Born to Rock

  Fleming didn’t answer my question. “It’s this cheating thing. You said you’d straighten it out, and—well, you never did.”

  “You’ve got me there, pal,” I said with false cheeriness. “I guess I’ll have to suffer through these last few days as an enlisted man.”

  “And you can’t put the club on your resume,” he told me. “Or use it in later life.”

  I had to laugh. “There is no high school in later life, Fleming. Once we step out that door on Friday, the whole four years never happened.”

  I acted like I didn’t care, but the truth was it bothered me. Not that Fleming had ever been my role model. But next year he’d be an Ivy League freshman with a beautiful girlfriend and infinite prospects, and I’d be—

  God, what would I be? Depressed, maybe. Humiliated, probably.

  A total loser, definitely.

  Mercifully, the call-waiting beeped in. “Sorry, Flem—gotta take this.” I hit flash. “Hello?”

  “Leo Caraway, please,” came a voice. English accent. All business.

  “My name is Nigel Ratcliff. I’m an attorney.” He paused. “I represent King Maggot.”

  King did get my letter!

  “You must understand—my client is flabber-gasted. It’s an outrageous claim.”

  “Outrageous but true,” I said.

  “That remains to be seen,” he informed me. “But let us assume for the sake of argument that you are my client’s progeny. What are your intentions?”

  “Intentions?”

  “What, precisely, do you want from Mr. Maggot?”

  Mr. Maggot. I stifled a laugh. Then it occurred to me what the lawyer was getting at: was I a gold digger?

  The answer was—well, yes. I absolutely intended to hit King Maggot up for money. Not the way Ratcliff had in mind—I wasn’t going to sue for millions or demand to be put in King’s will. I just wanted the tuition for next year. Hell, it could even be a loan; between Dad and me, we’d pay it back somehow. I just didn’t want to give up my spot at Harvard.

  But if I mentioned money, Ratcliff would assume the worst. Then the opportunity would be gone forever.

  “I just want to meet him,” I lied. “I’m not a blackmailer or a stalker. I’m a kid who’s looking for a chance to get to know his father.”

  There was pause. Then, “Are you free tomorrow afternoon?”

  “Uh—I guess. But—”

  “The St. Moritz Hotel. Room 1101. Shall we say two o’clock?”

  We must have said two o’clock, because on that note, he hung up on me.

  I put down the handset, mind whirling. What I’d been meaning to tell Ratcliff was I had school tomorrow. On the other hand, what could they do to me for ditching—put a black mark on my record? Kick me out of the Young Republicans?

  School would get along without me.

  I had a meeting with King Maggot’s lawyer.

  The St. Moritz Hotel, New York City.

  The elevator stopped and I exited to the plush hall. A brass plaque declared Room 1101 to be the Presidential Suite. I stepped through the open door and found not a hotel room but a business office. A miniature mansion of connected luxury parlors had been converted into Concussed festival headquarters. At least a dozen publicists chattered excitedly into cell phones. Band members were being interviewed all around the suite. The breathtaking view of Central Park was obstructed by a hanging map of the United States, with festival venues marked with pushpins. A manicurist applied black polish to the fingernails of one of the members of Citizen Rot, while a stylist dabbed at his Mohawk with blue dye.

  A roadie was stringing an electric bass with barbed wire, next to a woman who had passed out in the middle of the floor. People stepped over and around her. Others used her as a bulletin board. Her bare back and leather mini were covered in multicolored Post-it notes.

  I stood in the doorway, waiting to be noticed, when a roadie appeared, bellowed, “Fan mail!” and upended a large canvas sack. An assortment of letters fluttered down, followed by a dead octopus that hit the floor with a splat. A note attached to one of the tentacles bore greetings from the staff at Lockjaw Records. Apparently, this was the punk equivalent of a bouquet of flowers and a good-luck card.

  After ten minutes of being ignored, I approached a publicist. “I’m looking for Nigel Ratcliff.”

  “Anybody seen Nigel?” she barked.

  “He left,” supplied a middle-aged man standing in the hall.

  I was devastated. “But I’m supposed to meet him here. At two o’clock.”

  “Sorry, kid.” The publicist hurried away, but the man’s wary eyes were still on me.

  “Mr. Ratcliff wanted to talk about my letter,” I forged on. “You know, the letter—” I wasn’t sure how much I should say out loud.

  He pushed his way over. “So you’re that kid.” He put an arm around my shoulders and led me into the suite. “I didn’t recognize you without a half-ton of gristle clamped on.”

  “You were at the press conference?” I asked, a little sheepishly.

  He nodded. “I’m Purge’s manager. Bernie McMurphy.”

  I snapped to attention. “McMurphy—”

  “King and I are cousins,” he supplied, ushering me from the main parlor into a narrow hallway with rooms on either side. “So my interest is personal and professional.”

  I regarded him. There was no resemblance to King that I could see. Then again, King was clinging to his ’80s punk look, and Bernie could have been the one-hour-photo guy at a small-town Wal-Mart. Except for the eyes. You don’t know bloodshot until you’ve seen those eyes. Like he was in the middle of a lost weekend that had been going on for several months.

  He nodded me into the next doorway. Inside, two people occupied a large leather couch. One was a young reporter, jotting shorthand notes on a ring-bound pad. The other was King Maggot.

  Feeling like an intruder, I took a step backward, and inadvertently crunched Bernie’s toe.

  Spying me, King stood up. “Got enough?” he asked the reporter. It was a statement of fact rather than a question.

  The young man took the hint and followed Bernie out. That left me alone with the biological father who was a complete mystery to me. Talk about confronting your demons. I was face-to-face with McMurphy.

  He examined me so intently that it raised the hair on the back of my neck. This wasn’t the usual homicidal stare of his stage persona. This was scrutiny. I was being scanned.

  I have no idea where I got the nerve—probably from him—but I stared right back. If somebody didn’t say something very soon, I was either going to laugh or cry. I wasn’t sure which.

  At last, he broke the silence. “Tell me about your mother.”

  Not “Hello”; “Good to meet you”; “So you’re Leo.” I mean, I wasn’t expecting him to rhapsodize over what a fine young man someone had raised to be his son, but I’d hoped for a few syllables of pleasantry before we got straight to business. His speaking voice was low and surprisingly mellow.

  “Her name is Donna—Donna Davis, back then. It was at a show in New Haven where you guys—met.”

  From my pocket I pulled a laminated photo of Mom bringing me home from the hospital and held it out to him. He studied it, but made no move to take it.

  At long last, the verdict came down: “I don’t remember her.”

  I could feel my face turning red. “That’s it?”

  He shrugged. “Nothing personal.”

  “It’s personal to me!” I practically yelled at him. “It’s the reason I’m alive! But you don’t remember, so too bad, kid, take a hike.”

  He was surprised. “I’m not sending you away. I’m just telling the truth. I don’t remember. I wish I did.”

  I wasn’t sure exactly how to take that. After all, we were talking about my mother! Technically, I shouldn’t want this old letch to remember anything about his brief encounter with her. On the other hand, it was plain that the act that began my life was completely meaningless an
d forgettable to this rock star. It really burned me up.

  So he was a celebrity. So what? He wasn’t even famous for the right reasons. It wasn’t like he’d developed a vaccine or negotiated world peace. He was a cultural bad boy, worthy of attention only because of his outrageous behavior and his unflagging capacity to offend. Except for hearing-impaired counterculture nut-jobs like Melinda, everybody agreed there was zero value to his so-called music.

  At that moment, I didn’t care about Harvard or my future or even the fact that I was on his turf, and I would probably end up in the garbage again. I was going to introduce my bio-dad to a little piece of himself. It was time for McMurphy to crash this party.

  Just as I opened my mouth to let him have it, Bernie, the manager, poked his head back into the room. “So?” he questioned. “Are we related?”

  “Definitely,” said King without hesitation.

  If he’d hit me with a brick, I couldn’t have been more astounded. Definitely? What did he see in me that made him so positive? Was it my almost display of temper that would have knocked out the back wall of the hotel? As the real McMurphy, was he so attuned to rage that he could recognize it even in its potential?

  “He has the ear,” King told his cousin.

  “The what?”

  He took my hand and raised it to my right ear. “Feel that little notch in the lobe? It runs in the family.”

  He turned his head to the side so I could see the anomaly on him. Bernie picked up a small makeup mirror and held it out to me. I found the right angle and took in the sight of King Maggot’s earlobe hanging off my head.

  I looked at both of Bernie’s ears. No notches.

  He shrugged. “Not all of us have it. It skips the occasional kid. But if you do, you’re a McMurphy.”

  So it was definite. Not that I’d ever doubted it, because why would Mom make up such a horrendous thing? But to be here, standing right beside the guy, seeing what a jumped-up, uncaring jerk he was, and that’s when it gets confirmed—it was the living end. I felt like jumping out the window, but unless I was holding on to King at the time, what would be the point?

  “We’ll do DNA testing too,” he told me. “To sew it up nice and neat for the lawyers.”

  I nodded. Of course he didn’t trust me, or a romantic partner he didn’t remember, or even the evidence of his own family trait. Only indisputable scientific evidence was enough for the great King Maggot. Every minute I spent with him, I liked him a little less. And he hadn’t been very high in my estimation at the start.

  “The final results take four to six weeks,” he went on. “I think we should use that time to get to know each other.”

  My cheeks burned from the sheer hypocrisy of that statement. Purge was about to embark on a coast-to-coast tour. Concussed was scheduled to go to Europe in the fall. Get to know each other? How were we supposed to do that—by carrier pigeon?

  Calm down, I told myself. Meeting King had been a lousy experience—offensive, dehumanizing, and generally unpleasant. Yet the most important part of all this had gone exactly right: the front man of Purge had pretty much admitted that I was his son.

  I may have been out of the Young Republicans, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t be pragmatic and businesslike. There was a purpose to this whole exercise, and it wasn’t for me to share a warm and fuzzy moment with the composer of “Bomb Mars Now.”

  In four to six weeks, the DNA people would confirm that I was one-hundred-percent Prince Maggot. Then and only then would I hit King up for my Harvard tuition money. Coming from his scientifically certified flesh and blood, how could he say no?

  Getting to know this person—it was a small price to pay.

  “I’d like that,” I said carefully. “Maybe when the tour is over, we could—uh—have dinner or something.”

  He shook his head. “It’s already been seventeen years. We can’t waste any more time.”

  “Yeah, but you’ll be on the road with the band. You’re not going to be in—” I frowned at him. “I don’t even know where you live.”

  “I live in Malibu,” he told me, “but I’m not talking about the occasional dinner. Why don’t you spend the summer traveling with me?”

  I was floored. “You mean—”

  “With Purge,” he finished. “On the Concussed tour.”

  It was straight out of left field, something I hadn’t expected in a million years. This total stranger, who didn’t even seem to like me, and must have sensed how I felt about him, was prepared to bring me along on his comeback tour—a thirty-city traveling punk rock festival that would make front-page news in every city it touched.

  How could I say no? Forget that it wasn’t my kind of music—and shouldn’t have been anybody’s kind of music. I wanted a future in the business world; this was big business, the blockbuster entertainment event of the summer. And I’d be a part of it, and see it from the inside.

  King must have interpreted my silence as reluctance, because he sweetened the deal. “Don’t worry about money. I’ll take care of your expenses. And you’ll have a job.” He turned to Bernie. “Have we got something for Leo to do?”

  He knows my name, I thought. It was the first time he’d spoken it aloud.

  “I can always use another pair of hands,” said Bernie. “Junior roadie. You’ll like the guys.”

  “I’ve already met them,” I replied, rubbing my bruised hip.

  King grasped my hand and shook it, and actually smiled at me. In all the CD covers and publicity shots and Internet sites, I’d never seen him smile before. It didn’t fit the image of the Angriest Band in America.

  “Thanks for coming down,” he told me. “I’m really looking forward to this.”

  Then he turned away, and I wasn’t there anymore.

  It took me a moment to come to terms with the fact that, in King’s eyes, I had suddenly ceased to exist. It was Bernie who ushered me back into the main part of the suite, where the Post-it girl had awakened, and various Concussed officials were reclaiming their notes from her body.

  The manager gave me a sympathetic smile. “You get used to King’s style. When you’re the man, you’re like a drug, and everybody wants a toot. He’s not shutting you out. It’s just his way of making sure there’s enough of him to go around.”

  I didn’t reply. I was wondering if that’s how it was with my mother eighteen years ago.

  [10]

  BERNIE WAS RIGHT ABOUT KING BEING like a drug. I must have been on something. How else could I have agreed to join a traveling punk rock festival without even considering what my parents were going to say?

  The thought didn’t occur to me until I was at a pay phone in Grand Central station, calling my dad to let him know what train I’d be on.

  “Brickfield Hardware.”

  “Hi, Dad. I made the four-oh-eight. Can you pick me up around five-thirty?”

  “No problem.”

  “One more thing”—sucking air—“I’m not going to be able to work with you at the store this summer. I—I’ve got another job lined up.”

  “Always the wheeler-dealer, huh, Leo?” he chuckled. “Okay, lay it on me. What’s so important that it’s worth leaving your old man shorthanded? You’re the new president of the Stock Exchange, I suppose.”

  “I’m going to be a roadie for Purge.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. “Be serious.”

  “It’s the truth.” I filled him in on the details of my meeting with Bernie and King.

  “Do you have any idea what goes on with a tour like that?”

  “Do you?” I countered.

  “When Purge comes to town, it’s like a state of emergency! Cities hire extra police, impose curfews—”

  “That was the eighties, Dad. They’re all like you now—regular middle-aged guys. Besides, most of that stuff was probably hype. The media distorts everything.”

  “Can you be sure of that?”

  “Look, it’s all for Harvard, okay? If I had my sch
olarship, none of this would be necessary.”

  “And King Maggot agreed to fork over forty grand?” he persisted. “Just like that?”

  “I haven’t mentioned it yet,” I confessed. “Not until the DNA tests come back. By then I’ll have known the guy for a month, and I won’t seem like a gold digger.”

  I could hear his unspoken response over the dead air: Seem?

  “It’s the only way, Dad. Trust me.”

  He was silent for another moment. Then: “I want to meet him.”

  “There’s no time,” I argued. “Concussed starts in a few days.”

  “If King Maggot wants to take my son on a thirty-city tour, first he’s going to look me in the eye and promise me you’ll be okay.”

  “Yeah, but you’ll never get an appointment. He’s got wall-to-wall interviews.”

  He came to a decision. “I’ll be there in an hour.”

  I was horrified. “Dad—no!”

  “The St. Moritz, right?”

  Click.

  Now I was nervous. I noticed something in Dad’s voice that I hadn’t heard in years. Not since the day he’d decided to give up the commuting life after Mr. Rapaport’s heart attack. When Erik Caraway set himself on a course of action, you couldn’t change his mind with a howitzer. He’d never drive a Harley through a plate glass window, but in his own way, he was just as hell-bent.

  I called back, and got a recording. Dad was already on his way.

  The meeting of my two fathers, regular and biological, was something I would gladly have put off until doomsday. Talk about a clash of opposites. King was a rock star; Dad owned a small-town store. King could pull forty grand out of petty cash; Dad was a regular Joe with regular finances. King had seduced my mother before Dad had even held her hand. Worst of all, it was King’s DNA, not Dad’s, that made up half the sole heir to Brickfield Hardware. Dad knew all that, and had accepted it a long time ago. But to stand next to Marion X. McMurphy—that had to be a bitter pill the size of a U-boat.

  At five o’clock I stood outside the St. Moritz. It was another half hour before Dad emerged from the hotel garage, looking stressed and disgusted.