The House of Tomorrow

by Peter Bognanni

  “There’s nothing I can do,” I said. “I don’t have a choice in the matter. Nana has taken care of me my whole life. She’s my legal guardian.”

  Lindsey stepped in front of us. “Hey,” she said. “Did you hear me? I said you can’t smoke in here. Now put out the cigarette or I’m going to have you disqualified.”

  People on the dance team were coughing and waving away the smoke. Someone else had appeared with two dogs in matching pink sweaters and one of them started to bark.

  “I don’t want you to go,” said Jared. “This is a goddamn travesty.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re not sorry enough!” he said. “You’re my best friend, man. It doesn’t matter that I don’t have any other friends. Okay? You’re such . . . I don’t know. You believe in my stupid ideas. You . . . what the hell am I supposed to do without you around?”

  Lindsey walked over and tried to grab the cigarette from Jared’s hand. Instead she knocked it to the ground. It landed by a dance team girl’s foot and the girl screamed.

  “Hey,” said Wayne the magician from beyond the curtain. “Settle down back there or I might have to saw someone in half.”

  The audience laughed, and he went back to explaining a cup and ball trick.

  “Dammit, Lindsey,” said Jared. “Get your righteous ass out of the way. Can’t you see I’m trying to have an important moment here with my friend?”

  I grabbed Jared by the biceps to hold him back.

  “We’ll still spend time together,” I said.

  “Yeah right,” he said. “It’s going to be back to diddling myself in my bedroom. Endless days of diddling.”

  “Meredith will be around,” I said. “And your mom. They care about you, Jared. You know they do.”

  “I know,” he said. “But we’re not friends. It’s different. Don’t try to make me feel better. It’s not going to work. My life is a giant pile of dung now. I wish none of this would have happened at all.”

  “I’m having you disqualified,” said Lindsey. “I made up my mind. I’m going to tell Pastor Ron right now. And you’re going to be out of the show. I don’t have to take this! I’m president of the Youth Group.”

  She started walking away, but Jared reached out a hand and grabbed her shoulder.

  “Wait, Lindsey,” he said. “Just hang on a second.”

  “Let go of me!” she said.

  She tried to jerk away from him, and accidentally hit one of the guys in white shirts in the chest. The kid wheezed. Jared held on. I tried to pull his arm away.

  And that’s where we were when we heard the sound.

  Jared had one hand on Lindsey. I was right behind him, and the dance team was watching in horror. But the sound made us all stop. It was like a thunderclap. Or two thunderclaps in short succession. In reality, it was the sound of the back chapel doors slamming against the wall. The whole crowd quieted at once. Then there was a moment of silence, followed by a shuffling of feet and the sound of the audience murmuring and shifting in their seats.

  “Hey,” shouted Wayne from the stage. “What’s going on? I’m trying to finish my act.”

  Jared and I let go of Lindsey. And we all walked as if under a spell toward the slit in the curtain. When I got a view, I couldn’t believe what I saw. It was a group of ten, maybe fifteen people led by the clerk from The Record Collector, guiding them forward. They were parading down the aisle, between the rows of pews, and they looked like a bunch of vagrants or mental-hospital patients. Some of them were dressed in leather. Others wore blue jeans that had more holes than fabric. There were spiked hairdos, a couple of Mohawks, and a lot of long greasy hair. Some of them were carrying cans of beer in brown paper bags. And even after they saw the look of the rest of the crowd around them, they moved all the way to the front and huddled around the stage.

  “What is this?” asked Lindsey. “What’s happening? Who are these awful people?”

  “Holy mother of crap,” said Jared.

  Onstage now, Wayne looked like he’d been paralyzed. He held his top hat at his side, gripping the brim tight. He looked over the latest members of the audience. In front of him on the table were three cups, facedown. He took a reluctant step toward them and then tried to continue with his trick as if nothing unusual had transpired. He lifted one of the cups and underneath it was a cotton ball.

  “Wait!” he said. “Oh! Hang on, you weren’t supposed to see that. I just got a little . . .”

  He laughed nervously and fumbled with the cups, accidentally knocking one off the table. It bounced off the carpet and rolled into the aisle.

  “Shit,” said Wayne, louder than he meant to. “Just let me get that cup back . . .”

  He bent down to try to spot the cup, and that was what prompted the first round of boos. It began as just one voice, a random heckling from the new crowd. Then there was another lower and more sustained boo. In a couple of minutes, the whole renegade posse at the front was booing Wayne’s magic act. He walked to the edge of the stage, but the crowd wouldn’t part for him to get his cup.

  “I need that cup back,” he said.

  “Your cup sucks!” yelled a wiry guy in front of him.

  A middle-aged man stood up from the crowd in the back, his bald head shining under the lights. “What’s going on here?” he said. “Why don’t you leave my son alone?”

  Someone from the group threw a bottle cap and it whizzed right over the man’s head. Then the whole group started jumping up and down. Wayne had turned a bluish pale color, and he didn’t even stop to pick up his cups before leaving the stage from the side. He walked right off the end of the altar and down a side row. He was saying something to himself under his breath the whole way out of the chapel.

  Jared and I were completely silent. Our faces were locked in an expression of unabashed awe. I had never seen any of these people around town. I had no idea where they had come from. I was going to ask Jared about this, but before I could get the sentence out, I heard the name of our band uttered for the first time.

  “Did you hear that?” I asked.

  “Hear what?” he said.

  “We want The Rash!” yelled the record clerk.

  His crew whistled and shouted and then someone else said it.

  “Yeah! Bring on The Rash!”

  “Free beer!” someone else yelled.

  “That,” I said to Jared.

  Then they commenced the feet stomping. Quietly at first, a series of muffled steps on the plastic carpet cover. But they got louder, putting all their weight into it. And they were clapping, too, making the wood of the pews vibrate noticeably. Stomp! Stomp! Clap. Stomp! Stomp! Clap. And in the midst of this racket, our name became a kind of chant. “We want The Rash.” Stomp. “We want The Rash.” Clap.

  “Holy mother of all sacred crap,” said Jared.

  Lindsey had disappeared somewhere. Wayne had left the building. The dance team was long gone. Only the solitary baton girl was still there. She was watching us with her eyes wide. Jared and I turned around to look at her. The chanting grew louder.

  “WE WANT THE RASH! WE WANT THE RASH!”

  She peeked out of the slit in the curtains.

  “Is that you guys?” she said. “Are you . . . The Rash?”

  “Yeah,” said Jared. “That’s our band name.”

  She looked at the crowd again and then back to us. “Well, you better go out and play, then,” she said. “Or these assholes are going to tear down our church.”

  She turned and walked away from us, her baton streamers trailing behind her. Jared looked at me. “That weird baton girl is right,” said Jared. “I think we have to go out there.”

  “But they think we’re a real band,” I said.

  An intense look was forming on Jared’s face. A punk snarl combined with that unadulterated focus that came over him from time to time during our p
ractices. He took long deep breaths. Then he put his hand over his chest, feeling his heartbeat.

  “Then I guess we’ll have to play like a real band,” he said.

  32.

  Spaceship Rock

  AS BUCKMINSTER FULLER REACHED THE END OF HIS career, he became more and more unwavering in his beliefs about the metaphysical. Some questioned his sanity, yet he continued to claim he was capable of telepathic transmissions. His most oft-cited example of proof was the metaphysical connection he had with audience members during a speaking engagement. He believed, when he was onstage, that he could look out over a crowd and receive hundreds of shortwave messages from his admirers; the easiest method of transmission was to make eye contact. The eyes, said Bucky, provided the fastest and most efficient form of communication on earth.

  On that stage, under the golden cross of Immanuel Methodist, I finally understood something of what he was talking about. The next five minutes under the lights came at me in a series of revelatory images. My head was reeling. I gazed around the crowd at the front of the stage and saw every pair of eyes flitting back and forth from me to Jared. I saw the record clerk’s face contorted in a tight-lipped scowl. In his head I saw an image of myself, being booed off the stage while he laughed. I saw one of his friends slurping the foam off the lip of a beer, the white bubbles gathering in his beard. On the inside, this man was terrified for us, pulling for us to do something competent. And in the back row of the pews, there was a line of old ladies whose minds I didn’t need to read. Their looks all said exactly the same thing: What in the name of all that is sacred is this?

  The whole crowd had quieted when we walked out onstage and picked up our guitars, and that quiet was still around us. Now we were motionless. We stood on opposite ends of the stage. We were thin as rakes, and our boyish faces shone with perspiration. The crowd, I believed, was too stunned to boo.

  Jared made the first move. With one shaky swoop, he leaned down and flipped on his amplifier. There was a loud click, then the red light came on and soft buzz filled the air. Jared slowly turned the distortion and the volume all the way up until his V-shaped guitar was producing nothing but feedback. But he didn’t turn down the volume. He looked over and motioned for me to plug in.

  In a stupor of nervous energy, I couldn’t even feel my hand as I turned on my practice amp and slowly notched the volume up. The feedback from my amp was somehow worse than Jared’s, more piercing. And I saw people all across the pews clap their palms to their ears. Jared inched his way to the front of the stage and calmly adjusted the microphone down to suit his diminutive posture. He hovered over it, sweat already dripping from the thick strands of his hair. I looked to him for a signal. He put a hand to his forehead and looked out over the crowd.

  “Good evening, Methodists!” he said. “We are . . . The Rash!”

  The only sound was the feedback, still screaming around him. He was taking pleasure in it, I could see. The noise dipped in register, already playing a deranged song of its own. WeeeeeOOOHHH-WEEEEEEEAHHHHHWEEE. Jared looked at me and grinned. Then he put his lips to the mike and shouted, “One-two-three-four!”

  He strummed one time, a quick jerk of his forearm, and the feedback was instantly replaced by the opening note of “Stupid School.” It came out unbelievably loud and raw, like the last note sung from a hoarse throat. But it was in tune. He let the riff coast a moment, just like he had with the feedback. Then he started playing his part, frantically sending those sharp little notes into the crowd in wavelets of noise. My finger fumbled for the right fret, and I joined four beats too late. But we made our way through the opening somehow. Jared waited until we were on beat, then he took a deep breath and leaned into the microphone.

  “Mom’s taking me to stuuuupid school!”

  His voice was unsteady. He sang as loud as he could, but his range wasn’t there. I wondered if he could even hear himself over the guitar. We had not adjusted sound levels at all. He kept going and wandered in and out of tune on the next line. And when he screamed that long “and I wanna dieeeeeee!” his voice broke off because he was out of breath. I watched him cringe, but he didn’t start over. He just barreled into the next part.

  “Teacher, teacher, teacher, and I want to die! Teacher, teacher, teacher, and she teaches lies!”

  Jared looked at me and I leaned into the mike. I felt the heat rising up my neck until my entire face was flushed. I opened my mouth but nothing came out. Jared glared at me. But then he just turned back to the mike and moved brazenly into the chorus, tapping out a rhythm with his foot as he sang.

  “Everybody goes to stupid school, then the stupid rule the world . No. No. No!”

  It was right after that third “No” when he broke a string on his guitar.

  It made a loud pinging noise and flew back, barely missing his eye. He ducked out of the way, and his voice faltered, ending the song more like a question than a bold statement.

  “Everybody goes to the stupid school, then the stupid rule the . . . world? ”

  The music tottered to a stop on an accidental extra note from my bass, followed directly by more feedback from our instruments. Then we stood facing the audience, doing absolutely nothing. The song had collapsed out from under us, and it felt like we had played it in about twenty seconds. It had caved in quickly and we’d been lucky to escape from it alive. I knew this. And Jared knew it, too. I could tell by his dazed stare. Without even looking at his guitar, he reached up and yanked off the remains of the broken string. It made a terrible noise. Like someone snipping a piano wire.

  What we needed now was some kind of response from the audience. Any kind. It didn’t matter if it was positive or negative, but I knew something had to happen before we could play our next song. I looked for a familiar face, but I couldn’t locate Meredith or Janice. For an agonizing five or six seconds, we had nothing. Silence. Maybe it took that long for people to recover and try to assess what they had just heard. But it wasn’t until those first agonizing seconds passed that we heard another noise coalescing with the feedback from our guitars. The sound of a small child.

  More specifically, it was the sound of a small child shrieking. We had made a toddler weep. And not just one, actually. Soon after the first, two other children started in. This set off a shuffle of mothers scooping up keening babies and whisking them out of the chapel. They were all athletes suddenly, sprinting with their progeny. They filed out, one by one. I watched for Lindsey to come back out and toss us off the stage, to beg everyone to stay. But she was nowhere to be seen.

  The renegade bunch in front watched the evacuation with curiosity. But after half the original crowd was gone, they turned back around and examined us. And just when we seemed destined to sink into quiet defeat, a bearded guy, who was twice as large as the record clerk, jumped up in the air. I watched him leap, rising surprisingly high in the air, and spilling a beer on the church carpet (and himself) in the process. When he reached the zenith of his jump, he yelled one triumphant, “Hellllllll yeaahhhh!”

  A moment of silence passed, as his friends seemed to gauge his reaction. Jared and I watched him, too. But not too long after he yelled, his yell was returned by a volley of other loud yells. A rejoinder of YEAHs. A real rallying cry. And then the stomping and clapping began again. Stomp! Stomp! Clap. Stomp! Stomp! Clap.

  Jared walked cautiously back up to the mike. He cleared his throat. “Um, okay,” he said. “Thank you. Thanks. This next song is about naked girls, I guess.”

  “Yeaahhhhhh,” yelled the big man again.

  Jared looked at me and shrugged. He started to play again. At a higher volume this time, if that was possible. And I noticed a difference right away. He seemed more relaxed, and the sound was better. He didn’t try to speed things up; he just left the song at its original tempo. This made it easier for me to find my place, and from the beginning this time, I felt locked in. A to the E stri
ng. Seventh to the eighth fret. Then down to the ninth and tenth. We were on beat and in tune.

  “Saw you on the sidewalk . . . lookin’ pretty cute.”

  He sang farther away from the mike this time and it made a world of difference. You could actually hear his voice.

  “How I wish you were . . . in your birthday suit!”

  This line, the most intelligible one yet, was greeted with a handful of chuckles and hoots from the front row. I watched as Jared absorbed the sounds like nutrients. He almost cracked a smile as he launched into the bridge. And I could tell even before he sang a word that he was going to nail it. He took a long breath before his first perverse tirade, and then he was screaming in the Immanuel Methodist chapel about zapping girls’ clothes off. His eyes were closed and he strummed like a lunatic on the five strings he had left. And as he sang about the shirts and skirts he wanted to remove, he pointed to different women in the audience. Not girls. But grown women.

  I still had to look at my fingers while I played, but out of the corner of my eye, I could see more people from the pews getting up to leave. Each additional second the song played, someone else stood up and walked to the exit. But it wasn’t disappointing. The show had never been for that audience. They were completely expendable. Irrelevant. The show was for us. And we still had twenty-five people at the front of the stage. They were nodding their heads and pumping their fists. They were clearly all intoxicated, with the lowest of standards, but it didn’t matter. And when Jared got to the end of the first chorus, I leaned into the mike to sing it with him. I yelled as loud as I could.

  “ ’Cause I’m going mad. I’m going madddd. I’m going madddd up in my room.”

  It was not in tune. But it felt amazing.

  “Just keep playing those notes,” Jared yelled when I was close to him.

  I nodded, and as I played the bass part for the chorus, Jared embarked on a squealing discordant guitar solo. He knelt down right in front of the crowd. Then he lay down completely on the stage. He bent the highest notes he could play, looking up at the gold cross and picking the strings. He writhed around on the ground, shaking and seizing. I stood above him, keeping the bass line going. I moved to the mike, and Jared stopped playing.