Tiny Cooper is parked outside my house, honking methodically.
I run outside and only when he sees me does he stop honking. The passenger window rolls down. “Christ, Tiny. You’re going to wake the whole neighborhood.”
I see a can of Red Bull dancing in his huge, shaky hand. The other hand remains perched on the horn, ready to honk at any moment.
“We gotta go,” he says, his voice rushed. “Gotta go go go go go go go go.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Gotta go to school. I’ll explain later. Get in the car.” He sounds so frantically serious, and I am so tired, that I don’t think to question him. I just race back into the house, pull on some socks and shoes, brush my teeth, tell my parents I’m going to school early, and hurry into Tiny’s car.
“Five things, Grayson,” he says as he puts the car into drive and speeds off, without ever relinquishing his shaky hold on the can of Red Bull.
“What? Tiny, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s right. Things couldn’t be righter. Things could be less tired. They could be less busy. They could be less caffeinated. But they couldn’t be righter.”
“Dude, are you on meth?”
“No, I’m on Red Bull.” He hands me the Red Bull, and I sniff at it, trying to figure out whether it’s laced with something. “Also coffee,” he adds. “So but listen, Grayson. Five things.”
“I can’t believe you woke up my entire neighborhood at five forty-three for no reason.”
“Actually,” he says, his voice louder than seems entirely necessary at such a tender hour, “I woke you up for five reasons, which is what I’ve been trying to tell you, except that you keep interrupting me, which is just a very, like, Tiny Cooper thing of you to do.”
I’ve known Tiny Cooper since he was a very large and very g*y fifth grader. I’ve seen him drunk and sober, hungry and sated, loud and louder, in love and in longing. I have seen him in good times and bad, in sickness and in health. And in lo those many years, he has never before made a self-deprecating joke. And I can’t help but think: maybe Tiny Cooper should fry his brain with caffeine more often.
“Okay, what are the five things?” I ask.
“One, I finished casting the show last night around eleven while I was skyping with Will Grayson. He helped me. I imitated all the potential auditioners, and then he helped me decide who was least horrible.”
“The other Will Grayson,” I correct him.
“Two,” he says, as if he hasn’t heard me. “Shortly thereafter, Will went to bed. And I was thinking to myself, you know, it’s been eight days since I met him, and I haven’t technically liked someone who liked me back for eight days in my entire life, unless you count my relationship with Bethany Keene in third grade, which obviously you can’t, since she’s a girl.
“Three, and then I was thinking about that and lying in the bed staring up at the ceiling, and I could see the stars that we stuck up there in like sixth grade or whatever. Do you remember that? The glow-in-the-dark stars and the comet and everything?”
I nod, but he doesn’t look over, even though we’re stopped at a light. “Well,” he goes on, “I was looking at those stars and they were fading away because it had been a few minutes since I’d turned out the light, and then I had a blinding light spiritual awakening. What is Tiny Dancer about? I mean, what is its subject, Grayson? You’ve read it.”
I assume that, as usual, he is asking this question rhetorically, so I say nothing so he’ll go on ranting, because as painful as it is for me to admit, there is something kind of wonderful about Tiny’s ranting, particularly on a quiet street when I am still half asleep. There is something about the mere act of him speaking that is vaguely pleasurable even though I wish it weren’t. It is something about his voice, not his pitch or his rapid-fire, caffeinated diction, but the voice itself—the familiarity of it, I guess, but also its inexhaustibility.
But he doesn’t say anything for a while and then I realize he actually does want me to answer. I don’t know what he wants to hear, so in the end I just tell him the truth. “Tiny Dancer is about Tiny Cooper,” I say.
“Exactly!” he shouts, pounding the steering wheel. “And no great musical is ever about a person, not really. And that’s the problem. That’s the whole problem with the play. It’s not about tolerance or understanding or love or anything. It’s about me. And, like, nothing against me. I mean, I am pretty fabulous. Am I not?”
“You’re a pillar of fabulosity in the community,” I tell him.
“Yes, exactly,” he says. He’s smiling, but it’s tough to tell how much he’s kidding. We’re pulling into school now, the place entirely dead, not even a car in the faculty lot. He turns into his usual spot, reaches into the back for his backpack, gets out, and starts walking across the desolate lot. I follow.
“Four,” he says. “So I realized, in spite of my great and terrible fabulousness, the play can’t be about me. It must be about something even more fabulous: love. The polychromic many-splendored dreamcoat of love in all its myriad glories. And so it had to be revised. Also retitled. And so I had to stay up all night. And I’ve been writing like crazy, writing a musical called Hold Me Closer. We’ll need more sets than I thought. Also! Also! More voices in the chorus. The chorus must be like a f**king wall of song, you know?”
“Sure, okay. What’s the fifth thing?”
“Oh, right.” He wiggles a shoulder out of his backpack and slings it around to his chest. He unzips the front pocket, digs around for a moment, and then pulls out a rose made entirely of green duct tape. He hands it to me. “When I get stressed,” Tiny explains, “I get crafty. Okay. Okay. I’m gonna go to the auditorium and start blocking out some scenes, see how the new stuff looks onstage.”
I stop walking. “Um, do you need me to help or something?”
He shakes his head no. “No offense, Grayson, but what exactly are your theater credentials?”
He’s walking away from me, and I try to stand my ground, but then finally chase after him up the steps to school, because I’ve got a burning question. “Then why the hell did you wake me up at five forty-three in the morning?”