Perry's Killer Playlist

by Joe Schreiber

  “Who are you texting?” Paula asked from the driver’s seat.

  I switched off the phone and stuffed it in my pocket. “Norrie.”

  “Did you tell him yet?”

  “I told him there’s a band meeting at my house in an hour. I want it to be a surprise. Unless Linus already talked to them.” Linus Feldman was our manager, a five-foot-two, hundred-and-eight-pound Jewish tsunami who’d blown in sometime last summer from the wilds of Staten Island. He was old-school management, a scarred veteran of a dozen legendary management teams from back in the go-go eighties, when rock-and-roll was minting millionaires on what seemed like a weekly basis. From the moment he’d come out of semi-retirement to represent Inchworm, he’d been waiting for someone to try to take advantage of us so he could rip their head off. So far, to his great disappointment, we’d been treated with an unprecedented level of fairness and respect.

  “I’m not sure how crazy Linus is about the idea.”

  “A European tour? How could he not be thrilled?”

  “He’s got his own ideas about the band,” Paula said. “We’ll see how it goes.”

  She signaled left and turned from the beach road onto the two-lane highway and I watched the ocean receding in my side-view mirror, each of us lost in our own thoughts.

  I checked my phone to see if I might have missed any more texts, but the last one was from Norrie, accusing me of not yet having sex with Paula. Unfortunately, he was right. Paula and I had spent hours on the couch, kissing until our lips were numb and tingling, and we’d done plenty of other stuff, basically everything you can do—but the Deed itself remained undone.

  It definitely wasn’t Paula’s fault. She’d made it pretty clear that she was ready whenever I was, which I guess made me one of the worst deal-closers of all time. Throughout junior high and high school, all I’d thought about was the day I’d finally get rid of the virginity problem. Now here was Paula with her knockout face and smoking body—an experienced woman, no less—patiently waiting to teach me so that I wouldn’t knee-and-elbow my way through the chicken dance of sexual initiation the way my parents’ generation had, decoding the lyrics of bad eighties hair-metal power ballads as our Kama Sutra. Exactly what did you say to a girl after she shook you all night long? And was pouring some sugar on someone as sticky as it sounded?

  We were an enlightened generation. Chow had lost his cherry to his girlfriend back in his sophomore year of high school, Sasha and Caleb had never had any problems scoring (“Dude,” Sasha once said, with absolute sincerity, “why do you think we even play in a band?”), and even Norrie sounded like he was at it pretty routinely with his current girlfriend. Here I was, paralyzed at the starting line, waiting. For what? True love? A sign from God? A long weekend in Paris?

  Therapy was what I needed, and a lot of it. Meanwhile, I wondered if there was a Virgins Anonymous program in some church basement somewhere, or at least a cult in southern Connecticut in need of one to sacrifice.

  Throughout it all, Paula remained super cool about the whole thing. She always said she’d wait until I was ready. But how long before her anticipation turned to exasperation?

  Meanwhile, I tried not to think about it.

  It was a great plan, and sometimes it almost worked.

  4. “The Loved Ones”

  —Elvis Costello and the Attractions

  When we got back to the house, Mom was in the kitchen with her laptop and a glass of wine. We’d just moved in at the end of the summer—the workmen were still finishing the addition over the garage, and there were color tiles spread out on every surface, two thousand shades of white. It looked like a Michael Bolton concert on our kitchen table.

  “Hi, Perry. Oh, hello, Paula. How was the beach?”

  “It was great.”

  “I’ve always loved that stretch of shoreline, especially in the fall.” She cast her gaze across at the sea of nearly identical rectangles fanned out across the table. “Which color do you like for the upstairs bathroom, honey? Isabelline or Cosmic Latte?”

  “Mom,” I said, “Paula and I have got some really great news.”

  Mom looked up, her face suddenly slack with surprise. “You’re not getting married, are you?”

  “What? No.”

  “Thank God.” Mom reached for her wineglass. “I mean, not that you’re not a wonderful, terrific person, Paula, but—”

  “It’s all right, Mrs. Stormaire,” Paula said, and flicked her eyes in my direction. She still hadn’t gotten to the point where she could comfortably call my mom “Julie” yet. “For a second there, the way Perry said that, I think I almost had a heart attack too.”

  “So I assume that means you’re also not…” Mom gestured with her hands in front of her stomach.

  “What?” I said. “Full?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Seriously, Mom?”

  “Honey, I’m sorry, but these are the thoughts that run through a mother’s mind.” And before I could ask her why they had to be the thoughts that ran out of her mouth, she was back on the laptop, clicking away, talking and typing at the same time. “You know, I was thinking, since this is going to be our first Thanksgiving in the new house, and Paula, I know that your family is out in California… would you like to come and have Thanksgiving with us?”

  I took a deep breath. “I might not be around for Thanksgiving.”

  The typing noise stopped. From here I could see that she’d been updating her Facebook page, and in the silence I could feel her status changing. “Oh?”

  “I was trying to tell you—”

  “Tell us what?” That was Dad, coming down the stairs and around the corner with his iPhone in his hand and the Times under his arm. Immediately reading a disturbance in the emotional weather of the room, he turned to my mother. “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know.” Mom was frowning, and two red spots had appeared on her cheeks. “Your son hasn’t told me yet.”

  “Perry?” My father put on his stern attorney voice. “What’s going on?”

  “Look,” I started, and that was probably a good start, but at that moment, the rusty Econoline van came squealing up into our driveway and I saw Norrie and Caleb jump out and start lugging their guitar cases and drums up toward our garage with the unquestioning sense of purpose that comes from not being able to go anywhere without hauling five hundred pounds of equipment along. We’d been using my house for practice for the past couple weeks, and they must have assumed that my announcement of tonight’s meeting was business as usual.

  “I should go talk to those guys.”

  “Maybe you should wait,” Paula said.

  “Why?”

  She pointed out the window, not that it was necessary. There was no mistaking the tubercular gargle of the vehicle as it charged down the street and pulled in behind the van and Paula’s car. Linus Feldman drove a burgundy 1996 Olds 88, its chassis rusted and flaking down the primer, its remaining paint the color of an old bruise. Linus’s car doubled as his office, meaning the passenger seat was usually overflowing with unanswered correspondence, disputed contracts and flyers for our shows, past and future. Stepping out, he emerged in a swirl of paperwork and Starbucks cups.

  “Stormaire?” he bellowed, arriving at the front door without bothering to knock. “Is Paula in there? Send that duplicitous wench out here now.”

  Paula sighed. “Hi, Linus.”

  “Linus?” Dad blinked. “What’s he doing here?”

  Having trumpeted his arrival in no uncertain terms, Linus stood on our porch, arms crossed, with the air of a man who could wait forever. He was floating in a corduroy suit jacket with suede elbow patches and khaki pants, and his fluffy white popcorn hair seemed to swell, doubling and tripling with the sheer ferocity of his indignation.

  I opened the door. “Hi, Linus.”

  “Did you sign a contract?”

  “No, I—”

  “But you’ve seen it.”

  “A contract for
what?” Dad asked, alternating his attention between me and Linus. He knew that Linus was a lawyer like himself, a brotherhood with an overlap that might ideally permit them to use some kind of professional shorthand, although on the few occasions when they’d met, it seemed to work the opposite way, signals crossing, interfering with each other’s frequencies. “Perry, what’s going on?”

  “Take it easy, Linus,” Paula said. “Let’s all just breathe.”

  “Don’t patronize me, Yoko.” Linus held up a sheet of paper, thrusting it in our faces as if it were a warrant for someone’s arrest. “An e-mail from George Armitage’s assistant? This is how I find out that you’re taking Inchworm on a European tour?”

  “That was an oversight,” Paula said. “George was supposed to let me tell you myself.”

  “This is completely unacceptable.”

  “Wait—”

  “Europe?” Mom said. “Perry? When were you planning on telling us about this?”

  Dad reached for the e-mail in Linus’s hand. “May I see this, please?”

  “These terms are absurd,” Linus said, snatching the e-mail away before any of us could see it. “You can tell George Armitage that he can take his tour and shove it up his—”

  “Perry’s never been out of the country before,” Mom said.

  “That’s not true,” I said. “I went to Toronto for the Shakespeare festival my junior year. And we all went to Paradise Island for Christmas that year. My passport’s up to date.”

  “Okay.” Paula took in a deep breath. “With all due respect, I think we’re focusing on the wrong things here.”

  “For once we’re in perfect agreement.” Linus put his arm around my shoulder and led me aside, lowering his voice. “Perry, you know I respect you. You know I want what’s right for the band. I’ll go to the mat for you every single time.” He held his head as if it were in danger of flying apart. “But these terms—”

  “What about if we all went with you?” Mom said. “We’d stay out of your way, let you play your shows…”

  “Wait.” That was Annie, from all the way upstairs in her bedroom, where she’d apparently been monitoring the entire conversation through the ductwork. “We’re going to Europe?”

  At that moment the entire east wing of the house exploded with the heavy, chugging drum and guitar notes that meant Caleb and Norrie had plugged in and were warming up at top volume, waiting for me to come out and join them. Sasha, our lead singer, wasn’t here yet—he was always the last to arrive, and ever since he’d bought a vintage Indian motorcycle that broke down every other week, it wasn’t uncommon for him to show up in his mom’s Volvo, or even on a bicycle.

  “Family summit.” Annie moved past me in a cloud of conflicting perfumes and hair treatment smells. “Oh, hi, Linus.” She looked at my dad. “Are we going to Europe?”

  “No,” Dad said.

  “How come Perry gets to go?”

  “Don’t worry, sweetheart,” Linus said, glaring over her head at Paula. “Uncle Linus isn’t going to let the evil lady take anybody to Europe for this kind of chump change.”

  “Perry’s going on tour,” Mom said, “with his band. Isn’t that exciting?”

  Annie rolled her eyes. “I’m all a-flutter.” Irony was her new ketchup, and she was putting it on everything.

  “I think I’d better take a look at that contract,” Dad said, reaching for his reading glasses, which weren’t in his breast pocket.

  “Don’t bother,” Linus said, and his hands had gone from his head to his stomach. His initial wave of outrage had passed, leaving him with what looked like chronic dyspepsia. “Just let me kick you in the balls and you’ll get the idea.”

  “Linus,” Paula said, “I know this is your preferred method of negotiation, but—”

  “Negotiation?” Linus wailed, flung back by the very apogee of disbelief. “What is there to negotiate? How am I supposed to negotiate with nothing?”

  “In case you didn’t notice,” Paula said, putting her arm around me, “I’m on Perry’s side here. I’m kind of crazy about the guy.”

  “Oh, that’s rich. You’re good.” He waved his hands to anyone who might listen. “She’s good. This is worse than the Jacksons’ Victory Tour back in eighty-four, when we had to leave Tito in Vancouver.”

  “Linus, that’s enough,” I said. “Let’s just listen to what she has to say, okay?”

  “This is how it starts,” Linus moaned. “This is how it always starts…”

  Out in the garage, the guitar and drums had stopped, and I heard Caleb and Norrie come blundering inside, Cokes in hand, to find out what was taking me so long. They saw Linus standing there with Paula and my folks and stopped in their tracks.

  “Hey, dude,” Norrie said. “What’s up?”

  “I think you’ll find that the terms are boilerplate for any new band with no track record internationally,” Paula said. “Armitage is working out the merchandising deals with promoters for shirts and promotional items, and the exposure for Inchworm—”

  Caleb blinked. “What’s she talking about, Perry?”

  There was a clattering noise, and I looked out the window and saw that Sasha had arrived. He was wearing leather pants and a feather-plumed boa and pedaling the old twelve-speed Schwinn, which meant that his motorcycle had broken down yet again and was drooling oil somewhere in the back of his mom’s garage—but for once, none of these setbacks seemed to be bothering him in the least. Instead, he leapt off the bike while it was still rolling, letting it rattle to a halt into our garbage cans, and came sprinting up my front steps, bursting into the house, taking in the sight of me and Caleb and Norrie with a huge grin on his face.

  “Did you guys hear?” He pumped his fists. “Did Linus tell you? We’re going to Europe, bitches!”

  “Wait,” Caleb said. “Whaaaat?”

  Norrie’s mouth dropped open. “Seriously?”

  “Hell, yeah! Inchworm’s first world tour! Linus says once he negotiates the contract it’s gonna put us over the top, and—” He turned around. “Oh, hey, Linus.”

  Linus dropped his face in his hands. Through his fingers I could hear him murmuring to himself, praying for strength to persevere in the face of insurmountable obstacles—first among them, the band that he’d agreed to represent.

  “So,” Paula said, “can I call Armitage and tell him we have a deal?”

  5. “You Are a Tourist”

  —Death Cab for Cutie

  “Man,” Norrie said, “anybody else feel like wuh-we’ve been doing this for about tuh-ten years already?”

  It was eight-thirty at night, Italian time, and the Inchworm European tour had just rolled into Venice’s Santa Lucia station—meaning that we were lugging our own gear down onto the platform, having spent the better part of the last two days on the train playing Nintendo DS and trying not to drive each other crazy.

  Time had become a blur. With Linus leading the way, we’d left London yesterday at midday, taken the Chunnel into Paris, and left after lunch today on the way into Venice.

  Things had started out a little shaky. At our first gig in London, Caleb couldn’t find his Stratocaster, Norrie was still sick from the airline food, and half our amps weren’t wired to run off European power outlets. Backstage, Linus was pacing a hole in the dressing room floor, chain-smoking some obscure brand of foul-smelling British cigarettes while reassuring everybody that it was going to be okay. Outside, the crowd was getting antsy while the roadies fiddled with the amplifiers until finally, at a quarter past nine, Sasha stood up and said screw it, he didn’t know about the rest of us, but he for one hadn’t flown halfway around the world to sit in some dressing room like a bunch of American losers.

  Then we went out there and rocked.

  In the end it had taken approximately thirty seconds to realize what we should’ve known from the start: When the four of us got together, it didn’t matter if we were playing in New York, in London, or on the moon—when it came right down to it, a
t this particular moment in our lives, when our backs were to the wall, we could set that shit on fire.

  Even with half the amps off, Caleb’s loaner guitar squealed and soloed like the devil’s own chainsaw, Sasha was pulling out moves that none of us had ever seen before, spoonfeeding the crowd until they were shrieking for more, and Norrie sounded like he was setting off cherry bombs in the drum kit. We roared through every song on the set list, including a few new ones that we’d only practiced a couple times, until even the bouncers came up front and started dancing. Midway through the show, I glanced back at Norrie and saw him grinning back at me, a perfect reflection of that slightly dazed feeling of wonder. This is real, we were both thinking, at the exact same time. Holy shit, this is actually happening to us right now.

  Up front, Sasha gave his patented Navajo war whoop and a flying helicopter kick that just cleared the microphone stand. “Hello, U.K.!” he yelled. “We are Inchworm and we are here to rock you—’kay?”

  The place went absolutely bonkers. Finally, after playing almost three straight hours and closing with a rousing cover of Sham 69’s “If the Kids Are United” that had the whole place up on its feet and singing along, we stumbled offstage, exhausted and soaked with sweat, grinning like fools, and collapsed into a cab back to the hotel with a couple of girls from the front row. I called Paula in New York and told her how it had gone, while Sasha leaned out the window and howled, “Who wants to do that again?”

  We all did.

  Now, forty-four hours later, we were here in Venice. Two steps off the train, Norrie dropped his duffle bag on the platform next to Caleb’s and flung himself down on it as if it were a huge body pillow, pulling down his baseball cap and closing his eyes. Linus had fought his way into the station to buy tickets for the water taxi, and Sasha had tagged along, already on the prowl for Italian girls. Of the four of us, he was the only one with a seemingly limitless supply of energy, propelled forward by the libido of an adolescent rhino.

  I was digging through my bag for the last Red Bull when my phone started ringing. I looked at the screen and saw an international number I didn’t recognize.