by Stephen King
He shrugged and offered me the most useful advice I ever got as a musician: When in doubt, lay out. “Besides,” he said, baring his decaying teeth in a fiendish grin, “I’m gonna be turned up so loud they won’t hear what you’re doing, anyway.”
Paul rolled a short riff on his drums to get the crowd’s attention, finishing with a cymbal-clang. There was a brief spatter of anticipatory applause. There were all those eyes (millions, it seemed to me) looking up at the little stage where we were crowded together under the lights. I remember feeling incredibly stupid in my rhinestone-studded vest (the vests were holdovers from the brief period when Chrome Roses had been the Gunslingers), and wondering if I was going to vomit. It hardly seemed possible, since I’d only picked at lunch and hadn’t been able to eat any supper at all, but it sure felt that way. Then I thought, Not vomit. Faint. That’s what I’m going to do, faint.
I really might have, but Norm didn’t give me time. “We’re Chrome Roses, okay? You guys get up and dance.” Then, to us: “One . . . two . . . you-know-what-to-do.”
Paul Bouchard laid down the tomtom drumbeat that opens “Hang On Sloopy,” and we were off. Norm sang lead; except for a couple of songs when Kenny took over, he always did. Paul and I did backing vocals. I was terribly shy about that at first, but the feeling passed when I heard how different my amplified voice sounded—how adult. Later on I realized that no one pays much attention to the backup singers anyway . . . although they’d miss those voices if they were gone.
I watched the couples move onto the floor and start to dance. It was what they’d come for, but in my deepest heart I hadn’t believed they would—not to music I was a part of. When it became clear to me that we weren’t going to be booed off the stage, I felt a rising euphoria that was close to ecstasy. I’ve taken enough drugs to sink a battleship since then, but not even the best of them could equal that first rush. We were playing. They were dancing.
We played from seven until ten thirty, with a twenty-minute break around nine, when Norm and Kenny dropped their instruments, turned off their amps, and dashed outside to smoke. For me those hours passed in a dream, so I wasn’t surprised when during one of the slower numbers—I think it was “Who’ll Stop the Rain”—my mother and father waltzed by.
Mom’s head was on Dad’s shoulder. Her eyes were closed and there was a dreamy little smile on her face. My dad’s eyes were open, and he gave me a wink as they passed the bandstand. There was no need to be embarrassed by their presence; although the high school dances and the PAL hops at the Lewiston Roller Rink were strictly for kids, there were always a lot of adults when we played at the Eureka Grange, or the Elks and Amvets in Gates. The only thing wrong with that first gig was that, although some of Astrid’s friends were there, she wasn’t.
My folks left early, and Norm drove me home in the old microbus. We were all high on our success, laughing and reliving the show, and when Norm held out a ten-dollar bill to me, I didn’t understand what it was for.
“Your cut,” he said. “We got fifty for the gig. Twenty for me—because it’s my ’bus and I play lead—ten for each of you guys.”
I took it, still feeling like a boy in a dream, and slid open the side door with my aching left hand.
“Rehearsal this Thursday,” Norm said. “Band Room after school this time. I can’t take you home, though. My dad needs me to help paint a house over in Castle Rock.”
I said that was okay. If Con couldn’t give me a ride home, I’d hitch. Most of the people who used Route 9 between Gates Falls and Harlow knew me and would pick me up.
“You need to work on ‘Brown-Eyed Girl.’ You were way behind.”
I said I would.
“And Jamie?”
I looked at him.
“Otherwise you did okay.”
“Better than Snuffy,” Paul said.
“Way better than that hoser,” Kenny added.
That almost made up for Astrid’s not being at the dance.
Dad had gone to bed, but Mom was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea. She had changed into a flannel nightgown, but she still had her makeup on, and I thought she looked very pretty. When she smiled, I saw her eyes were full of tears.
“Mom? Are you okay?”
“Yes,” she said. “I’m just happy for you, Jamie. And a little scared.”
“Don’t be,” I said, and hugged her.
“You won’t start smoking with those boys, will you? Promise me.”
“I already promised, Mom.”
“Promise me again.”
I did. Making promises when you’re fourteen is even easier than working up a sweat.
Upstairs, Con was lying on his bed, reading a science book. It was hard for me to believe anyone would read such books for pleasure (especially a big-shot football player), but Connie did. He put it down and said, “You were pretty good.”
“How would you know?”
He smiled. “I peeked in. Just for a minute. You were playing that asshole song.”
“Wild Thing.” I didn’t even have to ask.
• • •
We played at the Amvets the following Friday night, and the high school dance on Saturday. At that one, Norm changed the words to ‘I Ain’t Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore’ to ‘I Ain’t Gonna Eat Out My Girl Anymore.’ The chaperones didn’t notice, they never noticed any of the lyrics, but the kids did, and loved it. The Gates gym was big enough to act as its own amplifier, and the sound we made, especially on really loud tunes like “Good Lovin’,” was tremendous. If I may misquote Slade, us boyz made big noize. During the break, Kenny went along with Norm and Paul to the smoking area, so I did, too.
There were several girls there, including Hattie Greer, the one who’d patted Norm’s butt on the day I auditioned. She put her arms around his neck and pressed her body against his. He put his hands in her back pockets to pull her closer. I tried not to stare.
A timid little voice came from behind me. “Jamie?”
I turned. It was Astrid. She was wearing a straight white skirt and a blue sleeveless blouse. Her hair had been released from its prim school ponytail and framed her face.
“Hi,” I said. And because that didn’t seem like enough: “Hi, Astrid. I didn’t see you inside.”
“I came late, because I had to ride with Bonnie and Bonnie’s dad. You guys are really good.”
“Thanks.”
Norm and Hattie were kissing strenuously. Norm was a noisy kisser, and the sound was a bit like my Mom’s Electrolux. There was other, quieter, making out going on as well, but Astrid didn’t seem to notice. Those luminous eyes never left my face. She was wearing frog earrings. Blue frogs that matched her blouse. You notice everything at times like that.
Meanwhile, she seemed to be waiting for me to say something else, so I amplified my previous remark: “Thanks a lot.”
“Are you going to have a cigarette?”
“Me?” It crossed my mind that she was spying for my mom. “I don’t smoke.”
“Walk me back, then?”
I walked her back. It was four hundred yards between the smoking area and the back door of the gym. I wished it had been four miles.
“Are you here with anybody?” I asked.
“Just Bonnie and Carla,” she said. “Not a guy, or anything. Mom and Dad won’t let me go out with guys until I’m fifteen.”
Then, as if to show me what she thought of such a silly idea, she took my hand. When we got to the back door, she looked up at me. I almost kissed her then, but lost my courage.
Boys can be dopes.
• • •
When we were loading Paul’s drumkit into the back of the microbus after the dance, Norm spoke to me in a stern, almost paternal voice. “After the break, you were off on everything. What was that about?”
“Dunno,” I said. “Sorry. I
’ll do better next time.”
“I hope so. If we’re good, we get gigs. If we’re not, we don’t.” He patted the rusty side of the microbus. “Betsy here don’t run on air bubbles, and neither do I.”
“It was that girl,” Kenny said. “Pretty little blondie in a white skirt.”
Norm looked enlightened. He put his hands on my shoulders and gave me a fatherly little shake to go with the fatherly voice. “Get with her, little buddy. Soon as you can. You’ll play better.”
Then he gave me fifteen dollars.
• • •
We played the Grange on New Year’s Eve. It was snowing. Astrid was there. She was wearing a parka with a fur-lined hood. I led her under the fire escape and kissed her. She was wearing lipstick that tasted like strawberries. When I pulled back, she looked at me with those big eyes of hers.
“I thought you never would,” she said, then giggled.
“Was it all right?”
“Do it again and I’ll tell you.”
We stood kissing under the fire escape until Norm tapped me on the shoulder. “Break it up, kids. Time to play some music.”
Astrid pecked me on the cheek. “Do ‘Wild Thing,’ I love that one,” she said, and ran toward the back door, slipping around in her dancing shoes.
Norm and I followed. “Blue balls much?” he asked.
“Huh?”
“Never mind. We’re gonna play her song first. You know how it works, right?”
I did, because the band played plenty of requests. And I was happy to do it, because now I felt more confident when I had the Kay in front of me, an electric shield plugged in and ready to drive.
We walked onto the stand. Paul hit the customary drum-riff to signal that the band was back and ready to rock. Norm gave me a nod as he adjusted a guitar strap that didn’t need adjusting. I stepped to the center mike and bellowed, “This one is for Astrid, by request, and because . . . wild thing, I think I LOVE you!” And although it was ordinarily Norm’s job—his prerogative, as leader of the band—I counted the song off: One, two, you-know-what-to-do. On the floor, Astrid’s friends were pummeling her and shrieking. Her cheeks were bright red. She blew me a kiss.
Astrid Soderberg blew me a kiss.
• • •
So the boys in Chrome Roses had girlfriends. Or maybe they were groupies. Or maybe they were both. When you’re in a band, it’s not always easy to tell where the line is. Norm had Hattie. Paul had Suzanne Fournier. Kenny had Carol Plummer. And I had Astrid.
Hattie, Suzanne, and Carol sometimes crammed into the microbus with us when we went to our gigs. Astrid wasn’t allowed to do that, but when Suzanne was able to borrow her parents’ car, Astrid was permitted to ride with the girls.
Sometimes they got out on the floor and danced with each other; mostly they just stood in their own tight little clique and watched. Astrid and I spent most of the breaks kissing, and I began to taste cigarettes on her breath. I didn’t mind. When she saw that (girls have ways of knowing), she started to smoke around me, and a couple of times she’d blow a little into my mouth while we were kissing. It gave me a hard-on I could have broken concrete with.
A week after her fifteenth birthday, Astrid was allowed to go with us in the microbus to the PAL hop in Lewiston. We kissed all the way home, and when I slipped my hand inside her coat to cup a breast that was now quite a bit more than a nubbin, she didn’t push it away as she always had before.
“That feels good,” she whispered in my ear. “I know it’s wrong, but it feels good.”
“Maybe that’s why,” I said. Sometimes boys aren’t dopes.
It was another month before she allowed my hand in her bra, and two before I was allowed to explore all the way up her skirt, but when I eventually got there, she admitted that also felt good. But beyond that she would not go.
“I know I’d get pregnant the first time,” she whispered in my ear one night when we were parking and things had gotten especially hot.
“I can get something at the drugstore. I could go to Lewiston, where they don’t know me.”
“Carol says sometimes those things break. That’s what happened one time when she was with Kenny, and she was scared for a month. She said she thought her period would never come. But there are other things we can do. She told me.”
The other things were pretty good.
• • •
I got my license when I was sixteen, the only one of my siblings to succeed the first time I took the road test. I owed that partly to Driver’s Ed and mostly to Cicero Irving. Norm lived with his mother, a goodhearted bottle blonde with a house in Gates Falls, but he spent most weekends with his dad, who lived in a scuzzy trailer park across the Harlow line in Motton.
If we had a gig on Saturday night, the band—along with our girlfriends—often got together at Cicero’s trailer on Saturday afternoon for pizza. Joints were rolled and smoked, and after saying no for almost a year, I gave in and tried it. I found it hard to hold the smoke in at first, but—as many of my readers will know for themselves—it gets easier. I never smoked much dope in those days; just enough to get loose for the show. I played better when I had a little residual buzz on, and we always laughed a lot in that old trailer.
When I told Cicero I was going for my license the following week, he asked me if my appointment was in Castle Rock or up-the-city, meaning Lewiston-Auburn. When I said it was L-A, he nodded sagely. “That means you’ll get Joe Cafferty. He’s been doing that job for twenty years. I used to drink with him at the Mellow Tiger in Castle Rock, when I was a constable there. This was before the Rock got big enough to have a regular PD, you know.”
It was hard to imagine Cicero Irving—grizzled, red-eyed, rail-thin, rarely dressed in anything but old khakis and strappy tee-shirts—being in the law enforcement biz, but people change; sometimes they go up the ladder and sometimes they go down. Those descending are frequently aided by various substances, such as the one he was so adept at rolling and sharing with his son’s teenage compadres.
“Ole Joey hardly ever gives anyone their license first crack out of the basket,” Cicero said. “As a rule, he don’t believe in it.”
This I knew; Claire, Andy, and Con had all fallen afoul of Joe Cafferty. Terry drew someone else (perhaps Officer Cafferty was sick that day), and although he was an excellent driver from the first time he got behind the wheel, Terry was a bundle of nerves that day and managed to back into a fire hydrant when he tried to parallel-park.
“Three things if you want to pass,” Cicero said, handing the joint he had just rolled to Paul Bouchard. “Number one, stay off this shit until after your road test.”
“Okay.” That was actually something of a relief. I enjoyed the bud, but with every toke I remembered the promise I’d made to my mother and was now breaking . . . although I consoled myself with the fact that I still wasn’t smoking cigarettes or drinking, which meant I was batting .666.
“Second, call him sir. Thank you sir when you get in the car and thank you sir when you get out. He likes that. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“Third and most important, cut your fucking hair. Joe Cafferty hates hippies.”
I didn’t like that idea one bit. I had shot up three inches since joining the band, but when it came to hair, I was a slowpoke. It had taken me a year to get it almost down to my shoulders. There had also been a lot of hair arguments with my parents, who told me I looked like a bum. Andy’s verdict was even blunter: “If you want to look like a girl, Jamie, why don’t you put on a dress?” Gosh, there’s nothing like reasoned Christian discourse, is there?
“Oh, man, if I cut my hair I’ll look like a nerd!”
“You look like a nerd already,” Kenny said, and everyone laughed. Even Astrid laughed (then put a hand on my thigh to take the sting out of it).
“Yeah,” Cicero Irving said, “y
ou’ll look like a nerd with a driver’s license. Paulie, are you going to fire up that joint or just sit there and admire it?”
• • •
I laid off the bud. I called Officer Cafferty sir. I got a Mr. Businessman haircut, which broke my heart and lifted my mother’s. When I parallel-parked, I tapped the bumper of the car behind me, but Officer Cafferty gave me my license, anyway.
“I’m trusting you, son,” he said.
“Thank you, sir,” I said. “I won’t let you down.”
• • •
When I turned seventeen, there was a birthday party for me at our house, which now stood on a paved road—the march of progress. Astrid was invited, of course, and she gave me a sweater she had knitted herself. I pulled it on at once, although it was August and the day was hot.
Mom gave me a hardbound set of Kenneth Roberts historical novels (which I actually read). Andy gave me a leatherbound Bible (which I also read, mostly to spite him) with my name stamped in gold on the front. The inscription on the flyleaf was from Revelation 3: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him.” The implication—that I had Fallen Away—was not exactly unwarranted.
From Claire—now twenty-five and teaching school in New Hampshire—I got a spiffy sportcoat. Con, always something of a cheapie, gave me six sets of guitar strings. Oh well, at least they were Dollar Slicks.
Mom brought in the birthday cake, and everyone sang the traditional song. If Norm had been there, he probably would have blown the candles out with his rock-and-roll voice, but he wasn’t, so I blew them out myself. As Mom was passing the plates around, I realized I hadn’t gotten anything from Dad or Terry—not so much as a Flower Power tie.