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Overview
At the urging of Dino Paradise, a grossly overweight and overly avid fan, the Truants aim to reunite and cash in. But miles from the horizon of youth, weighed down by bad marriages and mortgaged ambitions, they will have to get out of their own way to get back together. Richie, a divorce lawyer, will have to tear himself away from seducing clients with his karaoke skills. John, a dermatologist, needs to escape all the would–be patients who drop their pants at parties to ask for his advice. Tim must convince his wife to accept his drum set, which he keeps hidden in the attic the way most guys hide porn. Brian will have to step away from the thesis he's been barely trying to complete for 25 years. And all four will have to track down Jerry, a degenerate gambler/Equal addict who was last seen flying to the Caymans for his bookie with $1 million in cash taped to his body.
And that's not to mention the delusional sister, the anatomically–blessed baker, a couple of vengeful spouses, Les Paul, and former J. Geils lead singer Peter Wolf.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780060797096 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 11/28/2006 |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.68(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Time Won't Let Me
A Novel
Chapter One
1965-1967
If you really want to know the truth, the roots were not rock and roll, folk, or skiffle. The roots of the band known as the Truants came from detention. In the little known "Fire Extinguisher Wars" of October 1964, at Chase Academy in South Chase, New Hampshire, only ten sophomores were captured. They were sentenced to four Sundays, nine to twelve, in the Music Room, located in the dankest dankness of the Pershing Memorial Auditorium basement. Why the Music Room when there were plenty of free classrooms for the g-pop miscreants? Detention duties went to the most recent faculty hiree at Chase. And by two days, the job fell to Briggs Wentworth, who had left the nearby Nashua public school system suddenly for what he felt was the noblest of reasons: too many squares.
Briggs Wentworth was mohair jacket/clove cigarette weird enough that when he asked to hold Sunday detention in the Music Room, the dean of faculty just walked away quickly. Six of the ten sophomores served their time in a clock-watching stupor that thawed only in the last two minutes when they loaded themselves into a telepathic starting gate spring-loaded for 11:59.9. That was their only activity in detention: the end of detention.
The other four lingered. Their eyes wandered during the three hours, but purposefully. The charts on the walls. The hiatused instruments. The thicket of akimboed music stands. Independently and at once, the four came to the same conclusion: This was not a place to escape. This was a place to escape to.
Wentworth remained seated while the other six rushed to the door, continuing to write lesson plans, glee-club arrangements, or thumb through Downbeat. He was available for any questions, but the four who stayed around had none. Three of them owned guitars but were afraid to play for anyone. The other had his eye on the four-piece, randomly pummeled black-pearl Rogers drum kit in the corner. After two Sundays of lingering, they agreed to stay an additional hour the next week and try to play the one song the three guitarists knew: "Michael (Row the Boat Ashore)."
Richie Lyman, John Thiel, Tim Schlesinger, and Jerry Fyne were hardly friends. They had fought on opposite sides during the Fire Extinguisher Wars for their respective dorms, Mulvihill (Richie and John) and Grays (Tim and Jerry). Richie and Jerry had shared one intimate prep school moment the previous spring as freshmen when half a dozen juniors dunked their heads in an unflushed toilet for the unpardonable sin of being Jewish.
Tim Schlesinger had been excused from the Freshman Yid Roundup. Medical reasons. The post-knee-surgery cast on his leg made it impossible to kneel commodeward. It was his second operation since football season, when a bad foot plant on worse turf ripped his knee in two directions and his four-year, three-sport career was finished, a destination he had never anticipated. By February, he was begging his parents to humanely yank him out of Chase and let him hobble at North High, where he would be merely a guy on crutches rather than the Jew cripple. An outsider only needs one distinguishing feature. Anything more borders on showy.
Tim's parents told him to finish the year, and he did. On the sidelines. Over the summer, the cast came off and a physical therapist suggested swimming three times a week. Chase had an indoor pool. North High did not. So, he was back the following fall, crutch-less and more than fit enough to clean and jerk a fire extinguisher.
The physical therapist also said the restrengthening process might be sped along by...and this was only if Tim was interested...working the pedal on a bass drum a few minutes a day. This suggestion had slipped Tim's mind, but was lassoed the first Sunday he walked into detention.
It helped that they were equally bad. A four-way photo finish of ineptitude. And when one would poke his head in front...when Thiel picked clean the opening eight for "House of the Rising Sun," or when Jerry ditched his Guild for some cardboard bass that was much easier to play, or when Richie discovered if he screamed himself hoarse at the football game Saturday afternoon he sounded like an Isley brother Sunday morning, or when Tim didn't chase the beat like a bus into town...the others would aspire to that new touchstone, or risk the consequences: getting shit from the rest. Three months later, they still weren't exactly friends. If they had been, they might still be working on "Michael (Row the Boat Ashore)."
The hour on Sunday quickly became two, then backed up to include two hours Saturday morning and forty minutes Wednesday at noon, when the Chase class schedule was rejiggered to accommodate traveling athletic teams and no attendance was taken at lunch. Jerry Fyne would show up last to the Music Room with a gym bag of bread and peanut butter and half-pints of Hood milk. Nobody complained. Not even when Jerry laced his milk with a sweat-sock-sheathed half-pint of Old Crow. He said it made him play better. One of the few times he wasn't lying.
Once a month, on Saturday night, a hundred or fewer teenage girls were bused into the Chase Academy gym like kilted and cardiganed migrant workers. They came from places with names like Miss Porter's, Miss Hall's, Dana Hall, and...really, you can check; go ahead...Beaver Country Day. They came hoping to dance with someone who didn't look like another girl in their dorm or biology class. Preferably someone taller. They called such gatherings "mixers," a term that aspired to euphemism. Mixers. Like club soda or quinine water. Slight difference. Those kind of mixers, uh, worked.
Everyone got one dance, thanks to a "line up against the wall and pair off" boy-girl assembly-line ritual handed down from some ancient Sado-Victorian civilization wiped out after everybody danced once and no one procreated. Following that first dance/run-through, actual participants dropped . . .
Time Won't Let MeA Novel. Copyright © by Bill Scheft. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
What People are Saying About This
“A riotous novel. More fun than a night on the town with Keith Richards, without the ambulance ride.”
“The funniest, saddest, most wonderful book I’ve read in a long time. Bill Scheft is a genius, a comic God.”
“If only my high school band’s album fetched as much on EBay these days, I wouldn’t need to have fundraisers.”
“Time Won’t Let Me is for anybody with as warped a sense of humor as mine.”