The Amy Virus

THE AMY VIRUS

  by Andee Joyce

  Copyright 2016 Andee Joyce

  Thank you for downloading this ebook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form and the author is credited.

  Song quote credits:

  “Look Around” by Sergio Mendes, Alan Bergman, and Marilyn Bergman

  “Mas Que Nada,” by Jorge Ben Jor

  “Promentalshitbackwashpsychosis Enema Squad” by George Clinton, Garry Shider, and Linda Brown

  “Shake it Off,” by Taylor Swift, Max Martin, and Shellback

  “Up, Up and Away,” by Jimmy Webb

  “Roxie,” by John Kander and Fred Ebb

  All other quoted song lyrics written by Andee Joyce.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Andee Joyce is, much like her heroine, an autistic singer-songwriter-musician whose musical identity showed up when she began embracing her autistic identity. Unlike her heroine, however, she did not know about her diagnosis until well into adulthood, and once she found out, she discovered that she could do many things she had always assumed she could not do, as long as she did them "autistic style." She is a graduate of Oregon Partners in Policymaking 2014, a member of the Oregon Council on Developmental Disabilities, and teaches classes on autism to service providers. She also writes and records music under the band name Normal Fauna. She was born in Brooklyn, NY, and currently lives in Hillsboro, OR with her domestic partner and an enormous elderly black cat.

  STAGE 0:

  Disease process takes root; no obvious symptoms yet.

  Here's a Wikipedia page no one will ever get to see:

  Cyan Beaut (born August 12, 2001) is an American musician and songwriter, best known for her top10 hit, "Awesome Hit Song that Doesn't Exist Yet."

  Early life

  Born Cynthia Ann Butt in Steens Center, Oregon--

  Stop right there.

  No. Nobody who has ever had a name like Cynthia Ann Butt could ever have a hit song. Or a hit anything. Or do anything people would consider worthy of a Wikipedia page. Because Cynthia Ann Butt is the kind of name you don't live down, ever, even if you change it. You will not fool anyone; the smell of Butt will always enter the room ten seconds before you do. Your only hope is that somehow, before you have to start putting that name, that life killing name, on job applications and school transcripts and SATs and dear God, your badgerfracking driver's license, you can get rid of it and legally name yourself something else.

  I just turned fifteen. I am rapidly running out of time.

  DAY 1

  Boom cha-cha boom cha-cha BOOM…

  The first time it happens, my seventeen-year old sister Tamarlyn and I are walking down the street on a Saturday morning, the day after my birthday, to a neighborhood yard sale half a mile away from us. Out of nowhere, this rhythm bubbles up in my head:

  Boom cha-cha boom cha-cha BOOM…ba da dat-dat-dat…

  Tam does not see or hear any evidence of this happening. What she sees is me clapping my hands while I walk.

  “You’re doing it again,” she says.

  “Doing what?”

  “Clapping where there’s no music.”

  Of course, there is music. It’s in my head. But how do I tell her that? Or anyone else in my family?

  As an incoming sophomore, I was given a summer assignment to create either a biography or a mock Wikipedia page about where I expect to find myself at age thirty. I knew what I was supposed to write, a bio saying something like:

  Cynthia Ann Butt, M.D., grew up in Steens Center, Oregon, an isolated small town near the California border. She received her medical degree from Oregon Health & Science University after graduating summa cum laude from her father’s alma mater, California Institute of Technology. Cynthia’s father, whose major was information technology, encouraged all three of his daughters to become doctors…

  “Encouraged” is an understatement; “relentlessly pressured” comes a lot closer. My parents believe that there is only one way to secure your future in today’s job market, in which Ph.D.s drive taxis, lawyers wait tables even after passing the bar exam, and engineers work for almost nothing due to offshore competition. This is what happened to my dad; he majored in information technology and was forced out of the job market by a glut of younger competitors. My oldest sister, Annabeth, is carrying out their wishes right now; she graduated Caltech, nailing down those A’s in organic chemistry and molecular biology, got into med school at UCLA, and is a third-year intern at a hospital in Glendale, California.

  No doubt Tam will follow suit; she has the grades. I am going to be the biggest obstacle to the Butt sister med school trifecta; last year my grades started to slip. I missed crucial sentences uttered by my teachers and my class notes had more holes in them than a kitchen sponge. I was sent for an ADHD evaluation and was told I didn’t have it. I started to develop migraines and stomach problems, probably from all the stress. My verbal prescriptions, courtesy of the doctor and my parents: “Relax” and “Try harder.” (Don’t those contradict each other? Or am I just being a crank case?) This year I can’t let B minus report cards happen again. I know that.

  So when I wrote that fake Wikipedia page, I thought of it as kind of a joke, because let’s face it, there is no ambition for a teenager more cliched than becoming a pop star. But my fantasy wasn’t really about being a pop star; it was more about being a songwriter and musician who other musicians admire. And I actually like the name I picked for myself; the first name, Cyan, is an amalgam of Cynthia Ann, and Beaut is how Butt would be pronounced if it had an E at the end, only my spelling looks a lot cooler. And I invented it right there on the spot, I didn’t have to think about it or anything. I suppose I’m creative, in a way.

  But although I can write halfway decent sentences, I’ve never even written a rhyming poem, let alone a song. Of course it’s a joke. Has to be. And I can only imagine what my parents would say if I told them I wanted that name. That’s not a doctor’s name. Not to mention that they’d remind me I came from a completely unmusical family and that it was ridiculous even to think about.

  But today, here it is: Boom cha-cha boom cha-cha BOOM…

  To Tam, I say, “Do I really clap that much?”

  “I’ve seen you do it more and more over the summer. Ever since you went to that old hippie guy’s yard sale and bought all those vinyl albums, you’ve been clapping a lot, even when you don’t have music on. What’s up with that?”

  The sale she is talking about was three months ago, when the old hippie guy who lives four blocks over (and who sticks out like a broken toe in a place like this) had his own individual yard sale. That was where I discovered bossa nova music. He had some of it playing on an old record player, something called “Soul Bossa Nova,” which came out in the 1960s and, the old hippie guy told me, has also been used in a bunch of movies. And I got hooked. Why, one might ask, would someone my age be interested in that type of music?

  Because it’s awesome, that’s why. It’s like music from some funky lounge that people thought was “space age” back in the sixties, with rust-orange shag carpeting and lime green throw rugs shaped like giant feet and drinks that make you feel like you’re getting a preview of heaven without actually having to die. Where people just kind of hang, do their own thing, don’t even think about other people’s weirdness for a second, because they’re enjoying themselves too much. I have no idea if places like that ever existed, but this music makes it sound that way. And I want to be there. I can’t even find the words to say how much.

  So yes, at that time I bought a bunch of his vinyl and his old box record player plus a set of bongos, and have been wiggling ar
ound to Sergio Mendes and Jorge Ben and people like that ever since. Skips, pops, and all. Nobody in my family understands why I would want to listen to scratched-up records instead of nice, clean digital downloads and streams, despite my telling them, repeatedly, that music recorded using analog technology -- which was the case for every commercial album prior to Ry Cooder’s Bop til You Drop in 1979 -- should be listened to in an analog format. Even with scratches and pops, you hear things that you don’t hear when recordings are reduced to little tiny digital bits. Hardly anyone seems to understand that. Not even the old hippie guy, who was getting rid of his vinyl because was transferring it into MP3s. But I hope he’s at the sale, and that he has more vinyl for me to scavenge.

  “You’re not coming down with autism again, are you?” Tam jokes. “Remember how you used to clap all the time, until they put you on that diet?”

  “Autism is no joking matter, Tamarlyn,” I say, reciting almost completely verbatim from Mom’s autism-recovery Web site. “It is a brain-killing, soul-destroying scourge, and I am in complete and total recovery. I’m just standoffish and have an intractable case of intellectual snobbery.”

  That last sentence isn’t from the Web site, but I know that’s what my parents think, because they’ve all but said those very words to me. Since the age of four, they have had me on the Good Brain Diet, which they make money endorsing, and supposedly it’s because of this diet that my speech delay ended and I was willing to snuggle with them, which I had never done before. And now I have to eat it forever, or my autism will return. That’s what they tell me. So there are about ten things I can eat, which is why I don’t understand why I have fat thighs. I don’t have fat anything else, but my thighs look like I’m hoarding food for the winter. Maybe it’s because the diet is heavy on organ meats. Supposedly eating the brains of other creatures is what’s making my brain closer to a normal one.

  So according to my parents, I don’t have a disability, just the worst attitude in teenage human history. With Tam’s help, I’m working on it.

  Seriously. I am.

  The second time it happens, it’s when we’re almost at the sale, and Tam and I haven’t spoken for the last ten minutes, just because we have nothing to say. As I walk, I hear and see a band in my mind’s ear and eye, heavy on drummers and percussionists with chops galore. The squiggly basslines and propulsive, Latin-influenced rhythms have the festival crowd dancing and grooving and taking videos on their phones and waving their hands in the air, even before I come out on stage. When I come out, I am wearing a sparkly but stretchy sleeveless dress, and I shimmy and slither on over to my position at the front of the stage, where a staggering assortment of congas and bongos and other noisemaking things to tap on awaits me. I tear through that lineup of drums like a specially trained octopus, playing hot, hot rhythms that sound like they couldn’t possibly be made by one pair of human hands. The crowd goes bananas, whooping and applauding with every flourish as I play faster and faster —

  And then reality intrudes, in the form of a carful of sneering high school boys.

  “Hey, pretty Butt, how come you’re hanging out with that ugly Butt?”

  And as the carful of boys, who I don’t recognize but who evidently do recognize me, pulls away, trailing hard laughter in its wake, my fantasy comes crashing down to earth. There’s a catch: in order to be a successful musician, the audience has to like me. And I don’t have a whole lot of evidence that that’s possible, social skills lessons from my well-intended sister notwithstanding.

  Tam notices the crushed-tomato look on my face as the car fades into the distance. “Okay,” she says. “The first thing you need to remember, when you hear a bunch of douchebros saying stuff like that, is that you can’t automatically assume you’re the ugly Butt.”

  I am not sure what is worse, those douchemobile guys thinking I’m a pimple with feet, or my sister, who actually knows me, thinking I’m a dim bulb. I know perfectly well who the ugly Butt is, and so does she. “Come on,” I say, making myself smile while praying I don’t start crying. My unmatched ability to burst into tears in public has not endeared me to my classmates over the years. “You know better than that.”

  Tam stops walking, and I follow her, and when I turn to face her, she puts a hand on each of my shoulders. “Okay, so the second thing is, there’s no such thing as objectively pretty or ugly. Pretty and ugly are just ideas. You don’t have to buy into them.” She stares at me intently. “Look at me, Cindy. Promise me you’ll remember that, okay?”

  I try to look into her eyes. I do. Doctors must be able to make eye contact. This is a skill that I must must must must pick up, even if I feel like my eyeballs are dissolving on contact with others’. I’ve worked at it all my life. I must work some more.

  And I need more self-esteem. I know that’s a problem. I must believe. Believe that my terrible hair (which grows as if someone patched my scalp together with leftover scraps from other white people’s scalps with the same off-brown hair color but different hair textures) is just as lovely as Tam’s gleaming cascade of honey blondeness. Believe that my irregular, frowny features and acne-spotted complexion are just as good to look at as the chiseled porcelain of my sister’s face. Believe that my lumpy, ungainly figure is every bit as hot as Tam’s graceful, slender hourglass. Believe that anything I have to say is completely fascinating and that anyone who’s bored by my ebullient wit and impressive body of arcane knowledge is too shallow to care about. Believe believe believe.

  I must believe I could actually be someone who slithers and shimmies and sparkles and gets wild applause from thousands of people. Or, excuse me, someone who could walk into an exam room and say, “Hi, I’m Dr. Butt,” and have the patient simply smile sweetly instead of bursting into derisive come-on-that’s-not-your-name horselaughs. Or better yet, could marry someone with a nicer name because someone would actually want me for forever, because my beauty would make people forget my horrid surname. Tam and AB don’t seem particularly hampered by it.

  I shouldn’t be thinking about going on stage anyway. Me, a musician? I can’t play anything. I have those bongos, but I hardly do anything with them. I can’t sing; years of seeing family members and classmates wince at my attempts to do so have provided ample evidence of that. Why am I thinking about this all of a sudden?

  I ingest the lump in my throat, then look at Tam for a split second, see her face pleading with me not to be so hard on myself. A lot of girls, if they had a younger sister who ranked somewhere in the bottom five in her grade in popularity (in a school small enough to have only 125 kids in each grade), would never be willing to be seen with her in public, let alone be seen in public trying to build up little sister’s badly squashed ego. Tam is Southeast Oregon Nice. Nobody doesn’t like her. And that includes me. I do like her. I do appreciate what she’s trying to do for me, and I hope she knows that. It’s just that teaching me regular-girl (or future-doctor) social skills is like trying to turn a pair of bongos into a pair of rollerskates. But try telling my parents that. They simply don’t want to hear it.

  I nod at Tam, to let her know I hear what she’s saying. Then we start walking, and I feel my hands clapping again, clap-clap, clap, clap-clap, clap. And then I hear myself sing, sort of half under my breath: “My name is not Cindy Butt” – clap-clap, clap – “my name is…” Tam whips her head around at me, looking startled, and I drop my voice to a whisper for the next line: “I can’t tell you what.” Then I shove my hands into the pockets of my hoodie, feeling my reusable shopping bag that I brought for the sale brush against the side of my leg as I walk.

  Tam laughs. “Whoa, what was that? Are you rapping?”

  “Rapping?” I have no idea what’s happening to me. All I know is that, as I’m walking down this street with my genetically superior sister, for the first time in my life I am feeling myself pulsate with music. My own music. For a split second at a time, I can imagine a future that makes me feel good, even if it makes my parents tear their hair out.
I can imagine being good at something that nobody else in my family is good at. Or good at something, period. Obviously that’s not much of a song, but it’s a rhyme, and a spontaneous one at that. My first. “Not really. I…I think I was just rhyming.”

  “Butt and what aren’t really rhymes.”

  “It all depends on the accent,” I say. “In England, pain and again are rhymes. And there’s also something called a visual rhyme, do you know about those? Last year in my LA class, Caroleena spent like twenty minutes trying to convince Ms. Kekich that baseline and Vaseline were rhymes because only the first letter was different. That was funny stuff.”

  I force a laugh, but instead of laughing with me, Tam gives me a sad little smile. “You miss her, don’t you?”

  She’s referring to the fact that Caroleena Cernik, who was my only official friend, moved away two months ago. At the time, honestly, I wasn’t broken up about it. We hung out and read books together; we barely spoke. (From the time I turned ten up until a few months ago, I voraciously devoured young adult novels, thinking they might give me a clue about how my peers’ minds worked. No such luck.) It was a carryover from the days when our parents arranged playdates, nothing more, or so I thought then. When she moved away, we didn’t hug, didn’t cry, didn’t do any of those girls-parting-forever-geographically things.

  But once she was gone, it hit me: I am now officially a person with no friends at all. Which is partly what motivated my parents to get Tam (possibly with the aid of some sort of bribery) to take on their Teach Cindy Social Skills summer project. Of course there are people who would love me to candy-coated pieces, if they only knew I wanted to be friends with them! Never mind that when I asked my parents to name actual names of potential friends, they were stumped.

  I decide on the spot that I will no longer answer to Cindy. I don’t know if I’m ready to tell people I want to be Cyan yet, not until I can legally change both my first and last names; Cyan Butt is not much of an improvement over Cindy Butt, and someone would undoubtedly notice that cyan is a shade of blue and would start calling me Blue Butt. I am readying my argument for my parents, but in the meantime, if I must, I will settle for Cynthia. That they will have to give me, because it’s my legal name.

  In response to Tam’s question about Caroleena, I answer, “Sometimes.” My back starts to itch, and I contort myself to try to scratch it, but it’s about half an inch out of my reach. “You know, you don’t have to hang around with me all day. You can go be with your friends if you want. I don’t mind. You’ve done plenty for me already.”

  Tam looks at her watch and grunts. “It’s only eleven-thirty. They’re probably still hung over from last night. To be honest, I’m starting to get kind of annoyed with most of them.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. They’re a pain in my rear end.” Everyone in our family carefully avoids the use of the word butt unless we’re saying our names. “They always want something, and they’re never there for me when I want something.”

  “Wow,” I say. “You hardly ever say anything bad about anyone.”

  “Even I have my limits,” Tam says. Which is why it bewilders me that about thirty seconds later, we pass one of her friends’ houses, and a bunch of Tam’s friends pour out of the house and swarm over her, and they all squeal and hug and kiss each other like they haven’t seen each other in years, and Tam forgets I exist. I’m starting to get the idea that normal-girl social skills involve a lot of lying, but I’m not sure whether it’s them she’s lying to or me.

  I wave to her as she disappears into her crowd, and then, as I am walking away, it happens a third time: Boom cha-cha boom cha-cha BOOM…

  As I clap my hands – silently, so I won’t be detected – I hear myself softly sing: “Is there any truth to the rumor” – clap-clap, clap – “that my family has no sense of humor?”

  The girl on the album cover has long black frizzy hair, and her eyes are so dark they look almost like one big pupil. She looks…I don’t know how to describe it, exactly. Preoccupied? Obsessed?

  The title of the album is Just Looking, and it’s by a singer named Amy Zander, who I’ve never heard of before. But one of the songs on it is a Sergio Mendes song called “Look Around,” which is one of my favorites. Unlike the other albums on the table, which are priced at fifty cents apiece, this one is marked two dollars.

  “That girl was about your age when she made that record,” says the old hippie guy, who is probably my grandfather’s age, the same one whose bossa nova albums I bought a few months ago. He did show up today, thank you God. He has long gray hair and a gray beard and a rainbow-swirl tie-dye shirt that’s a size too small for him. It might be the same shirt he wore last time I saw him, but I never remember things like that in detail.

  I look at the picture again. This girl looks a lot older than fifteen, but I suppose they could do a lot with makeup, even back in the sixties. Then I look back at the old hippie guy, who says, “The reason that album’s two dollars is because it’s a rarity. It’s in terrible shape, but if it was brand new, it would run you probably fifty bucks or more, if you can even find it. It wasn’t a big seller, and that’s the only one she made. You can’t find any digital versions of it either.”

  I pull the inner sleeve, which is brown and slightly brittle, out of the cover. Then I slide the vinyl out of the sleeve to take a look at it on both sides. “This really looks thrashed.”

  “I told you it was. But a few songs on there are playable. If you like that kind of music, you’ll probably like her. She played the drums too.”

  “In 1969?”

  “Yeah, she was ahead of her time. But she played a special drum set they call a cocktail kit. You play it standing up. And she had a very unique voice. Some people would probably call it an acquired taste, let’s just put it that way. But she didn’t sound like anyone else.”

  I slip the vinyl back in the inner sleeve and put the sleeve back in the jacket. Then I tuck the album under my arm and look in my purse for my cash. I count out one dollar bill, two quarters, three dimes, and four nickels, and hand it to Hippie Geezer Man, then slip the record into my shopping bag. “I can’t wait to hear it,” I tell him. I sort of mean it, too. How could I have eaten, drunk, and slept bossa nova for the last three months, and never have heard of this girl? I have spent my summer lurking constantly on bossa nova message boards and blogs, and I don’t remember any posts about an Amy Zander.

  When I get the Amy Zander album home and put it on, I find that it’s almost unlistenable because of all the skips. But from what little I can hear, her voice is hypnotic; it starts really low, then swoops way up into the sky, then back down again, and it has a tight, heavy vibrato. I wish I could hear it for real. Maybe if I look her up, I’ll find a video or some kind of pirate download or something.

  Bingo. Here’s a video of Amy circa 1970, performing “Look Around” on a children’s show called Your Generation. I’ve heard of it because I’ve seen video of Joao Gilberto, Charlie Byrd, and David Frischberg on it. Pretty highbrow stuff for a show aimed at third graders. I click on it and wait while the video begins its hiccupy download. Our dinky little ten-stoplight exurb doesn’t have the swiftest Net connections. Finally, I get it to play. The video quality is bad (it looks like someone filmed a TV set playing the show) and the sound quality is worse, but at least it’s not skipping and popping, so I can actually hear a song of hers all the way through.

  And I can’t believe what I am hearing.

  And seeing.

  On a scale of zero to a hundred, with zero being “if you play this song anywhere in my time zone I will turn a football stadium power hose on your face,” and a hundred being “if you don’t like this, I don’t like you,” this is my first and only hundred, maybe the only hundred I will ever have. Amy Zander kicks the stuffing out of this song, just kills it dead, in the best possible way. All those cute and fluffy words about grains of sand and drops of rain become angry poetry in her mouth as she thrashes
away on those drums so hard she has to grab them before they fall over.

  The children are watching her and dutifully trying to clap along, like they usually do when there’s a musical guest, but they look completely, utterly, gloriously confused by what they are seeing. You can see them looking strangely at each other, like, “Is she okay?”

  Oh, she is more than okay. She is planting seeds in their little minds that will change them forever, even if they don’t know it in that moment, as they are trying and failing to clap to her wildly unpredictable rhythms.

  When the video is over, only then do I realize that I haven’t breathed in the entire four minutes I’ve watched this, and I feel myself suck in a giant lungful of oxygen. Then I play the video again.

  And again.

  And again.

  After the twentieth straight time watching this (I counted), I close the window and make sure to delete my browsing history, then shut the computer down. In theory my parents don’t monitor my Net usage any more, but I can’t trust anyone in this house not to snoop. Even Tam could be bribed to do it, I’m sure.

  I want to watch it some more. And then I want to find out everything there is to know about her.

  But I’m afraid to. Is she dead? If I found out she was, that would kill me. This girl cannot possibly be dead. Someone like this has to live forever.

  Oh, Amy.