Rob’s face tightened and his eyes blinked several times. He rarely let his emotions show, but he was now struggling to maintain control. I knew what was going on: His choice was down to pissing off the four of us or Candi. I had him cornered. And even though I felt bad about Rob’s predicament, I wasn’t about to let him off the hook now.
He started to say something but paused, and I could see him mentally backing off. “Christ, I didn’t know the future of the universe depended on us doing a road trip, but if you guys feel that strongly about it, I guess I can do it.” He pulled in a long breath. “But I need to call Candi first.”
Victory was within my grasp. Time to back off a bit. “Fine. Call her and see what she says. Use that phone at the front of the gym. We’ll wait for you out here.”
For a long, awkward moment, Rob hung there before us, then he stuffed his hands into his pockets and pushed through the door into the gym.
“Yeah, ring up bloody Yoko,” Mick whispered as the door shut behind Rob.
Sam stifled a laugh and murmured, “He’s in love, man. Give him a break.”
I looked over at Yogi, who, oblivious as usual, tapped out a beat on an imaginary snare drum with the half-eaten candy bar. I let my head fall back against the wall again, feeling the steady throb of my hangover.
After several minutes, Rob pushed back through the door. “She’s cool with it,” he said, forcing a grin. “No problem.”
I tilted my head forward and released a breath. The four pieces had come back together, and I was whole again. “I knew Candi’d be O.K. with it,” I lied, suspecting from the length of the phone call that it hadn’t been an easy conversation.
“Candi, ah, honey, honey,” Yogi sang out, waving the remains of the candy bar. “You are my candy girl, and you got me wanting you.”
“Shut the hell up, Yogi,” Rob said.
I let Rob’s uncharacteristic outburst fade away before pulling open the door to the gym. “Now that that’s settled, let’s go tune up.”
I let them file ahead of me—overhearing Rob’s whispered “Sorry, man” to Yogi as they passed by—and forced a big breath of cold air into my brain before following them into the gym.
3
THE NEXT AFTERNOON, four hours after calling Astley to tell him we were on, I walked into the garage and wrote three words on the chalkboard we used for song arrangements. I stepped back, cleared my throat, and looked around at the guys, who had gathered to practice for the Puente Harbor gig. One by one, each of them stopped fiddling with cords, amp switches, and cymbal stands, and looked over at me.
Rob caught the words first and nervously laughed. “Man, that’s a mind blower. ‘Hendrix, Heart, Killjoys.’ ”
Mick snorted. “Bloody hilarious, Daniel. Why didn’t you put us first?”
Sitting behind his mammoth cobalt-blue Ludwig drum set—two bass drums, two floor toms, four mounted toms, snare, hi-hat, and five bronze Zildjian cymbals—Yogi twirled a drumstick and grinned. Sam simply nodded, wiped his forehead, and continued plugging mike cables into the back of the PA. head.
We were a good band, sometimes a very good band, almost certainly the best in the area, but I wanted us to be great. Now was the time for more motivation, more focus; and, as I knew well, fear was a great motivator. I tapped the chalkboard. “That’s where we’re going. But we need to get better fast, and we’ve only gotta few days.”
“We get the point,” Mick said, draping himself over his mike stand in a pose of utter boredom. “You don’t need to act like a wankin’ teacher. Let’s get on with it.”
“Just wanted to get your attention.” I left the names on the chalkboard, strapped on my black Stratocaster guitar, and switched on my Fender Twin Reverb amp. I waited for the warm smell of the amplifier’s tubes to come to me. The garage, cozy with sound-deadening blankets hanging from the walls and doors, began to hum with the low sizzle of PA. speakers and guitar amps.
Rob plucked a bass string, adjusted his volume, and then ran through a quick scale. He segued into the riff from Whole Lotta Love before slipping into Sunshine of Your Love, buzzing a note against a fret and missing another. I glanced over and saw the strain on his usually placid face.
“Hey,” Mick said, with a clap of his hands. He took a step toward the chalkboard and pointed at the words I’d written. “This is a good time to get rid of that daft thing.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
He continued to point. “That. Killjoys, right? Our name’s daft. Always has been. Who wants to hang out with a bloody killjoy?”
I groaned. We’d had this argument a thousand times before. As a name, the Killjoys was my idea, and I’d fought hard to keep it, talking the guys, especially Mick and Sam, out of supposedly cool but meaningless names like Asteroid and Vapor Trail. With names like those, we might as well call ourselves Aerosmith or the Eagles. What the hell did those names mean, anyhow? No, I wanted something edgy and contradictory, a name that said we weren’t just another party band. I wanted a pissy name like the Stooges or the New York Dolls, and to me the Killjoys had that same kind of twisted attitude. Maybe the name didn’t fit the cover songs we were playing now, but it fit the agitated, angry things that I was starting to write.
“C’mon, Daniel,” Mick said. “Let’s change it. They don’t know us yet up in poofterville, right?”
“What do you suggest?”
“Well, how about Mick and the Micksters?”
I looked around at the other guys, who seemed mildly amused. “O.K., fine,” I said. “I don’t want to waste anymore time on this. How many in favor of Mick and the Micksters?” No hands went up.
“Hey, I was just pissing around about that name,” Mick said.
I ignored him. “How many in favor of keeping the Killjoys?”
Yogi’s hand went up. I glanced at Rob, who unenthusiastically raised a hand. Sam abstained by ignoring me. “O.K., we’re still the Killjoys,” I said, holding up my hand. “Let’s get started with practice.”
“Oh, bloody hell,” Mick said under his breath. He continued to hang on the mike stand, morosely muttering while the rest of us finished setting up and tuning. “What’s first?”
I glanced down at our song list. “Might as well start at the top. All Along the Watchtower.”
He grimaced. “Oh, how bloody perfect. Jimi bleedin’ Hendrix. What’s next? Crazy on You? If so, you can count me out, mate. I might fancy scarves, but I’m no Ann Wilson.”
I laughed, but as I did my eye caught the three names on the chalkboard and my legs went spongy. Maybe fear wasn’t such a great motivator.
LATE SATURDAY MORNING, a day before we were to leave, I stood on my mother’s porch, hands in pockets, waiting for her to come to the door. The little rectangular window in the center of the door framed my reflection like an overexposed album cover shot, and I cringed at the image. My brown hair, frizzed and tangled as usual, puffed out sideways from my head. I pulled a rubber band from a pocket of my Army surplus jacket, and after tying back my hair studied the reflection again. It wasn’t much better. My eyes were like dark stains on a bleached-out sheet.
I knew I wasn’t a good-looking guy, at least not in any traditional sense. Besides my hair, which I kept freak-flag long and which tended to go haywire at any moment, my eyes were indistinct, the color of mud, and were usually streaked red by cigarette smoke. My cheeks were high and hollow, which would’ve been O.K. except that my chin disappeared soon after appearing below my mouth. And, considering the vertical deficiencies of my face, I was too tall—almost as tall as Rob. One of the few girls I had dated in high school once told me that I looked European, spouting some crap about me being pale, gaunt, haunted. I suppose she meant it as a compliment—though if she had, we sure didn’t stay together long—but I didn’t take it as much of a recommendation.
That’s one of the reasons I needed Mick. He wasn’t particularly attractive either, but that didn’t matter to him. He had no problem prancing around in the s
potlight. For me, being out front, toes inches from the edge of the stage, face lit up by the spotlights, was like being in one of those sweaty dreams where your clothes are missing. So, except for an occasional trip up to the microphone to add background vocals, I stayed well back in the shadows near my amplifier. My cross-tops—kept in a vial in my pocket—helped, but I needed ongoing motivation to overcome the fear. And that’s why I continued to stand on the porch, waiting for Mom to open the door.
Looking sideways into the door’s reflecting pane of glass, I rang the bell again, knowing from Mom’s Plymouth sedan in the driveway that she was home. Finally, her face appeared through the window and momentarily merged with mine before the door opened.
“Pleasant!” she said, using my given name, the name of her father, the grandfather I never met. “I didn’t expect to see you today.” She wasn’t kidding. Her dark hair, speckled gray, wasn’t piled in its usual neat, tight bun. The apron over her housedress was stained with the ingredients of some long-past meal.
I slid past her into the entryway. She reached toward me and then pulled back. “Can you stay long, honey? I can fix you some lunch.”
I shook my head. “The band’s taking off tomorrow for a gig in Washington. I just stopped by to get something from Kevin’s room.”
She followed me through the entryway and into the kitchen, where I saw a half-empty fifth of Gilbey’s on the counter beside the panda bear cookie jar I remembered from my childhood. I continued down the hallway to Kevin’s room.
“You’re going all the way to Washington?” she called from behind me. “The state? Why didn’t you let me know? I thought you were returning to school.”
“What gave you that impression?” I passed by my old room and then hers on the way to Kevin’s bedroom at the end of the hallway.
“Well, honey, your grades were so good when you quit last year, I just thought....”
I kept going down the hall.
“Will you be back in time for your birthday?” she said from behind me. “Remember the special dinner I’m planning for you.”
“C’mon, Mom.” I twisted the knob of the closed door to Kevin’s room. “I didn’t promise to come over that day.”
“But Daniel, it’s your twenty-first.” Her voice sounded a little needy. “I thought you’d spend at least part of it with me.”
“Look, Mom,” I said over my shoulder, “we’ll talk about it when I get back. I’ll only be gone a week.” I pushed through the door, swinging it partially closed behind me. She wouldn’t follow me into Kevin’s room. The smell of stale dust told me that no one had been inside for weeks.
“Have you heard from him recently?” Mom asked from the hallway, her voice strained.
“Who?”
“You know who. Your father.”
“Oh, him. Not recently.” I glanced around at the Who and Kinks posters still tacked to the wall over the twin bed and knelt down in front of Kevin’s red-white-and-blue footlocker. I flipped open the cover and quickly found the dog tag lying on top of the triangular-folded flag. The calluses on the fingertips of my left hand quickly passed over the tag’s brail-like letters and numbers. Still attached to its chain, the tag slipped snugly over my head and ponytail.
I heard Mom pacing in the hallway. “What are you doing in there?”
I closed the footlocker and crossed the room to a low bookcase beside the bed. “I’m getting a record,” I called back, flipping through the albums in the bookcase. Finding what I wanted, I slipped out Kevin’s copy of The Who Sings My Generation. For good measure, I took his copy of Happy Jack. He wouldn’t need them.
With the albums under my arm, I returned to the hall and started back toward the front door. Mom trailed me.
“Pleasant, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something.”
I kept moving. “Why do you keep calling me that? Nobody does, not even Dad.”
“It’s your name, honey.”
She caught up with me in the kitchen, and I stopped. “Look,” I said, “the guys are waiting for me over at the house. I need to get going.”
She glanced away, but her eyes apparently caught the Gilbey’s bottle because they quickly swung back to my face. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Why are you wasting all your money on that terrible house? It looks like it’s ready to collapse.”
“That’s where I live. That’s where the band practices.” I shifted from one foot to the other and looked longingly through the window at the Blue Bomb, which I’d parked behind her sedan in the driveway.
Mom tilted her chin in that way that told me she was about to drop something on me. I couldn’t help but notice that we had the same small, squared-off chin, a feature that made our faces look unbalanced by our high foreheads. “Why don’t you move back here, honey?” she asked. “I miss having you around. You could save money, and I could use your help with the lawn and the house.”
“You mean, like, live here?”
“Your old room’s still empty.” Her voice went up hopefully.
But I couldn’t do it. “Are you kidding? No way. I told you we practice at the house. I have to be there.”
Her chin arched higher. I now noticed new wrinkles appearing around the corners of her mouth. “You won’t be doing that forever. You’ll need to get a job and save for when you go back to college. With your father gone. With Kevin....” She paused and bit at her lip.
“What’s that have to do with anything?” I gave my head a tight shake. “Kevin’s been dead a long time. And he would’ve wanted me to play.”
Her eyes flashed. “Don’t tell me what I already know. I just meant that everyone’s left me, and there’s plenty of room for you here.”
She kept staring at me as my teeth ground tight. I had to consciously relax my arm to keep from bending the LPs. “Look, if you’d let Kevin get the CO deferment like Dad wanted, maybe they’d both be here.”
“Pleasant!”
I arched my head away from her, but her open hand caught my cheek. My free hand started to rise, but I stopped it. “I’m leaving,” I said, moving toward the door. She touched my shoulder, but I flinched away. Looking back, I saw tears forming at the corners of her eyes. She moved to hug me. I tensed. Then she pulled back, and I turned away.
“That’s why I don’t come over here,” I told her. “I can’t solve all your problems.”
She stopped at the entryway, and I could feel her gaze on my back as I went through the door.
After pulling the door shut behind me and crossing the lawn toward the van, I caught sight of Mom through the kitchen window, her arms crossed, head turned away from me. I started the engine but sat parked in the driveway for a moment, looking at the house. I shook my head. There was nothing I could do. It was too late.
I slipped the glass vial out of my pocket, tapped out two of my cross-tops and swallowed them dry as I pulled out into the street.
4
PLEASANT DANIEL TRAVERS. That was the name she gave me, and I never forgave my father for letting her do it. How could I? He could’ve altered my entire personality by insisting on something normal like Steven or Michael. But, no, he let me become Pleasant, and it wasn’t long before I knew I just couldn’t get comfortable being in my own skin.
I suffered through seven grades of school, being mistaken by teachers for a girl and losing playground fights at a pace that would’ve made Jerry Quarry proud, before coming to the conclusion that Pleasant had to die. That’s when my middle name, Daniel, was elevated to the top of the charts, and I was reborn, just like Tommy in Townshend’s rock opera. And later, for good measure, I added a B to replace my now-missing middle name. The B stood for nothing in particular, but it had symbolic and symmetrical importance: Peter Dennis B. Townshend, born 1945; Pleasant Daniel B. Travers, born 1955. The initials connected me to something better than my family heritage. And nobody called me Pleasant anymore. Except her. Well, and Mick once in a while when he got in a particularly foul mood.
&nb
sp; Even with Mom’s nagging “Pleasant” still ringing in my ears, my mood had improved considerably by the time I got back to the house. I knew it was because of the pills, but that was O.K.. The guys had already broken down the PA. and were ready to load the gear into the van by the time I arrived, but it was still almost dark before Rob jammed the last duffel bag of microphones and guitar cords into the back of the Blue Bomb and slammed its doors shut.
Together, the five of us walked into the garage, now lonely-seeming without the amplifiers and mike stands.
Rob glanced at his watch. “I need to split. Candi’s cooking up something big for me tonight. She’s calling it the last supper.” He forced a laugh and started down the driveway.
“Hold on.” I grabbed the sleeve of his blue work shirt. “Everybody’s here by seven tomorrow morning, O.K.? And Sam, you’re gonna pick up Yogi on the way over, right?”
Sam nodded and glanced at our drummer. “Be ready by quarter to seven.”
“Hey!” Mick interrupted with a clap of his hands. “One of you needs to come by me parents’ place tomorrow. I’m staying there tonight.”
I shook my head. “Don’t do this to me, Mick.”
“What? Chill out, mate. Me mum just wants to cook me breakfast before we leave, and I need some clean clothes. Anyway, I’m leaving the car there while we’re away.”
I should have anticipated this move—Mick idolized his mother and wouldn’t leave town without personally saying goodbye—but I hated letting him out of sight right before leaving. But no use arguing with Mick about his mother.
I turned to Rob. “Look, you’re gonna be here on time, right?” He nodded. “Good. Now listen, Mick, we’ll be by your house at seven-fifteen sharp. You’ll be ready, right?”
“Sure, mate. I’ll be there at the bleedin’ curb with bells on me fuckin’ sneakers.”
Getting in Tune Page 3