Born to Rock (14 page)

She was horrified. “I've held your hand through a million horror stories! I
deserve
the details! P.S.—if you don't tell me, I'll carve it out of your entrails with my toenail clippers!”

Owen did something I've never been able to do under cross-examination from Melinda: he held firm. The guy was turning into my role model.

By that time the campsite was almost empty. Most of the nomads had moved on to the next city. Melinda and Owen decided to stay here another night. We would skip Detroit and catch up with the tour in Cleveland.

My own plans were a mystery, even to me. But for the time being, I was sticking with Melinda.

To sleep in twenty-eight square feet with two other people is to know how a sardine must feel. I spent the night scrunched onto my side, staring up at the canvas peak of the tent.

By now, Purge would know that I was a no-show. I wondered if anybody cared. Cam wouldn't miss me at all, and the feeling was definitely mutual. Zach would need another sucker to sneak him cupcakes and Doritos, but that was an easy vacancy to fill. Max wouldn't notice if I showed up headless in a tutu. All that mattered to him was his drums.

And Bernie. My “father.” That really meant a lot to him! What was his first action when he knew the truth? To talk to me? Not on your life. It was business as usual for Bernie—another town, another show, another groupie. The manager had been growing to like me less and less as the summer progressed. Now that I was an embarrassment and a potential lawsuit to him, he probably hated my guts.

Sure, it crossed my mind to ask Bernie to supply the tuition for Harvard. For about three seconds. I'd lost pretty much everything, but I still had some pride. I wouldn't have taken that man's money to buy my last crust of bread.

My summer was officially over. In the sense that this whole experience was about getting to know my biological father, today was the day I decided I didn't want to know him at all.

King was the father I wanted to get to know—that I
had
gotten to know, a little at least. I wanted
him
to miss me. He probably wouldn't. Now that he knew I wasn't his son, I was just an inconvenience that had muddied the waters of his comeback tour, a blip on the radar screen of his semiretirement. By Labor Day, he'd have forgotten I'd ever existed.

If only
I
could forget.

We took our time driving from Milwaukee to Cleveland. Outside Gary, Indiana, Melinda pulled into a high-tech rest stop that offered Internet access. I considered booting up my laptop to see if KafkaDreams was blogging about me, but I chickened out. I didn't let on that I knew about Graffiti-Wall.usa. I was depressed, not suicidal. Keeping secrets? Maybe. But she didn't tell me, and I didn't tell her, so that made us even.

At the Cleveland campground, we staked our claim to some prime real estate, right next to the bathroom station and showers. The Detroit show was still in full swing, so we were among the first to arrive.

In that city, Lethal Injection would be halfway through their set, stoking the crowd into a white-hot fever in anticipation of the Concussed headliners. Backstage, I knew King would be working up his nightly rage, so essential to his performance. I pictured Cam, running around, cursing me for skipping out on the work, leaving him sole nursemaid to Max's beloved kit.

I knew it would be coming soon—the opening power chords of “Bomb Mars Now.” Die-hard Purge fans would imagine them as they had come off the guitar of Neb Nezzer. But I heard the Pete Vukovich version—raw, distorted, thrumming in my pancreas.

The issue of which riff would go down in history from now on would be decided in court. Earlier that day, we'd heard on the car radio that Neb was suing Purge for replacing him. Melinda and Owen talked of little else during the seven-hour drive.

That was the one Purge performance I'd missed all summer. And although I didn't want to be there, my absence felt wrong somehow.

I tightened my arm around the sleeping Melinda and tried to tune out Owen's juicy mouth-breathing. After the adrenaline-charged atmosphere of the Concussed hotels, an empty campground in Cleveland seemed like a very lost and remote place to be.

Cleveland. The home of Detective Sergeant Ogrodnick of the Cleveland PD.

I didn't know it then, but I had entered the ZIP code of the cavity search.

[22]

THE EARLY BIRDS FROM DETROIT BEGAN
arriving late morning, and the nomads were in full tailgate by lunch. Half a dozen hibachis were fired up, with supermarket hot dogs sizzling on the grills. I was amazed at the atmosphere of community that prevailed among these punk fans. They looked like something out of a house of horrors, but behaved as if this was a '60s commune. Everything was shared, there were no outsiders, and pass the ketchup. We made s'mores over an open fire with a ska biker gang from Des Moines that was collectively pierced in more than a hundred places.

Fleming Norwood would have had a heart attack at the thought of anybody who looked like that existing outside of the penal system. I have to admit to being a little surprised myself. But I genuinely enjoyed their company.

Later in the day, Owen, God bless him, made himself scarce, giving Melinda and me a chance to make sure yesterday wasn't a fluke.

It wasn't.

It was starting to look as if I had a girlfriend—just in time for her to go away to college and for me to do what? Get a paper route? I could work with Dad in the hardware store, but it didn't exactly measure up to a full ride at Harvard.

The fact was every time I looked beyond a couple of days into the future, I saw nothing but smoke. I couldn't even decide if I should go to the Cleveland show tomorrow with Melinda and Owen. I kind of wanted to see King in action one last time. But the whole thing seemed too painful.

I didn't notice the commotion at first, just a distant hubbub when I awoke in the tent. Distant hubbubs were par for the course among the nomads, especially now that the campground was jam-packed. In a few hours, the Stem Cells would be kicking off the Cleveland concert. The battle for parking space had already given way to the battle for a good spot near the stage come showtime. Melinda and Owen were gone. They'd mentioned something about grocery shopping this morning. I struggled into my jeans and crawled out of the tent. For once, the washroom had no lineup. Everybody seemed to be on the other side of the camp where a crowd was gathering, and the noise seemed to be getting louder.

When I came out of the men's room a few minutes later, it was a full-fledged mob.

“What's going on?” I yelled to one of the bikers I knew.

Underneath his glittering hardware, he was pink with excitement. “Hurry up, bro! King Maggot's in the camp!”

“Huh?” I followed him, my bare feet bruising on gravel and sharp stubble. “King? Here?”

King wasn't like Pete and some of the others who reveled in glad-handing with the fans. He once told me that the teeth-gnashing, blood-spitting vitriol of his public image couldn't be maintained up close and personal. It didn't make sense that he would put himself in the middle of thousands of punk worshippers. More than likely, this was an impersonator—a superfan dressed up as King in honor of today's show.

But then I saw him, stalking through the campsite like the Pied Piper, trailing rats in all directions. It really
was
King.

I could tell when he spotted me because he flipped up his shades and his eyes shot sparks. He closed the gap between us with deliberate strides and got right in my face. “Do you have any idea how many people are looking for you?” he demanded, cold with fury. “I ought to tear your head off!”

This caused a ripple of anticipation in the crowd. When King Maggot used a phrase like
tear your head off
, there was usually a head rolling around p.d.q.

I was thunderstruck. Why did King give a damn about where I was? He'd barely even noticed when his own guitarist crashed and burned five feet away from him. Why was he standing here chewing me out like he was my father?

“But King,” I managed. “Bernie—”

“So you had a dustup with Bernie! So what? Bernie's a bastard! Who doesn't know that? You want to quit the tour? Fine! You come to
me
! You don't just drop off the radar, and nobody knows if you're dead or alive!”

“I—I didn't think you'd care,” I stuttered.

His reaction was one of those gasket-blowing rants that had made him an icon of the '80s.
“What the hell are you talking about? What was the whole point of this summer? So I wasn't there to change diapers and put you on the school bus! I'm still your father—”

He said more—a lot more, and at maximum decibelage, but I never got past those words:
I'm still your father.

He didn't know! Bernie hadn't told him. That lowlife didn't want to take responsibility for being my father, so he let King go on thinking
he
was. Quite a family, those McMurphys. They treated each other just as badly as they treated everybody else.

King was still yelling. “Not to mention that I promised your old man you were safe with me! That wasn't bull! I
meant
that!” For someone with zero parenting experience, he really knew how to lay a guilt trip on a guy.

“Sorry, King,” I mumbled. “I thought I was fired.”

“Well, you're not. So what'll it be? Are you coming back or going home?”

I'm still not sure why I didn't tell him about the DNA test results. Some of it was definitely cowardice. I was surrounded by King's acolytes. And just as referees are subconsciously swayed to make calls in favor of the home team, I felt a strange pressure to give the nomads the happy ending they seemed to want.

But I have another theory, and I'm not proud of it. On some semiconscious level, I was thinking that, as long as King didn't know the truth, Harvard wasn't dead yet. And since Bernie wasn't going to spill the beans, my McMurphy ear and I might be able to keep the secret safe long enough to get the first year's tuition squared away.

“I'll come back,” I told him, to the delight of the nomads. “I just have to write a note to Melinda.”

I make this excuse: I was desperate.

Backstage at Concussed it was like I'd never left. Nobody asked, “Where were you?” They just gave me the crappiest jobs, and I did them. Business as usual.

Well, not exactly as usual. For one thing, Cam mumbled, “Good to see you, kid,” which really floored me. Maybe King had threatened to tear
his
head off too.

Also not as usual because Max had recruited Julius as the new nanny to his drums. I knew from experience what a pressure job that was. When Julius dropped the snare, Max threw the kind of hissy fit that you normally associate with toddlers and Tasmanian devils. For a minute there, I was afraid the drum might be broken. It made a funny rattling sound as it hit the floor. Luckily, though, Max pronounced it okay, which was the only reason Julius was permitted to go on living.

Bernie had made good on his threat to hire a nutritionist for Zach. Her name was Ariadne, and she looked more like a supermodel than a nutritionist—which probably explained how she wowed Bernie at the interview. It obviously wasn't for her skills as a dietician and motivator. Zach was presently working on a cinnamon bun the size of a curling stone, and she wasn't even looking in his direction.

Another unfamiliar face backstage—a lawyer with a ski-jump nose and a paper to serve that nobody would accept from him. We'd been briefed about this. He was a high-profile attorney hired by Neb Nezzer, who had taken out an injunction to stop Purge from performing without him. At least three times I watched the document flutter to the floor off Bernie's chest. According to the manager, even closing your hand on the paper constituted acceptance. And God help whoever did that.

Bernie had a circular black-and-yellow bruise on his left cheek. It had probably faded since I'd put it there four days ago.

He greeted me warily. “Cuz.”

“I'm not your
cuz
,” I told him. “I'm nothing to you.”

“You're less than nothing to me,” he confirmed. “If I had my way, you'd never come near this stage. Not without buying a ticket.”

I glared at him. “Do you even remember my mother?”

He looked exasperated. “You have no idea what it was like to be with Purge in the eighties. Wall-to-wall chicks. You think I remember one any more than the others? We were crazy in those days.”

“Sounds like you've really grown up since then,” I muttered sarcastically.

“What do you want me to say?” he countered. “That she was a princess and I loved her dearly? You know how I am. Some people get into this business for the music or the money, or because they think they can change the world. I was always in it for the women. I never pretended to be anything else.”

Charles Manson could have said the same thing about killing people.

Lethal Injection came crashing to their usual cacophonous ending, and the roar of the crowd gradually petered out into relative quiet.

The moment had arrived for the Lethal Injection roadies and us to strike down the old and put up the new. I'm not sure why, but somehow I knew that I was doing this for the last time. Was it instinct? Or maybe the unusually large number of uniformed police officers in and around the stage area?

Ski-Jump Nose was arguing with one of them, probably the commander, gesturing emphatically with his unserved court document. The cops couldn't do anything until someone accepted that injunction. Fat chance of finding anybody stupid enough to do that.

The lights went down to a buzz of supercharged excitement.

“Lockjaw recording artists—
Purge!
”

It might have been just me, but the sound seemed
bigger
tonight. Max's drums were a barrage, like a battlefield firefight. Zach's bass could be measured on the Richter scale. Pete's guitar roared out of the speaker towers with a ferocity that was almost scary.

And King. Maybe this wasn't the '80s anymore. Maybe rage was hard work now. But tonight he blazed ten feet tall across that stage, hurling fireballs with his vocals.

I drank it in, experiencing “Bomb Mars Now” as if hearing it for the first time. In a way, it
was
the first time, because I'd never really liked it before. I'd learned to appreciate things about it, but I hadn't allowed myself to experience the whole tableau. It was almost precious to me now, not just the music, but the whole thing—the lights, the fans, the night; the cocktail of musicians, instruments, and a hundred thousand watts of power, turning an empty field into a nuclear detonation of sound and fury.

It had taken all summer, but I had finally become a punk Republican, if not the first, then one of a select few.

My eyes wandered backstage where my fellow crew members were monitoring soundboards and mixers, and standing by to attend quickly to blown amps and broken guitar strings.

I blinked in surprise. What was Owen Stevenson doing in the wings? He didn't have a backstage pass for tonight. Instinctively, I looked around for Melinda. But it was just Owen, grooving to the music in the midst of a group of roadies. He saw me, waved, and started to walk over.

It unfolded like a bad pantomime. Owen took three steps before his path was blocked by Ski-Jump Nose. The lawyer held out the injunction to the one person who hadn't been told not to take it.

I yelled, “Owen—don't!” But he didn't have a hope of hearing me over “The Supreme Court Makes Me Barf.”

He reached out and accepted the paper.

And all hell broke loose.

Ski-Jump Nose signaled the cops, and a sea of blue swarmed the stage. The speaker towers fairly exploded with the twanging thwack of a nightstick making contact with Pete's Stratocaster. Zach's bass hit the stage with a deep-throated w
oomph!
Microphones went down in a shriek of feedback.

“Hey!”
Bernie was wading into the melee. “That kid doesn't work for us!
We haven't been served!
”

In the audience, thirty thousand throats were screaming with outrage. A brave and foolhardy few were rushing the stage, where they were met by more nightsticks.

In the midst of the chaos burst Ariadne, Zach's nutritionist. I watched, dumbfounded, as she clicked open a pocketknife and ran out onto the stage.

“No-o-o!!”
I cried in horror, and took off after her. What kind of dietician carried a switchblade? All I could think of was John Lennon being assassinated by a demented fan. What if this crazy woman was trying to get her name in the paper by stabbing King?

Heart thumping, I followed her through the sea of struggling people. She bulldozed her way to Max's kit, and, before I could stop her, she had slit open every drum in the set. I didn't think anything could bring order to that donnybrook. But the sight of a supermodel nutritionist carving up all those drums focused everyone's attention on the back of the stage. Max's demented scream helped.

Ariadne reached into the snare and pulled out a fistful of the most brilliant jewelry I'd ever seen. There were diamond necklaces, strings of pearls, chokers set with sapphires and rubies, and gold chains the thickness of hemp.

The cops took one look at this dragon's hoard of treasure and forgot all about Neb Nezzer and his little injunction.

I was twice as blown away as they were. I mean, had I missed something? A cache of hidden jewels?

What the hell was going on?

Purge was arrested. Not just the band. All of us—the manager, the staff, the roadies. We were interrogated and searched. That's how I came to meet Detective Sergeant Ogrodnick and his rubber glove.

So help me, I didn't even know what a cavity search was. And when the sergeant explained it, I'm not ashamed to admit I burst into tears.

“But why?” I bawled. “What are you looking for? What do you think I have up there? Drugs?”

“Sorry, son. Standard procedure when there's stolen jewelry involved.”

“Stolen jewelry?” But of course that's what they'd think when a zillion dollars' worth of gems comes out of a snare drum. For all they knew, Purge was a front for a roving band of cat burglars, using Concussed as a cover.