“Forty bucks for parking,” he muttered. “If I can find a spot on the street the next thousand times I come to the city, I’ll save enough money to pay your tuition.”
“You don’t have to do this,” I urged gently.
“The hell I don’t.”
We went upstairs to the suite, which was, if anything, even more chaotic than before. The Stem Cells had arrived, and were prancing and mugging for a gaggle of photographers. Guitarist Pete Vukovich was shirtless, showing off a brand new diamond stud in his pierced nipple. I thought Dad was going to throw up.
“Come on,” I chided. “To each his own.”
But the piercing wasn’t what offended Dad’s sensibilities. “Poser,” he scoffed. “When did you ever see Johnny Rotten with a two-carat rock in his boob?”
I pulled up short. “You know about this kind of music?”
“In high school we used to take the train into the city to go to CBGB. Everybody was there—the Ramones, Patti Smith, Television, the Dead Boys—”
“Purge?”
“They came later,” he told me. “I’m talking about the early days, when punk was just starting out.”
Could it be that Dad was more comfortable in this scene than I was?
Everybody was ignoring us. Worse, we seemed to be in the way. Photographers kept backing into us. Dad knocked over a TV crew’s lighting rig, which nearly brained one of the Hatchlings.
Finally, he marched up to a small desk and barked, “Is King Maggot available?”
A young man with a reverse Mohawk—bushy hair on the sides and a bald stripe shaved down the middle—surveyed him up and down. “And you are?”
“His son’s father.”
Reverse Mohawk never even questioned it. “King’s in with Rolling Stone right now,” he told us. “You’ll have to chill.”
We chilled on the edge of a leather ottoman, sharing space with a stray amplifier. As regular business hours drew on into evening, new people continued to arrive, rougher around the edges, if such a thing was possible. A room service cart packed with champagne bottles was wheeled into the suite. Someone cranked up the music—all I could make out was the refrain, which sounded like “kill the poor.”
“Dead Kennedys,” Dad supplied. “Early eighties.”
The business office was transforming into a party. Women, dressed to shock, were trawling for rock stars. Pete Vukovich was the catch of the day. “Shove over, yo,” he mumbled to us, joined at the lips to his hoochie. As they squeezed in beside us, she climbed onto his lap for space conservation and possibly other reasons.
“Let’s get out of here,” I hissed at Dad.
His expression would not have been out of place on the stone heads of Easter Island.
A hot buffet showed up on another room service cart, along with more champagne. I checked my watch. It was coming up on eight o’clock! Where was King?
And then a familiar earlobe appeared out of the throng, attached to the body of my bio-dad. Bernie was with him, steering the punk icon through the maelstrom of worshipful high fives that swirled around them. The cousins McMurphy looked tired and anxious to leave. But Bernie stopped when he spotted me on the edge of the ottoman.
“Hey, Cuz—have you been here all this time?”
It had to be the most awkward moment in history. “King, Bernie”—my voice sounded unnaturally high—“this is my father. I mean—”
Dad spoke up. “I need to talk to you, Maggot or McMurphy, or whatever your name is. You’ve only been a father for a few hours; I’ve been at it for seventeen years, so let me give you a little friendly advice: if you’re going to let your kid go gallivanting across the country with a man like you, you’d better make sure he’s not going to be exposed to anything sick.” He tossed a thumb in the direction of Pete and his girl, who were approaching the “get-a-room” stage.
I waited for King to sic the goon squad on us. But the rock star didn’t call for his army of roadies. He didn’t even seem to be offended. He looked like he was thinking it over.
Finally, he said, “What do you suggest?”
Dad, who had been anticipating a punch in the nose—and maybe even hoping for it so he’d have an excuse to pound King Maggot—was caught off guard. “Huh?”
“For Leo,” King elaborated. “What special arrangements should we make for him?”
This left Dad hemming and hawing. That Purge’s notorious front man might ask for a laundry list of demands was the last thing he’d prepared for. “Well, uh, he’s not a baby. But he’s not—you know—one of you.”
“Fair enough.” King stuck out his hand, and Dad shook it—an image still scorched on my retinas.
With that, King and Bernie were out the door and gone. Dad was shell-shocked. Maybe he was going over the conversation in his mind, searching for the place where he’d missed his chance to make a big stink. At any moment, he might burst out with “And furthermore…!” only to find himself talking to the back of somebody’s head.
But he just said, “What the hell are we going to tell your mother?”
[11]
OUR HOUSE LOOKED LIKE AN ART GALLERY tilted ninety degrees. Every table, counter, cabinet top, and a good percentage of floor space hosted an elaborate jigsaw puzzle. Images ranging from the Last Supper, to an aerial photograph of Mount Everest, to a scientifically labeled close-up of a tarantula festooned our home. The simple act of moving from room to room became a tightrope walk. Heaven help the poor slob who accidentally stepped on a completed work.
Mom was quiet in her focus, but that peacefulness was deceiving. When my toe accidentally dislodged one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy, Mom threw a book at me, which only served to knock a piece off Michelangelo’s David that I’m sure David would dearly love to have back.
She scrambled to restore the famous sculpture. “Watch it, will you? I’m trying to do a puzzle!”
“You’re not doing a puzzle,” I retorted. “You’re doing fifty puzzles because you won’t face the fact that I’m going on Concussed.”
Dad stuck up for me. “Don’t treat this like it isn’t real, Donna. Leo will be eighteen soon. We can’t hold him back forever.”
“I hope you told that degenerate we’re holding him responsible for anything that happens on that traveling freak show!” She seethed at Dad.
“No worries,” Dad assured her. “I set Maggot straight.”
I didn’t hear anything more from King, but Bernie faxed me directions to a nearby lab where he had scheduled my DNA test. A courier arrived with a packet of information about Concussed—festival venues, hotels, and maps.
I was with the band.
tor•ture, n: 1) The infliction of severe physical pain as a means of punishment or coercion.
2) Having to march up on the graduation stage and shake Mr. Borman’s hand (see Caraway, Leo).
“Leo’s hard work over the past four years has brought him numerous honors, including early acceptance to Harvard,” the assistant principal announced to polite applause as I accepted my diploma.
It made my blood boil. I mean, Borman knew exactly what had happened to my scholarship, and that, as things stood, Harvard was a pipe dream for me. And he had the nerve to take credit for my academic success while at the same time rubbing it in that I wouldn’t get to go.
I was angry, but McMurphy wanted him dead. Just because I was going on tour with Purge didn’t mean my genetic hitchhiker was under control. Now that he was not just my father, but also my employer, Project X was more important than ever.
I bottled up McMurphy and marched off the stage into the high-fiving mass of seniors. That was where I found myself nose to nose ring with Melinda. We hadn’t spoken since the Concussed press conference.
“Congratulations, Leo,” she mumbled.
“You, too. And you,” I added to Owen, who had materialized over her shoulder. During the ceremony, Mr. Borman had gone on and on about Owen’s gifted status in a fatherly I-taught-him-everything-he-knows tone.
As if Borman hadn’t ruined my life in his attempt to ruin Owen’s. Was our A.P. a class act or what?
Melinda wouldn’t look me in the eye. “So did you ever get in touch with him?”
I didn’t have to ask who she was talking about. “I met him. He’s pretty nice.”
This prompted a little gasp from her. “And?”
“We think it’s probably true. Him being my father. I have the McMurphy ear.” I flipped up my notched lobe. “We’re doing DNA, just to be sure.”
I waited for her to demand every detail of my conversation with the burning bush. Instead, she turned away. Funny—my history with Melinda was pre-preschool. We’d started with precious little in common, and seemed to have less every year. But even as she grew into a goth, and I grew into a Republican, we always got along. Who knew that the one thing that would come between us would be the one thing we actually shared?
King Maggot was her idol. You’d think that me being his flesh and blood would be good in her eyes. But she seemed to resent it, like I’d snuck up and stolen him from her.
The only normal comment came from, of all people, Owen. “That’s really cool, Leo, finding your roots like that.” Then he spoiled it by adding, “Your mom must have been totally hot before she got middle-aged.”
“You have a nice summer too,” I managed.
I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
[12]
WHEN ST. GEORGE SET OUT TO FIGHT the dragon, knowing he had an excellent chance of coming home a charcoal briquette, his mother probably created less of a scene than mine did at Kennedy Airport. She would have happily shipped me off to a dozen fire-breathing beasts rather than one King Maggot. In her eyes, I was going off to join the Klingons. I would come back grunting and scratching myself—if I came back at all.
She held it together all the way to security. Then, just as my laptop was heading through the X-ray, she blurted, “I’m sorry, Leo!”
I froze, my front leg partway through the metal detector. “For what?”
“I’m sorry I planted a stranger inside you, who you feel you have to get to know in order to know yourself!” she raved. “I’m not a bad person! I made one mistake a long time ago, and how can I regret it if that’s what brought me you?” After years of stony silence and three-word answers, after enough jigsaw puzzles to fill Toys “R” Us, my mother was finally ready to share her feelings about how I had come into the world.
Oh, how I wished for a jigsaw puzzle of my own right then. It was all I could do to stammer, “Please don’t worry about me, Mom,” as I stepped through to the other side.
Even Dad looked a little rocky as the TSA agent was measuring my toenail clippers. “You can still change your mind, Leo. You don’t have to do this just because you said you would.”
“I’m fine,” I promised. There was more I wanted to say, about how he was always going to be my one and only dad, no matter what happened. But we were holding up the line, and the clippers passed inspection. It was time to go.
It would be the last I saw of my parents before the cavity search. If I’d known then what I know now, I’d have been babbling just as compulsively as my mother.
The omens were bad from the outset. My tray table wouldn’t come down. They ran out of Coke so I had to have diet. And somewhere over the Grand Canyon, an indicator light came on, signifying either catastrophic engine failure or a faulty indicator light.
We landed in Las Vegas, and sat there for about three hours. That’s how long it took them to decide that, whatever the problem was, they couldn’t fix it.
There were no more planes available, so they stuck us on a bus. Five and a half mortal hours later, we pulled into LAX. If anybody had come to meet me, they sure weren’t there now. The L.A. show had already started.
Concussed was an all-day outdoor festival that kicked off around noon and went on until midnight or later. As the headliner, Purge didn’t appear until last, so the band wouldn’t even head over to the venue until later in the evening. But the roadies had to be there early, getting the equipment in place for when Lethal Injection was done and it was time to set up for the main event.
It was already after nine. I was late for my first day of work. I unloaded my baggage from the bus’s cargo bay and somehow managed to cram it all into a taxi. According to Bernie’s faxes, the venue was an old, out-of-use racetrack in the San Fernando Valley.
The taxi driver was ecstatic. I found out why. It was a one-hundred-and-fifteen-dollar fare. I wanted to argue with the guy, but even outside the gates, the roar of raw punk was so loud that he wouldn’t have heard a word I said. I paid up.
The cab drove away, leaving me grunting under two big suitcases and a backpack. The place would have qualified as the middle of nowhere, except for the presence of forty thousand head-banging fans, whipped up to fever pitch. The stage looked like it was in the next county. But the noise was up close and personal—two giant walls of speakers, blasting enough decibelage to move the San Andreas fault.
My eyes fell on a huge guy wearing an EVENT STAFF jacket. He wasn’t a punk. He looked more like a Hells Angel. I pushed my way over and showed him my CREW badge. He glanced at it and waved me forward in the general direction of the eighty acres of surging, screaming humanity.
A hand clamped on to my shoulder. “Leo!” I only heard the voice because it was bellowing in my ear. A semi-familiar face—Cam Somebody. One of Purge’s roadies, part of the team that had put me in the garbage, but a very welcome sight right now. “What happened, man? You stood us up!”
“There was a problem with the plane! I was stuck in Vegas—” I broke it off. What was the point of trying to explain it? “Where is everybody? Where am I supposed to go?”
He pointed at the distant spotlit stage and grinned. “These people are going to love you, man! Some of them have been camped out since last night to get a place up close!”
He could have helped me. He could have taken at least one suitcase on the thousand-mile journey to the front. But he didn’t offer, and I sure wasn’t going to ask. It’s hard enough to win the respect of your coworkers as the new kid. And when they’ve already picked you up and heaved you into a New York City alley, you’re not starting with much cred.
So I hefted my stuff and waded into the mob. If Woodstock had been about ’60s peace and love, Concussed was about 21st-century do-it-to-him-before-he-does-it-to-you. I paid dearly for every inch of progress I made. Some of it was unintentional. A guy with mucho luggage makes a pretty big speed bump in the middle of all that slam dancing. Yet I was grateful for the suitcases. They took the majority of the blows that came my way.
Closer to the stage, the crush tightened up, and my progress stalled. People were packed in belly to belly, bouncing vertically, because there was no horizontal. The net effect of hundreds of tons of bodies leaping up and down in perfect unison was more like a force of nature than anything man-made.
I was stuck. Literally. There was no going forward, no going sideways, and no going back. If this had been Pompeii—a volcano preserving us in lava for all time—archaeologists would have driven themselves insane trying to figure what some tourist was doing there with luggage in the middle of a huge public event.
Then, with a spectacular crash that included the demolition of several guitars, Lethal Injection ended their performance. The crowd went berserk, and I was almost sandwiched to death between my suitcases.
To thank us for our warm reception, the band ripped off all their clothes and stood before us, stark naked except for long ski socks covering their privates. Bellowing insults and obscenities, they performed an impromptu conga line before stomping into the wings.
I knew I’d never have a better chance than this. I held my bags in front of me like a plow blade and began bulling my way forward. The fans shoved back and cursed me out, but at least I was making headway. I veered diagonally toward the side of the stage and arrived, more or less intact, just in time to see Cam roll up in a golf cart. He had driven
outside the fence along a cinder track that ringed the festival grounds.
I was livid. “How come you made me fight my way through that crazy crowd?”
He leered. “Hazing, butt-wipe. You’re the new guy. Get used to it.”
There was no point in sulking. It was time for Leo Caraway to report for duty before he got any later. Purge was on next.
Backstage was almost as crowded as out front. Besides Purge, there were eight other bands, their managers, and their crews. They were all done for the day. The openers, the Stem Cells, had finished their set around one-thirty. But they had returned to watch history in the making. Concussed’s full contingent of staff, talent, and crew was there, along with reporters, photographers, and an assortment of VIPs. This next set represented the resurrection of Purge after sixteen years. It was very big stuff.
Still carrying my luggage, I ran around looking for King, and finally came face-to-face with him in the wings.
“I’m sorry!” I panted, out of breath from hauling my worldly possessions through an army of ravening beasts. “The plane broke down and we came from Vegas by bus! I got here as fast as I could—”
He looked at me with such utter ferocity that I was cut to pieces. Then he stalked away without so much as a single word. I’m not ashamed to admit that I almost lost it. What the hell was I doing three thousand miles away from home with this man?
Bernie came rushing up behind me. “Jeez, Leo, don’t talk to him before he goes on! He’ll rip your lungs out without ever knowing he did it!”
I stared at my biological father. He was now standing over by the lighting array, his murderous gaze raking an innocent sandbag with every bit as much rage as he’d just directed at me. It was the trademark King Maggot anger, as much a part of his wardrobe as his black leather jacket and the noose around his neck.
Feeling a little better, I explained to Bernie about my jinxed journey west.
“Don’t sweat it, Cuz,” he said soothingly. “This is earn-while-you-learn time for all of us. Just watch the guys set up onstage, see what plugs where. You’ll get your feet wet soon enough.” He looked at me with a wry smile. “And I guess we should find a place for those suitcases.”