Rules to Rock By

by Josh Farrar

  I looked around the room. The bass player was playing an Eastern-sounding scale up and down his fret board. He was probably bored by this stuff, had seen it a thousand times. But I recognized the drummer: it was Curly Burly, looking straight at me with those heavy-lidded eyes. He twirled a drumstick up in the air, then pointed it straight at me.

  “I know you,” he said. “You’re the one from the hall. You’re the one—”

  “Darren, you’re acquainted with Beatles Girl?” Jackson said.

  Curly Burly’s name was Darren? How could a dude that tough-looking, with the wallet chain and the heavy metal duds, be named Darren?

  Jackson sat down on his amp and crossed his legs. “This chance meeting will be a happy reunion, I trust. How did you meet?”

  “She made eye contact,” Darren said. “First day of school. She—”

  “Darren, you need to learn how to express yourself in—Far. Fewer. Words. Work on it, please.” Jackson squinted and rubbed his chin. He strolled over until he was standing right in front of me, looking me over like a piece of merchandise he had decided wasn’t worth legal tender. “Check out the trembling lip on Beatles Girl. She really does look terrified. You’ve done your job well, motormouth.”

  “Aye, aye, Captain.”

  “Well, shall we crank it back up, then?” Jackson signaled Darren, who ripped off a pounding drum fill. Jackson and the bassist dug into their strings, and Raising Cain resumed its merciless attack. Christine and I looked at each other in disbelief.

  “What was he talking about?” she said.

  I just shook my head. I still didn’t have my words back. It was like one of those bad dreams where you’re trying to yell or scream but the sound just won’t come out. I touched my face. My lower lip was definitely not trembling! I was a little nervous; that was all. Okay, more than nervous. Freaked out. Slightly humiliated. But mostly, just really annoyed!

  Another Annabelle rule:

  Rock stars are not intimidated by rival bands.

  TURKEY MEATBALLS

  When I came home, Ronaldo popped up on IM.

  EggMtnRckr: wassup Belle?

  Bassinyrface: hey, R.

  EggMtnRckr: I read your email. He seriously said EYE CONTACT? Like he doesnt let anybody look him in the eye? I guess he thinks he’s Prince William or something, and not the loser leader of a middle school cover band.

  Bassinyrface:

  EggMtnRckr: Listen, just stay out of his way. Lay low.

  Bassinyrface: I know, but there’s something about this guy that just makes me want to …

  I dunno.

  EggMtnRckr: what?

  Bassinyrface: Make him stop being so full of himself. And mean.

  EggMtnRckr: No matter what you do, u cant change that about him. Trust me!

  Bassinyrface: More wisdom from the professor, eh?

  EggMtnRckr: you know it.

  Bassinyrface: YOU are a know-it-ALL sometimes, you know that?

  EggMtnRckr: Maybe. Just trying to help! I’ve had my share of that kind of guy before. U don’t think I’ve gotten guys like that messing with me? with how I dress?

  Bassinyrface: I know, it’s true. You have more bully experience than me.

  EggMtnRckr: I’m not saying run away. I’m just saying keep a low profile, girl! Is that so hard?

  Bassinyrface: no.

  EggMtnRckr: Actually, I know you! Staying mellow is gonna be almost impossible for you, huh?

  Bassinyrface: Heh. Maybe. We’ll see …

  “Come here buddy, I got a message from Abuela today. You wanna listen to it?”

  X skated over to my bed and sat next to me.

  “Doesn’t that violate your grounding, little man?” I asked. “Skating in the house?”

  “Not if you don’t tell Mom and Dad about it,” he said.

  “Good point. Mum’s the word. Unless you mess with me, that is.”

  I set the phone to speaker and started the message.

  “Annabella and Chabito”—this was her special nickname for X—“this is your Abuela, your grandmama, calling you to say hello. Annabelle, I sorry I do not call you before. Things very busy, and the recorder no work no more. Consuela she giving me the message but it’s gonna be too late.

  “I miss you. I miss our family like it once was. And I know you do also. But things will be good. They will be better. I promise you, okay?”

  Abuela paused, and I thought I could hear the scratchy rasp of one of her old lady friends in the background, probably barking at the TV.

  “This is what you need to do, okay, mis angeles? Don’t do a lot of things wrong for you fathers. And you need to try to make the family happy, make the family proud, always be good boy and good girl. Be beautiful, and then the world, it will be beautiful for you, too. Okay? Besos, besos.” Abuela’s smacking kissy sounds. “And Chabito … he can hear me, Annabelle? Chabito, you try to live more normal for me, okay?”

  X shrugged as I closed the phone.

  “Normal, shnormal,” X said.

  “Whatever, Trevor,” I said, sighing. Why couldn’t she have moved here with us? She said she was too old to move anywhere at her age, that she would have to literally be dragged out of her apartment when she died. I couldn’t even think about that. All I knew was that, without her, we were falling apart.

  That night, Mom put on a big show of making dinner for the whole family, including Shaky Jake. I could smell the good-food-cooking smells from my room/personal area. I could hear the sounds of pots and pans clanging, and instantly I knew exactly what was going on: she was trying to win our hearts back through our stomachs.

  Making turkey meatballs was one of the only actual momlike things Mom ever did, and back in Brooklyn I used to feel lucky if it happened once every couple of months. Abuela was the cook of the family, and Mom knew how to prepare two, maybe three dishes. So if Mom was cooking, it was usually to make a point: that a woman who had once been called the “ice princess of indie rock” by Blender magazine could also roll up her sleeves and transform herself into a regular stay-at-home type—or, as in this case, to make up for something horribly irresponsible that she had done earlier that day.

  I sat at the edge of the kitchen and watched her, dirty blond hair in a ponytail, furiously chopping onions and mixing them into a big ball of goodness in the mixing bowl. She shaped the mixture into tight, rounded balls and began to cook them to a delicious golden brown. It was a smart strategy. One whiff of the air in that kitchen was enough to make me swoon.

  But would I let her get away with this? Let her buy my forgiveness through my taste buds? Perform emotional bribery with oregano and bread crumbs? No way. It wasn’t going to work this time. Parents couldn’t just bail on their kids in the middle of the night, recording or no recording. And they couldn’t make up for it with one meal, however yummy.

  It was my goal to say no more than ten words during the whole dinner.

  “Someday I’d like to mix our whole catalog in surround sound,” Dad was saying as we all sat down.

  “Interesting,” was Jake’s reply, although he didn’t actually sound that interested.

  Dad was in outer space. I knew that, and I didn’t have the unrealistic expectation that he would feel bad about what he had done. Bigger storms had come and gone without him noticing a cloud in the sky. Mr. V said the other day that the definition of insanity is doing or seeing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. No matter how many times I heard Dad obsess about music over the dinner table while barely nodding hello to his own children, I hoped things would be different. But they never were. So I guess that made me crazy.

  I decided to concentrate all my silent fury on my mom. She was clueless, but not as clueless as my dad. She wasn’t too clueless to be made to feel guilty. I wanted her to feel bad, and for a good long while.

  “So, how was school?” Mom asked, taking off her apron. She wore a sheer periwinkle shirt. The short sleeves had pretty frills at the ends, and tiny w
hite butterflies decorated the fabric.

  “Fine.” I sat down at the table, not meeting her eyes. One word. One out of ten. X sat across from me with his clapping monkey.

  I twirled pasta around my fork, making sure my expression wasn’t sad or angry. I just went for emptiness, wide-open emptiness that would keep Mom guessing. I was good at this.

  X was inhaling his pasta and making rhymes about his two favorite foods, orange sherbet and Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray soda. These two items had been mostly off-limits in Brooklyn, when Abuela was in charge of the shopping and cooking. Abuela used to let X have orange sherbet on holidays and other special occasions, and once a month or so she’d go all the way to a Lower East Side deli to buy a six-pack of Cel-Ray, a soda that actually mixed in celery flavor along with the regular five pounds of sugar. Back then, these things had been only once-in-a-while treats. Now X wanted them every day. My mom had pretty much caved in when it came to the orange sherbet, letting X have some every night after dinner. But she couldn’t find Cel-Ray anywhere.

  “Sunday, Monday, X wants a Cel-Ray,” X chanted. “Tuesday, Wednesday, I know my mom’ll find a way!”

  Mom succeeded in calming Xavier down after a while by squeezing a lime into his ginger ale and giving him her most serious enough-is-enough stare. Then she got even more ambitious, trying to get me to talk again, to answer questions with more than one-syllable answers. She admitted that going to the mastering studio had been “bad judgment” and that she’d start being “more aware of” X’s and my “needs.” She tried to puncture my armor with these measly peace offerings. But it wasn’t going to work, and she knew it. She shifted tactics.

  “Are you still enjoying that English class you said you liked? The one with the funny teacher?”

  “It’s fine.” Three.

  “Have you been looking for bandmates?”

  “No.” Four.

  “Have you made any other friends?”

  “Nope.” That made five words that I’d spoken since dinner had started. Mom put her fork down and leaned over, trying to get me to make eye contact. I gave her a glance that lasted less than a half second.

  “Belle, not all your friends need to be musicians, you know. I’ll bet there are all kinds of neat kids at Federal Hill.”

  Neat kids?

  “Whatever, Mom.” Seven. Bad move. She couldn’t offer me advice and parental wisdom on the same day she had abandoned me in the middle of the night.

  “Belle’s never been great at making friends,” said my dad, as if I weren’t sitting right there in front of him. “She’s a loner, like me, dreaming about music.”

  Then he turned to me. “Annabelle, I love the way you’ve taken after me with your music. It’s something that’ll stay with you for the rest of your life. But you need to work on making friends, too, and keeping them. Maybe you need to … I don’t know, soften your edges a little bit?”

  “What are you talking about? I don’t have any edges!” Enraged at the fact that my dad had made me go over my word count by seven, I picked up my plate and headed toward the sink. But now that my plan had been shot to pieces, I couldn’t resist coming back to the table to stir things up a little. I guess I hadn’t fully mastered the art of sulking.

  “So, Dad, how’d your masterpiece album turn out? Was it worth it?”

  “Well, I don’t know if it’s a masterpiece, but—”

  “Really? Then why bother? What’s the point if it’s not going to be your Sgt. Pepper’s, your Doolittle, your OK Computer?”

  “I don’t know what you’re getting at, Belle, but I’m quite sure I don’t like your tone.”

  Both my parents pulled this trick. Ninety-nine percent of the time they didn’t act the least bit like parents, but as soon as they didn’t like the way I was acting, they came out with all the things they thought parents were supposed to say: “I’m not sure if I like your tone,” “Watch yourself, young lady,” “You’ve got an attitude problem,” etc.

  “Okay, how about this tone? Do you agree with all the bloggers that say you guys haven’t made a good record since Entranced?” Even X looked up from his state of orange-sherbet gluttony to see the response to that one.

  “That’s enough, Belle,” said my mom. “Go to your room. This instant!”

  She didn’t even sound like a real parent. She sounded like a fake mother in a black-and-white movie, an actor reading from a script.

  “I don’t even have a room! My room is four walls away from being a room! It’s just a personal area!”

  “Well, go to your personal area, then!” Mom said. “Right now!”

  I ran into the kitchen and paced back and forth in front of the sink. I was stomping so hard that my feet actually ached, and the room seemed to be moving, not me. Everything was a blur, and my brain felt hot with anger. Then I reached into the sink, grabbed the plate I had just put there, and smashed it to the floor.

  “Belle!” my mom shouted as I ran to my room, to my area, to whatever it was, cursing the fact that it didn’t even have a door I could slam. I just jumped on my bed and put the pillow over my head. I tried to calm myself down by going through Beatles lyrics in my head, but it didn’t work. How could my parents be that clueless? How could they treat X and me like we were just another piece of baggage they had to take up north with them to make their home-studio dream come true?

  I needed a real band more than ever now. Anything to take me away from all this. A band would be my magic carpet, my escape route out of this stupid situation.

  “Belle?” It was my mom. “I’m sorry, honey.”

  “Go away!”

  “Can we talk? Please?”

  “I don’t feel like it.”

  “Jake is here. Will you talk to him?”

  “No!”

  That took the cake. Things had gotten so bad with my parents, they had forgotten how to even be parents. They needed a big bearded drummer to raise their own kids.

  I waited until I was sure they had both walked away and weren’t coming back, opened up my notebook, and wrote:

  You stand there trying to say the right things

  But I can’t even look you in the eye

  When you wake up, see I’ve left this place

  Will you even cry?

  I wonder, will it hurt you bad?

  When I turn from you and run?

  I’ll be the one with the last word

  Heading for the setting sun

  I titled it “Setting Sun.” As they say in the business, this song-to-be “wrote itself.” If my parents were going to drive me insane, maybe I could at least get some lyrics out of it.

  Rock stars use their lame family lives as material for songs.

  THE FIRST PRACTICE

  “Abuela, I know you want me and X to do what Mom and Dad say,” I said to Abuela bright and early the next morning, a Saturday. “But I don’t think you’re really getting the situation.”

  Abuela had woken me up with a phone call at the ungodly hour of 7:13 a.m. and had just finished her “make your fathers proud” speech.

  “How you mean, Annabella?” she said.

  “What I mean is that I can’t make them ‘proud’ if they’re never even around.”

  “They really spending so much time outside of house?”

  “Yes, Abuela, they really are. But what’s worse is how they never notice what’s going on with us. I mean, X is not the same as when you last saw him. He’s so hyper and crazy, going bonkers constantly.”

  “This is no good. No good.”

  “And Mom and Dad haven’t met any of my teachers yet, or anything. I probably hang out more with my English teacher than I do with them.”

  “Mi angelita, I did not know this. I so sorry. This also no good.”

  “And Jake makes us chocolate chip pancakes like four times a week. Last night, Mom made turkey meatballs. That’s the first real sit-down meal we’ve had as a family in Providence. And it ended in a fight.”

  “What?!?!” She scre
eched so loudly I had to pull my ear away from the phone. “You eating pancakes? For dinner? Annabella, this is very, very, very bad. Why you no tell me this before? Shaking Jake no can cook for my family. That red-beard man no cook for my grandchildrens. I gonna talk to your fathers now. For sure! Nobody making the good food for you? I very upset about this, my baby. I no happy at all.”

  “How you doin’, Belle?” the red-beard man asked me only moments after I hung up the phone with Abuela.

  But I didn’t want to talk about it. “I’m having a band practice. With only one measly bandmate! I need at least one more musician, Jake. Otherwise we’ll be a joke!”

  I had just finished cleaning up the broken dish that my parents had left from the night before with a note from my dad next to it saying, “You broke it, you clean it up.” I could hear my parents stirring upstairs, and I was trying to finish this chat with Jake before they came down.

  Jake had a homemade carrot cake in the oven and was licking some of the leftover batter off a spatula. The light orange color matched his beard and head hair perfectly. “Want some?” he asked, and I shook my head. In Brooklyn, Abuela had absolutely forbidden him to make his cakes after the time he’d clogged her drain with carrot peels and she’d had to call a plumber.

  “How did you hook up with the bands you’ve been in, Jake?”

  “Well, drummers are in demand. Always. I’ve never really had to look for people to play with. They’ve found me.”

  “Well, all I know is that it’s been two months and I’m not even close to having a band. And every time I ask people about how they put theirs together, they make it sound like it just happened. Like magic.”

  “Well, it is kind of like that,” said Jake. “You put yourself out there, and things just start to work for you.”

  “Well, I’ve been putting myself out there.”

  “It can take some time.” He licked his fingers.

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “And listen, I’m psyched to jam with you if you need a drummer.”