The Rise and Fall of the Gallivanters

by M. J. Beaufrand

  We had to step over the drunk in the tinfoil hat to get into the store.

  There was the usual tinkle of bells above the door when Crock and Ev and I walked in and inhaled that musty record store smell. Jojo was standing alone behind the front case, reading a copy of Willamette Week, the alternative Portland newspaper.

  Behind him, lined up under a long row of windowsills, leaned pictures of the Disappearing Girls—black-and-white flyers pasted to pieces of cardboard, a candle sitting in the window above each. Probably a fire hazard, but it was a nice touch—a beacon for every girl to come home.

  Crock skulked off toward the cassettes, which fit in his jeans pockets more easily than LPs. He liked getting things but not paying for them.

  I said that, free or not, cassettes weren’t worth crap. LPs were the only thing—even scratched. I loved the shine and groove of vinyl. And Jojo had bins full, new and glossy or used and worn. The really valuable records, like the bootlegs, were in clear plastic slipcases that folded over like giant sandwich baggies.

  “Hey, Jojo,” I said.

  Jojo looked up. He had these freakishly huge eyes, like a praying kitten. And this stringy gray hair that ran halfway down his back. He said he used to be a roadie, mainly for Jefferson Airplane, but we weren’t sure that was real. Not that he was lying—he probably had really convincing LSD flashbacks.

  “Hey, Noah,” he said. “What happened to you, man? That’s an impressive goose egg on your head. Plus your aura’s all wonky. Whoa, look at all those colors. It’s psychedelic.”

  “Stage-diving accident,” I mumbled.

  Jojo folded up his paper. “I don’t mean to get all parental on you and shit, but if I were you I’d at least take the safety pin out of your nose before going out slam dancing. That could do some serious damage.”

  I suppose it was nice of him to show an interest, but we came here to forget about me. At least for a little while. “Are you alone, Jojo? Where’s Derek?” Jojo had great taste in records but lousy taste in employees. They were all skate punks named Derek or Dennis. All of them robbed him blind.

  “You mean Darlene? She took off, man. I put her on a train to San Francisco. She’s going to dance school.”

  “What kind of dance?” Evan asked.

  “Exotic,” Jojo said. “She says even sleazeballs pay better than me.”

  “Did she have a snake?” Crock said. How he heard the words “exotic dancer” from the other side of the store, I’ll never know.

  “I didn’t see one, man,” Jojo said. He stared blankly at a spot just above my head, probably looking for a snake that wasn’t there.

  Talk about lost in space. Ground control to Jojo.

  “Are you okay here on your own?” I asked. I counted three guys with duffel bags who were about to walk off with everything in the “B” bins.

  Jojo said, “Oh yeah. No problem. Except I’ve gotta pee. And I don’t think I’ve eaten since Friday.”

  It was now Monday. He’d probably eaten, just forgotten about it. Still, there was a pulling at the pit of my stomach like I felt when Evan needed help. “Why don’t you take a bathroom break, Jojo? Let us watch the counter for a sec.”

  “Really? You’d do that for me?” Jojo said, his eyes suddenly focusing.

  “You need to pee, right?”

  “It’s okay, man, I’ve been doing it in this Big Gulp.” He picked up a giant waxy container from the windowsill and shook it. It sloshed and smelled like ammonia. “But you know what? I could use a pizza. Why don’t you and Evan watch the counter? It’s real easy. All you have to do is make change. But do me a favor, will ya? Keep Crock away from the till.”

  “No prob,” Evan said. “Crock has work to do. Don’t you, Crock?”

  Crock had been subtly picking at the lock on the cassette case with no luck.

  “I do?” he said, trying to look innocent.

  “Yesssss,” I said extra slow. “You have to go to the PfefferBrau Haus and enter us in the contest. You’re our manager, remember?”

  His eyes popped open. “Oh yeah,” he said. “Work. I’ll get right on it.”

  He left the store with a jangle of the bells.

  After he left, Evan stared after him. Finally he said, “Huh. Jaime thinks that guy is her prince.”

  I’d forgotten that little factoid. But Ev was right. One of life’s great mysteries. Jaime acted all goofy around Crock and blushed when he even said hi to her. And she was supposed to be smart. Why couldn’t she see the guy was a major hound? There was no way the two of them would ever be a couple. She wanted a boyfriend; Crock just wanted sex. Lots of it. With different women. True, Jaime was female so there was a good chance they might hook up, but then Crock would ignore her afterward.

  So Ev and I invoked the “hands off the Old Girls” rule. We put ourselves between them at parties. We suggested Crock might have better luck with someone sluttier.

  Jojo seemed to know what we were thinking, about how even smart girls could be turned into complete ditzes. “It’s the chest hair, man. Makes ’em all stupid. Girls, I mean,” Jojo said.

  Ev and I both looked down at our chests. Pitiful. I was pale as a ghost and Ev was worse than me, what with being scrawny and having a giant scar on his rib cage from his appendectomy.

  Working for Jojo wasn’t hard. I stood at the door and asked people leaving to open their gym bags and backpacks, which seemed to be what Jojo needed most. I busted four kids, and none of them put up a fight. They seemed thankful I didn’t call the police.

  When Jojo had been gone an hour, there was a lull in business. “Not bad,” Evan said.

  I had no idea what he was talking about. “What’s not bad?”

  “That tune you’re humming.”

  I hadn’t even realized I’d been doing it aloud, but that was Evan for you. Keyed into what I was thinking before I even thought it.

  “Nothing,” I said, and sang the chorus of “Smoking Ruin,” the song that had been running through my head since last night.

  Nothing breaks over me

  Nothing gives me hope

  Nothing hit me with a great black claw

  I’d be a smoking ruin but there’s nothing left to smoke

  When I was done, Ev said, “Wow. Perky.”

  He was right. Who would pay money to listen to such morbid crap?

  Then Ev went on, “You know what would sound really good under that?” And he started a low rumbling counterpoint. He wasn’t humming exactly. The sounds he made came out more like now now now. He picked at his left thigh as though it were terraced with strings.

  And that was how Jojo found us when he came back at closing time, carrying a pizza box. It was so greasy you could see the shape of the disc under the square cardboard.

  I was mumbling lyrics, Evan was muttering now now now.

  “Hey, man. That sounds pretty good. You should put some instruments to that. I think there are some in the Maxi Pad. Come on, I’ll show you.”

  Now, okay, Ev and I had only partly been paying attention to his customers, so maybe Jojo was trying to punish us in a really disgusting way we didn’t understand. The Maxi Pad? Seriously? What kind of bloody torture was that? Did it even exist? Or was it like Darlene’s snake or his career with Jefferson Airplane?

  Jojo saw us silently trying to puzzle it out, and said, “Oh yeah.” He pulled a checkbook from a drawer under the till and wrote out two checks for twenty-five dollars apiece. He handed one to each of us, then picked up the pizza box he’d been carrying. “You can work Saturdays, right? Hey, I hope you guys like garlic. I had them put on extra. Goes over real well with the ladies.” He breathed on us. “Just playin’ with you guys. Seriously. You two need to lighten up.”

  He smiled and rattled a couple of keys on a ring attached to his belt. He unlocked a door I’d never seen at the back of the store.

  I could tell from Evan’s look that he didn’t want to follow him. He mouthed the words Maxi Pad? to me. But I was in a zone where, if some
one opened a door for me, goddamn it, I was going to go through.

  Jojo led us up a wooden staircase that was worn in the middle and smelled like cat pee. I’d never been upstairs before, but I knew there had to be one, even with the high ceilings on the store below. If you looked at the building from the outside you could see three levels of windows before the crumbling cornices of the rooftop. There were even these weird gargoyles, faces that seemed human but with expressions that looked like they all had really bad toothaches.

  Inside, we stopped at the first landing. There was another set of stairs going up—presumably to the space with the cornices and the toothache gargoyles, but this was our destination.

  Jojo took out his keys, unlocked a door with a frosted pane, walked in, and flicked a switch.

  The lights went up on the next stage of our lives.

  “MAKE YOURSELVES AT HOME,” JOJO SAID, clearing dirty laundry off a futon and dumping heaps of tie-dyed shirts onto his white shag carpet, which looked like the hide of an albino yak. This place was huge. I could see why he called it the Maxi Pad. Everything about it was maxi. There weren’t any rooms—only glass bricks marking off space, making it look like a warehouse-sized aquarium.

  Ev lost no time worshipping at the shrine of Jojo’s instruments. “Oh my god! Is that a Rickenbacker 4001 JG?” Ev grabbed a bass, its body shaped like the letter V with mother-of-pearl inlay.

  There were stands with rows and rows of basses and guitars, plus something under a thick linty blanket that took up so much room it had to be a drum kit. At least twelve pieces. Sonia would go apeshit.

  Then there were the pictures lining the walls. A much younger Jojo with Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane. Jojo with Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Jojo with Jimi Hendrix. Jojo with the hedonistic drummer of the Who, Keith Moon. Jojo with Paul McCartney.

  So he hadn’t made up his past after all. If anything, he’d left a lot out.

  “Wow. Could we use your space sometime? We’re trying to put together a demo for the PfefferFest.”

  Jojo flipped the lid on the pizza box and helped himself to a slice, which he ate standing up, grease dripping down his chin.

  “I don’t know, man,” Jojo said. “I mean, someone should use this stuff. But the PfefferFest? I know hate isn’t healthy, but that place is just evil. Why not start someplace smaller? Maybe open mic night at the Long Goodbye?”

  “It has to be the PfefferFest.”

  “Why?”

  Evan stared extra hard at me, as though I were the one being eaten inside out by the black plague.

  I blurted, “Because of the money. Our drummer has this crazy idea about going to college.”

  “Oh, right. I forgot about the purse.” Jojo scratched his head. “And hey, the Pfeffer guys were acquitted and everybody deserves a second chance . . .”

  “Even cannibals,” Evan muttered.

  “. . . but I don’t like that one dude. You know, with the hair? He reminds me of these guys I knew in the Haight.” He chuckled. “Good times, man, good times. You know, before they got blown to bits in ’Nam.” He stared overlong at his dining room table, which, like Jojo himself, was old enough to be retro but not old enough to be antique. He seemed mesmerized by the flicker of the mica in the plastic surface. “What were we talking about again? Oh yeah, food.” He pointed to the pizza box. “Dig in, everybody.”

  Ev and I tore ourselves away from the Museum of Rock Art and sat down for a slice with our new boss.

  “So, it’s just you two? Are you putting together an acoustic set or what?”

  Evan said, “Nah. We’ve got a drummer and this girl on keys.”

  “You’re bringing a lady around?” Jojo said.

  “Two. The drummer’s a girl.”

  He practically jumped out of his chair. “Oh, crap. We’d better get busy.” He rummaged in a pants pocket and pulled out a pair of greasy twenty-dollar bills, then handed them to me. “Get us some cleaning stuff, will ya? There’s a Safeway down the street. Wait, you know what to get, right? To clean, like, furniture and shit?”

  Across the room, Evan sank heavily into his own bones, which seemed so thin and brittle through his T-shirt I was afraid they might break into plaster and rain down on Country Western in the store below. “Yes, Noah knows,” he said. “We both do.”

  • • •

  I couldn’t wait to tell the Old Girls about the Maxi Pad. Sonia would go crazy over that drum kit, and then she’d have to come back to me.

  Us. Come back to us.

  The next day I caught up with them in the hall between third and fourth periods. Or almost caught up with them. You couldn’t mistake those heads of hair.

  I racewalked to catch up. I was reaching out to tap Sonia on the shoulder when I heard her say, “Yeah, well, that’s the problem. He can come through sometimes.”

  I was left there with one hand out. I felt my reaching fingers turn to Jell-O.

  I ghosted them, following two paces behind.

  “Look. I’m not saying you need to trust him again,” Jaime said. “I know what he put you through. I’m just saying—”

  “It’s different for you,” Sonia cut her off. “You don’t need this. I do. I want the money.”

  “I’m trying to tell you I don’t think it’s a game to Noah either. He’s different. It scares me.” She leaned in close, but even though she whispered, I heard her under the giggles and scoffs of five hundred other between-classes kids. “Have you met Ziggy yet?”

  Every nerve in my body tingled and thrummed. I swept along behind them, hardly daring to breathe.

  I didn’t hear what Sonia replied, but then Jaime said, “Well, I have. It was creepy. I mean, he said all the right things, but still . . . it reminded me of Noah’s father.”

  In the halls of Gresham High, which smelled of sweat and hair spray and Pine-Sol, the warning bell rang. I nearly dropped my books. My head was so thick and brittle it felt like it was stuffed with straw.

  No one was supposed to talk about my dad. Nobody. That was the deal. Especially for the ones who knew what really happened.

  Now, between classes, the pressure in my head was so bad I screamed to pour off some of the pain, but no one around me noticed, so maybe I didn’t make a sound.

  But everybody noticed the next part, when I sprinted up between the girls and knocked the books out of Jaime’s hand. “Bitch,” I spat.

  It didn’t make me feel any better. I might as well have kicked her down a flight of stairs.

  Oh god, the shame. No no no. This was all wrong. I was a good guy. I wasn’t my father.

  I put my head down and charged away from them, around the corner, and into chem lab.

  Something else must’ve taken hold of me.

  I braced myself against the doorframe of chem lab. The halls were almost empty now; most of the other kids were where they needed to go. One or two were sprinting down the hall, trailing dust devils of notebook paper and color-coded subject folders. And that was when I felt the chill.

  It wasn’t coming from chem but somewhere else. Everywhere and nowhere all at once. A soul-sucking chill. Roiling clouds of black smoke came in through the window. The metallic tang of blood coming with it.

  Noah, it whispered. You really thought you could lose me?

  I knew that voice. I’d heard it Sunday night, taunting me, goading me with grimaces of half-digested faces.

  Inside the classroom, Mr. Arepedian was handing a beaker to Tyler Eubanks. He looked up, his gray comb-over flopping on top of a shiny brown skull. “Are you okay, Noah?”

  Yes, Noah, the Marr hissed, reaching its black lobster claws for me. Are you okay? Or should I tell you how I cut up the girls before I buried them? Or how I’m going to feed on your friend Evan until there’s nothing left?

  I backed out of chem class and stared down the hall.

  It was coming for me.

  I felt a tap on my shoulder.

  I wheeled around.

  If I thought Sonia was crazy-m
ad when she slammed my fingers in the car door, it was nothing compared to the way she looked now. She was dripping acid. Her eyes were like death rays.

  She brought her knee up right between my legs. Hard.

  I doubled over. The pain was so bad I couldn’t breathe.

  Yesssss, the cloud hissed. Deliciousss . . .

  I tried to crawl away but was blocked in every direction by a thousand pairs of feet. The whole school was looking down at me, nobody helping.

  One of them kicked me over onto my back. I looked up. Sonia planted one black boot on my chest, bent over, grabbed hold of the safety pin in my left nostril, and yanked.

  IT’S NOT EASY TO TEAR THROUGH CARTILAGE.

  Sonia took a long time to pull that hardware out of my nose. She braced herself against me. She grimaced as she ripped me in two.

  And I let her.

  I wasn’t tough about it either. I screamed and screamed and I didn’t care who heard me.

  I was rolling on the floor and my face was a red sea, deep and parted. And I saw her, standing above me, holding a safety pin in her right hand, blood cascading down her arm. So help me, she was smirking.

  Delicious. It’s even better when it’s from someone you love, the Marr said, as the black, sucking void drew nearer.

  I tried to talk but could only gurgle. Could nobody see this thing? Ziggy had said I was more sensitive to it, but could no one else feel the cold? See the swirling blackness? Hear the screams of the half digested?

  I didn’t see Evan before he smothered my face. “Here, hold this,” he said, shoving a piece of checked purple material over my nose. He hoisted me to my feet. He put my free arm around his shoulder. He was so skinny his body felt like kindling. “Time to go, man,” he said. And then he shouted over his shoulder to Sonia (I guessed), “I don’t care what kind of daddy issues you’ve got, but you’ve got no right—”

  “I have every right! He called Jaime a bitch!”

  “Don’t you have any idea what you’ve done? Swear to god, I’m making sure Noah sues your ass and your daddy’s ass, you twisted fuck. Kiss college good-bye.”

  I wasn’t so out of my head that I didn’t realize that that was the worst threat he could have made.