Gone Bad

by Lesley Choyce

“Ready?” Kelsey asked me.

  “No,” I said. I nodded towards my old friends. They were surrounded by six cops in total now. They were being led out front, out through the crowd and away from the stage. People pulled back as they were led through. I didn’t understand it. We had just been talking. I knew they hadn’t done anything wrong. Not today anyway. I watched as one cop grabbed for Jordan’s shoulder and pushed him along. Jordan tried to jerk away from him and Eric reached over to take the cop’s hand off Jordan.

  When I saw two of the cops pull out their clubs, I had to react. This was all wrong. I knew exactly why Jordan, Eric, and Logan were being hassled right now. It wasn’t anything they had done. It was because they looked bad, they looked tough and they looked like they might cause trouble.

  But no one had a right to kick somebody out of here just because of the way they looked.

  I jumped down from the stage and made my way through the crowd to where the action was.

  Maybe because I was part of the band the police couldn’t just ignore me when I demanded, “Why are you pushing them around? They have a right to be here.”

  Three cops now had clubs in their hands. They looked good and ready to use them. Another officer was eyeing me. I had this weird feeling they knew who we were . . . they knew what we had all done.

  “Get those creeps out of here,” someone in the crowd yelled. “They’re troublemakers. They have no right to be here!”

  The absurdity of that idiot shouting these words hit me like slap in the face. Why weren’t Jordan, Eric, and Logan allowed to be here at this rally? Why should they have to leave? Was this event only for the privileged who looked normal?

  “These are my friends,” I said to the police. “I invited them backstage. I want them to stay.”

  I knew it was a gamble. I knew the cops had good reason to worry about these three being here. But they were here and that was something. Maybe one of Kelsey’s songs would get to them. Maybe something about these people getting together to say “no more violence” would mean something. But if they were booted out of here now . . . well, I know exactly how I would feel. I’d be madder than before.

  “Sorry, son,” one of the officers said to me. “These guys are trouble.” They began to push them away.

  Jordan had the look on his face, the look that said he’d let someone, even a cop, push him only so far.

  Kelsey and Jeffrey had followed me off the stage. They were beside me now. Everybody in the crowd knew something was going on.

  “Let them stay!” Kelsey shouted at the cops. But they weren’t listening. More police were moving in now. What they saw was a flashpoint, some serious trouble about to break out.

  “Come on, man,” Jeffrey said, grabbing onto the sleeve of one of the uniforms. “You don’t have to kick them out of here.”

  I don’t think the cop got a good look at Jeffrey. He just knew someone had grabbed him and he wasn’t going to wait and see what happened next. He turned and swung his club. Jeffrey saw it coming. He was quick. He ducked out of the way but ended up falling on the ground.

  “No!” screamed Kelsey.

  Eric and Jordan used the distraction to try to get away. The cops were trying to hold onto them. Logan was down on the ground covering his head like he expected to get it next. Some of Jeffrey’s friends were pushing through the crowd coming to help him. They started to push the cops away from Jeffrey and the police were pushing back. People were shoving, everybody was starting to freak, and I knew in a few seconds someone was going to get hurt.

  I quickly backed away and jumped up on stage. I grabbed the mic from the stand and looked over to Barry at the soundboard. Gave him a thumb in the air. He knew I wanted the volume fully cranked.

  “Okay,” I said breathlessly into the mic, making maybe the first speech I ever made in my life. “Everybody be cool.” The words reverberated off the buildings. “Just everybody be cool.”

  I guess I was loud enough to make everyone at least take notice. I had their attention now. I looked over towards the disturbance. Eric and Jordan had their arms twisted up behind them. A couple of Jeffrey’s friends were squared off in front of two cops with clubs. Logan was still somewhere down on the ground, I guessed, cowering. And Kelsey was right there in the middle of it. If I couldn’t say the right thing, somebody would get hurt. Maybe just a face in the crowd or maybe it would be Kelsey.

  “It’s all a misunderstanding,” I said. I was looking at the cops but I was talking to everyone. “It’s not right to throw my friends out of here. They came here like everybody else did and they have a right to be here. They’re being picked on because they look like they don’t fit in.”

  The crowd was almost quiet, but people were all jammed up around the police. People were taking sides.

  “Everybody just back off,” I said. “Yeah, just back off, okay?”

  “How about it?” I said, looking at the cops, then around at the crowd. “Back off. Please.”

  I saw one of the cops looking at me. He turned to the others, nodded. They backed off. Logan got up off the ground. Eric, Jordan, and Logan were now standing there with everybody watching them. That was the moment I knew I had made the biggest gamble of my life. Maybe Jordan would bust someone. Maybe Logan would think it was a great chance to turn the whole scene into a riot. Or maybe Eric would spit at one of the cops and then run for it.

  Instead, someone else in the crowd yelled out, “Let ’em stay!”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” someone else shouted. “Let everyone stay. This is our party, right? And everyone’s invited.”

  A few people clapped and cheered but a lot of people were just plain confused. When things got quiet, I saw Jeffrey and Kelsey coming back up to the stage. Somebody helped both of them hop up onto the front.

  I caught a glimpse of Jordan. I saw that old familiar hate on his face. He put his hands to his mouth and shouted something at me — something loud, angry, and full of the same old hate. “Forget it, Cody. We don’t want to stay. You can all go to hell as far as I’m concerned.”

  But no one shouted back anything at them. I watched as Eric, Logan, and Jordan weaved towards the back of the crowd and found their way out of there on their own. The cops let them be.

  Kelsey was holding down a minor chord on the keyboard. I felt a twinge of loss as I stumbled back to my drum set, tripping over one of the power cords. I wondered if we had just won or lost a battle. I wondered if any of this had meant anything at all.

  Kelsey launched us into “Daredevil Difference” and it all came back to me — the early days. The way I used to be. I knew I could never go back, I knew I had changed and I was hoping that sooner or later something good would happen for Logan, Jordan, and Eric, and then they would change too. Maybe. That’s what I hoped for as I sat there and played my heart out on my drums in front of those people on Gottingen Street in Halifax.

  After the concert, I felt oddly at home among this crowd. Everybody kept telling us what a wonderful set we played. Jeffrey introduced me to a couple of his friends. I acted like it was no big deal even though I still felt really uncomfortable and wouldn’t let them get too friendly.

  Kelsey introduced me to the old grey-haired woman who had given one of the speeches. “Cody, this is Maude.”

  I nodded. “Hi,” I said.

  “You’re a good man, Cody,” she said. “I admire you for what you did. And I like your music too.”

  Oh, right, like I really believed her. But Kelsey was watching me. It was another one of her tests. I wanted to pass this one. I truly did.

  I pointed my drumsticks straight at the woman, “The way I figure it, lady, it goes like this. We’re all different in some way or another. And it really doesn’t matter. We just gotta do what we gotta do and learn to live with everybody else.”

  She gave me a hug just then and I was caught off guard. She was old
and she was skinny and I felt her thin, bony arms pulled tight around me with a kind of strength that shocked me. When she let me go, she playfully hit me hard on the arm with her knuckle. “Keep it up,” she told me, then turned and walked away.

  Jeffrey’s friends were laughing at me. I guess I looked pretty bewildered. That’s when Kelsey slipped an arm around me and said, “I think it went pretty well.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Twenty thousand dollars worth of free publicity. I think we scored big.” But I knew what she meant. I just didn’t have the words in me right then to tell her what I had finally figured out.

  “Let’s go find something to eat. I’m starving,” she said.

  “Me too. But I’m broke.”

  “I’m buying,” Kelsey said. “Let’s stash the gear in the garage and then I’ll take you out to dinner.”

  “This isn’t like a date or anything?” I asked.

  “No way,” she said, the sweet smile on her face telling me the opposite. “You think I’d go out on a date with a big ugly thug like you?”

  And I knew then that it was the beginning of something very fine. My life, for the first time in a long while, was looking pretty damn good.

  Afterword

  Violence in any form sucks. Once, when I was a kid, I had my head bashed into the windscreen of a car until blood ran down my face. I had just finished playing a gig with a band named Prodigy at a Friday night dance. I had tried to stop one guy from punching out the lights of another guy who had said the wrong thing at the wrong time. As a result, I got hammered by someone who had obviously spent a lot more time practising with his fists than I had.

  This novel is about music but it is also about violence. You might wonder, why is this guy who is opposed to violence writing a book where the main character is a bully and a thug who gets his jollies by bashing anyone he sees as “different”? Isn’t there already too much violence in the movies and on TV and even in books?

  The answer is yes and no.

  Yes, most of the violence you see in the media is there for shock and entertainment value. And it still sucks. There’s no doubt in my mind that it helps to increase violence in the real world. The reason I explored violence in this book is because I was interested in examining the root of violence both in myself and in the world around me. That’s what this story is all about.

  It was a rough book to write. Cody was a difficult character for me to get into. In order to write a good novel, to some degree I have to become the character who is telling the story. So imagine for a minute what happens when this author becomes Cody.

  Several times in my life, I’ve actively been involved in protests and other activities to stop wars, to get rid of nuclear weapons, to promote gun control, to reduce violence on TV, and to counter racial hatred. If you read any of my other books, you’ll find that there’s a strong underlying theme of “tolerance.” Everyone should get along with everyone else no matter how different they are. I’m a pacifist, too, which means that I think all forms of fighting — schoolyard and battleground— are stupid. I’ll do what I can to end violence.

  So figure this: somewhere inside of the complex of personalities that is me, Cody exists. I think there’s a little bit of Cody in you as well, no matter how freaky that sounds.

  Intolerant tough guys hate others — immigrants, gays, racial minorities, emo kids, or rappers — because of basic insecurities, frustration, and an anger that grows from a very primary fear. We all share some of that insecurity and the fear that goes along with it. Most people don’t act out the violence that results from it, but some do.

  Having written from Cody’s point of view, I think I understand the problem a little bit better. If Cody remained the same stubborn, pigheaded bully that he was at the beginning of this chain of events, there would have been no story here. Fiction, though, is created around characters and the changes they go through. Cody is a different drummer by the end of the book and therein lies the tale.

  But I wasn’t writing a book exclusively about violence. I was also writing a book about music. The same night that I had my head bashed in while trying to stop a fight, I had just had a great session playing lead guitar in my band in front of a crowd of a couple hundred kids. We had played our hearts out. We wailed and thrashed and sang and stomped and jammed away until everybody’s ears rang and neighbours were complaining that we were disturbing the peace. But when we had to stop at the end of the gig, we knew we had succeeded in making the music work through our drums, guitars, and keyboard, and through us as well. Maybe that’s why I had felt invincible and had to be brought back to cold, hard reality by a guy who did his communicating with fists instead of guitar picks.

  I like to think that I haven’t lost the music. I still play guitar. I’ve recently recorded some more new tunes adapting my poetry to music. You can search for the music videos of Lesley Choyce and the SurfPoets on YouTube or on my website, lesleychoyce.com. So, when Kelsey, Cody, and Alex work out a new tune, I’m there with them at the heart of the musical creative process.

  The music and the message that Cody and Kelsey create is inextricably entwined. The songs have sound but they also have lyrics with real content. As sometimes happens with books, original music with real lyric content is often the first to get condemned, to get censored, to get banned. Maybe someone will even want to attack this novel for its violence, for its language, or because Cody is not a respectable character. Maybe it should be kept out of the schools because it deals with sensitive subjects.

  If that were to happen, I think that we’d all be losing something. We’d be losing a chance to openly discuss the root problems of violence. We’d be giving over the power of influence to TV and movie producers who glorify the death and destruction that has become so much a part of our lives. Novels provide a fictional world to examine our deepest concerns. It’s my hope that this novel will help readers take a look at their own neighbourhoods and think about ways to reduce hostility and intolerance in whatever form it takes.

  Lesley Choyce

  Lawrencetown Beach, Nova Scotia

  Copyright 2011 © by Lesley Choyce

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  James Lorimer & Company Ltd., Publishers acknowledge the support of the Ontario Arts Council. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities. We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the support of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Choyce, Lesley, 1951-

  Gone bad [electronic resource] / Lesley Choyce.

  (SideStreets)

  Previously published under title: Good idea gone bad.

  Type of computer file: Electronic monograph in EPUB format.

  Issued also in print format.

  ISBN 978-1-55277-711-4

  I. Title. II. Series: Choyce, Lesley, 1951- . Good idea gone bad. III. Series: SideStreets (Online)

  PS8555.H668G6 2011a jC813’.54 C2010-907698-2

  This digital edition first published in 2011 as 978-1-55277-711-4

  Originally published in 2011 as 978-1-55277-709-1

  James Lorimer & Company Ltd., Publishers

  317 Adelaide Street West Suite 1002

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5V 1P9

  www.lorimer.ca

  About the author

  About the Author

  LESLEY CHOYCE is a novelist and poet living at Lawrencetown Beach in Nova Scotia. His writing has earned him several awards, incl
uding two Dartmouth Book Awards and the Ann Connor Brimer Award for the Young Adult novel Good Idea Gone Bad. Five of his previous Formac novels have received the Canadian Children’s Book Centre’s “Our Choice” Award. The Ottawa Citizen calls him “a national treasure”.

  www.lesleychoyce.com

  Check out even more SideStreets titles

  In Ebook or print format!

  The SideStreets novels place believable characters and dialogue in situations of high interest to teenagers. Written at a grade 3 to 5 reading level, all these books are by Canadian authors and take place in Canadian settings.

  A Terrible Secret

  Something is troubling Maggie Alexander. It’s something she doesn’t want to think about, doesn’t want to explain.

  Adrenaline High

  D’Arcy is a newshound who thinks she has found the big scoop when her classmate Zania’s mother goes missing. But solving this mystery has the girls in way over their heads.

  All In

  Todd Lerner’s never been much of a student, but he’s got plenty of street smarts and he’s a mean poker player. If Todd wants to date the girl of his dreams, he’ll need cash and plenty of it. Soon, a weekly poker game turns into a costly and dangerous obsession, and Todd’s luck begins to change.

  At Risk

  Tia is spending the summer working at a special ranch for at-risk youth. She tries to bond with Sage, a street kid who has been given one last chance to get her life together. But when money goes missing, all fingers point to the troubled teen.

  Best Laid Plans

  Robyn may have to leave her family behind to make a better life for herself.

  Charged

  How will Craig and Manda learn to let go of their anger and find the courage to move into adulthood when they see only flaws in their parents?

  Dream Racer

  Zoë’s caught the racing bug. She thinks she might even have the stuff to become a racecar engineer one day. But Zoë’s mother has another dream for her daughter, and it’s called “Zoë Kendall, M.D.”