Fool's Errand: The Beat Street Series Book, #2

By Jenna Zark

When her best friend Sophie goes missing, 12-year-old Ruby Tabeata has a choice: wait for her friend to come home or defy her parents and find Sophie.

Set during the 1950s Blacklist era when writers like Sophie's mom were being jailed or fired, Fool's Errand sends Ruby out of her city and her comfort zone.
With nothing to rely on but her grit and determination, Ruby has to outsmart the men chasing Sophie and her mom—discovering that whether or not you succeed, trying to save a friend is never a fool's errand.

Read part one of this middle-grade Beat Street Series, The Beat on Ruby's Street, to learn how Ruby's story begins. 

 

Please Note: narrative language and dialogue was designed to evoke the 1950s. The author does not condone 1950s language in present times.  

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dragon Moon Press
• Release date: Nov 21, 2018
• ISBN: 9781774000021

Jenna Zark

I am a columnist, lyricist and an award-winning playwright whose plays have been produced in New York and around the country. More information on my play credits are on my Playwriting page. I first learned about the Beats when my older sister brought me to a play in the Village and shared stories about the poets who walked its streets in the 1950s. Though long gone, their poems and books were in all the book stores and I started to read them. When I was in college, I visited the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco and heard more stories about Beats and the readings they had there. Years later, my sister and her family moved to Perry Street and I visited them every Friday after work. I began to imagine a young girl, trying to find the poets who were legends in her time. Would she want to be a poet herself? What would life be like for her? Turned out it was kind of rough—rougher than I thought it would be, and full of surprises. But the story kept growing until it became the Beat Street Series. Now I want to share it with you.

Book preview

Acknowledgments

This book and series are dedicated to Susan Jeffers Casel, who encouraged me to create Ruby and whose courage, brilliance, and beauty will continue to shine, and whose season will always be summer.

I also want to thank Kim Hines, Rita Itzkowitz, and Caroline Kennedy for their insights, and the exceptional Pam Labbe for shepherding my work forward and making it visible.

I’m grateful as well to my brilliant editor Sandra Nguyen and cover artist/publisher Gwen Gades for her beautiful work and for delivering this book into your hands.

1—UNDER A BRIDGE

Sophie is missing.

I don’t know for how long, but I know she’s gone.

She’s my best friend in the world, since forever. Not exactly a Beat Generation-artist-type ’cause her mother was rich, but Mrs. T was the best comedy writer in town and the best mom to Sophie. (Sometimes I wish she was my mom.)

If you want to help me look, Sophie’s mother‘s name is Annie Tanya. I call her Mrs. T sometimes because it’s quicker, and she doesn’t seem to mind.

I say she was rich because the pile of money Mrs. T made is shrinking, and that happened because she lost her job. Something about the Blacklist, which is connected to how the government sees you, but it’s dumb because Mrs. Tanya doesn’t care about politics.

Funny isn’t easy, she always says, but she makes it look that way. She’s written scripts for a ton of TV shows and is mainly the only lady comedy writer in the world. She worked with guys like Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, and Neil Simon—some of the funniest funny men in the world—and a few years back wrote for Your Show of Shows with Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca. That was 1954, just four years ago, and she worked there just about four years, too. A producer named Max brought her into the business. I know every big shot in town is named Max, but that really is his name.

Sophie’s mom is also beautiful, like a dark-haired Doris Day, and I always thought she could be a great actress. But Sophie’s the real actress in the family. And since both of us were little, Mrs. T tried out her jokes on us and made us laugh.

Here’s what I learned works best when you’re trying to be funny:

• Bad jokes work best in the middle of an argument

• Hiccups can be funny, but not as funny as you think

• Jokes about politicians and people and things we know

• Things we think and never say

• Saying them in funny voices (Sophie’s specialty)

No one knows if Mrs. T is going to get the chance to be funny anymore because of the Blacklist—which isn’t something you can find lying around, but it exists the same as we do. You only mostly get on the list if someone at the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in Congress accuses you of being a Communist. I asked Sophie what that meant, and she says Communists are people in Russia who rebelled against rich guys who were lording it over everyone else.

But then somehow or other, this maniac named Joseph Stalin took over, and he started killing everyone right and left, and even though he’s dead, the people who took over are still dictators.

Mainly I think Congress believes everyone in Russia has cooties, which is what the kids around here say about people nobody likes. And Congress doesn’t want Americans to get them.

A lot of writers and actors in Hollywood thought the Communists were good guys at first, and then those writers and actors changed their minds. But that House Committee thinks there’s still a lot of Communists running around over here, and have to be rooted out.

The HUAC folks started pulling all these actors into court hearings and asking them questions. Did you ever go to a meeting with Communists? Who are the Communists you know? Mrs. T’s husband brought her to some meetings a long time ago, but she was never a Communist. She just went to the meetings because he asked her to go.

But if the committee wants you to name the people you met at meetings, they want you to rat on your friends, who are just like Mrs. T and didn’t mean any harm. If the committee asks you questions and you don’t want to answer them, you can say I plead the Fifth, which means you don’t have to speak about anything that could hurt you in court.

Except… once you plead the Fifth, the committee sends your name to all the producers in Hollywood and New York and you get blacklisted, and no one, I mean NO one, will hire you anymore. Period.

Plus some people even go to jail if they don’t name their friends.

This whole Blacklist thing didn’t just happen to Mrs. T—it happened to a lot of people, and because Sophie and her mom are Jewish, somehow that makes it worse, because a lot of people say bad things about Jews, which is stupid. Mrs. T’s producer Max is Jewish too, and he’s also in trouble with the House Committee.

What happened was Mrs. T wrote a sketch for a play that a group of actors were doing. Some were on the Blacklist already, and they wanted to let audiences know what was happening. The sketch Mrs. T wrote was pretty funny and made it look like all you had to do was eat red cereal to be called a Communist.

Except somebody who saw the play told the House Committee that Mrs. T was a Communist. And because Max helped produce the play, he got in trouble too, and both Max and Mrs. T got fired. That wasn’t fair at all, because it’s a free country and you’re supposed to be able to write whatever you want. Except Congress doesn’t see it that way.

The weird thing is, nobody thought this stuff could even happen in 1958. The Blacklist has been going on for like ten, twelve years, but it’s still happening and no one knows when it will end, if ever.

I don’t know how it started exactly, but there was a senator named Joseph McCarthy going after Communists in the government until he died a few years ago. Then the House of Representatives started bothering entertainers. If you don’t answer them the way they want, they write your name on a list that says you’re Red, which is the same thing as Communist. They share it with the papers and everyone else.

My mother Nell—I call her Nell-mom—says the suits in Congress just want you to conform, which means going to work and wearing ties, and if you’re a woman, staying home making Jell-O.

I hate Jell-O.

In Greenwich Village, here, Beats try to do the opposite of conforming, because we want to do things differently from regular people. And the last thing anyone expected was for Mrs. T and her producer Max to get this House Committee on their tails.

For as long as I’ve known them, Sophie and her mom were going gangbusters through the world. They had the biggest apartment I’d ever seen, and I loved going over there.

When Mrs. T lost her job in May, she tried to find some way to write on the Q-T, which means the down-low. You have to make up a name, or just write something and let someone else take the credit. I would hate that, but Mrs. T says she’d be lucky to find that kind of thing.

But because most of the writers are cats—I mean guys, not chicks—I mean ladies—it’s harder for Mrs. T to find work. She has some money saved up, but she also has to pay a lawyer in case those Congress guys bring her in for questioning. And lawyers are expensive, which means they cost a lot.

When Mrs. T had to stop working at the TV station, she started having trouble paying rent, because the apartment she and Sophie live in is expensive, too. And since Sophie’s dad left the family years ago, Mrs. T has to come up with every penny.

Nell-mom said they could crash at our place for a while—I’ve got bunk beds and there’s a fold-out in the living room—and they were here for a couple of weeks. Mrs. T told my mom they couldn’t impose on us anymore

even though Nell-mom said we were in no hurry to get rid of them, which I didn’t like because it sounded like they were pets. But Mrs. Tanya said she thought they should go to New Jersey, where they have relatives. Except Sophie told me later that’s a story like the ones her mom makes up for TV.

Now it’s June and school’s out, which is good, because Sophie and me and our friend Gordy were really looking forward to being free for the summer. This year was the first time any of us had ever been to a real school, because we were mostly learning on our own at a store called Blue Skies in the neighborhood. The owners picked that name because their names are Sky and Blu.

Like I said, Beats don’t usually do what everyone else does, unless a social worker makes us. Which is what happened this year—and it’s why we had to start going to a regular school. Today was our last day, and Gordy wanted to get sodas at Sorocco’s to celebrate, even though we’d only been in classrooms for a month and a half. I think I can speak for everyone and say that was more school than any Beat should put up with, and we don’t want to go back in the fall.

Sophie said she’d see us later, ’cause she wanted to go home and see her mom. That was the last I saw of her, walking down Bleecker and heading over to Charles, getting smaller and smaller as she walked away.

I would have been home sooner, but it started raining buckets all of a sudden, and Gordy and I stayed inside Sorocco’s a while, waiting for it to stop. It didn’t stop exactly, but there was a break in the rain and we both left and by the time I got home, all the suitcases were gone and there was no Sophie and no Mrs. T.

That was around five, and now it’s close to midnight and extremely hot and humid, so you feel like you’re in a bathtub when you go outside, or even stick your head out the window like Mrs. Belusa does at my old digs on Perry Street when she’s yelling at you. We saw that Mrs. T left a note about that New Jersey relative, but of course I know better. I tried to tell Nell-mom, but she refuses to get upset.

I think Nell-mom changed after she married Chaz. She thinks it’s a good change, but I’d argue differently. She’s worried about me and my older brother Ray getting mad at her, so she’s always trying to be as sweet as pie, which feels like she turned into the kind of mom you’d see on TV—not that we have a television.

Because Chaz owns a gallery and charges high prices for his paintings (including Nell-mom’s), we get to live in a nice pad and things are mostly comfy-cozy. That’s if you don’t mind having your real dad on the road all the time and your brother skipping out whenever he can to join your father’s band.

Nell-mom has this thing, and she says all mothers have it: they want their kids to be happy. She’d do anything to make me happy, she says, and I don’t think I can tell her this, but if you try too hard, sometimes you do the opposite. Nell-mom is definitely, truly, completely trying too hard.

When I try to get her riled up over something, and I used to be pretty good at it, she smiles and acts real patient and wants to talk through what’s bothering me.

That’s nasty. And I even think she knows it.

There’s no New Jersey relatives, I tell her. Sophie and her mom are under a bridge somewhere.

Oh, Ruby, she says. Annie must have had a good reason for leaving, and she would have told me if she and her daughter had nowhere to go. She wouldn’t put Sophie at risk like that.

How do you know? I ask.

Nell-mom frowns. What do you want me to do?

I look at her, trying to figure out how far she’ll let me go.

Come out with me and look for them?

It’s nearly midnight. You need to go to bed, Nell-mom replies.

How can I?

We’ll look tomorrow, Ruby.

Tomorrow could be too late.

I’m sure Annie knows what she’s doing, Nell-mom says. I trust her.

I shake my head and look out the window, while Nell-mom goes over to the kitchen table and picks up a sketch pad to draw. I’m thinking about this couple I saw once under the Brooklyn Bridge when we had a school field trip about a month ago. A man and a woman sharing a sandwich, and when you got closer, you could see their clothes were dirty and torn, and the woman’s eyes were hungry, like an alley cat’s outside a diner at closing time.

How did that couple land under that bridge? Where did they live before? Did they have a wedding with a white dress and cake like Nell-mom and Chaz? Or did they just sort of live together like Nell-mom and my father, Gary Daddy-o? Do they have kids? And if they do, are the kids in a children’s home like I was for a while, until Nell-mom said she’d get married and brought me home? Did the man lose his job? Did either one of them even have jobs?

And why isn’t Nell-mom worried? Maybe it’s because she worries so much about me and Ray she doesn’t have room to worry about anyone else. Or maybe she just wants to focus on her art now that she finally has a little more money than she used to. Whatever the problem is, I don’t think I can get her upset about it. She’s just too focused on staying calm.

I put my hands on the kitchen window, which is starting to fog up with drizzle. Sophie, please don’t be under the Brooklyn Bridge tonight. I close my eyes and all I can do is think of you with your mom, trying to eat a roll you found in the garbage somewhere. What if you don’t even find that much?

I’m happy it’s not cold, but I’m also worried about where you’ll be when it turns cold. Luckily that won’t happen for a while. June is the month when the sun gets hotter and brighter, bongos are everywhere like sprouts all over the streets, and fruit blossoms into bunches of green, red, orange, and yellow on the bins