Born to Rock (13 page)

[21]

AS A SPECIAL ADDED BONUS, I GOT TO
wake up in the same room as Cam.

Not that I slept much. I was coming to see that insomnia was as integral a part of rock and roll as hearing loss. Although, in my case, the sleeplessness had less to do with music than my own imploding world.

The plan was to sneak out while my roommate was still unconscious. But he had grown sensitive to my furtive tiptoeing, and stirred with a subvocalized moan: “Ohhhh—did anybody get the license number of that truck?”

“Go back to sleep. You've got a couple of hours before we plow.”

“I've got to cut down on the beer,” he mumbled.

I frowned. I knew the difference between alcohol and a bad attitude. Cam hadn't been all that drunk in the hospitality suite. Why should he pretend to be? “Remember that guy Owen? You didn't beat him up after I left, right?” If Owen was in intensive care at the hands of my boss, Melinda would put the blame on me for sure. Not that she'd ever talk to me again. I was branded with the KafkaDreams Seal of Disapproval for life, thanks to last night.

“It's all a blur.” His eyes never left me. “But I didn't scrap with anybody. I wouldn't forget something like that.”

Thank God. “Don't sweat it, Cam. It was just another after-party. Standard stuff.”

I wasn't being generous. I just had no time for the creep. The DNA test results had arrived, and the only thing between them and me was Bernie. Believe me, I wasn't thrilled with the idea of facing the manager just a few short hours after punching him out. But in a way, the timing was perfect. Now that the DNA information was in, the connection between King and me would be definite. The moment had finally come for me to come clean to my bio-dad and ask him to front me the money for Harvard. Then I could stop living this lie and quit the tour.

Funny. The thought of leaving Concussed—even with the money for college in my hot little hand—brought me zero pleasure. I was no punk rocker, nor would I ever be. Yet when I pictured myself back home with Mom and Dad, it all looked a little flat. There, I was the high school kid I'd been for the past four years. The entirety of my adult life had happened on the road with Purge.

But the matter of staying or going was academic at this point. No roadie, not even the lead singer's son, still had a job after decking the band's manager.

So I had a double purpose: get my test results and resign. From there, next stop: King. With any luck, Harvard would be my severance package. I wasn't asking for charity. It would be a loan. Dad and I would find a way to pay him back.

I hoped King wouldn't think this whole summer had been nothing more than a grab for his money, although it had certainly started that way. In spite of everything, I was glad I'd gotten to know my biological father. I'd come face-to-face with the McMurphy in my blood. And no, he wasn't perfect. In truth, he was pretty damn awful. But he had good points, too. He was an amazing man—a famous man.

A star.

Room 1223. Bernie's suite. The door was open, and the housekeeper was vacuuming.

“Bernie,” I called over the noise of the machine. “Bernie, it's Leo. Can I come in?”

He wasn't there, and I wasn't sorry. I crept into the sitting room. The maid had picked up the strewn mail and placed it neatly on the coffee table.

I hesitated. It wasn't stealing. This was
mine.
Nobody had more right to it than me, except maybe King. And he was the guy I was going to show it to.

I found the envelope and noted that it had been opened. Exactly when was Bernie planning to share this with the people who were truly involved?

I stuffed the letter into my pocket and rushed out of the suite. Ducking into the stairwell, I sat down on the top step and unfolded the report.

There were several pages of comparative graphs and points of scientific methodology. But the final conclusion was contained in the covering letter.

The words stood out. They flamed.

The genetic evidence indicates that Subject A and Subject B are not father and son. There is, however, a significant family relationship between the two specimens, most likely that of second cousins or first cousins once removed.

Gravity reversed, very nearly sending me spinning off into space. It was as much a blow as the original McMurphy shock back in fourth grade. I wasn't Prince Maggot. King was not my father.

Oh, I was part of the family, all right. I had the McMurphy earlobe to prove it. But it didn't come from King.

It came from Bernie.

It was a revelation that absolutely blindsided me. Yet I should have known it from the start. My mother's tearful story of the night I was conceived—did that sound like King? Hardly. But I'd been watching Bernie hunt and gather young women from the moment I'd joined the tour. He used his position with Purge to dazzle them with glamour; he used King Maggot as bait; he was a predator. Last night the target had been Melinda. Eighteen years ago, it had been my mother.

So this was it—the moment that I knew for sure about McMurphy. And I couldn't even get that right.

I had the wrong McMurphy.

Suddenly, I was scrambling down the concrete stairs, all twelve flights to the lobby. If I'd been up on the roof, I probably would have launched myself into thin air. When you come upon something you truly can't live with, the first irrational instinct is to try to outrun it.

I blasted through the lobby and out onto the street. Downtown Milwaukee was alive, but I was in my own little world, in too much pain to notice my surroundings.

Shoppers and businessmen glanced at me curiously as I fled along the sidewalk, lost in my personal marathon to nowhere. Maybe on some level I believed there was a spot in this universe where a horrible thought like Bernie McMurphy being my father wasn't true. If such a place existed, I intended to find it.

I ran until there wasn't a step left in me, all over downtown, past churches, and stores and office buildings. And when I'd worn a layer of skin off the bottom of my feet, nothing had changed. I was still the son of a dirtbag.

All at once, I couldn't stand to be alone for one more second. I needed another human being, not for advice, or even companionship. I needed somebody to say, “Poor you,” and agree with me that life sucks.

But who did I know in Milwaukee?

The taxi drove along the narrow lane that bisected the fairgrounds, separating last night's concert venue from the parking lot and camping area. Although it was no longer raining, the place that had housed an audience of thirty thousand yesterday was a mud puddle from the
Guinness Book of World Records.
The lineup of Concussed nomads waiting to get into the showers was a mile long.

This was my destination—this bog of huddled masses yearning to get clean. Not the showers, but a certain beat-up Subaru and the only two people who might care whether I lived or died.

Luckily, the tent city was breaking up as the tour moved on to Detroit, so the Subaru was easy to find. The pup tent was still up. There was no sign of Owen, but Melinda was there, in T-shirt, boxers, and biker boots, cramming duffle bags into the car's trunk.

She appeared a little tight-lipped, but not bad, considering what had happened last night. Actually, she'd never looked better to me, and it had nothing to do with her newfound attractiveness. Right then, she looked like home.

I could see the state I was in reflected in her horrified expression. I was expecting “What do
you
want?” or “Get out of my face!” or maybe even a swift kick from those boots.

Instead, she asked, “Leo—what's wrong?”

I had no words. I closed the distance between us, wrapped my arms around her, and put my head on her shoulder. It was the most aggressive I'd ever been with a girl, yet it was no more sexual than a shipwrecked sailor clinging to a life preserver.

“Tell me what happened,” she persisted.

To this day I still believe I kissed her just to get out of having to answer that question. Joined at the lips, we stood there, our feet sinking into the mud.

I was dizzy. Shouldn't there be rules governing how many twists a human being can absorb in such a short period of time? Kind of like the stock market curbs that kick in on volatile days? Yet, stopping was the last thing I had in mind. This moment had been brewing for a long time, and there was a fervor to it that reminded me of the steam buildup below a volcano's lava dome. Just hours ago, I was toe-jam to the girl. And now this.

“Hey, Mel,” called an all-too-familiar voice. “I got the athlete's foot spray, but they were out of Gas-X—
whoa
!”

We jumped apart. It was such classic Owen timing that I had to laugh. And if Owen Stevenson could produce a laugh from me on this hideous day, he couldn't be all bad.

He spun on his heel and began to hurry away, his shoes making sucking sounds in the swamp. We chased after him.

“Come back,” Melinda called. “It's okay.”

He turned to face us. “Do you know how long I've been waiting for you two idiots to get together? It's about time.”

“It's not like that,” I insisted. “I just came to tell you guys—I quit the tour.”

Melinda was horrified. “Because of last night?” She was instantly ready to blame herself. “Because of me?”

“You might as well both know,” I said with resignation. “King isn't my father.”

Owen was mystified. “You said it was definite. What about the McMurphy ear?”

My silence must have been answer enough. A look of awed understanding came over Melinda's face. “Oh, Leo—not Bernie!”

“Bernie doesn't have the ear,” Owen protested.

The last time I explained something to Owen, it cost me my scholarship. I definitely wasn't going to get into recessive and dominant genes with the guy.

“Trust me. What Bernie tried to do to Melinda last night, he did to my mother eighteen years ago. That's the kind of pedigree I'm carrying around. You can see why I have to get away from these people.”

“I'll tie your stuff onto the car,” Owen volunteered. I guess he forgot what happened last time.

I had a mental picture of my luggage, lying half-packed in the room I'd shared with Cam. “I'm not going back to that hotel. To hell with it.”

“I'll get it for you,” Owen promised, hopping into the Subaru. “It's the least I can do.”

I was dismayed. “Look, Owen, losing my scholarship—that isn't your fault. It's Borman's fault. You don't have to be my slave.”

In answer, he gunned the engine and drove off, spraying me with mud as a final gesture.

When I turned to Melinda, she was as pale as her former goth self.

“Your
scholarship
?”

I shrugged like it wasn't the catalyst that had set off a chain reaction of disasters that still hadn't ceased. With this latest blow—King not being my father—the dream of Harvard was pretty much dead and buried, for the foreseeable future anyway.

I said something absurdly brave. “Ivy makes me itch.”

She was shattered. “It's
my
fault! I was the one who got you to tutor Owen!”

I was amazed. Melinda Rapaport was tough as nails. I'd seen her go head-to-head with goth-bashing football players, and it was usually the jocks who retreated with their tails between their legs. This was KafkaDreams, the anti-everything punk blogger with fans around the world logging in to see who or what would be the next target of her abundant wrath. Here she was, crying her eyes out—for
me.

I pulled her close. “It's okay.”

But she didn't take my word for it. She was hysterical. We were attracting attention from concerned neighbors. I knew a moment of real fear thinking that this could degenerate into a public spectacle. So I hustled her into the only privacy we had—the tent.

There, huddled in twenty-eight square feet, I took a stab at calming her. “Listen, Melinda—”

And suddenly, her mouth was pressed up against mine, and she was crawling on top of me.

I had assumed that nothing good could ever come out of losing Harvard.

I was wrong about that.

Owen was gone all day. I can't say I missed him, and not even for the usual reasons. He was being considerate, leaving us alone to give things a chance to happen between Melinda and me. Owen's giftedness had never showed itself so clearly. He definitely understood more about the two of us than we'd ever guessed about ourselves. He may not have lived up to his potential to become the next Einstein, but he had a real shot at Dr. Phil.

Melinda and I didn't leave the tent in all that time except to go to the bathroom. We did come up for air long enough for her to apologize for being so weird back when it looked as if I was King's son. And I expressed my regrets at being such a stuffed shirt about her style and interests.

In a way, this moment had only become possible because I had been stripped of my Republicanism, and she had been stripped of her gothism, and we had somehow found each other in a campground outside Milwaukee.

Who could say how it was going to play out when we got back to our regular lives? But in this place, at this time, it seemed like destiny.

Owen finally showed up around seven, with my suitcase and duffle on the roof, and an extra-large pizza with the works. Leave it to him to like anchovies. Actually, Melinda and I were so hungry by this point that we would have started on the tent if food hadn't turned up.

“Owen,” Melinda said shyly, “you didn't have to disappear all day like that.”

“Oh, that was no problem. Besides,” he added coyly, “I think I might have met somebody.”

“What?”
Melinda lifted six inches off the ground. “That should have been the first thing you said to me! Who?”

Owen just smiled knowingly and helped himself to another slice, folding it New York style.