Wheels of Steel, Book 1

“No I got some good shit I want to try out.”

  “Cool.” They were a loosely organized group. They sold mix tapes and made decent money on it, nothing to get rich over. But now that everyone had heard the More Love Mix they were more popular than ever. Yet Wheels of Steel wasn’t just Jason and Link just because they were the two that made the actual music. It was an equal endeavor between the four of them, as the videos certainly added to the entire effect. It would make Jason feel very odd if Link played any of their music and Amberly and Patty weren’t around.

  Link pulled the van up to the curb and blew his horn while Jason undid his seatbelt. The side door opened and the lift gently maneuvered him down to the ground. After a moment Link moved out of his seat and using nothing more than his upper body strength, he maneuvered himself into his wheelchair behind the driver’s seat. Then the side door opened and he was maneuvered out of the van with the use of a second lift.

  Two guys hurried out of the frat house. The party could be heard clearly from the street. Several other people spilled out of the large house holding plastic cups of liquor, including two very drunk women.

  “Link!” One of the girl’s screeched. Jason didn’t particularly care for drunk girls. They were either curious or cruel. He speculated that there was something about a man in a wheelchair that made drunk women curious about the function of his penis. He’d gotten felt up more times that way, but they always stopped short of allowing him to actually do them. Therefore, he’d had lots of sexual contact but was still a virgin.

  He pressed the button to send the lift back up and then he slammed the door shut. The two guys were already at the back of the van unloading the equipment while Link supervised and ‘greeted’ the drunken woman.

  While Link’s lips made their acquaintance with the pretty blonde, the pretty brunette pointed at Jason. “Top? You gotta be Top with that red hair!” She came over and quickly hugged Jason, stumbling and spilling some of the beer on him. He jumped as the cold fluid slushed down the back of his neck.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!” She exclaimed and then laughed. For some reason she began trying to sit on Jason’s lap and he grimaced when he realized that she wanted a ride on his chair.

  His back stiffened and he quickly wheeled away from her and up the ramp to the house. Link was following behind him. The blonde was in his lap…ahh so that’s where she had gotten the idea. But how he managed to wheel the both of them with his tongue half buried down her throat was beyond him. The drunken brunette positioned herself to sit on his lap too, and the blonde made room for her friend.

  Once inside Jason saw that, just as he had feared, the house was crowded with drunken bodies and because of this, not very wheelchair friendly. He followed the ‘roadie crew’ into a large dining room that was empty of the big dining table and chairs. A staging area had been set up; just two long tables pushed together and the crates of music and equipment were placed carefully there. Not many people had gathered in this particular room as all of the booze and food was elsewhere, so Jason didn’t fear running over drunken people’s toes.

  “I want a ride!” Another girl cried out when she saw that Link had set himself up as an impromptu shuttle. She ran over to Jason who stopped her with a withering look. Most might not always be able to understand his words but the look he gave held no mystery. The girl pouted but wisely chose to turn her attentions elsewhere.

  With nothing better to do, he wheeled behind the table and began hooking up the equipment. Link joined him after a few minutes, sans his entourage. Suddenly several people began chanting ‘Wheels of Steel!’ Jason and Link exchanged looks. He was grinning, Jason wasn’t. This wasn’t Wheels of Steel. He quickly moved back away from the stage area and Link began spinning a few practice beats. People began crowding into the room chanting WHEELS OF STEEL! WHEELS OF STEEL! Jason was amazed as he looked around.

  He knew how to mix beats but that didn’t mean that he had ever gone out in public to DJ. His gauge to popularity was YouTube and the few people that approached him at school as Top. So what was happening tonight at Omicron house was on a totally new level!

  Link began playing a drum beat that Jason knew was James Brown’s Funky Drummer but chopped and screwed. And once he had people moving to the beat he threw in some rhythm. He kept building on it until he finally moved to the turntable and began mixing in a techno record.

  Jason’s eyes were glued to his friend’s fingers as they deftly moved along the vinyl. He had taught Link to do this and he was as proud as a Papa despite the fact that Link was the older of the two. But still…watching his friend’s hands move in a way that his never would, made him feel cheated. For the most part he accepted his CP. It was just times like this, when his mind could do what his body would not allow, that he felt like a prisoner within himself.

  They were going crazy as more and more people tried to squeeze into the room. Even he was dancing in his seat; head thrashing as his unruly red hair fell across his face. He saw a girl watching him. She was holding a cup and seemed more interested in him than in the music. When he met her eyes she quickly looked away. He continued with his head bangers dance and then felt something move his chair forward an inch. He looked behind him and saw a guy and a girl talking. The guy was leaning against the back of his chair as he tried talking his way into the girl’s pants.

  Jason tried not to become annoyed by it. People didn’t always understand that leaning against his wheelchair was like leaning against him. The wheelchair was an extension of him. He fought to ignore it but soon both the guy and the girl were leaning against it! Jason would have wheeled forward but there was absolutely no place to go since the crowd had thickened. So Jason decided to just roll backward.

  “Fuck! Dude, watch it!” The guy yelped when his foot was crushed beneath the wheels of the chair. But he and the girl backed up. Jason smiled to himself and from the corner of his eyes he saw the pretty girl watching him with open curiosity and a hint of a smile on her lips. He continued to dance and wondered if she was drunk enough to approach him.

  Link went nonstop for an hour and then he let a techno song play out as he wheeled back onto the floor. People crowded around him; high fiving him and telling him how good he sounded. The two friends were finally able to slap hands.

  “Top!” He yelled over the noise of the crowd and music. “I want you up there man! You need to play one of your mixes.” Jason didn’t know what to say. He’d never DJ’d at a house party before. And besides, he wasn’t sure if he wanted to do that. It was too close to what he’d thought earlier; Wheels of Steel performing without Amberly and Patty. Somehow it didn’t seem right.

  But the contagious music and watching his friend doing something that he himself loved was overwhelming. Jason wheeled behind the table where the equipment was set up and studied the crates containing albums. Link had picked some good ones.

  And he suddenly knew what he wanted to do. He hadn’t even shown it to Link yet so it wasn’t Wheels of Steel, just his own creation. He grabbed Portishead’s Only You vinyl and set it up on the deck. Then he put on headphones and made a flip, just cutting a portion out of the song using the mixer. No one could hear what he was doing but with the flip he could scratch on the FL mixer instead of using the turntables.

  When Link’s song ended, Portishead began. The familiar sultry yet hip beat caused the partygoers to change tempos. And then Jason used the controls on the mixer to scratch a beat that complimented the song. Now that he was doing something that he loved, he almost forgot the crowd. It wasn’t until they began applauding at each of his scratches that he remembered that he was doing this for them. He continued; slowing down, speeding up, moving backwards until it was like he was doing acrobats on the system!

  Before he knew it, Link had joined him. He placed a record on the second turntable and an ambient/electronic beat could be heard. Jason continued doing his thing with Portishead and Link began mixing in his electronic beat while the crowd chanted ‘WHEEL
S OF STEEL!’ Over and over. It was so perfect that Jason felt himself becoming the music. It sometimes happened when everything came together just perfectly. His body knew what to do, his ears counted the beats, his fingers found the right breaks, his mind soared ahead to put everything in its proper order. And Link was right along with him, bobbing his head and spinning, and looping and mixing.

  They played together for nearly an hour and then he felt the familiar pull of his limbs and then the light-headedness that told him that he was going to have a seizure.

  ‘Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck’, he thought. Carefully he backed away from the table and gave Link a warning look. Link’s brow rose in a question, then he got it when Jason’s eyes began blinking rapidly. He knew what was up and he kept one eye on the younger man and one eye on the records that he was spinning.

  A seizure was not something that he relished having in front of fifty people and yet he had them so often that he had no choice but to accept the inevitable; whether he liked it or not, he was going to have a seizure with all eyes on him.

  Jason allowed his head to fall back and he gripped the wheels of his chair. Don’t fight it…He said this to himself. It would be less violent if he just rode along with it. He knew Link was watching him in case he fell forward but hopefully that wouldn’t happen this time. He’d had a seizure in the van once and had slammed his head onto the dashboard before he’d gotten himself buckled in. His nose had bled profusely from a gash. He thought he’d broken it but it was just cut pretty good. If he fell forward he would destroy Link’s Fruity Loops Studio.

  His heart suddenly began to race and Jason’s muscles quickly seized. His hands gripped the wheels and his legs thrust outward. His head strained back and he looked like a man that was receiving an electrical shock. His body stretched outward, as if searching for a way to extend itself beyond its packaging of skin, and bones.

  Every muscle in his body was taut, including his penis. He froze there for a moment, all stretched lines and tight muscles and just as suddenly as it began, his body collapsed, relaxing back in the chair. Next came the muscles jerks; the tapping of his feet, his fingers. Sometimes he kicked or thrashed but if he allowed the seizure to work its way out of him then that did not always happen. Soon his body quieted. Link’s music continued, the crowd’s appreciation for it continued as Jason laid semi conscious in his chair. When his green eyes opened once again he found that he wore a broad smile on his face and was chuckling.

  That was something that happened at times; he would regain consciousness to find himself chuckling. He’d never heard of anyone else doing that and he’d looked it up on the internet. Maybe self-consciously he realized the ridiculousness of how he must look to everyone around him. Or perhaps he was just amused by it all. Whatever the case, when he sat there in his chair chuckling to himself, still half sprawled he heard a girl yell.

  “You big faker! You were faking all this time!” And then all of the drunk people in the room got it in their heads that his seizure had been a part of the show. They began applauding him! He sat up, glancing at Link who shook his head wearing a shit-eating grin on his own face.

  “Nice.” He mouthed.

  “’least I didn’t kick over your equipment.” His muscles were quiet now. He reached up and pushed his hair behind his ears. Even his voice was barely slurred. His tongue seemed to have caught up with the commands he gave his mouth.

  “If you had, it would have been YOUR equipment.” Link quickly lowered the volume and began yelling into the mike. “WHEELS OF STEEL EVERYBODY! I’M LINK, THAT’S TOP AND THEN WE HAVE TRAMPSTAMP AND PEPPERMINT PATTY ON POST PRODUCTION. THANK YOU!”

  Jason had barely wheeled himself from behind the table before the crowd converged on him now, slapping his back and telling him how much they liked the music.

  “Man, you guys are sick! You ought to be mixing for real groups!”

  “Thanks, man. That’s the plan.” He responded, amazed that people had so thoroughly disregarded the seizure. Did they really think he’d faked it?

  He felt gentle hands on his shoulder and looked up. It was the watcher. She smiled at him. “Can you do other things as well as you can DJ?”

  He grinned and then nodded.

  Chapter 9

  After returning Jason to his home, Robin couldn’t get into her car fast enough and drive away from the bad experience. She was still so upset about the seizure that she was actually trembling. She didn’t know why it bothered her so much, but she couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  She couldn’t do this. She just couldn’t. Robin drove straight to Pinnacle even though she was dog tired and needed a nap before work. The receptionist greeted her.

  “Is Ben in?”

  “Ben won’t be in for several more hours, but Aaron is here.” Aaron was the other manager.

  “Well I need to speak to him. Will you tell him that Robin Mathena is here?”

  “Oh Robin, I made an appointment for you to take a course in seizure emergencies. I know you work two jobs so I set it up for Saturday afternoon.”

  She grimaced. Saturday was the only day she had for herself; which didn’t necessarily mean relaxing. It was the only day she had to clean her apartment, shop, run errands as well as anything else that needed taking care of. Even Sunday was partially her mother’s day because of church and their lunch date.

  She was shaking her head at the woman and anxiously rubbing her hair where it was still confined into its tight ponytail. “I just need to talk to the manager.” The woman who Robin presumed was the same woman that Jason had spoken to earlier got up and knocked on the office door before letting herself in. She was in there for a few moments, probably explaining that the jig was up and they’d have to find a new patsy.

  “Come on in Robin.” The woman ushered her into the office. A man in his fifties with dyed black hair and goatee so stark that he looked like the devil, quickly rose from his chair and offered his hand. She noticed right away that he had a spray on tan from a can in the way that orange pigment gathered around his fingernails. She averted her eyes in embarrassment for him.

  “Hello Robin. I’m Aaron Seiberling. We haven’t met yet. Have a seat, please.” He was polite in a rushed manner—the same way that Ben had been. She guessed hustlers had to be fast talkers.

  “Mr. Seiberling-”

  “Call me Aaron.”

  “Aaron…this job I’m on is not going to work for me.” His eyes got momentarily big. She figured that would probably be the most honest expression she’d get from the man. He plastered on a concerned look.

  “Ok…is there something that I can do?”

  “Honestly…I’m not prepared to care for…someone like him.”

  “Ok.” He plastered on a concerned yet confused look. “What do you mean?”

  “He has seizures, he needs me to stay with him while he’s at school…” She wanted to say that he was rude and crude and that she just didn’t want to work with him, instead she took another tactic. “Besides, I’ve been working two jobs for several months. I think I’ll take a break while Miss Lucille is in the hospital and then start back again.”

  Aaron began digging through some papers on his desk. “Miss Lucille Babbs…” He was reading something. “…won’t be a client of Pinnacle any longer.”

  Robin felt her chest constrict. “What? Why? I-is she okay?”

  “Her son is moving her to a nursing home when she’s released.” Her mouth stayed ajar. “Robin, we don’t want to lose you at Pinnacle. You’re a great asset, always on time, no complaints from the clients. The thing is, there is no other job that I can give you right now. If you’re not working with Mr. Hamilton then we actually don’t need you right now. If you can hang in there with your current client for a while longer I can offer you the next job. How does that sound?”

  Robin couldn’t find words to respond. She wasn’t ready to stop being with Miss Lucille.

  Working with the older woman had become so much of her daily routine
that the prospect of never enjoying her company again saddened her. Robin knew that the few extras that she did for the woman had made her dreary existence livable. The evidence was in her perky greeting each morning and their long conversations that now took the place of her pre-taped evangelist shows.