“Yeah, I wanna come,” I say, watching through the window as a gym class troops by. Ravenna Woods is wearing the world’s tiniest pair of shorts, showing off the compact absurdity of her ass. Lesser ponytails bob all around her. The girls are laughing and nattering and cooing and goading. They’re pulling and poking and stretching and flouncing. Each and every sound makes each and every inch of my body ache.
“Great. Plenty for everyone.”
I shake my head sadly, like it was a tough choice. “But I can’t. I got homework. You dudes’ll have to hit the launchpad alone. Just make sure to say hi to Space Elvis for me.”
Joe Yung laughs his granite laugh. “We’ll say hi to God, for sure. We’ll even tell him he should let you in the gates when the time comes.”
“Wait, I’m on the golden list?”
“Dude,” Beenie Sloat says. “Compared to all the dickholes at Sackville? You’re totally in, like, the top five.”
“Right on,” I say, then get up and walk across the caf, almost positive Ravenna Woods is looking through the window, her face pressed against the glass, watching my back get smaller and smaller.
I split a pizza with Looper, Canadian bacon and pineapple, then lie on the carpet until Elliot swings by in the Renault.
“How’s it going with the drummer?” he asks, the door not even closed yet.
“It’s going.”
“What does that mean, man? Are you doing it or not?”
“Hey, you want to start screening calls yourself?”
Elliot stares like he’s about to lean over and bite a steak out of my neck. Then he exhales and rubs his face with his palms. “Sorry, I’m losing it a little.”
More than a little. He looks haggard. In desperate need of a shower, a shave, and about ninety straight hours of MILF-less sleep.
“Seriously?” I say. “You should hear some of the freaks who have responded so far. This chick with a Mohawk who never played before but ‘wants to learn.’ This guy says he’s into doing Limp Bizkit covers but ‘way, way faster.’ A jazz-band kid who thinks we should also add his buddy on flute. And then some other dude who sounded cool until he finally goes and admits he’s in his thirties.”
Elliot laughs. “And now, on drums, give a big hand to… somebody’s ancient dad.”
“Exactly.”
“Still, we’re running out of time.”
We take a corner hard (Beth). I have to hold on (Beth) with two hands (Beth) to keep from slamming my face (Beth) into the dash.
“Whoa there, hoss,” I say.
Elliot laughs. “Jus’ followin’ the yella line.”
Way back in olden times, Sackville was all farmland. But when those people died, their kids sold off the yokes and looms and butter churners and built nine million identical houses on tiny lots facing one another. So now there’re these courts like High Ridge View Estates and cul-de-sacs like Louis the XIV’s Nut Sac Terrace, but it’s still mostly woods where they haven’t clear-cut, and the streets are just old cow paths that have been paved over. Consequently, Sackville is one of the most dangerous towns in the state, every single road narrow and windy and mostly based on where Bessie thought the next mouthful of sweet clover might be.
Elliot takes another corner like he’s at Daytona, trying to get the back end to spin out, and then rams a CD into the slot, cranking something that’s hard and fast and harsh and fast and awesome and fast and loud and fast and fast and fast.
“Who’s this?”
“My friend, this is the Germs.”
“Which album?”
“Actually, it’s their only album.”
“Slackers.”
El Hella nods thoughtfully, holding up a finger for a round of Ask the Punk Professor.
“You see, the Germs’ lead singer, Darby Crash, fell out in the eighties. You know, way after rockers of the Morrison-Joplin-Hendrix stripe had already made an art form of ODing.”
“Why have I never heard of this Darby Crash?” I ask.
“You’ve never heard of that Darby Crash mostly because the dude snuffed himself the very same day John Lennon got shot.”
“What a moron.”
He cackles. “I know, right?”
“Total punk timing. Of all the days to pick.”
“The building of a legend begins with but a single misstep. Now please turn to page sixty-three in your text for a pop quiz.”
It’s actually just a dumb game we play. I know all about Darby Crash. In fact, I turned Elliot on to the Germs to begin with. But, you know, Punk Professor passes a few minutes, which comes in handy most nights in a numb-dick town like Sackville.
Elliot cranks the volume post-max, sheer distortion, as Darby wails.
“ ‘What we do is secret! Secret!’ ”
We’re pounding the dash in time, metal fingers, head banging.
“ ‘Secret! Secret!’ ”
The car zooming around another corner.
“ ‘Secret! Secret!’ ”
When out of the woods clomps Beenie Sloat, right into the headlights. El Hella mashes the brake with both feet.
The Renault whines, bucks, and screes, losing rubber off the edges of all four tires. We skid toward Beenie sideways, a sickening lunge of metal and velocity and inertia, stopping about a foot and a half away from his kneecap. Beenie Sloat doesn’t even flinch.
“You okay?” Elliot asks.
“No.”
My body drips with nausea and fear-sweat.
Young Joe Yung creeps from the scrub like a wolf. The Renault ticks and steams. We sit there for a while, quiet, dark, crickety. I finally get out, headlights blazing, the dead voice of Darby Crash going, “ ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, YEAH!’ ”
“Hey, dude. Everything cool?”
“Cool?” Beenie says in an alien voice, eyes like garbage lids.
“I mean, do you need a ride or whatever?”
He just stares at the car, like it’s about to dematerialize.
“You good, Joe?” I call.
Young Joe doesn’t answer. His pupils are rotating backward. His grin is widening a tear in the time continuum.
“What the fuck are they on?” Elliot asks.
“Acid.”
“Dirty hippies.”
“Ah, they’re all right.”
“Dude, they are so massively far from all right.”
“True, but still.”
I’m about to ask Beenie how many drops they actually droppered when he turns and gallops back into the woods, leaping over trees and branches and rocks, long hair flashing in the moonlight.
“How, Kemo Sabe,” Joe Yung says, raising his hand. I give him the peace sign. He scampers among the trees like a wraith.
The engine whines, headlights boring into the dark. We listen to them stomp around the underbrush, giggling, as Darby Crash giggles a half beat behind.
“Man,” I finally say. “I know I talk a good game. How we’re alternative and radical and punk and all. How our ironic T-shirts are threatening the very foundations of straight society. But you know what? It’s a total pose.”
“I hear you.”
“Those dudes? That’s alternative.”
“No safety net there.”
“Sheer breaking on through to the other side.”
“Human performance art. Chemically returned to infancy.”
“Even so, though?”
“Yeah?”
“Give me a wife and kids and a boring job any day if it means I never have to be that far out on the coil.”
The Renault sputters and coughs. The headlights begin to fade. The giggles of Young Joe and Beenie Sloat have already faded away.
Elliot nods. “How about we go back to the Black Widow’s, make a grilled cheese, and watch some cartoons?”
I don’t even answer, just get in and buckle up.
Stepdad, Step Lad
a new song
by Ritchie Sudden
It would be good if you got killed
Killed in Iraq
It would be good if you got killed
’Cause I hate it when you fuck with my Marshall Stack
I hope you’re drafted
I hope your head’s whitewalled and you die
I hope you’re blasted by a scud
Like a tear from Allah’s eye
It would be good if you stayed gone
If you re-upped and lied
If you never came back from Basic
If you grew a beard and became a Kuwaiti spy.
I hated you
Ever since my mama dated you
Since you stained the sofa with your Quarter Pounder and fries.
It would be good, yes good
Oh so good if you took the IED ride
Died in Iraq, died in an attack, died like a one-eyed jack
While absolutely no one cried.
Stepdad, dad of step
Stepdad, you had a rep.
Sign him up; line him up
A marine machine
A lean McQueen
Grind him up
Wind him up
Flee the scene
Clock his clean
Stepdad, dad of step
Stepdad, you had a rep
You’re not the first; you’re not the last
You’re just the latest
Dad I hated
Just the latest
Dad I hated.
Elliot puts the paper down. “That’s fucking awesome, Sudden.”
“Thanks.”
“It’s, you know, a little intense. But awesome.”
“You sure? ’Cause I could change a few—”
“No way, man, don’t change a thing.”
Elliot straps on his guitar and starts playing around with riffs. In an hour we got the verses and chorus down. An hour after that, the break. I even bust out a solo that almost sounds good.
“So, like, is it about Looper?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you know, if you want to get all technical and shit, she’s pretty much your stepdad.”
I hadn’t really thought about it that way. “She wasn’t in the army, though. At least I don’t think.”
“True.”
“Also, I don’t hate her.”
“Amazing, but also true.”
“No, it’s sort of more about the universal experience of living under the yoke of step-daddery.”
“You know what would be radical?”
“People actually staying married?”
“No. A song about a cool, friendly stepdad. Who, like, hated beer and had a good job and treated your mom well.”
I laugh and start changing the lyrics, making it friendly and sad and wholesome, begging for the dude to come home and have French toast with the whole loving family. When I’m done, it’s eight million times more subversive.
Elliot cranks the volume and strums a massive bar chord. His amp makes a tortured squall, one long agonized note, then dies. A tiny puff of smoke comes out the top.
“Damn.”
I find a screwdriver and take off the plate in back. We look in, where a bunch of wires are all fused together, smoking.
“I do believe this amp has shit the bed.”
“We need some real equipment,” I say.
“So does Looper,” he says.
We both laugh, but Elliot laughs harder.
“So does Lawrence,” I say.
We both laugh, but I laugh harder.
“No, I mean high-quality equipment. Pro gear. Like you might find bolted into a Teaching Tower.”
“I thought I told you to forget that.”
“Yeah, you told me.”
He gives me the El Hella stare, a stare that has been intimidating weenies, wetting waitress panties, and clearing the backseat of the bus for years.
“I’m not kidding.”
“I know you’re not,” I agree, without agreeing at all.
“Good. So should we do a funeral at sea?”
“Osama-style!”
We both grab an end and then carry the amp up to the roof. The thing is the size of a small refrigerator. We have to balance it against the weather vane and steady our feet.
“Want to say a few words?”
I nod. “You’ve served us well, rectangular noise funnel. May you die with the same style and élan with which you rudely amplified our many funky chops.”
“In magna exspirare nobis otium,” Elliot says.
“One, two…”
The amp lands in the middle of the driveway and smashes into two large pieces.
We climb down and get them and toss them off again.
Four pieces.
We do it again.
Eight pieces.
Then sixteen.
Thirty-two.
Sixty-four.
Eventually the thing has spread all across the driveway and the shrubbery and the lawn, a deconstruction so thorough it’s impossible to imagine that the chunky strains of Sin Sistermouth ever came out of its colorful component parts.
“Mission accomplished,” Elliot says, lighting the smoke he’d had wedged behind his ear.
Kids come into the library all day long, giddy, amped. “Gonna be a fight in the dayroom, yo!”
“Oh, yeah?” I go.
“Fight today. After lunch.”
“Oh, yeah?” B’los goes.
“Fight’s on.”
“Right.”
“Fight later.”
“Gotcha.”
“Fight happening.”
“Good to know.”
“Don’t anyone want to take out a book anymore?” B’los asks.
I’m checking in a new one. It’s a Lexington Cole mystery called The Pugilist, the Pulchritude, and Scenes from the Velvet Past.
“Or at least a book about fighting?”
“Party in the dayroom!” says Jeremiah, poking his head in the door. He’s a short kid who gets picked on a lot. There’s a huge smile on his face. He does a shadowbox, throws rights and lefts. “Gonna be some major Undercard! You all coming?”
“Thanks for the invite,” B’los says.
We listen to Jeremiah’s voice all the way down the hall.
“Little dude’s just glad it’s not him.”
“It’ll be him soon enough,” I say. “Then he’ll be in here trying to hide under your skirt.”
B’los frowns. “When was your last bout?”
I pretend to think, even though I know exactly, down to the minute.
“Nine days.”
“Peanut don’t like you much.”
“I can’t figure it. I keep my mouth shut. I mind my own business.”
“Minding your own business is bad business.”
I look up. “Is that really all it is?”
“You want to know the truth, dog?”
“Yeah.”
“There’s just something about your ass.”
“Whatta you mean?” I say, a tiny bit scared he’s going to talk about its firmness or curvature.
“You just so goddamned… certain.”
“Of what?”
“That you don’t belong up in here.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
B’los laughs. “Nothing. Except it being a walking reminder on how everyone else does.”
On Friday night in Sackville, everyone pretty much goes where they’re told. There’re six or eight major party spots, and they each have a name, like nightclubs you have to have a special password to get into even though they’re mostly just clearings or empty lots cops tend not to check on much. There’s Ox Hill, which is not a hill and certainly 100 percent ox-free. It’s really just a turnaround at the end of an unpaved road with a makeshift fire pit. Every possible brand of cheap booze has been emptied and tossed, smashed against the rocks and ground underfoot, so many beer cans flattened in rows they look like arty bathroom tiles. Someone lights a fire, someone backs a car up and opens the trunk so Fred Zeppelin blares out; add two cups of water
and a dash of soy sauce and it’s instant party.
There’s also the Pines, which is full of pines. It’s a slant on the side of a hill that you have to park below and hike up to, perfect visual cover, no pastry-ass cop about to climb the grade even if half the Taliban were sucking down Four Lokos and eating rat meat in the scrub, biding their time for a frontal assault on the mall. Then there’s the Bridge, which, yeah, is a bridge, but with no water underneath, troubled or otherwise. There’s Currytuck, which is really just a pile of abandoned tires. And Sack Rock City, which is the foundation of an abandoned house. And Stevenson Dam, which is a dam. There’s the Grove, the Bear, Bear II, and the Pump. Occasionally one of them will get tossed from the rotation once the cops get hip to it and fifteen minutes after everyone parks they’re hitting the flashers and checking IDs. Someone will be like, Bear II is so over, and then someone else will discover a big rock in a field and start calling it “the Pigeon Beak” or some shit and then it’ll be, Y’all gonna be at Beak’s on Friday? like it’s been called that for years, and everyone will show up and stand around a trash fire and drink their asses off until the movable feast moves again.
So we’re at the Pigeon Beak.
“Wanna beer?” people keep asking me.
“No.”
“Wanna brew?”
“No.”
“Cold one?”
“Nope.”
“Dude, brewski?”
“Uh-uh.”
Elliot and I play a couple of tunes by the fire. There’re maybe thirty cars, people standing around in twos and threes talking. Girls listen and sway a little when we hit a nice harmony. Guys suggest lame covers and then say dickish things under their breath when we tell them we don’t know (or want to know) how to play any Radiofred. Or Fredtallica. Or Fred Against the Machine. We play “Nipple Ring Hero” instead, a killer early Sin Sistermouth tune, real punk style, which totally and immediately clears the place out.
Just as a Volvo pulls up.
It’s Dick Isley.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” someone says.
“Him again? Seriously?”
People hide their drugs.
People make a halfhearted attempt to hide their booze.
But no one freaks out too much, because Dick Isley parties. Dick Isley goes to a lot of parties. Dick Isley is the life of the party.
Wise Young Fool Page 9