ST2.12 | "What Ever Happened to the Cracker Jacks?"

PROMPT: It's time for Jingle Bell Rock. For December, we want stories about music. Whether it's musicians in a very tough spot, a record collector who will do anything to get that rare LP, the secrets that lurk in relationships between bandmates, or the traditions and legends of specific musical subcultures, if it's about music, we want to roll with it.

WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO THE CRACKER JACKS?

by Tom Andes

For Brett Evans

It turns out being an icon is not all it’s cracked up to be. Just ask any child star whose life winds up a sad parade of drugs, straight-to-DVD movies, and behind-the-scenes documentaries, or any boyband veteran who ends up the subject of an episode of VH1’s Behind the Music.

Never mind one who throws himself off a hotel balcony in New Orleans.

It started for us on a talent show on public access TV, Channel 27, back in Boston. Nirvana was riding the charts—Kurt was still among us—and New Jack Swing was hitting hard. The winds of change were upon us, and the producers wanted to cash in on this latest trend before it went the way of houseguests and fish left too long in the fridge. They wanted kids who could dance the shoeshine and the shuffle—in other words, little players and New Jacks—but they wanted them to be white.

By now, I guess you’ve read about the aftermath. For years, my brother was a regular feature on TMZ, and Perez Hilton should’ve cut us a check for all the traffic we directed his way. In these days of Elon and X, we’ve faded from public consciousness, except for the occasional ironic revival, or when somebody posts an article on a slow news day: “What Ever Happened to the Cracker Jacks?”

But now, with a gun in my hand in a hotel room in New Orleans, with a suitcase full of cash on the bed, with sirens sounding out the window and the flashes of a hundred smartphones popping below me on the sidewalk, I know we’re going—as the kids say—viral.

***

“He’s got it coming.” That’s what I told my brother, Kevin when I walked into room 206 in the St. Peter Hotel thirty minutes ago, before I pistol-whipped our former manager, Mourad Malati, then gave my brother the gun to finish him.

Why was it so easy to convince Kevin? Maybe it was the coke. Maybe Kevin had been dreaming of this since he was a teen. Maybe it was just that Mourad was a First Class, Grade A piece of shit.

And so, even though I was a little surprised when Kevin pulled the trigger, plugging Mourad in the gut—my brother’s aim must’ve been off since he was still cuffed to the bed—I was looking forward to watching Mourad die a long, slow death.

Kevin had been doing so well, too. After that last stint on Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew, my brother had managed to stay out of jail, and out of the tabloids. But when a guy falls, he falls hard, especially from the heights we’d climbed.

“The fuck,” I said. For a hot minute, back in the day, my brother had been laying pipe to Britney Spears. Now, one of his hands was cuffed to a king-sized bed in the same hotel where Johnny Thunders had died; my brother’s shit-streaked tighty-whities pulled down his thighs, tears staining his tattooed cheeks. He grinned at me, showing off his new, diamond-crusted grill.

“I shot him.” He was sniveling, coked to the gills.

“No shit.” I grabbed his phone from the floor next to the bed. I took the gun back, too.

***

Depending on who you asked and who he was talking to, Mourad was either Syrian or Russian. He’d been the visionary, the one who’d seen us dancing on that show, Boston’s Got Talent—five Southie teens doing steps we’d picked up in classes at the Roxbury Community Center. Credit where credit’s due: if he’d seen an opportunity, he’d seen the future, too. Like Sam Phillips and Colonel Tom Parker before him, like Eminem a few years later, he knew what white America would tolerate pumped into its living rooms.

Not that we were Elvis Presley. Not that between the five of us, we had half as much talent as Eminem’s got in his pinky finger.

Kevin had been the star, and Mourad’s favorite. In this age when these revelations drop on the daily, you know where this is going, don’t you? Back then, we’d all been diddled by clergy, teachers, uncles. Kevin was being groomed for success by Mourad. Well, he was being groomed in other ways, too.

If we did suspect, so what? Kevin was our hot ticket out of a life of petty crime. The best thing in front of us was working the docks, a foregone conclusion that we wouldn’t achieve half of what our fathers had. And all our dads had done was slap the shit out of us and our moms on their way to drinking themselves into early graves.

Yeah, all the signs were there, the drug use, the depression. But the worst part was the fact my brother wanted to take himself seriously as an artist. You’ll remember his solo record, which was held up for ridicule in those early days of the Internet, receiving a rare zero-star review in Pitchfork, the critic saying my brother was like Vanilla Ice without the redeeming features, calling the record a modern-day minstrel show.

Truth was, we hated him. Young as we were, success went to our heads. On that last world tour, Kevin insisted on his own bus, like he was the star, and we were the backing band. Like he was Mick and Keith, and we were the rest of the Stones. Like he was James Brown, and we were the Famous Flames. Like he was Michael—

Well, you get the picture.

After the solo record, he said he was going to rehab. Half the shows on his breakout tour had been cancelled due to low ticket sales. It was a flop, a faceplant of epic proportions, his career written off as DOA.

“Guess you needed us after all,” I told him, months later, when he suggested a reunion show. I’d dabbled in music production, done a stint as a backup dancer on Janet Jackson’s All For You tour, but my future held a life of straight jobs. Mourad had negotiated our contracts. When the band broke up, I had enough in savings for a down payment on a house in Southie, two blocks from the Old Colony Housing Project where we’d grown up.

Not like Kevin, the star, with the fat solo contract.

“Please.” On the other end of the phone, he was sobbing. After all those years of seeing him in the limelight, I was happy about it, like when I’d read those pans of Jacked 4 Lyfe. “I just need a little cash to get me into a facility.”

“Why don’t you call Mourad, since you’ve always been his butt boy.”

And I hung up on him.

***

Maybe I couldn’t have known how those words would hurt him. But even if I didn’t know, I knew. No surprise when years later, he sold the whole sordid story to Us Weekly. It was supposed to be the beginning of his comeback, his public rehabilitation, but he was too far gone with the nose candy.

All that gangsta stuff? It was a front. The face tattoos, the gold teeth, the wifebeater tank-tops, thug life on his fists, he wore that mask to convince the world he wasn’t the sensitive kid who’d dazzled a studio audience on Boston’s Got Talent, peaking on public access TV at age 17.

***

All of which brings us back to this hotel room in New Orleans, where half an hour ago, I showed up to find my brother handcuffed to the bed, like I’d walked into a scene from a weird European movie—something out of Lars von Trier, that one with Björk and the trains.

“Just couldn’t stay away,” I told my brother, “could you?”

Kevin was shaking his head. “I needed money, man.”

“Where’d you get the dough for that grill, those new teeth?” Disgusted, I kicked the tray with the lines of blow they’d been doing across the room, Kevin’s eyes bugging.

“Dude.” He might’ve hoovered the stuff up from the carpet. “Lighten up.”

For years, when his bank accounts were empty, credit cards maxed out, when he relapsed and needed cash to stay on a bender, my brother went back to Mourad, his Daddy Malati.

In the corner, Mourad was coughing. Blood flecked his lips, black fluid seeping from a wound below his heart—gut shot, like a fat, horny buck.

“I made you,” he said, “made you what you are.”

As if that was something to be proud of, making the Cracker Jacks.

“Should we call an ambulance?” Kevin’s teeth were chattering: a symptom of shock, as I knew from my EMS training, since I had to get a real job.

I sat with the gun. “We’re going to watch him bleed out.”

“Every time I called and asked him for money,” Kevin said, “he’d make me do this.”

“Somebody help.” A foam of blood was on Mourad’s lips. The room smelled of his intestines, whatever organs the bullet had pierced. He tried getting to his feet, grunting as he fell against the wall.

“Bro, get me out of these handcuffs.” In Kevin’s face was the beginning of a realization. “Hey, what are you doing in New Orleans, anyway?”

***

And yeah, part of me did go to look out for him. I knew he couldn’t stay clean, knew Mourad would make Kevin an offer he couldn’t refuse. Poor fucker, maybe he thought I’d come to patch things up, make amends.

As if.

No, I’ve been following Kevin since I got to town, and I came here for that suitcase, the money Mourad gives Kevin every time they get up to their little shenanigans

That was the plan: boost the cash, ice Mourad, and leave Kevin on the hook for the murder beef.

But now, damn my conscience, I want to get Kevin out of here, too.

***

I take the cuffs off. It isn’t my fault, what comes next.

If you’ve seen the Behind the Music episode or read the articles in Buzzfeed, you’re familiar with the official version, which culminates in a tragic murder-suicide: after years of abuse, the washed up one-time protégé and frontman of a chart-topping boyband turns on the promoter who took him off the mean streets of Boston, killing him in cold blood before throwing himself out a New Orleans hotel window during Mardi Gras.

The story’s got sex, sleaze, intrigue.

Like most stories, it’s half true.

***

Maybe it’s the drugs. Maybe after decades, he can’t take it anymore. Maybe he knows he’ll get done for murdering Mourad, or he doesn’t have the stones to live with himself after killing the guy. Not even if I was the one whispering in his ear, telling him to do it.

He’s out the window like a streak. In the glare of those cellphone flashes, in his dirty underwear, he balances on the wrought iron railing. I go after him, leaping toward that balcony, but those flashes are popping, and I don’t want to be in the frame.

“Kevin,” I shout.

He looks over his shoulder, and I swear, he has the same expression he did that day on Boston’s Got Talent, when he knew he’d nailed it, securing our future, changing our lives.

If only we’d known how they would be changed.

I see it again, as if in slow motion. Can I say—do—anything to stop him?

But like when we were kids, Kevin’s the star, the one out front, hogging the limelight.

“Not worth it.” Those are his last words.

“Don’t—”

I’m still saying it when he jumps.

Out the window, below the railing, under that blank piece of sky where my brother was, people scream.

Holy fuck.

I grab the suitcase. Time to go, but not before I finish Mourad, a bullet to the temple, more merciful than he deserves.

I wipe the gun, toss it on the bed, and run, slamming the door behind me.

This is Kevin’s last viral moment, and I want no part of it.

Tom Andes (Twitter / X: @thomaseandes; Instagram: @thomasandes) wrote the detective novel Wait There Till You Hear from Me, forthcoming from Crescent City Books in 2025. His stories have appeared in dozens of publications including Best American Mystery Stories 2012, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and Santa Monica Review. He lives in Albuquerque, where he is a working musician, performing solo and with several bands. He is also a freelance editor, writing coach, teaches, picks up catering shifts, and pet sits. His two acclaimed EPs of original songs will be rereleased on vinyl by Southern Crescent Recording Co. in 2025. He can be found at tomandes.com.