In my “Glee” Tribute to Lou Reed Episode, I’m the new kid everyone is talking about in school because I used to be in a successful boy band, but I quit after seeing a photo of Justin Timberlake wearing his hair in cornrows.
So everyone is wondering if I’m going to join the New Directions glee club and why the heck I’m living in Lima, Ohio. But I’m that tall, really good-looking, silent type, so I’m not saying anything.
I’m in the school cafeteria when Tina Cohen-Chang says, “Hey, Jon, I hear you’re a great singer. Are you going to join New Directions?”
I shake my head no.
“Why not? We’re great!”
I shrug. I really don’t want to go there.
“That’s not an answer. Have you heard us?”
“Of course I have. Look, you guys have had gay kids, a kid in a wheelchair, and you even had a quarterback, but where is your alterna-misfit like me, who hates half the music you sing? How am I gonna fit in?”
“It’s so easy to be a hater, Jon. What do you think we should be doing?”
And then, on the soundtrack, these two bass notes glissando from G to C and then slide back again. You know the song. Everyone does. And I say, “Holly came from Miami, F-L-A…”
So I lead a killer version of Lou’s drag-queen classic, “Take a Walk on the Wild Side,” mincing down the food line, turning myself into one of his characters, tonging a heap of spaghetti over my head, holding cantaloupes to my chest, and applying ketchup for lipstick. I even cue the food-service workers: “And all the colored girls go, ‘Doo do doo do doo doo di doo do doo do doo do di doo.’ ” Then Mercedes and Santana, who are visiting because it’s alumni day, join in. The whole cafeteria cheers when we finish.
I go to the bathroom in my “Glee” Tribute to Lou Reed Episode, so I can wash off the ketchup and get the spaghetti out of my hair, and Tina comes in to tell me how awesome I was. She says I should attend the next New Directions rehearsal and try it out. Maybe I can even give them an edge. Then, because we’re in the bathroom and looking at ourselves, she sings “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” which is like a song that, like, everyone name-checks as great and sensitive. And, even though I’m tall, dark, and mysterious, my eyes get watery for a second, but I wipe them really quickly.
At rehearsal, the kids are all talking about me. It’s like “Waiting for Godot.” Will I show up or not? Artie (the kid in the wheelchair), Blaine (a gay kid), and Marley (a new girl) decide to go looking for me and roam through the halls singing “I’m Waiting for the Man” and doing cartwheels and splits, and even a wheelchair wheelie. It’s so upbeat you could almost forget it’s a song about scoring heroin.
When I finally show up, I say I’ll try out on one condition.
“Anything!” Blaine says.
“I want us to sing a two-minute version of ‘Metal Machine Music, Part 1.’ ”
“No! Don’t do it!” It’s Rachel, back from Julliard for alumni day. “I know a former student who heard a performance of it at Columbia University and went nuts. It’s pure noise.”
“Well, that’s my requirement,” I say. “The club is called New Directions, right?”
“But the new direction isn’t insanity!” says Rachel, who has had a really hard time this year. “Listen, you guys, I love you all. But don’t do it. It’s like a… a descent into madness.”
Rachel is tearful and pleading. And I feel a little like a jerk in my “Glee” Tribute to Lou Reed Episode, but I say what I have to: “Art isn’t always beautiful, man.”
The principal, Sue Sylvester, who is played by the awesome Jane Lynch, storms in. “Rachel! What’s wrong?” she says.
Artie rats me out: “He wants to sing ‘Metal Machine Music.’ ”
Sue gasps in horror. “Look what you’ve done with your horrible, hateful music,” she says to me. “Get out of here, Mister Misery Guts!”
I stand up. I weigh three choices. If we were off screen and out of character, I would definitely sing her “Sweet Jane.” But we are in character, so I consider wooing Sue with “Pale Blue Eyes,” which is my personal favorite Lou song. But then I think, Duh, this is “Glee,” so I launch into “I Love You, Suzanne.” It’s a fabulous, finger-snapping version that makes you want to dance. The “Glee” gang loves it, and by the end even Sue is making goo-goo eyes at me.
“We don’t have to do ‘Metal Machine Music,’ ” I say, walking over to Rachel. “Rachel, are you okay?”
She smiles through her tear-stained face, and then, with that crystalline voice and the following lyrics, leads us to the finale of my “Glee” Tribute to Lou Reed Episode:
It’s “I’m Set Free,” the glorious, pounding, punky, gospel-tinged song that Lou Reed wrote for the Velvet Underground. Mercedes steps in for the second verse to blast it to the stratosphere, and then we’re all in, singing our hearts out, the New Directions, finally going somewhere different, soaring high above the Top 40, trumpeting “I’m set free!” And we are whirling, swirling, like those kids at Phish shows, except we actually know how to dance. It is so good, so moving, it doesn’t matter that the last line is a bit cynical: “I’m set free to find a new illusion.”
“Are you in, Jon?” asks Brittany, who is back from M.I.T. for alumni day at the very end of my “Glee” Tribute to Lou Reed Episode.
I know she’s trouble. And I know a Styx tribute show can’t be too far away, either. But this is a force of nature, my new illusion. So I say the only thing I can: “Hell, yes!”
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Seth Kaufman is the author of “The King of Pain.”
Photograph: Fox.
