Born to Rock (11 page)

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 “My license was revoked back in eighty-eight.”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 bouncers 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.

“Llama!”
Even yelling for a dog, King had an iconic punk voice, a piercing rasp full of what Melinda called the Three A's: Anger, Angst, and Anarchy.

“Llama!” My own effort was anemic by comparison.

“Come on, Leo, a real scream comes from your spleen. Listen—” He stuck his head and shoulders out the car window and unleashed a
“Llama!!!”
that lifted downtown Denver off its bedrock foundation.

A chorus of “Hey, pipe down!” and “Shut up, man!” rang out in the neighborhood around us.

He shrugged. “Critics. Okay, you try.”

“I don't even know where my spleen is,” I protested.

“It isn't rocket science, Leo. Just think about something that pisses you off and let fly.”

That was easy. I conjured up a mental picture of graduation day—smug Borman at the dais, bragging about me getting into Harvard, knowing full well that my scholarship was history. I felt my spleen then, a deep wellspring of suppressed fury, a reservoir of pure McMurphy. The rage began to bubble over, the pressure building. It wasn't a question of yelling; I just had to loosen the valve:

“LLAMA!!!”
It echoed off warehouses and offices.

He looked impressed. “We'll make a punk rocker out of you yet.”

“Is that all there is to it?”

“You know what punk is? A bunch of no-talent guys who really,
really
want to be in a band. Nobody reads music, nobody plays the mandolin, and you're too dumb to write songs about mythology or Middle-earth. So what's your style? Three chords, cranked out fast and loud and distorted because your instruments are crap and you can't play them worth a damn. And you scream your lungs out to cover up the fact that you can't sing. It should suck, but here's the thing—it
doesn't.
Rock and roll can be so full of itself, but not this. It's simple and angry and raw.”

I was wide-eyed. “That's how Purge started?” It didn't sound much like the version of events in Melinda's project.

“That's how
everybody
started,” King assured me. “The Ramones, the Sex Pistols, X. Sure, we all got better musically. That comes with practice. But what makes it punk—that has to be there on day one.”

I could picture King young and hungry like that. But Max, Zach, and Neb seemed like neurotic middle-aged guys, obsessed with personal issues, weight issues, and health issues. Not exactly what you'd expect of the Angriest Band in America.

“Back in the eighties,” I ventured, “was the whole band, you know, like you?”

He didn't pretend to misunderstand. “You mean crazy? It's easy to be crazy when you're broke and starving. But it's hard to keep it up in a Benz. It's all about authenticity. The one thing you don't want to be in this business is a poser.”

I remembered Dad using that word in the suite at the St. Moritz. Dad and bio-dad on the same page—the mind boggles. “Are you posing when you're onstage now?”

He thought it over. “It's just harder to
care
so much. In the old days, Reagan would do something, and I'd get so steamed I'd be ready to jump into the audience and start ripping off heads. Today, if the government does something I don't like, I know the sun's still going to rise tomorrow. It's fifty times tougher to get my energy level where it needs to be for a performance. I can still do it, but it wipes me out.”

I gave him a crooked smile. “So the old King Maggot's gone forever?”

He looked tired. “Maybe I didn't get fat, bald, divorced, and herniated. But I'm just as middle-aged as the others. Still—” He flipped up his shades, and his dark eyes were gleaming. “I like to think that if something came along that was
really
worth caring about, I could get just as worked up as I used to in the eighties.”

“That's why people with plate glass windows are nervous.”

He groaned. “I barely remember that day. Everybody else does, though. The damn Harley has become an extension of my butt. That's rock and roll for you. Ozzy bit the head off a bat, and I rode a Harley through a window. And nobody's going to let either one of us forget it.”

It's funny, I'd always thought of Purge's antics as vandalism, drug-induced insanity, and publicity stunts. Never in a million years would it have occurred to me that it had anything to do with
caring.
Not that I wanted to ride a chopper through a window, but suddenly my own life seemed very blah. I couldn't imagine feeling that strongly about something.

“It must have been amazing,” I said wistfully.

“The hospital said I broke the record for stitches.”

“Not the injuries; the caring. You know, caring
that
much.”

“I wasn't exactly Gandhi. Most of the time I just busted stuff up. I was usually high.” He looked embarrassed. “That's not what you say when you're learning to be a father, is it?”

I pulled up short. Learning to be a father? Since when?

“Don't worry,” I soothed. “I had plenty of chances to be a burnout before this summer. In high school, the drugs are there if you go looking for them. I was into other things.”

“Like the Young Republicans?”

I stared at him. “How do you know about that?”

“I Googled you. That's my drug of choice these days. Bernie's got Viagra; I've got a laptop.”

I pictured myself on Graffiti-Wall.usa, spying on Melinda's blog, while King was at his own computer in another part of the hotel. Father and son Web-surfing, another family trait like the earlobe. I was amazed. Not that he found me online—I knew that my name appeared on the Young Republicans' Web site. I just couldn't picture this punk icon keyboarding the words “Leo Caraway” in the search field.

“Did it say they kicked me out?”

“No kidding. Did they have a pretzel machine, too?”

I was treading perilously close to my real reason for being on Concussed. I gave him the expurgated version. “They said I helped this kid cheat on a test.”

“Did you?”

“Depends on how you look at it. But the problem wasn't what happened. It was that I refused to help the assistant principal get the other guy kicked out of school.”

His eyebrow shot up. “See, that doesn't sound very Republican.”

“There's nothing wrong with hard work and personal responsibility,” I said righteously. It was the beginning of a lecture I'd given to a lot of unbelievers, cribbed from a stump speech by Congressman DeLuca himself. But extolling The Common Sense Revolution to King Maggot? He was the opposite of common sense. He had built a legendary career on a foundation of chaos, gut impulse, and rage.

An awkward silence followed. It underscored the chasm that separated my bio-dad and me. A fruitless poodle search couldn't span that gap. Neither could the Golden Gate Bridge. I was still a Republican, and he was still a McMurphy.

We were literally saved by the dogcatcher. A panel truck came around the corner and parked in front of an all-night diner. The driver got out and went inside.

I stared at the lettering on the door. It read:
CITY OF DENVER ANIMAL CONTROL
.

Something in the back barked.

And then the Republican and McMurphy were grinning at each other.

“If that's Llama,” King vowed, “I'm going to church.”

I had to admit it was a pretty sweet piece of timing.

We got out of the van and approached the truck from behind. I joined my bio-dad at the small window in the rear door. Mesh pens lined both sides of the payload, five across and stacked three high. Only three of the thirty enclosures were occupied. There was a yappy mongrel, a strange-looking animal that appeared to be some kind of muskrat, and—fast asleep in the far cage, bottom level—

A large white poodle.

“Jackpot,” said the front man of Purge.

The door was unlocked. We entered to a barrage of outraged barking from the mongrel.

“Hey, Llama,” King greeted the poodle. “How's it going, boy?”

Llama opened a baleful eye and glared at us.

“Penelope trained him well,” remarked my bio-dad. “He's got her personality, not just her good looks.”

I decided to take the initiative. This was my errand of mercy. And as a Purge staffer, I couldn't let King get his microphone hand bitten off.

I flipped open the latch, grabbed Llama by the collar, and hustled him out of the truck, and over to the van. King threw open the cargo doors, and we pushed Llama inside. He promptly curled into a ball and went back to sleep.

Our smooth operation was interrupted by a booming voice:
“Hey
—
you can't take that animal!”

Enter one very angry dogcatcher, his breakfast rudely interrupted.

We scrambled into the van and I gunned the motor. Much of the tread of our tires was transferred to the pavement as the rental screeched away.

I flew through central Denver, wheeling left and right down anonymous streets, in a desperate bid to disappear fast. I sneaked a sideways look at King, who was practically cackling with exhilaration.

“What?” I demanded.

“My son, the Young Republican.” He didn't seem entirely repulsed by the idea.

“
Ex–
Young Republican.” And if Fleming Norwood knew about this, he'd probably blackball me again.

“You can slow down, Leo,” King added. “They don't do high-speed chases in animal control.”

It was getting light by the time we hauled Llama into the plush lobby of our hotel. After the late night at the Pretzel, I figured everyone would still be asleep. But Max sat at a table in the restaurant, feeding slabs of Belgian waffle to a large white poodle.

“Morning,” he called, sounding tired, but otherwise none the worse for wear. “Whose dog is that?”

What were the odds? Another poodle in the right place at the right time.

We had kidnapped the wrong dog.

“Yours,” King told him.

“Nobody's like my Llama,” the drummer enthused. “Can you believe he found his way back here? Just showed up at valet parking ten minutes ago.”

“Congratulations,” said his lead singer. “Now you've got a pair.”

“You thought that was Llama?” Max was amazed. “Can't you see that's a bitch?”

King stifled a yawn. “Definitely.” And he started for the elevator.