Born to Rock Page 9

  Llama the poodle, led by Max on a tight leash, chose that very moment to make a statement on the sidewalk. The reaction from the protestors was absolute bedlam. I honestly think SOD believed that Purge had deliberately trained the dog to do something disgusting.

  By the time we were safely inside the lobby, we were on our hands and knees on the carpet. It was the first huge laugh I’d ever shared with King Maggot.

  Max said it all. “And you guys wanted to put him in a kennel!”

  No one could ever say that being a roadie is a cushy job. Amps and equipment weigh hundreds of pounds. The stuff is constantly being moved around, set up, struck down, and packed up again. Glamour? Try muscle aches, bruises, toe sprains, and electric shocks. The first time I plugged in Zach’s bass, I got a jolt that had my hair standing straight up at attention. Julius claimed he actually saw a wisp of smoke coming out of the top of my head.

  The festival had its own crew for the stage, the lighting, and the speaker towers. All the other equipment was the responsibility of the individual bands. And for Purge, that meant us.

  Those were just our official duties. It was the gofer jobs that made this a twenty-four/seven affair: constant runs to the pharmacy for Advil and deodorant; walk the dog; pick the raisins out of the trail mix for Zach; put them back in for Max. Ever try to have a noose dry-cleaned? You get some pretty strange looks.

  Max made me read the fine print on the faxes he received from his divorce lawyer because he was too proud to wear reading glasses. Zach had me sneaking him food, which was uncomfortable because Bernie had me spying on Zach to keep him on his diet.

  The only band member I didn’t have much to do with was King, the guy I was supposed to be getting to know. The other roadies were constantly shuttling him to interviews and TV appearances. I never got asked to go. Cam handed out most of the assignments, and he always saved the worst for me.

  The travel was a lot less glamorous than it looked. Regardless of whether I was first-classing it with the band or trucking it with the roadies and equipment, the schedule was grueling. And with Cam as my roommate, even downtime was uptime. He was constantly on my case for being too slow or too inexperienced. Mostly, though, he complained that, “I’m never going to hook up with any babes with you latched on.”

  “Hey,” I kept telling him, “you’re not my personal chaperone. Feel free to go girl-hunting without me.”

  In Las Vegas, he decided to take me up on it. That was my first chance to take out my laptop. Gates was the only friend I’d told about Concussed, and he’d e-mailed to ask how the tour was going. I was sort of hoping to hear from Melinda, but I knew I didn’t really deserve it. Leaving town without telling her probably wasn’t the best way to defuse the awkwardness that had developed between us.

  I couldn’t resist visiting Graffiti-Wall.usa and checking up on The World According to Kafka-Dreams. Actually, her message board was sparser than usual, but I did find this current posting:

  Keep an eye on the people you’re close to—they’re the ones who’ll surprise you, and I DON’T mean in a good way. It’s the friends you’ve known forever—THAT’S where the stink’s going to come from. P.S.—Speaking of stink—what’s up with rest stop bathrooms? KafkaDreams seal of disapproval.

  “The friends you’ve known forever….” Was she talking about me? Who else could it have been? Not Owen, her personal shadow. They didn’t start hanging out until high school. I was the one who went back to prehistory with her.

  Perfect—Melinda was trashing me on the Internet, figuring that I’d never see it. It was almost as if she was accusing me of stabbing her in the back by having King as a father. How did that make sense? Nobody controls his own parentage. By definition, it’s something that happens before you’re born.

  Anger flared in my gut. Did she think a genetic hitchhiker was like one of her tattoos or piercings—a style statement? Of all the potential bio-dads in the world, she had to know that I would have picked King Maggot dead last. My opinion of punk rock was no mystery to her.

  And just as suddenly, the burn receded as my thoughts traveled back to that day on the commuter platform. I used to be one father up on Melinda. Now I was two—and the guy was her hero.

  She had no right to blame me. But at that moment, I sympathized. I always sympathized with Melinda where dads were concerned. How could I not?

  The P.S. made me frown. Rest stop bathrooms? What was that supposed to mean?

  I shut down my laptop, and sat in the silence of the darkened hotel room. T-shirts and underwear were already strewn across the furniture, although we had only been in Vegas for a few hours. Maid service was as important to rock and roll as electric guitars and record companies.

  All at once, the isolation came crushing down on me. I had never felt so disconnected from my regular life.

  Bernie put Cam in charge of picking up Pete Vukovich after his opening set with the Stem Cells and driving him back to the hotel to rest up for his stint with Purge that same night. But in Vegas, he pushed the job off on me. I found out why when I got into the rental van. Whoever had driven it last had left the tank a thimbleful away from dead empty. And Cam was too lazy to fill it up.

  I drove to the festival grounds, so low on fuel that the motor stalled out on every upgrade. But there was no time to stop at a gas station. Cam hadn’t given me much warning, and I didn’t want to keep Pete waiting. The buzz was he was doing a spectacular job filling in for Neb, and Purge loved him. Melinda was right. He was the rising star of punk.

  Concussed provided a luxury trailer for the performers to use as a dressing room/crash pad while on site. That’s where I found the rising star—flaked out on the overstuffed couch, naked from the waist up, with four girls from the audience rubbing baby oil into his chest and shoulders. Did this guy own a shirt?

  I cleared my throat, and Pete acknowledged me. “Get lost.”

  “I’m here to take you back to the hotel.”

  “Wait outside, yo,” he mumbled.

  “King asked me to make sure you’re well rested for the set tonight,” I lied. “I’d hate to let him down.”

  He sat up and peered through the girls at me. The musicians of the Concussed festival were a motley lot who belonged on Yu-Gi-Oh cards more than any concert stage. But they had one thing in common—total worship of King Maggot.

  “Yeah, okay.” He swung his legs to the floor. “Rain check, ladies. Gotta fly.”

  Still shirtless, he followed me out through the backstage gate to the van.

  It took several tries to start the engine. “We have to stop for gas on the way,” I said apologetically.

  We shuddered into a Mobil station on fumes alone. Pete went to the bathroom while I pumped thirty gallons into the van. I pocketed my receipts and climbed in behind the wheel to wait for him.

  Ten minutes passed. Then twenty. How long did it take to go to the bathroom?

  Feeling half-anxious, half-stupid, I walked around the back and tapped tentatively on the men’s room door. “Pete?” I called. Louder, “Pete?”

  No reply.

  Well, what would you have done? Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Tupac Shakur—how many recording artists had died under weird circumstances over the years? I threw open the door and burst inside.

  Pete knelt on the slimy cement floor, bent over a none-too-clean toilet. The seat cover was down. A long stripe of white powder had been painstakingly formed on top of it.

  I may have been a Republican Goody Two-shoes, but I knew what cocaine looked like. “Hey—”

  And then a gust of wind swept in from outside, and the stuff was airborne. A translucent cloud filled the bathroom. Pete reached out with both arms as if he thought he could somehow corral the powder and wrestle it back onto the toilet seat.

  I tried to stammer an apology. Before I could finish, his bony fist was hurtling toward my face. I dodged the punch, mind reeling. What would the roadie’s handbook say about this? We served at the pleasure of the performers, but su
rely that didn’t mean we had to let them beat the crap out of us.

  Not knowing what else to do, I grabbed him in a bear hug, imprisoning his arms against his sides. I was surprised at how easy it was to subdue him. Onstage, he seemed lean and powerful, a tight weave of knotted muscles. But in reality, he was just skinny and weak.

  “That was four hundred bucks’ worth of blow!” he thundered, struggling against me.

  “Sorry,” I panted, holding on for dear life.

  He stomped on my foot, causing me to relax my grip. I jumped back to avoid his flailing elbows.

  “You owe me four C’s, man!” he snarled, and stormed away.

  I couldn’t stop trembling. I had scuffled—physically—with a band member. My summer was over. I would be fired, sent home. My relationship with King Maggot would end here and now. And Harvard—

  It took the loud honking of a horn to get me out of the bathroom. Pete was in the passenger seat of the van, looking impatient. “Hurry up, yo,” he called. “You want to get something to eat? I’m starving!”

  By the time I noticed the DO NOT DISTURB sign, I had already been pounding on the door of Bernie’s hotel suite for several seconds.

  “Yeah?” came a noncommittal voice from inside the room.

  “Bernie, it’s me. Leo.”

  “Can it wait?”

  “It’s Pete. He’s—” I dropped my voice even as I strained to project through the closed door. “He’s on drugs.”

  I wasn’t normally a tattletale. But sitting in the restaurant sharing a pizza with a guy who had tried to rearrange my face just a few minutes before, it suddenly occurred to me—I was an employee of Purge. I had a responsibility to tell the band their replacement guitarist was a cokehead.

  At last, Bernie appeared, wrapped in a white hotel robe, and escorted me into the suite. He looked awful—hair wild, skin raw and scratched. His bleary eyes were so bloodshot he looked like he had conjunctivitis.

  There was a woman dressing hurriedly in the bathroom. When she stepped out, clad in what were obviously her clothes from last night, I saw she was not much older than I was.

  “Leo, meet…” His voice trailed off.

  She blushed. “Kelly—Hi.” To the manager, she said, “Got those passes for me, Bernie?”

  He rummaged around in a briefcase, and handed her a stack of tickets, which she secreted away in her pocketbook. “See you backstage.” She flitted out, happy as a lark.

  I delivered my report. “Pete tried to get his nose around a pile of cocaine in a gas station bathroom.”

  He stifled a big yawn. “And?”

  “And he’s trouble. He’ll O.D., or get busted, or do something nuts.”

  The manager seemed amused by this. “Such as?”

  “He tried to kill me because the wind blew his coke away!”

  “You seem uninjured.”

  “The guy’s wacked! And just like that, he’s fine again, dragging me out for pizza. He’s unstable!”

  I could read the look on Bernie’s face. He had spent the ’80s riding the mechanical bull of King’s front-page antics. What could Pete do that would top driving a Harley through a plate glass window?

  “I can see Pete freaked you out, and I’m sorry it happened. But remember—this is Pete’s world, not yours. Drugs have always been part of it. Before Pete; before King; before the Beatles. It’s on the sign: ‘Sex and drugs and rock and roll.’”

  He had a point. I was just a tourist in the music business. I had no right to change the rules to suit me. Even Mom had mentioned it, one of the few details she’d ever provided of the encounter that had brought me into being: “…and there were—drugs.” These were fast people—cavity-search people, although I couldn’t have known that at the time.

  “Thanks, Bernie. Sorry to come busting in on you.” It wasn’t hard to guess the manager’s favorite tine on the sex/drugs/rock and roll trident.

  “Anytime, Cuz. Hey, what were you doing with Pete in the first place? Isn’t that Cam’s gig?”

  Uh-oh. “He got busy with some—uh—other work—”

  Bernie wasn’t buying it. “Tell him to stop by and see me, will you?”

  My roommate was going to love me more than ever.

  [15]

  THE RADIO CLICKED ON, BLASTING ME back to consciousness with the pounding onslaught of punk guitar. Rubbing my eyes, I was surprised to recognize the song—Chemical Ali’s set opener, “Rigor Mantis.”

  The digital readout on the clock came into bleary focus. 10:02.

  10:02? That was impossible! Cam set the alarm for eight! We were supposed to be leaving for Phoenix at nine-thirty!

  “Cam, wake up!”

  I was alone in the hotel room. Cam’s stuff was packed and gone.

  That jerk! He had deliberately changed the alarm so that I’d miss my ride to Phoenix. It was his revenge for catching flak from Bernie over the thing with Pete.

  I called Bernie’s room, but I already knew it was too late. By now, the band was at Madame Tussauds, attending the unveiling of their wax likenesses. They were heading straight to the airport from there.

  Frantic, I threw on clothes, crammed my stuff into my suitcases and backpack, and rushed downstairs. What an idiot I was to trust Cam! It was no secret that he hated me.

  I stuck my head into the restaurant in the hope that one of the other bands’ crews had been delayed, and I could catch a ride with them. No such luck. The reality of my predicament was starting to sink in. What could I do? Take a bus to Phoenix? That would look great—rolling into town hours after everybody else. It would only prove to King that bringing me on tour was a mistake.

  There was one more chance. I ran out of the hotel and threw my bags into a taxi. “The fairgrounds!” I barked at the driver. Maybe I could hitch a ride on one of the Concussed trucks—the big semis that transported the stage setup and sound system.

  As we pulled onto the festival site, my heart sank. The speaker towers were gone, the stage and lighting arrays dismantled. There were no eighteen-wheelers, only the cars and vans in the campground across the way. This was home to the die-hard fans who were living on the road, following Concussed from city to city, crisscrossing the country in a summer blitz of punk and Porta Potties. And if the Concussed band members were a bizarre collection, their zealots were extraterrestrials. Picture several thousand headbangers living in tents and rusty old vans, sweating their way through all-day outdoor concerts. The black hole of Calcutta with body piercing.

  That’s not to say everybody was bizarre. There were plenty of ordinary kids and young adults traveling with Concussed. The normal people seemed strangest of all—like Leave It to Beaver characters who had taken a wrong turn in the studio back lot, and had wandered onto the set of Planet of the Apes. My eyes fell on one preppy-looking polo shirt in the bathroom line, surrounded by Mohawks and safety pins on all sides.

  “Stop the car!” I bellowed.

  The shocked driver slammed on the brakes, and the taxi fishtailed on the gravel lane.

  Not possible. You don’t travel twenty-five hundred miles from home to run into Owen Stevenson in a tent city outside Las Vegas.

  I stuck my head out the window of the cab. “Owen!” I bellowed. “Over here!”

  He spotted me and goggled. It must have looked to him as if I had taken a taxi all the way from Connecticut.

  God forgive me, I was happy to see the guy. His superior expression and nit-picking eyes, scanning me for flaws, brought back memories of my childhood—which seemed, at this point, about a thousand years in the past.

  “Hey, Leo! What are you doing here? Mel’s going to freak out when she sees you.”

  “Melinda’s here too?”

  “That’s our summer,” Owen explained. “We’re following Concussed. We’re going to hit fifteen cities if the Subaru holds out.”

  Rest stop bathrooms. KafkaDreams was on the road.

  That meant they had a car.

  I unloaded my luggage and paid off the cab
bie. Owen let me carry both suitcases and the backpack through the unwashed crowd. Still, I have to say he seemed genuinely thrilled to see me, and blown away that I was traveling with Purge.

  “That’s awesome, Leo. What’s it like?”

  I thought it over. I had no idea what it was like. And Owen wasn’t the guy who could put me in touch with my feelings.

  “To be honest,” I said finally, “it’s a little stressful right now. I overslept, and the crew left for Phoenix without me. Any chance of a lift?”

  “Totally!” he exclaimed, amazed that I had to ask. “It’ll be like old times.”

  I had no old times with Owen. I sort of had old times with Melinda, but that was overshadowed by the new times with Melinda. I wasn’t her favorite person these days.

  But she was glad to see me too. I guess in a far-flung, garbage-strewn, broiling desert wilderness, any familiar face is a welcome sight.

  Owen could hardly wait to break the news. “Mel, you won’t believe this! Leo’s a roadie for Purge!”

  All the welcome instantly faded from her raccoonlike eyes. Sleeping in a tiny pup tent with very little in the way of sanitation around hadn’t done much for her goth makeup.

  “Lucky you,” she said sarcastically. “Daddy hooked you up with a job in the family business.”

  Two dads to none, I reminded myself, swallowing an angry reply. I tried to reason with her. “Of all the things that aren’t my fault, him being my father is top of the list. And don’t call him Daddy. I don’t.”

  “If you’re with Purge,” she said sulkily, “why do you need us to drive you?”

  “I got my roommate in trouble, and this is his revenge. Can I ride with you guys or what?”

  “You’ve got too much luggage,” she accused.

  Owen had an answer for that. “No problem. I’ve got bungee cords.”

  All the way to Phoenix, with the tent fabric flapping noisily against my suitcases on the roof, Owen peppered me with questions about life on the inside of the Concussed tour. He ate up my details about Neb’s hernia, Max’s poodle and divorce, Zach’s diet, and what Pete Vukovich does in a gas station bathroom.