If Rock and Roll Were a Machine (3 page)

Shepard thumbs the red button next to the throttle and the engine dies. “That's how you shut 'er down,” he says.

“I'll be here tomorrow to give you the money,” Bert says. “If I had any money now, I'd give you some to hold it.”

“No need,” Sherpard replies. “Your word's enough.”

“I give you my word, then,” Bert says, and he reaches to shake Shepard's hand.

Bert pulls up in front
of his house, climbs out of the Bug, sets his school folder on the hood, and pulls his new Harley T-shirt over his head. Everybody who buys a bike gets a shirt, Shepard said. Bert bends down and looks at himself in the side mirror. He smooths the collar of his white Lacoste shirt over the black T-shirt. He doesn't feel like himself in tough-guy clothes. He just bought a tough-guy motorcycle, though, so some changes in his image might be due. “This could be a look for me,” Bert says, thinking of Michael Keaton at the end of
Beetlejuice
when his head is shrunk.

Bert walks through the garage to the back door. He can't keep from looking down at his chest where an eagle glares out of yellow eyes and screams with its beak wide,
HARLEY-DAVIDSON, TOO TOUGH TO DIE!

His dad's Acura is sitting next to his mom's Mazda. Bert was hoping his dad would be at a dinner meeting. There won't be any playing them off against each other. But the time for that is over, Bert tells himself. Time to stand up and face them both.

*  *  *

I'll have some shirts printed up, Bert is thinking as he lies on his bed. They'll be pink with a picture of me in
a diaper, a thoughtful expression on my baby face, and above the picture they'll say
ALBERT BOWDEN
, and below,
TOO CHICKENSHIT TO LIVE!

Bert didn't tell his parents during supper. Now
Nightline
is over and he's lying on his bed not paying attention to a
Hill Street Blues
rerun.

For a while during the evening Bert's mind was filled with images of riding the Sportster. He rode along the Spokane River through a cool green tunnel of fir trees. He rode into the school parking lot, the Sportster's exhaust note deep and mellow like a musical motif that accompanies the hero in a movie.

But Bert wants a real image of himself he can admire for a change instead of a fantasy, and it is in pursuit of this that he arises from his bed, walks upstairs, and knocks on his parents' bedroom door.

“Bert?” his mother says.

“Yeah,” Bert says. “I need to talk to you guys.”

“Well, come in,” she says.

Bert sits at the foot of his mother's bed. Her reading lamp is on, but it only illuminates a circle the size of a basketball on her pillow. Bert's father is just a dark shape turning and sitting up against the headboard of his bed a few feet away. “Jesus, Bert,” comes the voice from the dark shape. “We've got to work tomorrow.”

“I bought that Harley-Davidson motorcycle I told you guys about,” Bert says.

The dark shape sits straighter. His mother doesn't move.
“What can we do, Donald?” she finally says.

“You can't do anything,” Bert says. “You don't need to do anything.”

“Of course we can do something,” Donald Bowden says. “You're sixteen years old. You can't enter into a contract without our permission.”

“Jesus, Dad,” Bert says. “That's not the point.” Bert shakes his head. He can see the mixture of disapproval and scorn on his mom's face, but his dad is just a voice and a shape in the dark.

“It doesn't matter how much it cost, Bert,” his mother says. “That money is for college.”

“College is two years away, Mom. If I can get in at all. I don't need money for college right now. I need this motorcycle.”

“Human beings need food, water, protection from the cold,” his father says. “We might have a physical need for affection. But nobody needs a goddamn motorcycle.”

That's right, Bert says to himself. What kind of a human being thinks he needs a motorcycle?

“Where's the bike?” his father asks.

“It's still at the shop.”

“Good,” his father says. “Then you won't have to take it back.”

“Dad, I gave my word.”

“You can take your word back. Taking your word back isn't lying,” Bert's father says. “If you're concerned about integrity, you might give some thought to the fact
that we said you couldn't buy that motorcycle, and you said okay. And you might consider that you live in our house, and that as a matter of integrity you might abide by our rules.

“We've told you, and told you, and told you, Bert,” his father goes on. “It wouldn't matter if you had a million dollars in the bank and a full ride to Stanford, we wouldn't let you buy a motorcycle because they're too dangerous. Motorcycles kill and maim thousands of people every year. It's the ones who survive and lie in hospital beds like veg—”

Bert is up and screaming into the dark. “I don't need a motorcycle wreck to turn me into a vegetable. I'm a vegetable now! I'm a fucking vegetable right now!”

Bert is out the door, down the hall, and halfway across the kitchen. He takes a half-dozen deep breaths as he stands at the sink looking out the window into the dark. He listens for his father's footsteps. He drinks a glass of water. He's sure his mother will come out. He drinks another glass of water. The house is silent except for water dripping into the drain. Neither his mother nor his father comes after him. Bert can't think of a thing to do but go back to his room.

Bert walks around three sides of his bed and back, around and back. He hates it that he's not going to buy the Sportster. He hates it that he's going to break his word. And he hates it most that he doesn't have the guts to do what he wants to do.

Maybe this is the worst thing that ever happened to him. He needs to start writing that essay. But he needs to apologize to his folks first.

A milestone, Bert thinks as he walks upstairs, I said “fuck” in front of my mom and dad.

Bert hears voices behind the door, so he hesitates before knocking. He puts his hear to the door to hear his father's words.

“Bert was such a bright kid when he was younger,” Donald Bowden is saying. “I don't know what happened. It seems like he gets dimmer every year. I don't know if there's anything in there anymore. He's just become this zero. A nothing.”

Bert turns and walks quietly down the hall, through the kitchen and downstairs. He pulls his green-and-gold Thompson High athletic bag from his closet shelf and tosses it on his bed. He takes his savings book from the drawer of his nightstand, removes the seventy-one dollars from between the pages, puts the cash in his wallet, then throws the wallet and savings book in the bag. He tosses in some clothes, then walks to the bathroom and grabs his toothbrush and toothpaste. He steps into his Reeboks, pulls on the Harley T-shirt, and looks around the room. He sees his school folder on the desk and grabs it along with two pens. This is all he needs for tonight. He can come back tomorrow before his folks get home from work. He turns off the light and heads upstairs once more.

Bert leaves a note on the fridge telling his parents not to worry, that he's spending the night in a motel, then he'll find a room to rent. He tells them they're right, he should abide by their rules if he's going to live in their house. But this is a rule he can't abide, so he's moving out. He says he'll be careful on his motorcycle.

Bert feels an unexpected sense
of adventure as he pushes the Bug to the end of the block. He's pushed the sixteen-year-old car plenty of times, but it's never pushed this easily. Bert is energized. He feels like he could stay up all night, and he's going to have to if he wants to finish his English essay. Which he will do.

Bert gives a final push and lets the Bug roll through the intersection and down the gentle slope of the Susan B. Anthony Elementary School parking lot. He follows, looking up at the stars.

God, what a beautiful night. The air is cool, like water on his face and neck and arms. Bert is scared, but that's okay. He should be a little scared if he's going to face this.

He walks through the lot and across the grass and sits on one of the swings. These are the swings he swung on all through his childhood. This is where he started school. He remembers his first day of kindergarten like it was yesterday. He can hear the teacher call out the names: Steven Thonski, Janice Fluman, Jeannie Knutsen, Kyle Retger, Pat Sweat. He can see their faces. He was scared of all the boys.

“Everything changes,” Bert says aloud in the dark. The creaking of the chains and the wind whistling softly
in his ears as he pumps high are the only sounds.

Everything changes, he says to himself again. And I can change too. If I changed once for the worse, I can change again for the better. I can be somebody different from who I am now.

Bert thinks of the days when he fit comfortably on the seat of this little-kids' swing. He loved school then. There were always other kids to play with, always something new to learn, assignments he could take home and do with ease and find a star or a bird sticker on when the teacher returned them. It seemed like Bert knew the answer to every question the teachers asked then. He thought he knew all the answers, anyway, and he sure tried to answer all the questions. Until fifth grade, that is. That's when things began to go bad.

And now, at one o'clock in the morning as he swings on the little-kids' swings, Bert realizes the worst thing that ever happened to him. He digs his heels into the dirt to stop himself. He walks fast across the playground, climbs into the Bug, fires it up, and heads to town to find a motel. He's got an essay to write.

The motel clock-radio erupts in
Rolling Stones at the same time the wake-up call buzzes. The exact same time, Bert thinks. It's amazing! It's a sign!

The Stones are suffering mixed emotions at high volume. Bert Bowden, however, is possessed of singular conviction as he sits on the edge of the bed and speaks aloud. “I consider this roughly akin to the Holy Virgin appearing in cloud formations over the state of Wisconsin. What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is a miracle. This,” he says as he shuffles toward the shower like Beetlejuice heading for the whorehouse, “is the way to begin a day.”

When Bert reaches the bathroom door, he turns and faces the room, bends his knees, thrusts out his crotch, and grabs himself in what strikes him as an appropriate gesture of masculine affirmation. “Honk! Honk!” he says to the empty room, to the day, to this new life he is beginning.

*  *  *

Bert's high spirits evaporate at roughly the same time his cup of complimentary motel coffee is empty. Bert is not used to drinking coffee. As he waits at the light watching the kids in the mall parking lot sitting on the fenders of their cars talking, laughing, listening to music, he is sure
he feels the corrosive liquid working its way through his stomach. Not the way stuff is supposed to go through a stomach, but eating through the lining, bubbling back out the top, spilling like toxic waste through a flawed container.

And Bert is indeed a flawed container this morning. He's not used to drinking coffee and he's not used to functioning on three hours' sleep. The light goes green and the motorheads behind him are on their horns in a millisecond. Bert's stomach makes sounds like a volcanic mud pot as he accelerates through the light. By the time he has covered the last mile, ridden the roller coaster of speed bumps into the school lot, and slipped the Bug between two yellow lines, a band of pain has emerged inside his head and is trying to expand its way through his skull at the equator of his eyes.

Bert breathes through his mouth as he walks by the office. There's a good chance he'll throw up. The fulmination in his stomach is producing gas bubbles the size of carp. Some rise to the surface, and others dive to the depths. Maybe if he allows a little one—just a little minnow-sized one—out the lower pipe, he'll feel better. He's passing the trophy cases, his head bent, his eyes open just enough so he can see a few inches beyond the toes of his Reeboks, when he lets one go.

Most of Bert's sensory awareness is concentrated in his head where the pain is, but there's enough feeling left below to alert him to emergency conditions there as well. That is not gas escaping down here, the nerve fibers on the backs of Bert's
legs tell him. If this were once vapor, it has now condensed into something more substantial.

You have shit yourself, Dude. And in the main hall at school. How's that for the way to begin a day? How's that for a new life?

Bert stops to lean his forehead against the cool glass of the trophy case and sees that he has come undone in the most ironic of locations: in front of the epitome of self-discipline, the late Louden Swain, Thompson High's Olympic wrestler, Spokane's famous astronaut.

Bert steps back and looks into the photo. The crew, in full gear, stands in front of the space shuttle. Swain is smiling like a little kid, like he can't wait to get up there on top of that rocket and have somebody light the fuse. Bert reads, as he has read many times, the lines in memoriam:

Major Louden Swain, USAF, Thompson High Class of 1972. Born December 2, 1954, Spokane, Washington; died January 22, 1985, on his way to space.

Usually Bert reads in these lines the message that heroism is possible. But this morning the message is this: Some people are something and some people are nothing. And you, Bert Bowden, are among the nothings.

At least I can keep my word, Bert thinks on his way to the bathroom. I can do that, at least. He continues to tell himself this on his way to Tanneran's room.

But Tanneran isn't there, and he isn't in the journalism room next door.
A girl looks up from a keyboard and says The Big T is in the darkroom.