by Chris Lynch
This worried me deeply, Lars and me thinking the same thing.
Scratch didn’t even look at him. He just played harder, faster, louder.
“You’re a punk!” Lars screamed. “Kid, you’re a real live punk!”
The Killer jumped between them, standing right up in Lars’s face. “You want me to bop this guy, Scratch?” he asked.
“What’s a punk?” the punk himself asked. I couldn’t tell if he was just toying with Lars. Lars makes you want to toy with him.
“What’s a punk? Come on. I can tell by the way you play, you know all about them. You know, the Ramones, the Stooges, the Pistols. I know you know Johnny Rotten.”
“We know Johnny Chesthair,” Jerome cracked.
“Do you know Johnny Shut-up?” Steven cracked back.
Now, this was fun. Maybe it was punk, maybe it wasn’t, but I certainly liked the atmosphere around the club now. This was the style I wanted for my regime.
“Well, as a matter of fact, Lars,” I said, “we are starting a band.”
All together, like one dopey choir, my boys all said, “Huunnhh?”
“See?” I told Lars. “We already do harmonies.”
“I was in a band once,” Lars said. “We called ourselves the Blood Blisters, and I could show you kids a thing or two about—”
“You guys play music?” Scratch asked.
“Of course we do,” I said.
“We do?” Jerome asked.
“We do,” I reassured him.
“No,” he said back. “I don’t think we do.”
“What do you play?” Steven asked me.
The problem I had here was, my guys had no imagination. They took everything so literally.
“I, you know, play this and that.”
“So tell us, what’s this?”
You’re really starting to bug me there, Steve-o. “I’m the manager, okay?”
He smiled. “And what is that?”
Grrrrr. “I … sing,” I muttered, to my own great surprise.
Well, if nothing else, I had managed to bring more humor to the club than our two previous leaders combined. Coincidentally, they were the very two who were now laughing so hard I looked around the garage floor for a stray tonsil or two.
“I said something funny?” I asked coolly.
“Anyway, we were the hottest band in town for a while, no kidding …” Lars plowed on.
“I want to play the drums,” Ling blurted.
Everybody stopped. We turned our attention to Ling-Ling.
“Ever played the drums before?” I asked.
“No,” he said.
We waited.
“But I know where I can get some. My grandfather used to play in a silent movie theater band.”
“You’re hired,” Scratch said.
“What, are you joking?” I asked Scratch. “Just like that? Is that how you select instrumentalists?”
He shrugged. “That’s how all bands do it. Whoever has a drum kit is the drummer.”
“I wanted to play drums,” Steven said.
“I wanted to play drums,” Jerome said.
“Tough,” I said. “You can’t all be—”
“Why not?” Scratch said. “Ling, is it a big drum kit? Could you share?”
Ling nodded. “But I want to play that big giant drum myself.”
“Oh, this is stupid. One guitar and three drummers …”
“Don’t forget my washboard,” Cecil said.
“Oh no, we wouldn’t forget….”
“And of course,” Lars added, “I have my own—”
“Get outta here, you,” I barked. “Go fix a car or something.”
Scratch was laughing now, for the first time since I met him. “This is gonna be fun,” he said.
“If you say so,” I said. Then I rolled up close to whisper to him. “All kidding aside, Scratch, you will teach us, right? So we don’t make butts of ourselves.”
“Teach you what?”
“You know, teach us to play.”
He laughed some more, his mouth opening all the way to show that just about half of his teeth were missing. “I don’t know how to play,” he said. “That was just screechy-noise I was doing before.”
I deflated.
“Don’t worry,” he said, putting a hand on my shoulder. “It doesn’t matter anyway. Knowing how just gets in the way.”
I wished I’d said that.
“What’ll we call ourselves? That’s the most important thing,” Steven said.
“Well, I figure we should try ‘The Wolf Gang,’” one of us offered. “It’s got kind of a ring to it.”
“Kind of a gong to it, you mean,” Steven replied.
Scratch just shook his head. “You don’t name a band after the manager. You name it after the guitar player. Everybody knows that.”
Scratch. Scratch?
“No,” I said.
He quietly started packing up his stuff.
“Okay,” I said. “But ‘Scratch’ sounds like it’s just you. We need to be ‘Scratch’ and the … Somethings.”
Once again, as in all our times of need, Ling-Ling stepped up to the plate.
“I got this card,” he said, holding the card up in the air and examining it. “It fell out of my American Survivor magazine. It’s an ad for a deodorant for hunters called Moose Musk. See, what you do is you scratch this little circle right here—”
“Yesss!” I said, and Steven seconded it.
“Yeeee-haw,” Cecil yelled. “I love it too. Scratch and the Moose Musk.”
Jerome jumped up. “I can’t take much more of this,” he squealed. He walked right up to The Killer—who was about three Jeromes tall—and started poking him in the belly with his sharp little index finger. “Scratch and the Sniffs, Huckleberry! They want to call us Scratch and the Sniffs!”
Jerome was still poking the stunned Killer as I rolled it around. Scratch and the Sniffs.
“I like it,” I said, making it official. “It’s pungent.”
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1997 by Chris Lynch
cover design by Elizabeth Connor
978-1-4804-0480-9
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media
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New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
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