by Jill Malone
“Fucking punks!” comes the cry from the crowd.
I yank my guitar free from the cord, and cradle it protectively. The crowd’s roar and another launch of beer chase us from the stage. Trevor, at the last, picks up a speaker and hurls it into the crowd. Backstage, the manager tries to chide us about hurling equipment at his patrons.
“Fuck you, douche bag,” Trevor says. “Get your fucking monkeys out there to break our gear down right now, before I call the police.” The guy tries to argue, and Trevor steps up so close that the manager flinches. “Get your fucking monkeys out there to break our gear down now. I won’t tell you again.”
The guy vanishes. Even backstage we hear the crowd roaring. Musicians from other bands stand around, glancing at us, then at each other.
Ernie rubs his guitar down, and packs it inside his case before toweling the beer from his hair. Nobody but Trevor has spoken. “How much must that beer suck?” Ernie says now. “They were throwing entire pitchers.”
Dismal. Our party, reeking of cheap beer, sits on the bench seats in Trevor’s van, staring at our cigarettes. Trevor drinks two Budweisers, crushing the emptied can and hurling it to the floor each time.
“Fuck,” he says again to no one in particular.
The first gig I’ve ever played without my chaperone, and we’re attacked by beer-catapulting metalheads. Of course, my parents have no inkling that I’m unchaperoned and it’s not like I could explain it, anyway. I start laughing.
“You’re hysterical,” Trevor observes disgustedly.
“That was really scary,” I say.
“I wish I’d thought to throw speakers,” Ernie says.
“That should be the plan,” Joe says, “for next time.”
“Next time?” Trevor asks. He shakes his head.
“Those are your people, man,” Ernie tells Trevor. “Your own people attacked us.”
“Those fuckers,” Trevor says, jabbing his cigarette at the night for emphasis, “are not my people. We should burn that fucking place down. Cole, dude, you’re gonna be sick if you keep laughing like that.”
“I’m sorry,” I gasp.
“We smell,” Joe says, “like we’ve been to a really bad party.”
The worst, we agree. The worst party imaginable.
Soaking in the bath, I call Bangs and wonder, briefly, if I’ll be electrocuted.
“They what?” he asks.
I tell him again.
“That’s horrible,” he says.
“Yes. The look on Trevor’s face when he said fucking monkeys—unreal—he was actually the scariest thing in the whole place.”
“I should come over there,” he says.
“What?”
“I feel like I should come over. Make sure you’re OK.”
“I’m OK.”
“Cole,” he says.
“Don’t worry,” I tell him. How to explain that this is the least of it? Tonight in the bar pales compared to Jeremy walking out, or Meghan vanishing. Nothing, anywhere, is certain. “Everything gets corrupted, doesn’t it?”
“Fifteen minutes,” Bangs says, and rings off.
For a while, I stare at the phone. I bought it with babysitting money when I was twelve, and allowed, for the first time, to have a phone in my bedroom. I pull my flannel pajama pants on when I hear the scratch at the door.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers as he slides past me into the room. He doesn’t ask where my shirt is, why I’m damp, why the light’s out; in fact, he doesn’t say anything as he tips my face back and kisses me.
We kiss for so long that I stop crying, and brush my palm against his jawline. “Christian,” I say, and cry again.
He lifts me onto the bed, and holds me. He’s singing Prove My Love, by the Violent Femmes, maybe the most hilarious lullaby I’ve ever heard. And I laugh and he kisses me again. My laugh in both our mouths.
Ascension 1991
TRAGEDY.
That’s the header, the only word I’ve written on my sheet of lined paper. We’re supposed to write 500 words about tragedy before the bell rings. Everyone else—head bent and pen scrabbling—has engaged with this assignment. I’ve written: TRAGEDY.
What exactly am I supposed to write? I haven’t seen Meghan in 26 days—since the night she left Board with a migraine. That’s my tragedy. One of them. But shouldn’t tragedy have more scope than my particular life? Shouldn’t tragedy affect some other people too? What about my atheist? Deployed, running drills in the desert, anticipating the inevitable invasion, the chemical warfare, the horrible death. That’s tragic.
He wrote me again:
I wish I could take you out for coffee, or a soda, or something. Maybe just a drive. I used to drive all the time in high school. Your letters make me nostalgic. I’m going to tell you something, but you’re never allowed to repeat it—to anyone—in fact, you must burn this letter directly after reading it. Do you promise?
The first time I had sex, my knees kept slipping on the bed sheets, and I had no leverage and really sucked. It was bad. Not bad, it was embarrassing. I thought sex would be systematic or intuitive or something, but it wasn’t. In the end, I was ashamed of myself, and made her feel bad.
It’s lonely at first, being young. I remember it that way too, I remember the loneliness. It’s like being here at night. Like you’re nothing.
I’ve considered making up some advice for you. Something sage like, You’ll fall in and out of love for the rest of your life. But I can see how you might not find that reassuring. Listen to a lot of music. There’s great heartbreak music out there. Or revenge music. I used to listen to “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You”—you know that Led Zeppelin song?—whenever I was bummed out. It’s a heartbreak/revenge classic.
I’ve started smoking again. I figure, what the fuck?
But I don’t want to share my atheist, or his tragedy, especially with Overhead. Then I think about the Space Shuttle Challenger. We were sitting in Ms. Moos’ class, learning how to divide fractions, when someone came to the door. The women murmured to one another, and Ms. Moos turned back to us, and announced the news in a trembling voice.
They pulled a television in from the A/V room and we watched the shuttle explode again and again that afternoon. The teachers consoled one another, while we sat at our desks, and were awestruck. Alive and then not. Momentum and then pieces. I’d just turned eleven and was startled to discover it could all be over so quickly—blinked out—that’s what could happen.
I can hear the clock on the wall tick, and the sweeping hand of my Swatch sweep; Alicia’s furious erasing, and the dash of her hand as she wipes away the pink skin.
The last year we lived in Missouri, I was a fourth grader, and my father had taken over the division chapel where the basic trainees came every Sunday by the hundreds. (If they attended a church service, they could skip drills.) What I remember most from that year is a family down the street from us, who discovered, in a heavy trunk in their garage, the body of their four-year-old son, who’d climbed into the trunk with three newborn kittens and suffocated. My father performed the funeral. He cried when he told us.
Fuck you, Overhead. Fuck you and your tragedy. Fuck Jeremy and his precious soul. Fuck Meghan and her stupid career. Fuck Iraq and Kuwait and sand and shuttles and heavy trunks.
My atheist’s advice about heartbreak/revenge songs is sage. During Christmas break, Bangs played Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You on his record player all afternoon, and I lay with my head on his thigh and felt righteous.
Our fourth day back in classes, and I can’t fake caring anymore. I’m out of the habit, I guess. Tonight we have a gig at one of the new places. Trevor has us playing all over the place. He said we’d become old news at Board if we played there every week, so now we play eight different places in some kind of random order that I can’t figure at all. Every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday we have gigs, Monday we have practice, and the rest of the time I’m free to do a bunch of homework, or babysit. I worried my parents m
ight freak about my schedule, but they said as long as I maintain a 3.8 GPA, I’m golden.
And Christmas break? Christmas break began with several bags on our doorstep, tagged to each of us from Meghan, along with a hasty note explaining how sorry she was to miss us but she had to leave immediately for the trip down to see her folks, and would see us again in January. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Yeah. Whatever. My parents haven’t said anything about my being unchaperoned. They have mentioned several times that they think Joe is a surprisingly responsible teenager. Last year I wasn’t allowed to date, and now my parents are trying to pick out my boyfriends. Over break, Nate and Nigel took two ski trips. I shot a portrait of my mother in her tool belt—something black smudged across her cheek, and a wicked drill held to her chest like she’s going to pledge allegiance—which Mr. Pang claims he’ll enter in some state competition.
Tragedy. I miss the weekly vocabulary lists. I miss the sheet of words in Meghan’s handwriting. I miss the band—the way it used to feel less like business and more like invention. I miss watching Hitchcock movies with Jeremy. I miss Nate. And sometimes, especially in the morning, on the walk from homeroom to Graphic Arts, I miss Kelly.
Finally, just before the bell rings, I write: I don’t even know where to begin.
I’ve got cramps, and am breaking out around my mouth, and engaged in full glower-mode with all the other kids waiting in line to board the bus.
“What’s with you?” Stacy Masteller asks.
I glower at her.
“Oh,” she says. “You want some gum? I think I’ve got watermelon.”
“OK,” I say.
It’s snowing, and Stacy’s dressed in her denim jacket without a proper coat. Her bangs, recently Aqua-netted, stand at frizzy attention; she reeks of fresh cigarette, and practically crawls into her giant acid-washed purse to get me a piece of watermelon gum.
“Hey!” a voice shouts. Every kid in line looks up. On the far side of the scraggly parking strip, Doug leans out the window of Nate’s hatchback and waves at Stacy and me. “Hey, you two, get your scrawny asses over here.”
We stall a moment, and then she links her arm through mine, and pulls me to Nate’s car. Doug doesn’t bother to get out, but grabs the handle of his bucket seat and leans forward. When I climb in, I give the seat a vicious push and crush into him.
“God,” he grunts. “I take it back. Your asses aren’t at all scrawny.”
“Thanks,” Stacy tells Nate.
She turns her head rapidly to the left twice, and I hear Nigel say, “I’m growing my hair out.”
“Is that what you’re doing?” she asks. “Gum?”
We blow bubbles—the car pungent with artificial watermelon—and Doug demonstrates the bubble within a bubble technique that made him famous around the neighborhood a couple of years ago.
“What’s your deal?” Doug asks me. “You catch chicken pox, or something?”
“You’re such a dick,” I say.
“Maybe we should’ve left you in the snow with the other losers.”
“Losers?” I say. “When was the last time you had a date with a girl that didn’t have scabs?”
He twists around in his seat and punches me hard, right in the middle of my thigh. I grab his hair and pull so hard that he cries out.
“You fucking bitch,” he yells, and then we’re all thrown forward.
“Doug,” Nate says. His tone is exactly our father’s—stern and cold and final—and I’m ashamed.
But Doug’s totally gone—screaming the kind of apocalyptic raving you hear at tent revivals—spittle in the air around him like gnats in the summer. Horns honk behind us.
“Doug,” Nate says again. Nate looks at me. “Are you OK?”
“I’m sorry,” I say, and start to cry.
“Doug,” Nate says. “Dude, enough. Calm down, or I’ll throw you out of the car.”
A driver behind us pins his horn, and yells out the window, “Get your ass out the way!”
Doug turns in his seat to stare out the window, his arms folded around his torso. No one says anything for the rest of the ride home.
I’m leaking, I can feel it, and the cramps make breathing difficult. In the kitchen, pausing just long enough to get a pudding and an apple, I hear my mother call my name.
“Yes?” I ask.
“You’ve got a letter,” she says. “On the kitchen table.”
My atheist. No one else writes me. But the letter on the table shows a single word in the return address space: Meghan. I forget, for a moment, even my cramps.
Snacks stuffed in my bag, I open the letter as I climb to my room, and find a single sheet of paper.
Cole,
I’ve enclosed your next vocabulary list—just 15 words this time—consider it another Christmas present. Please don’t be angry. I couldn’t bear that.
Depredation
Antediluvian
Encomium
Cadge
Desiccate
Noisome
Impecunious
Saturnine
Inchoate
Panegyric
Hapless
Prevaricate
Exculpate
Sedulous
Occidental
Yours,
Meghan
The truth, I’ll tell you the truth. I make it to the bathroom, but not to the tub, not even to the mat. I collapse on the freezing tile and cry and tremble until nothing else will come, and then I lie there sniveling with my eyes burning. For a while, nothing, not a single thought, forms itself. I’m anonymous.
Cadge. To beg. Or obtain by begging. Verb. Boy, I’m surprised we don’t see this on signs all over the place:
ABSOLUTELY NO CADGING ON
THESE PREMISES. VIOLATORS
WILL BE OBJURGATED!
Bangs and I are watching The Big Sleep on the television in his bedroom. It’s part of the Sunday afternoon gangster film festival, and we’re at the climax (Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall taking time between gun battles to shorthand their feelings) in a bizarrely incestuous story about porn, blackmail, gambling, and murder.
“He’s kind of a little guy, isn’t he?” I say.
“Who?”
“Humphrey Bogart.”
“You think so?” he asks.
“Why else would she be slumped down in the car like that—she can’t be comfortable—but it makes her look small and vulnerable compared to him.” We watch Bogart kiss her. Her slumped posture renders her strategically kissable. I whisper, “He has a scrawny little chest, and a giant head like a Chihuahua.”
“He’s a good actor, though,” Bangs whispers back, “interesting to watch.”
This is true. He’s compelling. The lisping loser tough guy fascinates me. You want to see him beat these smooth, evil bastards and get the dangerous blonde.
Bangs’ room gets toasty warm. Pitched on the couch in our socks, with a couple of cotton blankets, Burger King wrappers on the chest/ottoman thing, Hawaiian Punch in Coca Cola glasses—packed with ice so they’ll keep bracingly cold because we still have half a box of Ding Dongs to get through. I’ve been over here every Sunday for weeks, in Bangs’ room with the door locked, unsupervised. His parents may be a myth.
“There’s a lot going on in this movie,” I say.
“It’s pretty close to the book—the basic plot, I mean; they’ve toned down the porn angle in the movie—and the sex—and devised a love story.”
“You’ve read the book?”
“I’ve read all the Chandler novels. They’re pretty much like this.”
Bangs surprises me. That night he slept over, I woke early in the morning to find him raised up on his elbow watching me.
“Can’t you sleep?” I asked.
“Can’t you?”
“How did you get here last night?”
“Gabby dropped me off.”
“What’d you tell her?”
“That it was an emergency and I’d
explain later.” He touched my ear with his finger. “You’re pretty when you sleep.”
“Just when I sleep?”
“You’re harder to see when you’re awake.”
“What?” I said. “What do you mean?”
“I should go.” He climbed from the bed, and knelt to scour for his shoes.
“How are you going to get home?”
“Skate,” he said.
“Skate? It must be miles.”
He shrugged. “It’s all flat.”
“Should I walk you out or something?”
“No,” he said, and pressed me backward into the warm bed. “You should sleep.”
“It’s freezing, and dark. You can’t skate home like this.”
He kissed me and I stopped protesting.
“Less traffic,” he said. And then he slipped through the door, and I didn’t hear so much as a creak of the stairs.
In Bangs’ room, the artwork makes me feel like I’m inside a comic book. I’d kind of like to put on gloves and box with Alice; the Cheshire Cat, in his snappy little black bowtie, separating us, his arms stretched wide in warning.
A third spray of bullets through a door, and another guy drops without visible injury. “They’re all a bunch of racketeers,” I say.