If Rock and Roll Were a Machine

by Terry Davis

  He walked back to the front of the room. “Class,” he said, “young Mr. Bowden has a problem. He thinks he’s more important than the rest of us. He thinks he’s got all the answers, and he thinks we can’t wait to hear them. Young Mr. Bowden isn’t going to grow up to have a happy life if he keeps on this way, because nobody’s going to like him. He needs our help to change, and we’re going to give him our help.”

  The plan was for my classmates to help me change by making me aware when I was acting too important. Lawler instructed everyone that in this one instance they didn’t have to raise their hands and wait to be called on. If anyone saw me do something or heard me say something that suggested I thought I was more important than the rest of the class, they were to sing it right out. The class didn’t take to this as fast as they took to singing with Lawler at recess, but they caught on after a while.

  By Thanksgiving I quit answering questions even when I was called on. Lawler had told the class to listen for a “tone of superiority” in my voice, and a couple of kids who had never spoken up before took pleasure in this. It was a game, and everyone participated. But the novelty faded before long.

  A couple of times a week Lawler pointed out my eruptions of self-importance. Since I’d quit talking in class, he noted things I did or said outside class. He described how I’d been showing off my new Eddie Bauer winter coat, for example, and asked the class if they thought it was kind of me to try to make the kids whose parents couldn’t afford such a fancy coat feel envious.

  I shouldn’t say everyone participated. Everyone but Zimster did. This struck me as odd, because Zimster was the meanest kid I knew. And he was also smart. Sarcasm was his weapon. The only pleasure I ever saw him take in school was ridiculing other kids, reducing them—particularly pretty girls—to tears with a few slashes of his wit. He’d make fun of your looks or your clothes or stuff you said in class, and if you responded he’d just pour it on. If he ever got a peek at your mom or dad you’d hear about it the rest of the year. Nobody ever saw his folks.

  I figured the opportunity to point out someone’s faults would put Zimster in his glory, but he treated the whole enterprise with more than his usual contempt.

  When we came back to school after Christmas vacation, Lawler let me out of the corner. I would only speak when he asked me a question, and then I spoke every word to myself in my head before I let it out of my mouth.

  A weird thing happened that spring. Lawler was the new baseball coach, and he cut me. Nearly everybody who turned out made the team, but I was among those who didn’t. This isn’t the weird thing I mean to speak of, but it sure rocked me. I couldn’t believe it. Baseball was my sport. I played baseball better than I did anything. I was in a daze. It was like I’d separated into two kids, one of whom was always watching me and then giving me an immediate evaluation of every single thing I did, and the evaluation was always bad.

  The first game was away, but the school we played was close so I rode my bike there. I’d been playing with these guys and two girls since we started T-ball, and I had to go and watch.

  Our pitcher walked batter after batter. Lawler brought in the centerfielder, but he couldn’t throw a strike. He tried another kid, but that kid hurt his arm. It didn’t look like the top of the first would ever end. It was even embarrassing for the people watching.

  This is the weird thing: Lawler walked around behind the backstop and up to where I was sitting in the bleachers. He held out the ball. “You want to pitch?” he said. I’d brought my glove with me, and I put it on and held it out. He dropped the ball in and I walked to the mound.

  They bombed me. These were guys who couldn’t hit me to save their mothers’ lives in summer league, and they bombed me.

  I was on the team after that. Lawler never said a word about it. We had a lousy season. I never played so bad.

  Lawler was moving up to teach sixth grade the next year, and he told the class that any kids who wanted could be in his class the coming fall.

  I was surprised to find not one single kid from our fifth-grade class in the room on the first day of sixth grade. I thought everybody loved the guy. I was there though. Lawler had told my folks it would be best for me. He said we were making progress and that one more year would have me shaped up.

  I developed a stutter that fall. Lawler called on me a lot, and it was embarrassing not to be able to whip out the answer. I could live with that, but then it got so I couldn’t call plays in the huddle fast enough. We’d keep getting penalized for delay-of-game. Then I couldn’t call signals at the line. I’d stand over center and think the words in my mind, but I couldn’t get them out of my mouth. The other me would stand across scrimmage with the defense and watch. He could call signals like Boomer Esiason—I heard him in my mind—but I couldn’t get out a single sound.

  The stutter went away by the time I got to high school, but by then I didn’t have much to say.

  I realize that what happened to me isn’t a pimple on the butt of the pain a lot of kids endure by the time they’re sixteen. After serious consideration, however, I believe it’s the worst thing that ever happened to me.

  Chapter 12

  Gramp and Gran

  Gramp was sitting in a plastic chair beside his bed when Bert walked into the room. Bert hadn’t seen Gramp out of bed in a long time. He was held to the chair by a strap across his upper chest and a strap around each forearm. His head lolled to his shoulder. His eyes were open, but his face showed no expression. His lips quivered in a way that brought the word “palsy” to Bert’s mind. For a while after they put Gramp in the home he would say to Bert, “All I can do is smoke.” It wasn’t long before he couldn’t even smoke anymore.

  Gramp had just been shaved, and a tiny pearl of shave cream clung to his earlobe. His hospital gown was bunched around his waist, and his shriveled penis made Bert think of ginger root in the vegetable bin at Rosauers. His legs were the bone-thin, reptilian legs of a turkey. A stainless steel pan sat on the floor beneath the chair.

  Bert walked over and pulled the gown down around his grandfather’s knees. He reached out and wiped away the shave cream with his thumb, then he stepped back. The fragrance of Aqua Velva dominated the other odors in the room, but the ineradicable stench of cigarette smoke remained.

  Bert felt a hand at his elbow, and he turned as he stepped out of the doorway. “Excuse me,” the aide said.

  Bert didn’t know her. She was taller than Bert, and hefty. She unstrapped his grandfather, lifted him with an arm around his waist, lifted the back of his gown with that hand, wiped him, then dropped the cloth onto the floor. She picked him up in both her arms like a stout bride carrying a feeble husband over the threshold and laid him gently on the bed.

  “There you go, Berty Boy,” she said as she held his arms up and snugged the sheet and blanket around his chest.

  Bert opened his mouth to respond to his name. But the woman hadn’t turned around. She was talking to Gramp, whose name was also Albert Bowden.

  She turned from the bed, stepped back to the chair with the hole in its seat, bent and swept up the cloth and then the pan with the same hand. “You’re the grandson,” she said as she crossed the room. She stopped in the doorway. “They told me you’d be coming by, but I haven’t seen you.”

  Her name tag said Myrtrice Clovis. Up close Bert saw how young she was. She wasn’t a woman. She was a girl not much older than he. What would it be like to work in such a place? What would it be like to have to? Bert thought. What would it be like to be named Myrtrice Clovis? “I haven’t been by as often,” he said. “I’ve had football practice.”

  Why did I say that? Bert thought. I could come in the evenings, I could come on weekends. I haven’t been by because I’m an ungrateful little bastard. He lowered his head, and that’s when he saw the contents of the pan Myrtrice Clovis held at her hip.

  “It don’t seem like he knows one way or the other,” she said. But Bert didn’t hear this.

  Three blood-black
things the size of peas lay in a thin, shallow sauce of bright blood. The blood sloshed up the side of the shiny pan and the black turds rolled as she stepped out the door.

  Bert shut his eyes and clenched his teeth. He clamped down with such force that his head and shoulders shook. He was trying to squash the life out of the image in his mind. He thought of the huge metal-press that finally kills the Terminator in the movie. It just keeps pressing down until the red light in his eyes goes out. Bert wanted to smash out the red light of the blood and the little black turds that shone in it like pupils in a big, three-pupiled blood-eye.

  He walked over to the bed and took his grandfather’s hand. It wasn’t like leather. It was more like the snake skins he’d found in the woods with Gramp years ago. It was almost that translucent, almost that weightless. And it felt that dead.

  Bert watched his grandfather’s lips sing their silent, palsied song. He would never hear his grandfather’s voice ring out in the world again. Bert would, however, hear Gramp’s voice in memory. It would ring out clearly forever from that place where human beings are both haunted and sustained.

  * * *

  It was after five when Bert rolled the Sportster into the carport at his grandmother’s house. The sun was low in the west, but the light was strong and poured through the blue corrugated plastic roof, creating a blue mist where the dust motes floated silver and gold like grains of sand in a stream. Bert had helped Gramp build the carport onto the single garage. He had been the one to climb the ladder and nail down the four-by-eight plastic panels.

  Bert hit the kill button, and for a second all he could hear was the exhaust note ringing in his ears. The screen door opened and Bert’s grandmother leaned her head out. She was in the sunlight there, and her tightly permed, smoky-blue hair shone as distinctly as if it radiated a light of its own. Bert saw her mouth move, but he didn’t hear a thing. He dismounted and walked out of the blue mist and into the sunlight.

  “Has that motorcycle made you deaf already, Berty?” Edith Bowden yelled into her grandson’s face. She mistook the old half-helmet Shepard had lent him for a Nazi helmet she’d seen on a TV biker. “You look like a German,” she said.

  Bert stood on the sidewalk and his grandmother stood on the porch step, which put them face-to-face. Bert smiled at the irked expression she wore. It was her word and it always made Bert smile. Almost everything about Gram made him smile. He took off the helmet and set it on one of the thin white trellis staves where the moss-rose vines hadn’t woven themselves. He’d helped Gramp make the trellis, too.

  “What’s that, Gram?” Bert said. “Can’t hear very well. Think the bike’s made me deaf. Really irks me.”

  “Such a noise could make a person deaf,” she replied. “I don’t know why that thing isn’t against the law.”

  In terms of noise level it probably is, Bert thought. “I just stopped by to remind you I love you,” he said. “And to create an irksome racket with my motorcycle.”

  “You’ve been to visit your grandfather,” she said. “You always stop by to remind me you love me when you’ve been to visit your grandfather.”

  “I don’t think he hears me when I tell him,” Bert said. He was surprised to hear himself say this. It wasn’t something he would have said if he’d thought about it first.

  Edith Bowden put a hand on her grandson’s shoulder and stepped down onto the sidewalk. “Berty,” she said, “you told him often enough when he could hear you.”

  And then Bert was crying, which surprised him as much as what he’d just said. He broke out into big, gaspy sobs. Tears filled his eyes, brimmed over, ran down his cheeks and dropped off his chin. Snot collected on his upper lip in a gray moustache, and he wiped it off with the back of his hand.

  Edith held Bert’s arm and walked him a few steps across the grass to an addition built perpendicular to the garage. It looked like a tiny house with its chimney, wide windows, curtains, and window box still blooming geraniums, but it was a workshop. She nudged Bert into a seat on the red wooden bench under the window box. In her mind she could see her Bert and little Berty hanging the window box, painting the bench. She pulled a tissue from her apron pocket and held it out.

  It embarrassed Bert to be bawling with such gusto. Weeping of this or any sort didn’t fit with the biker image he would like to cultivate. It didn’t integrate into the music of power, which was the sound a Harley made. But, God, did it feel good just to sit there and wail. His whole body gave in to it. It was like falling asleep when he couldn’t stay awake another second. He took the tissue from Gram and wiped his nose. She sat down beside him and patted his leg.

  Bert looked over at the little pink house where his grandparents had lived for ten years, where his grandmother now lived alone. The living room couch folded out, and he had slept many nights there after whirling the last old maid through the buttery grit at the bottom of the popcorn bowl and crunching it, after wrestling or bowling or a wildlife show had ended at ten. He breathed deep and slow, blew his nose, looked down at the ragged tissue. He’d told himself he was riding over here to be a comfort to his grandmother, but he guessed he was really here for the comfort she and Gramp had always given him.

  Chapter 13

  Lucky Bert Bowden

  Bert gave a hand signal as he turned north on Division. He checked both mirrors and signaled again before he slipped into the right lane. You can count on drivers of cars to be predictable in one sense only, Shepard had told him. They’ll always be dangerous. They’ll look right at you, their faces will even seem to acknowledge you, then they’ll pull out, anyway. Bert was being particularly careful because he was breaking the law riding without the company of a licensed rider. Riding a motorcycle on Division during rush hour was unwise, and it was grossly stupid when you didn’t even have your operator’s license. Bert knew this, but he was riding, anyway.

  Traffic moved about forty-five miles an hour, and it was bumper-to-bumper. Bumper-to-bumper, that is, unless you were on a motorcycle, in which case you had no bumper. You had tires, fenders, a helmet, your skull—but you had no bumper.

  Bert watched the Blazer in front, the cars moving on both sides, and he checked his mirrors for encroachment from the rear. They might get him, but they wouldn’t take him by surprise.

  He insinuated himself into the right lane a long ways before the turn to Shepard’s, and he rode close to the curb to keep plenty of distance between him and the cars nosing over into any little space that opened up. From the middle lane a guy about Bert’s dad’s age in a brown jacked-up Ford 4x4 looked at him. The guy seemed to see Bert. He even stretched his neck to look back as he cut over into Bert’s lane. The cab of the pickup fit fine into the space between Bert and the red Miata in front, but there was no place for the rest of it.

  This happened too fast for Bert to yell at the guy or to have hit the horn button. Neither of these efforts would have helped, anyway, because the guy’s truck was louder than Bert’s bike. The whir of his oversized, all-terrain tires alone was enough to drown out the Sportster. What Bert did was exactly what he should have done: He gassed it and shot up over the curb.

  It was lucky for Bert and the people in the world who loved him that he hit the curb at just the right angle to go over it rather than skitter along the edge where the pickup would have caught him and where some part of him would have ended up under its right rear tire.

  Lucky Bert Bowden straddled the idling Sportster in the nursery parking lot and screamed after the Ford-man with all his might, “You cocksucker!” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, and then he heard a familiar voice.

  “You’ve had that bike what—twenty-four hours? And already you’re talkin’ like a biker. Who says the American teenager ain’t a fast learner?”

  There stood Scott Shepard holding a coffee can full of straw flowers. “How come you’re not at football practice?” he said. “Camille told me you’re a QB.”

  “I got cut,” Bert said. “I’m not a QB anymore.” B
ert was amazed that Camille knew his name.

  “That’s too bad,” Shepard said. “Shut that thing down and we’ll walk back to the shop. You might need a place to change your shorts.”

  Shepard bounced the can of flowers against his leg as they walked to the alley. He actually limped on both legs. Bert had never seen anyone limp on both legs before.

  “Easy to get hurt on a motorcycle,” Shepard said. “Easiest thing in the world. Especially for an inexperienced—and I might add an unlicensed—young shitball such as yourself.”

  “I know,” Bert said. “I know.” He was smiling at the way Shepard had called him a shitball.

  Shepard pointed at Bert’s Reeboks. “You know?” he said. “You don’t know much or you wouldn’t be riding in basketball shoes. Guy needs a decent pair of boots if he’s gonna ride a motorcycle.

  “There’ll come a time when one of those laces catches around your shifter or your brake pedal,” Shepard said. “If you need to stop fast, you’ll be in trouble because the only brake you’ll be able to get to is the front, and on these old bastards the front brake ain’t enough. Say you do get stopped and you go to put your foot down to steady the bike. Your foot’s not gonna reach the ground because your shoelace is caught. You’re already leaning the bike and you’ve got no leverage to stop it, so you and the bike go over. Besides looking a fool, which nobody ever died from, you break a bunch of shit on the bike and maybe on yourself, or maybe somebody just drives over you.”

  Bert looked down as he pushed the bike. The loops of his shoelaces were four inches long. Maybe longer.

  “And let’s say this,” Shepard went on. “Let’s say you’re whipping along through traffic on Division here, and those laces are flapping around and one of ’em gets caught in the chain. Ever see a section of highway where a deer or a big dog got hit? How there’s that one big splatter and then smaller and smaller spots down the road?”