Born to Rock

  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 reason
s. 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.

  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—”