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  I nodded, thoroughly chastened.

  As we climbed into the car, I distinctly heard King mutter to Bernie, “This kid actually gives a rat’s ass what happens to me. Why don’t you?”

  Bernie laughed. “He wouldn’t last five seconds in the rock and roll business. He’s nice!”

  I could feel my face burning again. If they knew my real reason for being on this tour, I wonder how nice they’d think I was.

  [17]

  I GOT BACK TO THE HOTEL JUST AS CAM was going down to meet the other roadies to divvy up assignments for the drive to Albuquerque.

  “Be ready at eleven,” he told me. “You wouldn’t want to get left behind.”

  Thanks, Cam. I hope I get the chance to do something for you one day.

  “Oh, yeah,” he added in an offhand way. “Some bimbo called you six times last night.”

  Some bimbo? “You mean Melinda?”

  “Didn’t catch a name.” He walked out, then stuck his head back in. “There was one clue. She said she was your mother. I told her you were in jail with King. That’s okay, right?”

  If I’d had a bazooka, he would have been a grease spot on the wall out there. Like my tenure with Concussed hadn’t been stressful enough. Now he’d sicced my mother on me, arming her with information that amounted to a trifecta from hell—out all night + in jail + with King Maggot.

  I had called home a couple of times already, of course. That was part of the Concussed compromise. It’s illogical, but I swear I could hear the jigsaw puzzles piling up on every available surface, choking out the inhabitants of our small home. The conversations were stiff and brief. Dad was dying to know if the issue of the tuition money had come up yet, but he was too proud to ask. And Mom was quiet because the Taj Mahal wasn’t finished yet.

  This morning, though, she wasn’t distracted by any puzzle.

  “What did that maniac do to you? Why were you in jail?”

  “I wasn’t, Mom.” I tried to sound soothing. “I just went down there for King’s hearing. It was no big deal.”

  “I think seven years in jail is a pretty big deal!” she retorted. “And if I was the judge, he’d get seventy!”

  “Nobody’s going to jail. It’s just hype.”

  “I was a victim of that hype,” she insisted. “A victim of that man. And now I have to stand by and watch him make a casualty of my son. Can’t you see that this life isn’t for you?”

  She was right about the last part. I’d known it at the St. Moritz Hotel before I’d even met King. But I also knew something else.

  “I’m not coming home.”

  It wasn’t just because of the money for Harvard, and certainly not because I thought the Concussed tour was so important. Yet it was something real. Most of my life, up to this point, had been training simulations. School, sports, the Young Republicans—even Harvard, if I got to go. How could I quit on the first real thing I’d ever been involved in?

  “I don’t understand you, Leo,” Mom said coldly. “Why would you want to make that man a part of your life?”

  Oh, how I was tempted to say it: I didn’t make him a part of my life, mother dear. You did.

  But I kept my mouth shut. Bernie was right—I really was nice.

  That night, I got an e-mail from Gates:

  She’s talking about you, right? What the hell’s happening on that tour of yours?

  It was accompanied by a link to the transcript of an online chat featuring KafkaDreams that was posted on Graffiti-Wall:

  KafkaDreams: Got into a fight with two Nazis and a Republican last night….

  I thought back to the onstage scrap. If I was the Republican, the “Nazis” could only be the two cops who had arrested King. The Phoenix Police Department would really appreciate that.

  BlondYossarian: Nazis, Republicans, what’s the difference?

  KafkaDreams: Didn’t fight the Republican—he was trying to haul me out of it.

  DarthLightning03: they think they own the world.

  KafkaDreams: He was just trying to keep me out of trouble. He’s not a bad guy. If he had a heart, it would be in the right place….

  BlondYossarian: Republicans have hearts?

  KafkaDreams: This one’s only a jerk part-time. I give him a lot of grief, and he usually lets me. P.S.—He has royal blood.

  Typical Melinda. Even when she says something nice, it still comes out as an insult.

  So why wasn’t I fuming?

  If Purge had been punk’s hard-living bad boys in the ’80s, that title today fell to the Stem Cells. As the Concussed juggernaut steamrolled past Albuquerque en route to Denver, I came to see that Pete Vukovich’s extracurricular activities in that gas station bathroom were just the tip of the iceberg. The five Stem Cells, none of whom had yet turned twenty-one, had pledged wholehearted allegiance to the god of Bands Behaving Badly, led by Pete, who King described as having “a life expectancy of ten minutes ago.”

  High praise from someone who had once ridden a motorcycle through a plate glass window.

  But to be fair, my bio-dad seemed less interested in the sex-and-drugs-and-rock-and-roll thing than anybody else on the tour. While Max, Zach, and Bernie etched maroon crescents below their middle-aged eyes trying to burn the candle at both ends with Pete and company, King never once went out clubbing or partying with them. Maybe he had gotten all the hell-raising out of his system in the ’80s. He had certainly accomplished plenty of it back then. I was living proof of that.

  Denver was Pete’s hometown. Purge’s guitarist pro tem was determined to play conquering hero. He did interviews side by side with King himself. And when the sun dipped beneath the Rockies, he set out to cut a swath through the area nightspots stretching from Boulder to the south suburbs.

  Pete led the way in his brand new Hummer sport-utility truck, overloaded with friends from his old high school. A stretch limo and two Concussed equipment vans completed our odd procession.

  According to the Stem Cells, the hottest place in Denver was the Pretzel, a former downtown pretzel factory that had been made into a dance club and lounge. There were about three hundred people standing behind a velvet rope when we got there, but nobody gave that a second thought. For rock stars, waiting in line was as likely as a June blizzard.

  A taxi squealed into the parking lot. I noticed a familiar head hanging out the back window, long tongue waving.

  Bernie was disgusted. “Max, what’s the mutt doing here?”

  The drummer climbed out of the cab, leading Llama on a leash. “I couldn’t leave him. He has acid reflux.” He glared at Zach. “Why’d you have to bring those Fig Newtons to the rehearsal room?”

  “Fig Newtons?” The manager wheeled on his bassist. “How does that fit into your diet?”

  “The dog’s calories don’t count against me,” Zach explained reasonably.

  Bernie signaled the taxi driver to hang on. “You’ve got to find a pet-sitter. You can’t take an animal to a club.”

  Wrong. The Pretzel’s management considered it an honor to host Max Plank’s poodle.

  Inside, the place was packed with gyrating bodies, Denver’s beautiful people, dressed and semi-dressed to impress. The booming dance music felt dissonant and wrong after my nightly doses of Concussed.

  Zach winced. “Sucks.”

  Amazingly, I found myself in agreement with him. I was no punk fan, but the dance stuff seemed canned by comparison. Just as loud, but more industrial, a computerized sound with a monotonous, room-shaking beat.

  “Maybe we should go somewhere else,” I suggested, shouting to be heard.

  “You go somewhere else,” retorted Bernie, indicating that the matter was closed.

  The Pretzel was packed with beautiful women, more than a few of them gathered around Llama, rubbing the big poodle’s belly and stroking his fur. I could see the wheels turning inside the manager’s head. The dog was a chick magnet.

  He ruffled his drummer’s receding Mohawk. “Take a break, Max. I’ll look after Llama fo
r a while. You go have a good time.”

  In addition to Pete’s friends, our group also included assorted Ball Peens and Hatchlings, a Dick Nixon, and a handful of roadies and crew. Pete acted like he owned the place, holding a clinic in Tequila Abuse 101 in the lounge area. Nearby, one of the old factory’s original baking machines was still in working order, and clubbers helped themselves to fresh pretzels hot off the conveyor belt.

  Go figure—in high school, warnings about peer pressure are constantly being hammered into your head. But Max and Zach, rock millionaires in their forties, couldn’t resist trying to keep up with Pete and his friends. Within twenty minutes, Max had passed out on the couch, a glass still clutched in his trembling hand.

  I shook him by the shoulder. He didn’t stir.

  “I’ll find Bernie,” I told Cam.

  “I’ll do it,” Cam growled.

  He wasn’t being generous. My boss had another job in mind for me. Green-faced Zach had been scarfing down pretzels at light speed “to soak up the alcohol.” It was my responsibility to find a discreet place for him to relieve himself of the contents of his stomach.

  I managed to haul the staggering Zach out to the parking lot. The sight of him would have bleached Melinda’s all-black wardrobe: the legendary bassist moaning and crawling around a patch of dandelions, trying to stick his finger far enough down his throat to make himself throw up. A member of Purge literally purging.

  At last, he sat up. “I can’t do it. Let’s go back in.”

  I sighed. “Why don’t we just call it a night?”

  No way. He returned to the club, and I headed for the all-night pharmacy next door to buy him some Pepto-Bismol.

  The next twist of fate: rock stars get special treatment, but I was no rock star. I was barred at the velvet rope for forty-five minutes, sorely tempted to chug the antacid myself. At long last, Mark Hatch spotted me and convinced the gate guardians to let me back in.

  When I finally pushed my way to the table, Zach was into the pretzels again, and Max was awake, but just barely. Bernie was a short distance away on the couch, mauling a leggy blonde in a gold lamé outfit that appeared to be spray-painted on.

  “Where’s Llama?” I asked him.

  “How should I know?” he mumbled without coming up for air.

  “Who’s got his leash?”

  “Do I look like a dog-walker?”

  “Well,” I persisted, “you were the one who had him last—”

  Bernie rolled away from the blonde and fixed me with a withering glare. “Beat it, Cuz.”

  That was when I caught sight of Llama. He was on the pretzel-making machine—standing on the conveyor, feasting on uncooked dough. His white fur shone as he passed through the glow of a spotlight, en route to the large hopper above—

  The oven!

  I vaulted over the back of the couch in a frantic rush to save the dog. Movement through the belly-to-belly crowd was like wading through chin-deep molasses. Angry clubbers shoved back when I tried to bull my way through to the machine.

  Heart sinking, I realized I wasn’t going to make it. In an act of desperation, I snatched up a small café table, sending ten-dollar drinks flying in all directions. People ducked as I hefted it over my head and flung it with all my might at the apparatus.

  It bounced off the end of the belt, and lodged in the hopper. Uncooked pretzels slid down the tabletop, piling up on the floor. Llama jumped down and disappeared into the crowd.

  A hamlike hand grabbed me by the scruff of the collar, and I found myself staring at a huge round face that reminded me of a mean Charlie Brown. It was attached to a very large bouncer.

  “It was the dog!” I tried to explain. “I had to save the dog!”

  It might have gone very badly for me if Pete’s friends hadn’t chosen that moment to show the hometown hero that they could be bad boys, too.

  Two of them jumped on the bouncer’s back, flailing away at the Charlie Brown head. The rest followed them into battle, cheered on by Pete, who lifted not a finger in their aid.

  Jammed with too many people for too many hours, the Pretzel was instant combustion. It wasn’t a brawl, but we were packed in so tightly that every shove had a ripple effect clear across the club.

  Someone pulled the fire alarm, but you couldn’t hear it until the management cut the music. The place cleared out surprisingly quickly. I guess nobody wanted to be hanging around in case the cops showed up.

  I don’t know who drove the Hummer back to the hotel, because Pete had to be carried inside. So did Max, and Zach was barely moving under his own power. I watched the limo and vans disgorging our group, and that was when it hit me—

  Llama.

  We had left him at the Pretzel.

  “Bernie!”

  “Shhhh!” he said sharply. “I see. I’m not blind, Cuz.”

  “You mean you knew? Why didn’t you say something?”

  The manager gestured in the direction of the blonde in the gold lamé, who had made the trip with us. “Anyway, Max wouldn’t notice an air raid.”

  “He’ll notice eventually,” I argued. “Like when he wakes up, and there’s no dog!”

  “The club will get in touch with us,” Bernie yawned. “Or the dogcatcher will. Sooner or later, the mutt will turn up.”

  “If an SUV doesn’t run him over first!”

  The manager shrugged. “That’s an act of God.”

  “It’s an act of us!” I argued. “We just jumped in the cars and flew. Llama must have been caught in the stampede somewhere. Nobody even looked for him.”

  “That’s Max’s problem.”

  “That’s your problem,” I countered. “Max is hanging by a thread as it is with all this divorce stuff. He’s going to have a nervous breakdown, and you don’t even care!”

  “Shut up!”

  It wasn’t just what he said; it was how he said it. His good-natured, buddy-buddy exasperation had disappeared. Something had changed forever between Purge’s manager and me.

  “You little snot, I put up with your crap as a favor to King! If you work for me, you do what I say! And right now I’m telling you to get lost!”

  The gold lamé beckoned. He collected her and headed for the elevator.

  I stood there in the lobby, head spinning. Bernie would kill me if I bugged him again. Max was totally out of commission. Cam would never help me.

  There was only one person I could call.

  [18]

  HE WASN’T REGISTERED UNDER MAGGOT, so I tried McMurphy.

  I woke him up. “Leo,” King said groggily. “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

  I just blurted it out. “The dog’s gone.”

  “Huh?”

  “Llama.” I gave him the whole sob story of our misadventures at the Pretzel that night. “Max is catatonic. He doesn’t even know it’s happening.”

  “What does Bernie say?”

  “Bernie’s with a girl. He’s out of the picture. Everybody’s out of the picture. What should I do?”

  There was dead silence on the phone, giving me a chance to reflect on the wisdom of disturbing King over this. This was the punk rebel who defined “attitude” for an entire decade. The man had refined not giving a damn into high art. He barely even noticed when Neb, cofounder of the band, had to drop out of the tour for emergency surgery. Why would he care about a lost poodle?

  He said, “Let me have five minutes to get dressed.”

  I still didn’t believe he was actually coming until he showed up in the lobby, a little unkempt, but seemingly not angry about being rousted out of bed. He tossed me the keys to one of the rental vans. “My license was revoked back in eighty-eight.”

  I was kind of nervous driving with him—almost like I was retaking my road test. When we got to the Pretzel, a scattering of cars remained in the lot. Some of the employees were still on hand. That was a good sign.

  I banged on the locked door until one of the bartenders answered. Over her shoulder I could see staff and bounce
rs cleaning up debris and overturned furniture from tonight’s festivities.

  “Sorry to bother you. We’re looking for a dog—”

  She regarded me as if I had a cabbage for a head. “This is a club. No dogs allowed.”

  “It’s Max Plank’s dog,” I explained. “He got lost when the fire alarm went off—”

  Then her eyes fell on the man standing beside me.

  “King Maggot!” she fairly shrieked. “Right? From Purge? Oh my God! Mick Jagger was here a couple of months ago, but this is way better!”

  That was enough to draw everybody to the door.

  “How’s it going?” King acknowledged them with a casual wave. “Okay, cough up the pooch so we can all get some sleep.”

  The Pretzel turned out to be canine-free. A few of the staff remembered seeing the poodle in the club. But it had to be concluded that he had joined in the mad dash for the exits. He was out there somewhere, wandering the streets of Denver.

  Llama was on the lam.

  King wasn’t the only one who got recognized. The bouncer with the Charlie Brown head glared at me. “Aren’t you the kid who threw that table into the pretzel machine?”

  “That was also because of the dog,” I said quickly. “He was on the conveyor belt, and it was the only way to keep him out of the oven. Sorry.”

  “No problem,” he grunted. If I hadn’t been with King, I’ll bet it would have been a problem.

  Back in the van, I could feel my bio-dad’s eyes boring into me. “You threw a table into a pretzel machine?”

  I studied my sneakers. “Yeah.”

  “I didn’t think you were the type,” he said in an odd voice. “I guess destruction of property runs in the family, like the earlobe.”

  It was the most fatherly thing he’d ever said to me. I don’t know why, but I felt warm all over. If I had burned down the building, he probably would have hugged me.

  We decided to search the neighborhood, spiraling outward from the Pretzel in a widening perimeter.