Gone Bad

by Lesley Choyce

  I knew that if we made it big, we’d get to play major gigs. Then we’d trash hotel rooms and stuff like that. If Kelsey and Alex weren’t into it, then I’d have to rely on my fan club to help me out. This was the sort of thing going on in my head as I headed downtown. Despite the boring meal, I was thinking about my glorious career — what I’d wear on stage, how the girls would react, whether or not to get a tattoo of a snake on my forehead. That sort of thing.

  Nothing was happening in front of the library. I guess Jordan and the boys had found a new haunt. A couple of cops, looking bored, sat in a squad car shovelling donuts into themselves.

  I thought I’d just walk on down through the old cemetery before I headed home. It was dark and spooky, surrounded by tall trees. After sitting in a boring restaurant, I needed something with a taste of weirdness and danger. I opened the gate and walked the path leading past a huge dark statue, past the lines of tombstones. I couldn’t hear anything at first except gravel crunching under my feet, but then there was a noise — a scream.

  I stopped. There was the sound of someone getting hit — hit hard. I heard him groan from the pain. I heard somebody else laugh. The laugh told the whole story. I’d recognize the sound of Logan getting his fun anywhere.

  Slowly I walked closer, staying behind some bushes so I wouldn’t be seen. Why didn’t I just go right up to them and join in? I’d played this scene before. What was holding me back?

  Now, though, it was all different. I wasn’t a part of it. I was what you’d call an innocent (or not-so-innocent) bystander. I didn’t know who was being trashed. Could have been some homeless fag. They were known to hang out in this place sometimes. They were also known to get beat up here. Jordan, Eric, and Logan had always talked about how much fun it would be to do an honest-to-god stakeout. I reckon tonight was their night.

  Keeping my distance, I stayed behind some bushes and shifted around so I could get a good view of what was happening. There was only a little street light getting through the branches but I got the picture clear enough. A guy was down, curled up like a baby now. The only sound he made was from the air coming out of his mouth in short bursts when Eric kicked him in the gut. I heard Jordan talking to the guy, telling him he deserved what he got, telling him that this was some sort of lesson.

  What happened in my head just then is pretty hard to explain. Maybe I’d been hanging out with Kelsey too much, listening to the lyrics of her songs. I wanted to turn around and get out of there. I didn’t want any part of this scene. The words of “Downtown Dangerous” were jammed inside my head, haunting me more than any cemetery ghost could.

  I felt confused and a little crazy. Then I edged further left and got a good look at the maniacal smile on Logan’s face. I watched as he kicked the guy in the chest as hard as he could, backed off, turned around, and did it again. He did it as if in some kind of a dance. He did it to entertain Eric and Jordan. This wasn’t like the beating we gave Jeffrey in front of the public library. There was no one else around here. I had no idea how long this had been going on. And it was just like Logan to keep a thing like this going until . . . until when?

  Jordan and Eric had probably already grounded the guy, knocked the wind out of him, and started to bash his head in. Logan’s idea of fun was to finish somebody off. Before, we’d always been interrupted. We’d always had to split before we got caught.

  That wasn’t going to happen here, I suddenly realized. I saw Jordan reach down and punch the guy in the head. They weren’t going to quit. Maybe they were going to kill him.

  I felt sick to my stomach. I wanted to run away from there real bad. I didn’t want to be around to see it. I didn’t want to get involved. The ugly thing was that I knew I’d been part of this scene. But what about now? Run, said the voice inside me. Just get the hell out of here and don’t tell anyone what you saw. It’s not your responsibility.

  But my feet didn’t want to run. Instead, I made some noise. I scuffed my shoes in the gravel. I cleared my throat. I rustled the bushes. No way was I going to show myself but I was counting on the fact that my old buddies hadn’t changed. They loved to get their fun, but they sure as heck didn’t want to get collared for it.

  Would they come after me or would they just hightail it?

  “Who’s there?” Logan asked.

  I didn’t say anything. That would be best. I was breathing hard. Let them think someone was watching but don’t let them know if it’s one person or two. Above all, don’t let them know it’s me.

  Eric walked in my direction but he couldn’t see me. What little light there was came from behind me. I could see him, though. And I could see that he was scared now. Scared that he’d get caught in the act.

  He didn’t say anything. He turned. “Let’s get out of here,” he told Jordan.

  The three of them ran off towards the cemetery gate. They were running hard and they were running fast. Sometimes we’d just take our time and kind of jog away from the scene of the crime. But this was different. I knew what that meant. If they were this scared, it was because they had done some real damage. The price would be high if they were caught. That’s why they were running fast, running scared from anyone who might confront them, anyone who could pin the blame.

  They were gone. I was still standing behind the bushes, maybe five metres from where this guy was curled up on the ground. Now what? Hadn’t I done my bit? Why wasn’t I getting out of there too?

  It was crazy but I had to see how bad off this guy was. I slowly walked towards him. “You all right?” was all I could say.

  There was no answer. I hunched down and got a look. Blood on the face. Arms still gripped around his gut. “You okay, man?” I asked. Stupid question. Again no answer. He was unconscious. I leaned over. I think he was breathing but it was too hard to tell because I was panting and my heart was pounding away. A new fear gripped me. If anyone found me here now, I’d get blamed for this. It would be easy to pin the blame on me. Run, that voice inside me said.

  But I also knew that if I left him here like this, he might not be found. I was sure that if he didn’t get help right away, this guy was going to die. I couldn’t let that happen.

  “I’ll get help,” I told him, even though I knew he couldn’t hear. I reached in my pocket for my cell phone but it wasn’t there. I’d run out of cell phone minutes and hadn’t bothered to bring it.

  Man, I never felt more scared or more responsible for someone else’s life! I tripped twice as I tried to make it back to the street. I thought of running up to the cops on Spring Garden Road, hoping they’d still be parked there. But it was too far away, maybe too much of a risk for me. The near-lifeless image of that guy back there kept jumping up inside my head.

  I found a phone and dialed 911.

  I told the man who answered about the scene in the cemetery. I told him exactly where to go.

  “He needs help bad. Send an ambulance. Do it quick, man. I’m serious.”

  The voice on the other end was calm. “I got it. Stay on the line.” I heard him fire off the location over the radio to a cruiser. Then he was back on the line. “Okay,” he said to me. “We’ve got somebody on the way. You want to tell me your name?”

  I held onto the phone for a second and looked at it. Then I slammed down the receiver. No way were they going to get my name.

  But it still wasn’t over for me. I was afraid they might not find him. It was a dark night and it was a big cemetery. So I ran back to the beat-up guy. He was still on the ground, not moving. “It’s okay,” I found myself telling him. “I got help.”

  I stayed there with him. I didn’t do anything but I stayed there until I heard footsteps hurrying towards us. Then I sneaked back into the bushes and ducked down low. First, there were two cops. They checked him over. One guy started giving mouth-to-mouth through a tube. Then two other men arrived with a stretcher. When the guy was carried away, the cops
stayed behind and shone their flashlights in all directions. I had to stay low and quiet but when they moved away a little to pick up something on the ground, I turned and ran like crazy.

  They heard me. “Stop!” one of them yelled, but I never turned around. I ran again into the night. I wasn’t going to be around to talk to any cops. I ran just like I had done before. Only now something was different. I was still scared, I was still running, but it felt more like I was running away from myself than running away from the cops.

  Chapter 14

  I kept a low profile over the weekend. I didn’t show up for practice on Saturday. I sat in my room and listened to music and watched movies on the Internet. My mother kept asking me to do stuff around the house, but I told her to get lost.

  “If you don’t want to do what your mother tells you,” my dad confided, “don’t say you won’t do it. Just say you’re busy and you’ll get around to it later. Maybe she’ll forget she asked you and everybody will be happy. I know I shouldn’t tell you this, but it’s how your mother and I get along. You’ve got to learn how to handle women, son.”

  Great advice from my old man. I said I’d try to stick by it.

  The business about the guy getting beat up was a pretty big deal. It was all over the news. He nearly died. The news anchor on TV referred to me as “the unidentified caller, a young male who saved the man’s life.”

  Maybe I should have felt like a hero. But I didn’t. Not by a long shot. I was full of really mixed up feelings, full of a kind of anger — anger at my old gang, mainly, but also anger at me. Why exactly was I mad at myself over this?

  When I put my fist through the wallboard in my room, my mother was pretty upset. She said I did it because those movies I was watching were such a bad influence.

  “Tell your mother you’re sorry and that you’ll fix it,” my father said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll fix it later, okay?”

  I went out for a walk and found myself stopping in front of a newspaper box. The headline in the Chronicle Herald read, “Thugs Strike in City Cemetery.” I bought a paper and sat down to read the story. The victim had recovered enough to give an interview to the papers. He said he’d been sleeping in the cemetery when he was attacked by “young punks.” The police talked about “teenage violence” and “street gangs.” They had statistics about the increase in fights and about people being attacked, but it all seemed to be missing something. There was one question screaming at me: Why were we doing these things? I knew all about how it had happened. I knew how I felt. I knew what Jordan, Eric, and Logan must have been thinking the other night. But I didn’t know why we felt that way. Up until now I had never cared. We liked being angry, and it felt good to trash something or someone. Now I was beginning to see what a loser I’d been.

  The TV and newspaper reporters didn’t understand anything about this. I kicked hard at the glass in the newspaper box. It was plastic. It didn’t break, which made me even angrier, so I kicked it over and stomped on it hard until the side was nicely dented in. Feeling only slightly better, I went back home, back to my room. No more newspapers, no more TV. All I had in my room in the way of drums was one old snare drum. I started playing and didn’t quit until it was dark and my parents had left the house to get some peace and quiet.

  On Sunday, in Kelsey’s garage, she gave me hell for missing practice on Saturday, but she said it wasn’t all a waste. She’d conned Alex into working on a new tune — something like their old stuff. Alex had gone along with it to make her happy.

  Giles wasn’t around. He’d flown to Toronto to push a demo to the bigwigs at D and D. So Kelsey had reverted to her old ways. She’d written a really hard, pounding tune with some angry lyrics and lots of swearing. It took me no time at all to come up with the right percussion to fit. I couldn’t really hear the words but I knew I liked the song.

  On the fifth try, we got it tight. When the wailing guitar lead and the crashing cymbal began to fade at the end, I discovered we had an audience. Barry.

  “Giles is going to hate it,” he said. He was smiling.

  “It’s only one song,” Kelsey said. “If he doesn’t like it, it’s his problem. We can do other stuff, too. He doesn’t have to approve of everything we do.”

  “But I thought you’d already gone commercial. I thought you left this original stuff behind.”

  “No way,” Kelsey said.

  “Well,” Alex corrected. “We have to try new material. Kelsey came up with this. It was important to her, so we worked on it. Gotta keep everyone happy, right?”

  “Right,” Barry said. “Can we record it tonight? While it’s still fresh?”

  “Yes,” Kelsey said instantly. I sensed conspiracy here.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t,” Alex objected.

  “I say we do it,” I said immediately. It was two out of three again. I felt bad about having pushed Barry off to the sidelines and letting Giles have so much say. We couldn’t do wimp-out music all the time.

  It wasn’t until I got out from behind the drums in Barry’s bathroom and got a listen to the first mix that I realized what the song was about. It was about the incident in the cemetery. Kelsey had told the story almost like she’d been there, like she’d seen it happen. She was good and mad about what had happened and angrier than I’d ever heard her.

  Kelsey was smiling and looking straight at me as we finished the recording.

  “Now that is a song,” Barry said.

  “It’s too controversial,” Alex insisted. “I don’t want it to go beyond this. It’s going to turn people against us again. Look at the language. Those Morality Moms are gonna be unhappy. And what about the creeps who do the stuff you’re talking about, Kelsey? They’re going to be offended and come looking for us.” Alex sounded like a real noodle now. “Besides, Giles would hate this.”

  “We’ve already established that Giles would hate it,” Kelsey snapped. “So what?”

  “So we have our careers to think about.”

  I wasn’t getting involved in the conflict but I knew what it was coming down to. One said yes, one said no.

  “Alex is right,” I said. “It could be bad for our careers.” But I wasn’t really thinking about careers. I was thinking about the violence issue. I didn’t want to get involved in it. It was all too close to home.

  Kelsey walked over to me now. She grabbed the drumsticks out of my hand and glared.

  “What is this, a threat?” I asked.

  She took the sticks and tapped out something like a code on the watch on my wrist.

  “Take it any way you want,” she said.

  “It’s okay,” Barry said, sounding really disappointed. “We can just save it in the can. When you hit the big time, I can just listen to it for my own private enjoyment and realize what might have been.”

  I was looking for a way out of this. I pretended it wasn’t Kelsey but Barry who had just changed my mind. “Ah, what the heck. We put all this time into it. Let’s send a few copies around town. Maybe see if Cuckledoo radio wants to play it. What can it hurt?”

  “No, dammit,” Alex said. “Absolutely not. Kelsey, you lied to me. You said if we worked this one up, if I went along, just for you, you’d have it out of your system so we could work on some more commercial tunes. There’s no way I’m going to let any of you release this.”

  But nothing Alex said stopped us. It went to Jeffrey at CKDU and he persuaded the guys there to play “Back off, Bashers!” every hour for forty-eight hours straight. It grabbed hold of the attention of enough kids in town to make it the talk of the street and the talk of the school.

  What’s weird is that you’d think that because it was a song putting down violence, a lot of adults would have liked it. But that wasn’t the case. Some very strict religious parents caught their kids listening to the song and blew the whistle on us, calling us “obscene (again),
insulting (again), and (of course) dangerous to the minds of youth.” The Parents For Musical Morality resurfaced, and actually picketed CKDU.

  There were editorials against us now in the papers and, in some bizarre way, people were linking the anger in Kelsey’s song — the anger against violence — with the violence itself. PFMM wanted the press to believe our music was somehow responsible. We were, as they claimed, dangerous. Our music should be banned — in schools, on the radio, and on the Internet.

  Alex was angry alright, but not about the same things as Kelsey. If anybody asked me, I didn’t say anything about the tune but, “Hey man, it’s only a song. It doesn’t mean nothin’.” I liked playing it stupid. It was an easy way out and it allowed me to roll with all the punches. None of the people who were complaining got to me, though.

  Well, that’s not quite true. One of the critics did. Jordan. Jordan called me up late one night to say, “Cody, I know exactly what you’ve become now. You’re a bloody traitor. We want you to know that we hate your song, man. We think you’ve been brainwashed. We feel sorry for you, brud. We think you should be careful, you know. Real careful.”

  There was nothing to say so I just hung up. Because of our song, I was now publicly connected with what had happened in the cemetery that night. Once again I thought about how I’d crossed the line. The Cody I once was no longer existed. I was this other person. Here I was, late at night standing in the darkness of my house, wondering who I was, what was going to happen next in this crazy mess, and just how dangerous this whole game had become.

  Chapter 15

  “You blew it,” Giles said when he walked into the garage.

  “Giles, we came up with a piece of music that means something to people,” said Kelsey in defence of our action. “We said what no one else in this city was willing to say.”

  There was this spooked look on Alex’s face. I knew just what he was thinking. I was thinking it too — career down the tubes. All because we tried to humour Kelsey. Or was it more than that?