obvious.
Wallace grabbed Walter’s right hand and pressed the two envelopes into it.
Walter sighed. He tore through the plastic wrap encasing his bag, stuffing the envelopes into the bag’s bottom. Wallace shook his head as he watched.
“You haven’t opened any of the envelopes, have you?” Wallace derided more than asked.
“Do phone booths still have phone books?” Walter deflected with a question of his own.
“Do phone booths still exist?” Wallace shot back.
“I remember not very long ago when you were actually in awe of everything.”
Walter started off down the sidewalk.
“Where are the envelopes?” Wallace called after his brother before hurrying along the sidewalk to catch up. “At the YMCA?”
“Some. The others are…” Walter reached into his backpack and retrieved two fistfuls of thick, lumpy envelopes, “…here.”
He attempted to hand them over to Wallace, but the little guy refused to take any of it, explaining instead, “Okay, so you should know that you have sixty-eight thousand seven hundred and twelve dollars in cash on some combination of your person.”
Walter stopped walking, turned to face Wallace.
“What?” he asked. “Why?”
“Because I can’t issue you checks or transfer the funds electronically until you sign off on the account paperwork that I sent to you in the first envelope.”
“No, why is there… Where is… What?”
“Ticket sales. Merch. Ad revenue from web traffic.”
“We don’t sell tickets,” Walter explained, choosing just one of the buckshot points of inquiry flooding his brain. “I play street corners.”
“We don’t sell them in a traditional sense, no. Haven’t you looked at the website?”
“But these people don’t even know me,” Walter picked another of the myriad points of conjecture and tossed it out, this one proving a recurring theme in Walter’s disbelief.
“I’ve been learning that commoditization when it comes to things of at least partially intrinsic value really operates according to an entirely different set of principles than does a product whose significance is purely or predominantly extrinsic. The value proposition is entirely different…”
“But these people,” Walter interjected yet a third rephrasing of what was clearly a central point of concern for him, “are not really paying for me.”
“…and people view their purchases as ingrained with an interwoven fabric of meaning that a purely utilitarian purchase lacks, or at least lacks in such magnitude. Now, this presents both challenges and opportunities. But pairing the reach of what is essentially an online communication and transactional model with the delivery of said intrinsic commodity has proven in many instances to be quite a powerful means of enabling meaningful consumer engagement. So I figured I’d give it a go. As a project. For my class. And, quite frankly, it has been wildly successful thus far.”
“But these people,” Walter repeated once again, only this time he stopped walking and lowered his hands down upon Wallace’s shoulder, as if to steer his brother’s attention away from theoretical business speak and back onto what Walter clearly considered a critical point, “they don’t even know me. Or my music.”
“As it turns out, that is only partially true,” Wallace explained, a burning spark of passion flitting about in his eyes. “I was discussing this project with a professor of mine and he said something to me that really opened up my thinking. Do you know what he said?”
“Of course not.”
“He said, ‘More important than the man is the story.’”
Wallace fell silent and entirely still, as if even a flinch of a muscle right now might completely overwhelm his brother as this surely earth-shattering concept washed over him and took root in his cognition. But Walter simply answered Wallace’s silence with his own blank-eyed silence.
“Isn’t that amazing?” Wallace finally prodded.
Walter turned and continued walking.
“Don’t you see how powerful that is?” Wallace called after his brother as he once again scurried to catch up and match gait, as much as his uneven limbs would afford anyway. “Especially in a market so deeply saturated with product.”
“What the fuck are you talking about, Wallace?” Walter barked.
“I’m building a sustainable audience for you. Like we discussed.”
“We never discussed that.”
“Not by name, perhaps, but we discussed diversifying your audience by expanding into new markets and increasing the amount of your monetary ask per interaction. So what else would such a conversation amount to, really? If you think about it.”
“Why are you here, Wallace?” Walter asked, not terribly interested in the answer to this question as he hung a right and headed towards a seedier part of town.
“I got you out of prison,” Wallace shot back, baffled.
“Oh, yeah. Thanks.”
“I feel a little bit responsible for that, I concede. But this circumstance has nevertheless presented me with an opportunity to come here to get you to sign the Walter Braum, LLC, paperwork that I have created and then to open a bank account so I can start putting your part of the profits directly into your account. It’s much safer that way…”
“So let me see if I understand this, in simplest terms.” Walter cut in as they continued to walk. “In the past five weeks, in addition to attending classes full time at Harvard, you have created a website that has generated nearly seventy thousand dollars in revenue around interest in my performances?”
“No,” corrected Wallace. “I created a website and accompanying viral marketing campaign, online and analog, in conjunction with my full-time classes at Harvard and these efforts have generated nearly one hundred and thirty thousand dollars in revenue around interest in your performances, sixty-eight thousand seven hundred and twelve dollars of which is your portion of the profits after estimated withholdings for taxes, annual operating costs, reinvestment into the brand, and my nominal salary have been deducted.”
Walter stopped walking, yet again.
So did Wallace, before adding…
“But yes to the other things. About the classes and the five weeks and all that.”
“What the fuck, Wallace?”
“To be perfectly honest with you, it’s slightly underperforming my projections. But I think I figured out why. It’s an adjustment I would make in any future comparable launches for sure. And I’m a little bit embarrassed by the margins, even though they are pretty strong for a start-up. But I also need you to check the new tour schedule every day on the website. It’s changed and you can’t miss performances. That is more or less the worst thing you could possibly do to your customer at this point. Last night was really a pretty bad thing, Walter.”
“I got arrested!” Walter insisted.
“But you didn’t perform,” Wallace countered. “The artist we all know and love would have at least performed for as long as he could. Even if it was only for a minute. That’s how much it matters to you, Walter. But instead, you walked away.”
“Wait…what?”
“But what we need to focus on for now is the backlash. Granted, there has also been a surge in broader interest as the story of the arrest has grown beyond the engine of the campaign itself. But ideally this would have happened anyway while we could have avoided the backlash by performing.”
“All of this has happened in the past ten hours?”
“This is the speed of business nowadays, Walter. We can keep up or we can perish. One of my other professors told me that.”
“Can we go back a second?”
“No. Aren’t you listening to me? We need to move forward. Immediately. We need to stick to the schedule, no matter what. That is what you would do.”
“But that’s not what I would do,” Walter explained. “In fact, I don’t think I want to follow the schedule anymore.”
“Why not?” Wallace asked, flummoxed.
“I want to get back to what I was doing before.”
“Back into sales?”
“No. After that, but before this.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I want to get back to just playing songs,” Walter explained as he finally arrived at an old, tattered public phone booth in front of a rundown liquor store with dust-laden, sun-faded products packed into every available square inch of its storefront window. “I thought this was still here,” Walter muttered to himself, justifying the journey before picking up the weather-beaten phone book that hung from a thin, rusted cord beneath the phone. He started leafing through the browning, yellowed pages.
“You can do that and follow the schedule,” Walter insisted. “The schedule has done everything we wanted it to do.”
“Do you have some coins?” Walter asked Wallace.
“For that phone?”
Walter nodded.
“I have a cell phone, Walter,” Wallace explained, removing it from his pocket and handing it to his brother, who shook his head and took the phone.
“You couldn’t have told me this before I went searching for a phone booth?”
“All you said was do phone booths have phone books. That’s supposed to mean something to me?”
“What reason for finding a phone booth exists that wouldn’t be addressed by a cell phone?”
“Damn it, Walter,” Wallace insisted, “I can’t stay. Let’s address the topic at hand.”
“What topic?” Walter mumbled as he dialed a number from the phone book into the cell phone.
“Our strategy moving forward. We need to clarify some things, to get on the same page, that’s why I came here,” Wallace replied only to be met with Walter’s raised hand as he waited for someone to answer his call.
“This message is for the Mark Clark from the band Walter and Mark, if I have the wrong number I apologize, but there are five Mark Clarks in the phone book. Anyway, I would like to know why the fuck you quit on the band when our sound was, in my opinion anyway, most certainly worth exploring. I’m open to the possibility that we might be better suited to traditional venues and wanted to try to get us booked at Pilot’s Bar where I know a guy, but… You need to explain to me. You need to… I’ll be at the park this evening and you need to come by and give me one hell of a reason. Or I’m kicking you out of the band. So…”
As Walter hung up, Wallace shook his head and lowered his stare to the ground, seething.
“You have a band?”
“I did,” corrected Walter. “Sort of.”
“Who is in this band?”
“No one at the moment.”
“Who was in the band, then?”
“Me. And a guy named Mark.”
“That’s it?” Wallace took this in a moment, before adding, “That’s a band?”
“The Black Keys. The White Stripes,” Walter scoffed back. “They’re two-member bands.”
Walter started dialing another number from the phone book.
“What did you play, then?” Wallace inquired, ruminating quite deeply about this new development.
“I sang,” Walter answered indignantly.
“In the band, though.”
“I sang.”
“In those two bands everyone plays an instrument, too.”
“Well,” Walter explained as he put the ringing phone to his ear, “this wasn’t that kind of band.”
“But you just said it was.”
Walter put up his hand again, silencing Wallace as he started, “This message is for the Mark Clark from the band Walter and Mark…”
Wallace took several steps away from Walter. He lifted his gaze across the street and puzzled why his brother would have even considered forming a band. Walter had everything he wanted. Or he was at the very least well on his way to everything. He had money, adoration, respect, recognition. He had the lifestyle he desired. He had the space and time in his life to perform his songs. Wallace pulled a small notepad and a pen from the inside breast pocket of his sport coat and started scribbling feverishly in his own lopsided way. Numbers, words, calculations, thoughts. He filled several pages, but none of the explanations he explored, none of the scenarios he mapped out, none of the reasons he posited could explain this move.
“Wallace,” Walter barked as though he were repeating the name for the sixth or seventh time.
Wallace looked up from his notepad.
“Let’s go,” said Walter. “I’m done.”
“Look, we’ve experienced an overwhelmingly rapid rate of growth, and I’m willing to concede that there are some elements of stress and fatigue that could be associated with such an occurrence. But far more pressing and worthy of our attention and energies at the present moment is the fact that this customer base might very well be poised to recede drastically if we don’t vary our product offerings, both in content and in nature of engagement. This is the other reason behind my visit.”
“I’m tired of whatever it is that you are talking about.”
“We need to slow down here. We need to regroup and redefine. We’ve accomplished so much, Walter. We really need to protect that so we can better build upon it. The new tour schedule I created offers half as many dates, but I’m thinking we might want to go even further.”
“I don’t want to think about this stuff, Wallace.”
“Then you’re being stupid!”
“So what is wrong with that?” answered Walter, in earnest.
“Well…” Wallace considered, deeply frustrated. “…everything!”
Walter started walking back in the direction from which they had come.
Wallace, whose frustration and resentment surprisingly read precisely as such on his face, tried to just let Walter go. But he could not.
“I’m trying to help you here,” Wallace called out, following after his brother.
“I’m going to get a band started,” Walter called back. “I’m getting back to the music and the songs.”
“That makes no sense, Walter,” Wallace proclaimed, thrusting his notepad of calculations over his head. “You’re going to need to work at least twice as hard to get back a fraction of the return that you’re already receiving.”
“I don’t care.”
“That is impossible!” Wallace nearly screamed.
Walter stopped walking and so did Wallace.
They both fell silent, conceding nothing.
“Look,” Wallace eventually began, attempting to be the bigger man. “I need you to perform tonight’s scheduled show. But after that we can stop playing shows for a stretch, if that’s what you really want. My numbers show we could probably go as far out as three months and it would still drive up demand. But after that point, we’d plateau and then recede, so we’re going to need to engage our audience…”
“Why would I stop playing shows?” asked Walter, confused.
“You just said you didn’t want to follow the schedule.”
“Yes. But I’m not going to stop performing.”
“So you’re… Look, I don’t understand. You want to perform but you don’t want to perform. Whatever. At the end of the day, you need to rarify your product. Your best options are to follow the modified schedule I created or to set out on a broader tour encompassing, by my calculations, at least twenty-four states and thirty-nine cities therein. But if you want to just stop playing public shows for a few months, then I can make that work, too. You would then return to performing with new material. Preferably at least half of the new material being original. If you do this, I predict that it will increase our revenue by approximately ten times. And that’s a conservative estimate. Granted, we would need to somehow introduce scarcity to the ticketing and attendance process so that we can increase the unit price of a ticket, but we can figure that one out in a tactful manner that doesn’t degrade the democratic messaging of the brand itself.”
“I’m not going to stop performing!”
“Your revenue has started to recede while your average ticket cost has remained static!” yelled Wallace. “Do you understand what this means?”
“No! And I don’t care.”
“It means your customer base has started to recede and I believe this is the beginning of a larger trend. I believe that if you keep playing these shows, you will see your audience atrophy and dissipate significantly. All the way back down to nearly nothing. You’ll be a fad, not a business.”
“I don’t care!” Walter repeated, emphatically.
“Of course you do,” Wallace grimaced, which looked more like a shy smile of sorts.
But Walter knew how to interpret it. He also knew that this conversation could go on unresolved forever. So he decided to stop talking.
He took a seat on a nearby curb.
But Wallace did not follow.
“How is Veronica?” Walter asked innocently as he looked back over his shoulder.
Wallace sighed nervously before explaining, “I wouldn’t know.”
“Oh,” answered Walter, genuinely sympathetic. “I’m sorry.”
Wallace shrugged.
“I need to get back to Boston,” he explained. “I’ll take all of your tour dates off of the website except for tonight’s. And I won’t update it again for three months, unless I hear differently from you.”
Walter shrugged right back.
“Please,” pleaded Wallace, “for your own well-being and professional longevity, perform tonight. Then give me three months.”
Wallace tottered over to his brother who, still seated on the curb, was at more or less eye-level. Wallace wrapped his arms around Walter’s back and shoulders and gave his brother a goodbye hug.
“I filed the expanded permit for tonight,” Wallace added before turning and starting along the sidewalk away from Walter. “I handled all of the details. It’s all legal.”
As Walter watched his twin brother totter away, he could not help but feel a kernel of appreciation for the little genius bastard’s efforts.
“You are not a man,” a familiar voice sounded from a distance, pulling Walter’s attention up from his crumpled pages of notes and into the expanse of Mayne Ridge Park that surrounded the bench upon which he was seated.
“You call yourself a man,” the voice had drawn closer and angrier before Walter was able to pinpoint its approaching source in the familiar face of Mr. Sheprick, his expression creased sour with bitter anger, “but a man does not run away from a business agreement!”
Mr. Sheprick’s presence in this particular place and moment required of Walter a mental, temporal, and expository shift of context before he could even begin processing what, exactly, was happening. But before much of any of that had time to happen, Mr. Sheprick was bearing down and proclaiming, “Stand up!”
Walter couldn’t quite comprehend this simple directive either, as doing so seemed contingent upon the prior contextual questions being resolved first. So instead of standing up, as instructed, Walter merely watched, puzzled, as Mr. Sheprick came to stand but a foot in front of him.
“I said stand up, you spineless prick!” Mr. Sheprick reiterated, adding a touch of choice diction for emphasis.
Walter could think of nothing to do right now, other than to follow the man’s injunction. So Walter shifted his weight and leaned forward to stand. But somewhere between Walter’s concession to and completion of the request at hand, Mr. Sheprick must have lost his patience. Or perhaps he simply changed his estimation of the importance of this imperative being carried out. Either way, the typically impeccably mannered man could contain his fury not a second longer, so he cocked his fist back and sprung it forward with an ardent punch intended squarely for Walter’s jaw. The blow strayed well off-line, however, surely in part due to Mr. Sheprick’s impatience, which caused him to pounce on a target still in motion. But it still resulted in a half-landed blow on the side of Walter’s forehead. The punch made enough impact, largely due to its unexpectedness, to push Walter staggering from the bench, but it did not carry enough heft to cause much pain or any disorientation. In a way, however, the diminished impact of this shot was an inadvertently strategic masterstroke on Mr. Sheprick’s behalf as it led to Walter’s erroneous presumption that his opponent was not terribly stalwart, an assumption immediately dispelled by the subsequent delivery of punches two through six, each of which landed cleanly and with the pop of a decades-younger man.
“My business,” Mr. Sheprick proclaimed as the aforementioned blows landed and sent Walter sprawling semi-limp to the ground, “was my life!”
Mr. Sheprick then straddled his flailing adversary and positioned himself to finish with authority the fight he had started.
Walter found himself, rather than fighting back, debating whether or not it was okay for him to punch a man of Mr. Sheprick’s age. Especially in such a public place, he wondered what exactly this would look like to passersby. But the next few punches, each with the weight of concrete behind them, sparked an ire in Walter that immediately superseded any logic and before Walter knew it, he was working Mr. Sheprick’s ribs with a succession of quick, sharp blows that toppled the septuagenarian to one side. Walter pushed his former mentor off of him and onto the ground before scurrying to put some space between them.
“If you had even a shred of a soul,” Mr. Sheprick barked, pulling himself right back up to his feet, either unimpeded by or flat out ignoring the pain in his trunk.
“I was in a bad place,” Walter found himself yammering as he maintained his distance only to be bum-rushed by the surprisingly scrappy man.
The two men spilled back to the ground where they wrestled for leverage.
“I trusted you!” Mr. Sheprick yelled in between grunts and strains. “That contract was my last hope.”
“Bergamot?” asked Walter, innocently enough and just before Mr. Sheprick landed an uppercut that shot stars throughout Walter’s vision.
“Yes, Bergamot! What the fuck else do you think this is about?” yelled Mr. Sheprick, finishing his sentence but a second before Walter connected with a right cross that sprawled Mr. Sheprick out.
Walter scurried to his feet once again, this time doubling the distance he had previously placed in between the two of them.
The distance meant nothing to Mr. Sheprick, though. Nor did the cut over his eye or the blood pouring from it. He just kept coming right after Walter, as if to demonstrate the ironclad tenacity that a man who respects himself and his business should possess.
“You don’t have the right to shutter my Goddamn business, you fuckhole!” Mr. Sheprick declared, as though a battle cry, as he lunged and took Walter down once again, grappling his way atop and continuing to pummel his enervating foe. “That was my life’s work, you son of a motherless cunt!”
Perhaps it was one of these punches.
Or perhaps it was the sum total of all of the punches.
Or perhaps it was just the unexpectedly fiery man’s words.
But something came loose. Right then. Walter did not understand it, but inside of him, something came loose.
His resolve drained.
His punches softened.
For a moment he wondered if he might be blacking out or otherwise growing too weak to carry on, but it wasn’t that. He was depleted, sure, but he was not beaten. He was just suddenly, and perhaps inexplicably, unwilling to fight back.
“Fight, you louse!” Mr. Sheprick yelled as Walter’s punches receded from pulled to held altogether. “Fight back, damn it! This isn’t over! I’m not done!”
But Walter found his arms falling to his side, unwilling or unable to so much as protect himself any longer.
“Come on!” Mr. Sheprick yelled right into Walter’s face.
Walter could feel only his breath now. And the burgeoning transition, throughout his face and trunk, from numbness to pain.
“No!” the old man yelled. “No!”
Walter went limp. His eyes were wide open, but his body simply surrendered.
“Well…” insisted Mr. Sheprick, disgusted, “that’s the difference between you and me.”
The old man opened his hand and slapped Walter one last time, straight across the cheek, and hard. Then he extracted himself from his possum of an opponent and dropped down on the bench where the fight had begun, leaning forward with his forearms on his knees to catch his breath while defiantly refusing to take stock of any injuries he might have sustained.
“I taught you better than that, you fucking wimp,” Mr. Sheprick grumbled before turning and spitting blood onto the ground.
In between hyperventilated breaths, Walter attempted to explain, “I didn’t…mean anything…by leaving.”
Fed up with the implication of mortality inherent in recuperation, Mr. Sheprick willed himself to his feet. “Well, it sure as shit meant something anyway, now didn’t it, you fuck?” he barked as he started limping off through the park, each step firing off a proud, satisfied wince of pain streaking through his body.
Walter had no real reason to move. So he laid limp on the earth. He had no real plan for how long he would stay there, but eventually people began walking past and sneaking glances just to make sure that he was still alive. And even more eventually these glancing passersby turned into people stopping to stare.
“I’m pretty sure that’s him,” one muttered to another.
“We’re coming tonight,” another one explained before turning to her friend and explaining, “Tonight’s his last show.”
“Why are you stopping?” a different one called out.
“Will you play again someday?” someone else called out.
These questions and their accompanying looming stares accumulated, feeling caustic and intrusive even if they were intended in earnest. It was this that finally pulled Walter achingly up off the ground to gather his scattered papers now sullied with dirt and stained with blood, which could have been either his or Mr. Sheprick’s.
“You can’t really stop, Walter,” a teenager insisted. “We need your music.”
“Yeah,” an adult agreed. “You give us hope.”
Walter crammed his pages into the bottom of his bag and headed off, out of Mayne Ridge Park.
There was never a wait at Smythe’s Diner, their typical smattering of customers the mere result of not being able to afford any better. But today a line stretched out the door and around the corner.
Walter made his way to the window and looked inside to find his usual table mobbed with kids in their late teens eating the daily special. All of the other tables were sparsely populated by their scant pockets of regulars. Walter spied Smythe staring him down with a disgusted glare and a shake of the head from behind the bustling order window.
“It’s good for your business,” Walter yelled, knowing full well that this was all, albeit indirectly, his fault. His words were eaten up by the plate glass window in front of him, though, reaching nowhere near the seething Smythe. These same words, however and unintentionally, traveled pristinely over to the first thirty or so people in the line reaching around the block, triggering a flutter of gasps and hoots and declarations upon the realization that the actual Walter Braum had arrived.
“It’s him,” someone called out.
“Oh my God!” several others replied. “He’s here!”
“I told you he would come!”
“Don’t stop, Walter! You can’t stop!”
“It’s our music, too!”
“We need the beauty!”
As the line morphed into an amoebic mass descending upon Walter, he hurried around the corner and away, as fast as his aching, bruised, and bleeding body could carry him.
At the YMCA, Walter found a padlock on the back door through which he normally entered.
“There he is!” someone yelled.
Walter turned to find a gawky, un-hip, teenage girl standing at the end of the alley and pointing directly at him. Her words conjured a flood of pounding footsteps that swelled nearer and nearer to where she stood, unseen but rapidly expanding to include shrieks, yells, chants, screams, and demands.
“You can’t stop!” the teenage girl pleaded with Walter from her deepest heart, adding, “We need you to keep going, Walter Braum!”
Just then the crowd surged into the alley led by a woman in a blue, short-sleeved collared shirt emblazoned with the YMCA logo across the left breast.
“Memberships aren’t free, Mr. Braum!” the woman called out as a mass of people of all ages, shapes, and sizes charged right behind her calling out now familiar refrains.
“Music! Music! Music!”
“It’s our music, too!”
“Keep going, Walter! Don’t ever stop!”
Seeing no other option before him, Walter turned and, once again, ran.
Back at the mouth of Mayne Ridge Park, Walter discovered a crowd of well more than two hundred people already gathered for the concert even though it was only 2:47 p.m. City workers had already begun putting barricades along the street while a light police presence kept an eye on the human and vehicular traffic passing through the area. A separate team was assembling a raised platform and speakers in the spot that Wallace had deemed ideal for performing at this venue.
Walter looked around for a quiet place to rest, his face, hands, and ribs aching from the morning’s altercation. His feet were tired, too, from all of the running. And his heart was heavy.
Someone from the crowd must have spotted him because the chants and calls began again…
“Music! Music! Music!”
“Don’t stop, Walter! Please don’t stop!”
“You give us the courage, Walter!”
As the cheers and declarations swelled, Walter realized he had absolutely nowhere to go for the next four hours. And then he had equally absolutely nowhere to go starting another two or so hours after that.