THE TOP OF HARRY'S HEAD

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

At court to-day, Richard T. Standaside, the name assumed by the performer born Richard Wise, appeared on the stand to recount the fateful events of November 9. He was attired not in his usual multi-colored leather vest, but in a conservative blue suit, though a yellow leather flower winked from his lapel. 

• :—Attorney Judith Macalester: “Tell us what happened.”
• :—Wise: “You called on me and I walked up here. You don’t remember? It was literally five seconds ago.”
• :—Macalester: “Please, let’s take this matter seriously, Mr. Wise. I am referring, of course, to the first night of the festival.”
• :—Wise: “Mr. Standaside.”
• :—Macalester: “If you wish.”
• :—Wise: “Yes. Well, Union Jack came first. He played fine. He was spinning these webs, long solos, and they kept the crowd in a kind of trance. Soon after he came off the stage, the mood started to shift. I was standing with Harry, my partner—Harry Whistle, Harry Freed, whatever you want to call him. I could see over the crowd. That’s what six-foot-six will get you. But Harry’s the fireplug, five-five, and he was right down in there. He said something about how we’ve faced drunk crowds before but never like this one. What he meant, mostly, was the Skeletons. They had been fighting the heat and the stress with beer all day long, and they were not happy drunks. The crowd was loaded also, and getting louder as they waited for Annex. We passed through a patch of calm, an interstitial act kind of like us—this was a pair of very pretty jugglers, sisters—and then the Circular Knives played their set. Then another interstitial, a comedian, then then the Obvious Solution, all against a backdrop of worsening energy. The drunk Skeletons and the drunk crowd were increasingly at each others’ throats. Bottles were being thrown in both directions. When kids got too close to the stage, a few of the Skeletons took off their boots and brandished them at the crowd. Some dumb kid off to our left made things a thousand times worse by falling blotto into one of the Skeletons’ motorcycles and knocking it over. That was during the Bluffers’ set. They were great. We have opened for them. In fact, that’s why we were in the desert at all: they helped us get our midnight set. We were both proud and pissed—excuse me, perturbed—when Yancey which is the first one Harry and I really got into, and we were both pissed and proud when Yancey came down off the stage to try to make peace between the drunk kid and the furious Skeleton. He got punched in the head and it looked like he was out cold for a minute. Janice Outcome needed to finish up that song. At sundown, Annex came to the stage. Harry had his here-here face on, you know? This was the greatest band in the world. The Skeletons tensed up notably. This is why they were being paid. But they couldn’t control the crowd, or themselves. One put a forearm in Victor Astronaut’s face as they walked up the stairs. And midway through the first song, ‘News Reports,’ it was clear that whatever order the Skeletons were trying to keep wasn’t being kept. Kids were crushed against the front apron of the stage, at least two hundred of them, and Astronaut kept stopping and restarting songs, telling everyone to be cool, to take it easy. During ‘Fingers and Fires,’ one dude in the crowd didn’t take it easy at all. He tried to rush the stage, and he was holding what looked like a pistol. The Skeletons came right back at him, charging him from his right. There was shouting, then screaming. A woman’s voice said something about strangling. Harry and I got the hell out of there, made a beeline for the VIP tent. But the news got there before we did. It hadn’t been a pistol but a length of wood, likely a barrel stave. And there had been no strangling: the man had been stabbed. The man was dead. We sat in silence in the tent. At midnight we went out and did our set. We got through all the routines—Port Security, The Man In the Booth, Waterworks, Sir May I Wear Your Glasses?, Nightmarathon, even Bleep Bloop Robot Love—but we knew what the crowd knew, which was that everything had changed, not just at the festival but in the country. As we finished up Bleep Bloop, Harry had tears in his eyes. I bent down and kissed him on the top of the head. I don’t know why I did that. The enormity of the moment just came down on me, all at once. I knew there would be no more Standaside and Whistle gigs. I didn’t think I’d ever go onstage again.”
• :—Macalester: “And have you spoken with Mr. Freed since that night?”
• :—Wise: “I have not. I have called him several times, but he won’t call me back.” 

At that, Wise burst into tears, and grew inconsolable, to the point where a bailiff was called to help him down from the stand and escort him from the courtroom. So powerful was his grief that the judge ordered that the jury be shown a five-minute segment of the movie version of Sir May I Wear Your Glasses? A state of uproarious hilarity was soon reached, and the trial resumed.