Talk about Danny and the Juniors, talk about the Spaniels, the Contours, Sonny Till and the Orioles. They made it to the big time: records, tours, sock hops at $500 a night. Fame and glory.
But you never heard of the Kool-Tones, because they achieved their apotheosis and their apocalypse on the same night, and then they broke up. Some still talk about that night, but so much happened, the Kool-Tones get lost in the shuffle. And who’s going to believe a bunch of kids, anyway? The cops didn’t and their parents didn’t. It was only two years after the president had been shot in Dallas, and people were still scared. This, then, is the Kool-Tones’ story:
Leroy was smoking a cigar through a hole he’d cut in a pair of thick, red wax lips. Slim and Zoot were tooting away on Wowee whistles. It was a week after Halloween, and their pockets were still full of trick-or-treat candy they’d muscled off little kids in the projects. Ray, slim and nervous, was hanging back, “We shouldn’t be here, you know? I mean, this ain’t the Hellbenders’ territory, you know? I don’t know whose it is, but, like, Vinnie and the guys don’t come this far.” He looked around.
Zoot, who was white and had the beginnings of a mustache, took the yellow wax-candy kazoo from his mouth. He bit off and chewed up the big C pipe. “I mean, if you’re scared, Ray, you can go back home, you know?”
“Nah!” said Leroy. “We need Ray for the middle parts.” Leroy was twelve years old and about four feet tall. He was finishing his fourth cigar of the day. He looked like a small Stymie Beard from the old Our Gang comedies.
File still wore the cut-down coat he’d taken with him when he’d escaped from his foster home.
He was staying with his sister and her boyfriend. In each of his coat pockets he had a bottle: one Coke and one bourbon.
“We’ll be all right,” said Cornelius, who was big as a house and almost eighteen. He was shaped like a big ebony golf tee, narrow legs and waist blooming out to an A-bomb mushroom of arms and chest. He was a yard wide at the shoulders. He looked like he was always wearing football pads.
“That’s right,” said Leroy, taking out the wax lips and wedging the cigar back into the hole in them. “I mean, the kid who found this place didn’t say anything about it being somebody’s spot, man.”
“What’s that?” asked Ray.
They looked up. A small spot of light moved slowly across the sky. It was barely visible, along with a few stars, in the lights from the city.
“Maybe it’s one of them UFOs you’re always talking about, Leroy,” said Zoot.
“Flying saucer, my left ball,” said Cornelius. “That’s Telstar. You ought to read the papers.”
“Like your mama makes you?” asked Slim.
“Aww . . . ” said Cornelius.
They walked on through the alleys and the dark streets. They all walked like a man.
“This place is Oz,” said Leroy.
“Hey!” yelled Ray, and his voice filled the area, echoed back and forth in the darkness, rose in volume, died away.
“Wow.”
They were on what had been the loading dock of an old freight and storage company. It must have been closed sometime during the Korean War or maybe in the unimaginable eons before World War II. The building took up most of the block but the loading area on the back was sunken and surrounded by the stone wall they had climbed. If you stood with your back against the one good loading door, the place was a natural amphitheater.
Leroy chugged some Coke, then poured bourbon into the half-empty bottle. They all took a drink, except Cornelius, whose mother was a Foursquare Baptist and could smell liquor on his breath three blocks away.
Cornelius drank only when he was away from home two or three days.
“Okay, Kool-Tones,” said Leroy. “Let’s hit sonic notes.”
They stood in front of the door, Leroy to the fore, the others behind him in a semicircle: Cornelius, Ray, Slim, and Zoot.
“One, two, three,” said Leroy quietly, his face toward the bright city beyond the surrounding buildings.
He had seen all the movies with Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers in them and knew the moves backwards. He jumped in the air and came down, and Cornelius hit it: “Bah-doo, bah-doo, bah-doo-uhh.”
It was a bass from the bottom of the ocean, from the Marianas Trench, a voice from Death Valley on a wet night, so far