“G’day, America!” he screamed. “You’ve been awesome!” He jumped high in the air and leapt clear across the garage before landing in the splits with his guitar held high.
For a few short moments, after the last of the reverberating chords died away, there was silence. Then we all started speaking at once.
“Wow! That was incredible!”
“Insane, dude!”
“Exemplary rockage!”
“Krushed it!”
Then I remembered something. “Hey!” I said, sounding like my mom during one of the ten million times I’d been in trouble. “You’ve got some explaining to do!”
“Can it wait until after the hospital?” Mr. Mann (aka Niki Blister) squeaked through gritted teeth. “I think I’ve broken my pelvis.”
WE NEVER DID get to the hospital.
Mr. Mann hadn’t broken his pelvis, after all. We later heard from Grandma Dotty, who had broken her pelvis learning how to ice dance (don’t ask), that breaking your pelvis is just about the single most painful thing a human being can break without dying and, if Mr. Mann really had broken his pelvis, his screams would have been heard from Saskatchewan to Siberia and back again. I’m not saying Mr. Mann was what you’d call comfortable or anything, but it only took about five minutes for him to be up on his feet again, so I think his pelvis was fine.
The time it had taken for Mr. Mann to recover from the broken pelvis that wasn’t really broken had given me time to think things through, to come up with a clever Khatchadorian strategy for getting to the bottom of the Blister Mystery. I wasn’t going to blunder in like some hayseed klutz—not me, no way. I was going to play things super-cool, do it the new, uber-laidback, Rafe Khatchadorian hipster style. And the first thing I needed to do was make some sort of cool, laidback hipster remark to let him know I knew (if you know what I mean). I took a deep breath and concentrated on making this the coolest sentence Niki Blister the Rock Legend had ever heard.
“You’re Bliki Nister, Mannster Miss!” I blurted out in a great, big, splurgy mixed-up word salad of complete garbage. “Biki Nibster, Miss Mannster! Blanster Blister, Sister Mister! Bicky Blaster, Mossy Moan!” I stopped, squeezed my eyes shut, and with a superhuman effort, practically screamed the right words in Niki’s face. “Niki Blister, Mr. Mann! You’re Niki Blister!” I sank back, exhausted.
Kasey rolled her eyes all the way up to a nine.
Miller the Killer looked puzzled. “Who’s Niki Blister?” he asked.
“Me,” Niki Blister said.
“But you’re Mr. Mann,” Miller said.
Kasey rolled her eyes again. “He’s Mr. Mann and Niki Blister. He’s a missing Australian rock star from the 1980s.”
The Changmeister nodded wisely. He was so brainy he’d probably figured everything out three weeks ago. “Of course,” he murmured, like everything made sense.
“So you’re not Mr. Mann, our substitute music teacher?” Miller said.
Boy, this was going to take a while. To expect Miller to understand the situation would have been like expecting an aardvark to translate Chinese poetry into Swahili.
Mr. Mann/Niki Blister nodded and shook his head, which was confusing in itself. “I am Mr. Mann. I’m both people.” He limped across to an upturned crate and sat down on it carefully. He looked at the four of us and nodded to himself, as if he was turning something over in his head. “Okay, perhaps I’d better tell you what happened …”
“ME AND THE rest of The Spiderzz met at school when we were about the same age as you guys,” Niki said. (He’d asked us to call him Niki because Mr. Blister sounded weird.) “We grew up in a small town in New South Wales called Wagga Wagga and we liked the same sort of music—mostly American stuff. Songs about cars and desert roads and midnight trains. All guitar solos and glitter and big hair.” Niki smiled and patted his bald head. “When I had hair.”
He looked off into space like he was back in Wagga Wagga.5
“The Spiderzz?” I said gently.
“Oh, yeah, right,” Niki said. His voice had lost all trace of an American accent. He was back in Wagga. “It was my sister Kelly’s idea that we formed a band.”
“Mr. Blister’s sister!” Miller snorted. “Ha!”
Niki raised his eyebrows. “Very funny.”
“Soz,” Miller said, shrinking back.
“Anyway,” Niki continued, “like I said, it was mostly Kelly’s idea. And she wasn’t Blister’s sister because Blister isn’t my real name. I was plain old—or young—Nicky Bleddisloe back then. But Bleddisloe isn’t really what you’d call a rock-and-roll name, right? So I became Niki Blister. We made up cooler names. That was one of the things my sister got us to do. If you want to be a true rocker, you have to live and breathe rock and roll. You need the right clothes, the right hair, the right attitude.” Niki put both arms up straight in the air in the rocker salute and let out a loud whoop. “Woo-hoooo! G’day, America! That kind of thing.”
If I’d done something like that, Kasey would have kicked me in the shins. When Niki Blister did it, she just nodded thoughtfully. And it did sound good coming from Niki, now we knew he was a genuine rocker.
“We started rehearsing, just like you guys are doing,” Niki said. “We got better, then got good, began writing songs, started playing some small places, then some bigger places. Pretty soon we had a heap of people who liked us. We got signed up to a record label and made an album. The first song we ever wrote was ‘Kangaroo Krush’ and that became a big hit all over, not just in Australia. We were famous.”
“So what happened?” I said. “What went wrong?”
Niki leaned forward and propped his arms on his knees. “Cincinnati. That’s what went wrong.”
“CINCINNATI WAS WHERE we were going to kick off our big American tour,” Niki said. “The record company in Australia had put everything into making us massive over here. They got a fancy US promoter, Heavy Blert, to organize everything and gave him a ton of money up front to make sure nothing was left to chance. The tour was called G’day, America and it was all part of pushing The Spiderzz right up into the big leagues. We were going to be stars, Heavy told us. We were going to be the next Bon Jovi.”
We all looked at him blankly.
“Bon Jovi,” Niki repeated. “You must have heard of Bon Jovi? ‘Living on a Prayer’?
‘You Give Love a Bad Name’? You seriously haven’t heard of Bon Jovi?”
“Who’s he?” I asked.
“They were massive in the ’80s and ’90s,” Niki said.
“None of us were born then,” I pointed out.
“Oh boy,” Niki sighed. “I was forgetting how old I am. Anyway, Bon Jovi were huge and we were next. We were going to play the Cincinnati Colts Arena. ‘Kangaroo Krush’ was high in the charts and Heavy Blert said he’d never seen tickets sell so fast. We were all set. We flew to America—four Aussie boys ready to conquer the world.”
Niki stood up and began to pace. He seemed agitated. Without warning, he kicked the crate he’d been sitting on. Yup, he was definitely agitated.
“So I’m guessing the show didn’t go well?” Kasey said.
“Go well?” Niki scoffed. “No, it didn’t go well, Kasey. It didn’t go well at all because there was no show. Turned out there was no such thing as the Cincinnati Colts Arena. There was no G’day, America tour, no other stadiums, no other shows—nothing. The whole American tour was one gigantic con. Heavy Blert was a total crook. He’d taken everything—the money from the record company, the ticket sales, the merchandise money—and skipped down to Venezuela. He’d done that trick to five other new bands at the time. He made squillions out of us suckers. Just like that, The Spiderzz were finished.
The rest of the boys wanted to go back to Australia and start again, but it had been a real kick in the guts for me. I took off on a motorbike and drove across the US. I drifted around a bit, did some rodeo, spent a few months on an oil rig out in the Gulf of Mexico and even drove an ice truck in Alaska for a whil
e. Then I became a supply teacher specializing in European composers of the eighteenth century.”
“I did not expect that last bit,” Kasey said.
AFTER NIKI BLISTER HAD told us his sad tale of rock-and-roll dreams gone bad, we had a whole bunch of questions and stuff, but none of it really matters to this story, so I’ll skip past that part. When he’d heard us out, Niki stood up and clapped his hands.
“So,” he said in a businesslike voice, “show me what you got.”
“Now?”
“No time like the present,” Niki replied, handing me the guitar and plec6 he’d been using. “This is the one I used when we made ‘Kangaroo Krush’,” he continued. His voice became a whisper. “It was given to me by Angus Young at a gig in Melbourne, and it had been given to Angus by Jimmy Page, who’d been gifted it by Gene Vincent himself at a crossroads in Memphis at midnight. That plec is rock-and-roll history.”
If I’m being honest, I’d never heard of any of those people (I googled them later), but, as I looked at the plec, a ghostly shiver ran up my spine (or down—I never know which way they go). This one was the coolest I’d ever seen. Full disclosure: I’d only ever seen three plectrums before.
“Are you sure?” I said, swallowing hard again. (I really had to stop doing that.)
“Play, kid,” Niki Blister growled in a voice that sounded like he’d been gargling rusty nails. “Before I lose interest.”
Mr. Mann was long gone. In his place was a rocker who’d seen it all. Behind me, Miller did a quick drumroll. “Let’s do it!” he yelled, and we launched into “Everything Sucks”.
I’d like to say we ripped up the joint and the moment went down in rock history, but I’m not going to lie. We stunk. We stunk worse than a garlic-eating skunk in a vat of diapers. Worse than a hippo with halitosis eating herring. Worse than Hairy Harry’s yoga thong dipped in Vegemite.
Everything we thought we knew was forgotten. Guitar strings broke mid-song. I mixed up the lyrics to two songs. At one point, Miller kicked over his drums because he’d lost the rhythm. It was a disaster.
As the last, badly out-of-tune chord died away, silence fell.
“Okay,” Niki said after a pause that lasted, oh, six hundred years, “that kind of sucked.”
Yeah, tell me something I don’t know.
“But you don’t totally suck. There’s something in there we can work with—a miniscule window of non-suckability.” Niki jumped up and clapped his hands. “Right. We’ve got two weeks before the comp. I can get you to the next level if you do exactly as I say from now on. Agreed?”
We agreed.
We didn’t want to totally suck.
We wanted to go to the next level.
We’d do anything Niki thought would help.
Anything.
OKAY, CALL ME an optimist, but with Niki Blister helping us prepare for the band comp, it was within the realm of possibility that we could win the thing. I mean, I know Miller already expected us to win and all, but I’d never even considered that as a realistic possibility … until now. Having a genuine rock star on the team was going to improve our chances by roughly eight billion percent.
And—ta-da!—that meant Jeanne Galletta was definitely/maybe going to pay me more attention! Everyone loves a rock star, right? And if I got to be a kind of rock star and kept at Dingbat Wall, then my mission to get J.G. to have a thing for me was going to be that bit closer to completion. This was great! This was awesome! I could see no possible problem with anything!
“Rock-and-roll boot camp starts tomorrow at five sharp,” Niki said. “And get ready for some work, people! Like the mighty Bon Scott himself said, it’s a long way to the top if you wanna rock and roll!”
I wasn’t sure who Bon Scott was, but two questions I had about what he’d just said drove all thoughts about asking Niki for details. Those things were:
(a) What exactly was rock-and-roll boot camp?
(b) Five sharp? As in FIVE AM?
Maybe this rock-star thing was going to be harder than it looked.
THE DAY AFTER Niki had agreed to become our rock-and-roll mentor, I was back to (unsuccessfully) avoiding Harry at Gudonya. The hairy one had been bugging me for weeks to add a drawing of him to Dingbat Wall.
Even though it’d be just another doodle, I wanted to draw Hairy Harry about as much as I’d wanted to cop another face full of his stinky flying thong—an incident that was still giving me panic attacks and flashbacks. The last thing I needed was seeing any more of H.H. up close and personal. But Hairy Harry must’ve been part mule because he just wouldn’t let it go.
“Come on,” Hairy Harry pleaded. “Anyone who’s anyone is up on Dingbat Wall! C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, c’mon!”
Sid, who was over at the register ringing up a sale, lifted his head and gave me a cool hipster nod. Hairy Harry was a good customer, after all. I surrendered, pulled out my sketch pad, pointed to a chair, and tried to think about how drawing H.H. would help me with J.G.
“Sit,” I said.
Hairy Harry leapt into place like an obedient labrador. “Awesome!” he said. “You won’t regret this, Khatch!”
I was already regretting it, but I swallowed the rising bile and began sketching. Pretty soon I’d gone into auto sketch mode. Auto sketch mode? Okay, that’s like a kind of trance that happens when I’m drawing. It doesn’t happen all the time … only when I’m in the zone. I don’t really think of much; not even what I’m drawing. It all becomes angles and shapes and stuff. It sounds weird, but I guess it’s what meditation must feel like.
And then it happened.
Right when I’d got to the end of drawing Hairy Harry, Jeanne Galletta walked into the cafe. She came and stood behind me and looked at the drawing. To get a closer look, she leaned in and put her hand on my shoulder. Did you hear that? Jeanne Galletta put her hand on MY shoulder! I almost fainted.
“Awesome, drawing, Rafe,” she whispered in my ear and planted a kiss on my cheek.
I’m not saying I actually passed out or anything, but things did get a bit wobbly for a while in Khatchadorian Land. When I opened my eyes, Jeanne was ordering coffee from Sid and Hairy Harry was looking at me like he was some Tibetan Wise Man of the Mountains or something.
“She likes you, Khatch,” he said, smiling.
I was about to say something hipster back to Harry, but I stopped dead. Thong Boy was right: J.G. did like me! She’d just kissed me, hadn’t she? Proof! I sat up a little straighter. I wasn’t going to take any chances with THE MISSION. From now on there was only one thing driving Rafe Khatchadorian forward: finishing Dingbat Wall and winning (yes, WINNING) the KRMY Best Band Comp so that Jeanne Galletta would be into me. Oh yes, I swore, this will come to be.
Hey wait, I hear you ask, we know you can probably finish enough doodles to fill Dingbat Wall, but how can you be sure you’re going to win that KRMY Best Band Comp?
The simple answer was, I didn’t.
But in the last two seconds, I’d had an idea so great and so amazing and so perfect that I went all wobbly again. Exactly what needed to be done had come to me in a blinding flash and it was perfect in every detail. All I had to do was make sure it happened.
I finished the sketch of Harry with a flourish and turned it around so he could see. Ignoring his screams (of laughter), I tacked the drawing to Dingbat Wall, flicked Jeanne a cool hipster wrist/point/wave, and headed home.
THE MISSION was on.
WE DON’T KNOW, but we’ve been told! Jimi’s axe is made of gold!
The People wail and what you’ll find
is The People on stage will blow your mind!
Testing!
One, two!
Testing!
Three, four!
When Niki had said “boot camp”, I figured he just meant that we’d be practicing hard. But here we were marching up and down the garage, singing like a bunch of Marines in training.
(Okay, I was exaggerating about Niki being in uniform, but he might a
s well have been.)
“COMPANY AT EASE!” he screamed, and we all relaxed.
“Do we have to do this?” Miller wheezed. “Can’t we just practice?”
“The first lesson of being a true rocker is discipline, soldier!” Niki shouted into Miller’s face. “We march together and we play together! IS THAT CLEAR?”
Miller blinked. “Uh …”
“I SAID, IS! THAT! CLEAR!” The veins on Niki’s forehead throbbed. He looked like an angry tomato.
“Y-yes!” Miller stuttered.
“YES, WHAT?” Niki screamed.
“YES, SIR!”
“That’s better, soldier.” Niki strutted toward the microphone stand (which we’d slapped together from a broom and a bucket of sand). While his back was turned, I looked over at Kasey, who shrugged and mouthed go with it.
Niki had brought a blackboard. He picked up a piece of chalk and wrote “THE WAY OF THE ’TUDE” on it.
“’Tude,” he said, tapping the board. “That’s short for ATTITUDE, people. Quite simply, it’s the key to rock-and-roll success. You don’t got ’tude, you don’t got what it takes. Hit the lights, Rafeman.”7
I switched off the garage lights and Niki flicked a remote. The data projector whirred to life. A black-and-white photo of a guy smashing up a guitar on stage popped up on the screen.
“Joe Strummer. The Clash. London, 1977.” Niki turned to us. “’Tude.” He clicked the remote and another photo appeared. This one showed a guy wearing clown makeup and sticking out his tongue, which seemed to be about eight feet long.
“Gene Simmons. KISS. Chicago, 1986. ’Tude.”
Another click, another pic. This time it was a woman with MASSIVE hair. She was screaming into the lens while wearing a red leather suit and boots and holding a leopard on a leash.
G'day, America Page 7
