So they started playing for real, and as I said, sonically it was relatively awesome, much better than any sound we were ever able to produce in my living room. The bass player (one of the goths) was even pretty good. They couldn’t play together very well, but it’s not like we could, either. I wasn’t sure what they were going for. At first I thought they were doing a kind of Cocksparrer/Sham 69 sort of football-chant punk rock. Then, to my even greater surprise, I figured out that they were going for a Smiths-y kind of thing. In fact, I soon realized that their whole set list was made up of punky Smiths and Cure and Joy Division covers, though many were so ineptly executed that it was hard to tell without a great deal of structural analysis. I don’t know if the punkiness was intentional or not, which is a common enough situation. Now, the irony was that the singer was Dennis Trela, who was among the most sadistic alpha psychos the normal world had to offer. In other words, he was a major player in the nation of perpetrators: he and his evil superbitch girlfriend had been responsible for half of the suicide attempts, nervous breakdowns, and eating disorders in the greater Bay Area. It’s guys like Dennis Trela who made the Smiths and the Cure and Joy Division necessary in the first place. I had thought normal people and that sort of music were mutually exclusive, but I guess I was wrong. It’s a funny world.
The nonband acts were scheduled to go on during the setup times, so while Karmageddon were setting up, this guy named Ben was doing an extremely ill-advised tap-dancing routine to “Singin’ in the Rain.” My guess is that he had lost a bet. But you just can’t tap-dance in front of an auditorium full of normal people and expect them not to take the bait. I heard this sound that was at once familiar and strange, the sound of around a hundred people pretending to cough and saying the word “homo” at the same time. There was also some loud fag-oriented heckling, chanting, and whatnot, which the crowd continued for some time after Ben left the stage. Fortunately, when you have amps and so forth, you can drown out the heckling. That’s what I was counting on. But hell, Ben got more of a response than Radio Free Atlantis had. You could look at it that way.
Both of the other bands were Black Sabbath–y, whether they realized it or not. Alter of Blood did their Christian Black Sabbath songs at normal slow speed, while Karmageddon sped their evil Black Sabbath songs up to a blur, so that they sounded like a malfunctioning piece of machinery. Both lead singers were trying as hard as they could to impersonate the Cookie Monster, and both guitarists played variations on “Flight of the Bumblebee” during the entire set without stopping, even between “songs.” Fortunately for Alter of Blood, the guitar-o-technics drew attention away from the fact that Todd Panchowski was finding counting to four a bit beyond his grasp. I envied them for that, at least.
Sam Hellerman pointed to the Alter of Blood guitarist as he let loose volley after volley of hammered-on and pulled-off hemisemidemiquavers. “Go tell him he missed a note,” he whispered. I almost spit my Coke all over my Che Guevara shirt.
I must admit, as our turn approached, I was getting pretty nervous, especially when I noticed Deanna Schumacher, along with around three or four other girls in IHA-SV uniforms, creeping into the auditorium through the side door. I tried to catch her eye and wave to her, but she pretended she didn’t notice. Oops, I realized. I was supposed to act like I didn’t know her, especially in front of her friends. I tried to wink, but I’m no good at winking, so I just mouthed “gotcha,” but she pretended not to notice that either.
Of course, that “gotcha” was dubious in every sense.
The main reason I was so taken aback by the Skoomacker factor was that I had recently broken down and tried to call her on an unauthorized day. I suppose I had been hoping for a little “I’m so glad you called” action and for a feeling that I had more or less made it through the maze after all. As it turned out, though, here’s what happened:
She picked up the phone without screening and, when she realized it was me, said, “My boyfriend’s here right now, and I’m sure he’s wondering who’s calling me at this hour. You want to talk to him?” I quickly hung up and went searching for a place to hide till I was done hyperventilating. I guess the Monday/Thursday schedule was there for a reason. I had reached a dead end and was still in the pseudorelationship maze after all. Yet now here she was, cutting class at Immaculate Heart Academy to see my band play. Or maybe it was her lunch period and they had open campus.
Now, if they ever make a TV movie called The Chi-Mo Story, they’ll probably try to present our performance at the Festival of Lights as a grand triumph of the underdog, a tribute to the noble spirit of the alienated and abused. We shamed and changed society. Because we three claimed our freedom, all are free. Hooray for us. In fact, our set did have a pretty significant impact on Hillmont High School society, but it was mostly negative, and entirely by accident. And it wasn’t a triumph. In fact, it totally sucked.
The first thing that went wrong was that unlike in movies and afterschool specials, where the sound would have been done by sympathetic people from the Math Club or something, the people in charge of the PA were totally normal guys, so they were psychotic and hate-filled and wanted us to die. And they wouldn’t let us use the PA. Or rather, they wanted a hundred dollars for the PA and fifty for the lights. I’m sure they hadn’t tried to charge the other bands, but they weren’t interested in arguing on that basis. Clearly, we didn’t have the money, and we had to resolve the issue quickly. The act before us was a normal backward-baseball-hat guy who was “rapping” to a backing track about how he had ramoned everybody’s mother or something. He was deeply into his second appalling minute and we knew it would end soon and we would be on. But the normal PA guys wouldn’t budge on the hundred and fifty bucks.
Sam Hellerman did a little Ronald Reagan voice and said, “I paid for this microphone,” which I thought was funny but which didn’t go over so well with the normal PA guys.
“Oops,” said one of them, and knocked Sam Hellerman’s Slurpee into his chest, all over his lovingly hand-lettered “Mao Is Murder” T-shirt. Sam Hellerman got that familiar “I’m totally gonna bleed all over this guy” look on his face, but he restrained himself and started to wheel and deal with them instead. In the end he got them to rent him one microphone and to turn on two lights for fifteen bucks, which was all we had on us.
We had to work quickly, but we knew what to do. I found a hand truck backstage and duct-taped Amanda’s karaoke mic to the handle, while Sam Hellerman taped the rented microphone to one of Todd Panchowski’s unused cymbal stands. Todd Panchowski wasn’t too pleased about that but allowed it, presumably because he was worried that otherwise Sam Hellerman might be tempted to express his disappointment by bleeding on his drums—it wasn’t like it hadn’t happened before. Although the stand was pretty short, it was about Hellerman height after its legs had been taped to the seat of a metal folding chair. In fact, since he had to slump so far to reach the strings of his low-slung bass with the fingers at the end of his half-dislocated right arm, he still had to tilt his head up Lemmy style to sing into the mic after all. My mouth was level with the taped-on karaoke mic if I lowered my body by spreading my legs wide enough. It almost worked.
Sam Hellerman, true to form, had brought along an XLR-to-quarter-inch adaptor, so we were able to plug both mics into the Frankenstein Bassman/Magnavox amp, just like at home. Living room rock. Live. In concert.
The fake rap guy finished, saying how he had “mad love” for his “hood” and “da funk,” and wanted to “shout out” to his “homies” about how he had nine millimeters for “they ass” and wanted to put his “gat” to “they dome” just as we were ready to go. It was more like an abortion than music, but he got a wildly enthusiastic response from the crowd. Well, we’re all pro-choice out here in Hillmont, after all.
I hadn’t meant to, but it turned out that here I made what I guess you’d call a fateful decision. I was standing at the taped-on mic thinking about how Amanda’s banned banner had really been the best thi
ng about Balls Deep, and how Sam Hellerman’s costume had been ruined and how Todd Panchowski had refused even to consider wearing his, and how everyone else got to use the PA without paying, and how nobody was ever going to understand the seventies porn/communist guerilla concept, and how I was tired of the name anyway, and how I would never know why my dad was dead, and how I really hated all normal people with every fiber of my being, not only because of the PA and Sam Hellerman’s Slurpee, but because of Charles Evan Henderson’s Brighton Rock and Bobby Duboyce’s helmet and Yasmynne Schmick’s pain and suffering and everybody’s Catcher in the Rye hypocrisy and Mr. Donnelly’s cruelty and Matt Lynch’s sadism and Mr. Teone’s idiocy and so many, many other things, including pretty much everything that had ever happened to me or that I had ever seen happen to anybody else. So as the student body’s white rap/poetry slam euphoria started to fade, and they gaped at us and several of them started trying to instigate a “you suck!” chant, I positioned my mouth about an inch from the karaoke mic (so I wouldn’t get shocked too bad) and—well, I think right up to the end I had intended to say, “hi, we’re Balls Deep.” But instead, what came out of my mouth was:
“Hi, we’re the Chi-Mos.” Then I didn’t know what to say.
Sam Hellerman stared at me, but he quickly recovered.
“Yeah!” he yelled in a high-pitched Paul Stanley voice, with a surprising degree of (devil-head) bravado, under the circumstances. “All right! We’re the Chi-Mos! That’s the Reverend Chi-Mo on guitar! And I’m your Assistant Principal Chi-Mo on bass and being aware of my own mortality, and back there we have Chi-Mo Panchowski on percussion and counting to four! Well, close enough, anyway! This song’s called ‘I Saw Mr. Teone Checking Out Kyrsten Blakeney’s Ass’!”
Now, what was supposed to happen next was that Todd Panchowski would count off with four stick clicks and we would launch into the song. And that would have been pretty cool. But what actually happened was that Todd Panchowski just sat there for a while. Then he took his little towel and wiped off his face. Then he stood up and adjusted his drum seat. Then he raised his sticks in the air and twirled them around. Then he bent down to pick up the stick he had dropped. Then, around four hours later, he finally did the count-in, except that he did only three not-quite-regular clicks and started a beat ahead of the rest of us. Well, he always did have a hard time remembering what comes after three. And here’s a valuable lesson I learned that I will share with anybody who may want to try to have a band one day: the fewer songs you have the drummer start, the more chance you’ll have of getting to do more than a couple of them in twenty minutes. Have them start with the guitar instead. Trust me.
I have to admit, our “music” was, in its own way, no less abominable than the white rap thing had been. Most of what we had accomplished in all those practices just evaporated under the pressure of the “gig.” The Hillmont student body were unimpressed, and not even moved enough to join in the “you suck!” chant that a few optimistic psycho normals kept trying to start. I think the crowd had realized that the most disheartening thing they could do in this situation was to gape in silent, stunned bemusement. They weren’t wrong about that, either. I don’t know how real bands manage to have three or more people all play the same thing at the same time—it was clearly beyond our capabilities. I kept getting shocked by the mic, so around half of the lyrics were lost, though without the PA I doubt anyone could tell one way or another. Meanwhile, we had these long, uncomfortable pauses between songs because of Todd Panchowski’s misguided attempts at reverse showmanship. It was a disaster.
“Yeah, I hear somebody say keep on rockin’?” said Sam Hellerman after we had finished the first tune. Now, this world is vast and complex, full of ambiguity and uncertainty. But if there was one thing in this muddled, crazy universe that was absolutely clear and beyond debate at that particular moment, it was this: Sam Hellerman had not heard anybody say keep on rockin’.
The best thing we had going for us was the song titles, many of which got a laugh when Sam Hellerman announced them. We did “Mr. Teone Likes ’em Young” and “Are There Hippies in Heaven (and If So, Can We at Least Confiscate Their Patchouli, ’Cause Otherwise I’m Definitely Going to Hell)?” We also did “I Wanna Ramone You,” which only I knew was in honor of Deanna Schumacher, and “Glad All Over,” which Sam Hellerman introduced by saying, “This song is about the face of God.”
Fortunately, our songs were very short. But we still had to cut quite a few because of Todd Panchowski’s delays, which were driving Sam Hellerman off the deep end. He kept looking back at the drum set, begging him with his eyes to start the song already. Plus, while Sam Hellerman was trying to introduce the songs with his clever little shrieked speeches, Todd Panchowski would just hit drums randomly, or practice his paradiddles on the snare. It was distracting, and I didn’t blame Sam Hellerman for being annoyed.
Our big finale was supposed to be “The Guy I Accidentally Beat Up,” the lyrics of which were just Paul Krebs’s name repeated over and over, ending in a wall of instrumental psychedelia during which we were supposed to chant “Freak out, freak out….” Sam Hellerman announced the song as best he could, trying to shout over the paradiddles, and waited for Todd Panchowski’s irregular count-in. He looked back after a while and saw TP standing on the drum seat with his arms raised for some reason. He’d had enough. He gave Todd Panchowski the most intense, most devastating eye-ray treatment the world had yet seen. Todd Panchowski flipped Sam Hellerman off, threw his sticks at him and stormed off the stage. Oh, well, it really wasn’t working out between us anyway.
So we did “The Guy I Accidentally Beat Up” without drums, but we skipped the actual song and started from the outro because we were running out of time and the audience was leaving. Sam Hellerman started bleeding from his nose, making sure that he thoroughly soaked the rented microphone. I put my guitar against the amp and turned it up all the way to cause as much feedback as possible, and then we knocked the drums over and tore the Magnavox apart by hitting it with the drum hardware. Sam Hellerman was on the speakers, jumping up and down, blood flying, hitting the Magnavox with a cymbal stand till it stopped making noise and was in several pieces. I was kicking the drum set, which soon was little more than a pile of rubbish. We were definitely going to have to find a new drummer after this. Todd Panchowski’s main qualification had been that he’d had a drum set. And he certainly didn’t have one of those anymore.
The set, and the Festival of Lights, finally ended when “Chet” and a few others pulled us away from the wreckage and switched off the Polytone. Sam Hellerman, who had been rolling in his own blood screaming what sounded like “yay-uss” over and over, had to be physically restrained by no fewer than three thoroughly confused goons. The students, who had been hurrying toward the exits when the destruction began, had all stopped dead in their tracks to stare and remained frozen for some time. They didn’t know what to say—even “you suck!” must have seemed inadequate. There was total silence, and for probably the first time in my Hillmont High School career I could hear myself think. It was nice, though the thoughts weren’t.
TOTALLY CALLABLE
We didn’t win the battle of—I mean, the Festival of Lights. The “yo mama” guy did. Everyone had hated the Chi-Mos. But we had made an impression, albeit a negative one, and it was the kind of thing people talked about, which is what everyone did for the rest of the day and well into the following week.
Sam Hellerman had printed up a zine with the lyrics to all the songs on the set list plus several others. It had said “Balls Deep,” of course, but as he stood at the main exit handing them out, he wrote “The Chi-Mos” at the top of each one in Sharpie, so it looked like “Balls Deep” was just the title. It proved to be a pretty popular item because of its populist anti-Teone message, and he ran out quickly, promising to go over to the Copymat to make more as soon as possible.
I was kind of in a daze standing by the stage when Deanna Schumacher came up and whispered, �
�Thanks for hanging up on me, ass.” (It didn’t matter what I said before I put the phone back on the hook: she always claimed she thought I had hung up on her.) But then she said, “Nice show, sexy,” in a voice that didn’t sound all the way sarcastic and handed me a note, sneakily rubbing my palm with her finger as she did it, before running off to join her friends, who were on the way out. The note said: “Thanks for rawking my world. I’m totally callable Mon/Thur from 6 to 10 if you’re into it,” and it was signed with a heart and a big “D.” And next to the heart it said “slurp.” I kid you not.
Cleaning up after our set had taken longer than anticipated, so I was late for sixth period. I stopped in to the otherwise deserted boys’ bathroom, and Mr. Teone ambled in.
Now, Mr. Teone’s office is located just across the corner from the boys’ bathroom at the southwest corner of center court, so he can see its door from his desk through the mirrored plate glass, though you can’t see him looking. When he has some important matter to discuss with a student in an unofficial capacity, he’ll wait for his moment and try to meet him in the bathroom for an informal chat. I don’t know who takes care of the girls’ bathroom in that corner of center court. Not Mr. Teone, surely, but, hey, you never know.
I had never been a participant in one of these secret meetings, but I had walked in on them. When someone walks in, Mr. Teone abruptly ends the meeting and growls something like “keep your nose clean!” Then he’ll zoom out, but as he leaves he’ll say to the interloper: “that goes double for you, Henderson!” Well, he only says Henderson if the interloper happens to be me or someone else with my last name. Obviously.
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