Scratch and the Sniffs

by Chris Lynch

  Somebody threw a battery. Then somebody threw a chair. Scratch tried to get back up onstage, but they wouldn’t give him back.

  “Harvey!” I screamed.

  Cecil threw himself once more into the tussle. Steven followed. They got sucked up like they were in a giant human food processor. Harvey emerged talking into his handset, and his assistants came running into the room. Vanessa took advantage of the situation to hop up onstage. Exit one triangle player out the back door like a fox terrier into a hollow log.

  So I was there, and Lars was there—petrified, like a statue of his goofy self. And Ling was still there, laying down the beat.

  Harvey was making a slashing motion across his throat, trying to get me to stop.

  “What, are you kidding?” I said into the microphone. “I’m just getting warm. Make them sit down so I can sing some more.”

  Harvey’s mouth hung open. He didn’t need to say anything. Make them sit down? I was one of them, I knew better than that.

  But I had the bug.

  “‘We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun …’”

  It was almost a cappella, with Ling-Ling now reduced to beating out the tune with one stick while he waved to the audience with the other. But we were enough.

  Suddenly the power went out.

  “Show’s over,” Harvey screamed over the sound of breaking glass.

  I must say in defense of our fans that though they may have been a little destructive, they were clearly not mean-spirited. They were having a fine time.

  “Everybody out!”

  And with that, we, Scratch and the Sniffs, were herded up and pushed toward the door, to give everybody the message.

  “The Sniffs have left the building,” Harvey announced from the stage, even though everyone could see we were still there.

  As I was wheeled away, I was rushed by the neighborhood’s really big businessman—he weighed about four hundred pounds—Sammy Blue. Sammy was always into something—caramel hot dog stands, local boxing promotion, designer dog breeding. Bright, lucrative ideas nobody else had.

  “You a genius, boy,” Sammy said, pumping my hand. “A bona fide musical genius. The way you combined the different genres there—how many genres did you have going there anyway, seven, eight?”

  “Twelve,” I said coolly, making a mental note to look up musical genres in the Funk & Wagnalls later on.

  “We gotta talk,” Sammy said. “Can we talk?”

  “I don’t know if you can talk,” I said, “but everybody knows I can.”

  11

  Just Don’t Think About It

  “WOULD I LIE?”

  It was a rhetorical question, but with a straight-shootin’ buck like Cecil, a question’s a question.

  “I believe you would, yes,” he said.

  “Well, I’m not lying. Sammy Blue wants us to make a music video, and that’s the straight stuff.”

  We were gathered for a super-secret session of the He-Man Women Haters Club, called by me to discuss this major break in our careers. We sat in and around the black Lincoln—just like in the old days when we were simple common peasants like the rest of you.

  “We’re going to be on MTV,” Ling sang, jamming both drumsticks in the air. He carried them with him everywhere now.

  “I’m not going on MTV,” Jerome said from his hiding spot under the dashboard. I peeked in at him. He looked like a bony Chihuahua shivering after a bath. “I’m not going anywhere, ever again. She’s out there. She’s going to get me. The last thing I want to do is go out and flaunt myself in front of her anymore.”

  “Hey, I forgot about you, ya big love monkey, you,” I said.

  “Don’t call me that,” he yipped. “We’re supposed to be the Women Haters, remember?”

  “Ah, that’s just a saying,” I answered. “We don’t really mean it.”

  “Oh yes we do,” Steven cut in.

  Now, why is it that the guys who actually have the girls chasing after them are the ones who want to hate ’em the most? Ain’t that peculiar?

  “Listen, you, we can’t have that stuff right now. We need you to be at your Johnny Chesthairiest for this operation. Because like it or not, and as big a mystery as it is to me, in this group you are the Cute One. Blecchh.”

  He smiled at that. “Say it again.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Say it again, so I’m sure I got it right. What’s my job again?”

  Now, what could possibly be worth this?

  Fame. Money. Power. I almost forgot.

  “You’re … the … cu …” I had to slap myself on the back of the head to force it out. “… Cute … One.”

  “Okay. Maybe I’ll cooperate.”

  “And what’s my job?” Ling asked anxiously.

  Oh, this was nice. Now I was going to have them all lining up to have the boss lick their boots.

  I think not.

  “You’re the Lunatic One,” I said, hoping to douse his fire.

  “Cool,” he said.

  All right. This is what I had to work with. I better wind up with a Grammy out of this.

  “And speaking of love monkeys,” said Steven, “you were doing a pretty mean Tom Jones up there, Wolfgang.”

  I very deliberately slicked my hair back, and looked off into the distance rather than at my accuser. “Hey, that’s my shtick,” I said coolly.

  Scratch sat on the hood of the car, shaking his head sadly as he plucked away at nothing on his guitar. He was looking extra rough these days, old Scratch. He still had on the same shiny pants, the same no shirt, still needed the same shower he was refusing to take. You could bend his hair into animal shapes, like pipe cleaners. Hey, maybe we could use that….

  But somehow he had managed to get even skinnier since he’d been with us. He must have been losing bone or something, because there was just no fat on him anywhere. He never smiled, and his hand-inked tattoos were fading and smudging, making him look a little more past his expiration date every day.

  “What’s the matter, Scratch?” I asked. “We are perched here on the very brink of megastardom, and you’re the second-biggest reason for that, next to myself. You should be feeling pretty satisfied right about now.”

  He shook his head more, slower, and in broader left-right swings. “This isn’t what I do,” he said. “I don’t understand any of this.”

  “You don’t have to understand it,” I assured him. “I’m the manager, remember? All you have to do is go on with your sulking genius noisemaker routine, and I’ll handle the rest.”

  He continued to shake his head. “Before, I thought, Okay, they can play around me if they want, it doesn’t make any difference to me. To be honest, I don’t even hear any of the rest of you while I’m playing.”

  That explains a lot.

  “But all this, this showtime stuff … this ain’t what I do at all.”

  “Shhh,” I said, sensing a bad turn in our little chat. “Don’t think about what you do, Scratch, just do it.”

  Everybody went off with his own assignment. Scratch had to stop thinking. Cecil had to start thinking. Jerome had to turn up the wattage on his new He-He-He-Man image so that it would beam out over the video. And the rest of them had to more or less flail their instruments, back me up, and stay out of the spotlights.

  “And bring along some girls, if you can.”

  Thought I might slip that one through as I shoved them out the door. No go.

  “Some what?” Steven, Jerome, and Ling—the charter guys—hollered together.

  “That’s the best harmony you guys have mustered the whole time—”

  “Wolfgang,” Jerome insisted. “If we stand for one thing in this club—”

  “Ya, well, we don’t,” I said. “Think about it. If you really want to make a statement, people have to be listening. And it’s a statistically proven fact that nobody listens to a video that doesn’t have girls all over the place. And let’s face cruel facts here—unless we get a cooler rep
, this club hating women is kind of like quitting the football team after you’ve already been cut.”

  The three of them stopped arguing with me. They pondered, they huddled. If I didn’t have them thinking my way, I at least had them momentarily stunned.

  “Are we going to be a football team too?” Cecil asked.

  “Could you go get your hammer and finish building us some platforms. Killer? There ya go, run over there, bang some nails.”

  “Here’s the deal,” Steven said, speaking for the group. “You can bring girls in here just for the video. Then they have to get out.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “But no Nessy,” Jerome insisted.

  “And absolutely, positively, no Monica,” Steven said.

  “That’s a deal,” I assured them, raising my hand in that stupid little three-fingered Boy Scout salute.

  Now, where could I find Monica again? Oh yes, the ice-cream parlor.

  12

  So I Ain’t No Boy Scout

  “THANKS FOR COMING. I’M glad you agreed to meet me.”

  “I was happy to. It all seems so mysterious and exciting.”

  “That’s me all over, babe. Mysterious and exciting.”

  I wasn’t even exaggerating. Because while I am always exciting, this day I was also a man of big mystery. I had called Monica and arranged this secret meeting, probably setting myself up for court-martial. I showed up incognito, wearing a dorky Red Sox baseball cap and windbreaker. I had also penciled in my mustache—not that it needed that much help—and wore small round tortoiseshell glasses that tinted darker when the light hit them. Doof City, so no one would suspect it was me in a million years, even with the wheelchair.

  And we met in the back of the church, just like real mobsters.

  “So I suppose you’re wondering why we’re here,” I whispered. There was nobody else in the place, but I think it’s impossible to raise your voice in a church unless you’re the featured speaker.

  “Are we getting married?”

  Bolts of lightning zinging around in my chest.

  “Don’t toy with me, you,” I said. “I’ll have that priest out of the bar and over here in a second.”

  “You’re always so funny,” she said, giggling to prove it.

  “So how come I’m not your favorite?”

  Monica paused, because she is, basically, a kind person. As kind as a female person can manage, anyway.

  “Some people might say you’re a little … scary,” she said.

  If she thought she was discouraging me, she was quite mistaken.

  “Oh they might, might they?”

  “Okay, they do.”

  “There, that’s better,” I said.

  Monica shook her head at me, laughing. “A lot of people might be offended by what I just said. Not you, though. You look like I just handed you money.”

  “Oh please,” I said, wheeling myself away from her. “Don’t. That would just embarrass me. Girls are always trying to give me money.”

  Already, Monica had broken the world church laughter record. “Is it okay to have fun in the church like this?” she asked extra softly.

  “I don’t know,” I answered even more softly. “I think you better come into the confessional booth with me so we can investigate.”

  “Thanks anyway,” she said. “But I don’t think I’ll be investigating anything with you.”

  I laughed, because I always laugh at such things. Because that’s who Wolf is. But we both knew she meant it, now and forever, and what I wanted to do was not laugh.

  “Anyway,” I said, steering back around to shore, “I don’t scare you at all, do I?”

  “Nope,” she said cheerily. Which made things mostly all better again.

  “Okay, so here’s the deal,” I said, jumping right into manager mode. “We have pulled together the most fantasmic band you ever heard in your whole girly life. We have a guitar player who’s like from another planet, and a huge, huge rhythm section that’s practically like a whole symphony orchestra. We could knock buildings down, if we wanted to. And we might want to at some point.”

  “How cool,” Monica said, coolly. Mostly she was being polite, waiting to get to the real point. “Is Steven in the band?”

  “See now, here we were having a perfectly nice time, and you had to go and ruin it.”

  “So that’s a yes.”

  I scowled, to make her wilt. She did not.

  “Well, I’m the singer, did you know that?”

  “When’s the show? Where? Will he be expecting me?”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute. What do you think, these tickets are free? This is going to be one of those must-see shows that you’ll have to be the tenth caller to the radio station to get into. I can’t just give—”

  “Save it, Wolf. You didn’t come to try and squeeze a few cents out of me. What do you think you’re doing here, scalping tickets to a show probably nobody’s going to want to see anyway? Get a grip, Oil Slick.”

  This must be the source of my powerful attraction to Monica: her uncanny resemblance to myself.

  And I don’t like it one bit.

  “Hey now, is honesty really necessary here? I thought you and I were above that.”

  “Yes, let’s be honest. What this is all about is, you have something I want—Steven. And I have something you want, which is …?”

  “All right—girls. Satisfied? A band has to have girls around, it’s an unwritten law and everybody knows it. It is more important for a musical group to have girls than to have musical instruments. And somebody’s going to film us. If they film us the way we usually look, we’ll make the Gregorian Chant guys seem like party animals. You’ve seen music videos—dripping with women.”

  I had her laughing again, only this time it didn’t feel so much like it was something we were sharing. “And you know … how many girls personally, Wolfgang?”

  “That’s kind of an unfair question, don’t you think? I mean, who can really even define know.”

  “Hey, I’d be impressed to find that anyone in your club can define girl.”

  “Ouch.”

  “So what would you say, Wolf? Personally, what do you guess, you might actually be able to round up two, maybe three girls who would talk to you?”

  “That’s a conservative estimate.”

  “Okay, and combining that with the girls the rest of the He-Men could bring in would raise the total to …?”

  “Two, maybe three,” I said quietly. I felt like I was a fighter, flat on the mat, but the referee wouldn’t stop counting me out (ninety-nine, one hundred, one hundred and one …).

  “Which would seem to make me and my friends pretty valuable to you. So I think the real question is, how much are you going to pay us per ticket?”

  My god, what happened here? She may well be just as wicked as they say she is. She’s like me. She’s worse than me even. She’s—

  A goddess.

  “We’ll have to see how much we can dig up,” I said, wheeling myself backward toward the door before she could damage me any further. This was embarrassing. “Just be at the club Saturday, noon. It’s going to be colossal.”

  She was shaking her head as I pushed open the big wooden door, bringing down a shaft of white light on her frizzy red head. “Who’d ever have thought it, you guys coming around to us like this?”

  “Hey,” I said, “we’re just like any rock-and-roll outfit—just ’cause we hate women doesn’t mean we don’t love ’em.”

  I shoved myself out the door before she could top me.

  13

  Sniff This

  I HAD TO BE QUIET. After all, Lars worked there, and Scratch lived there. Not that they should mind, since we all knew who had really become the star of the show.

  “Killer, you do beautiful work, honest. I’m tempted to travel all the way down to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, just to visit that silo you and your uncle built. I bet it’s like some kind of shrine, with pilgrims coming from all ov
er to see it.”

  Cecil allowed himself a moment of pride, something we didn’t see too much of with him. “Well, we have had ’em from as far as Huntsville and Biloxi.”

  “Wow!” I exclaimed, maybe with a little too much gusto. “Huntsville and Biloxi. That’s remarkable. Say, while we’re jawing here, how ’bout you take my platform, ya, that nice one there with the great little ramp, and kind of just haul it right over … come on, there you go … a little farther, now center it. Perfect!”

  “But you’re so far away from everybody else’s platform, and stuck in this greasy ol’ bay. What if Lars has to put up a car? No, I’ll just find you a better spot and—”

  “Leave it right where it is, Goober,” I snapped. “And here, over in the corner, this is where I want you sitting. During the performance, when I give you the signal, I want you to pull that lever right there.”

  “What’s that gonna—”

  “Just pull it, pull it, pull the lever, pull the lever!”

  This is what is known as the strain of command.

  “Is there a problem?” Scratch asked, crawling out of his bed in the car, stretching, and strapping on his guitar the way the rest of us pull on socks at the beginning of the day.

  “Good,” I said. “You’ll be there.” I pointed out one of two small platforms off to the right, out of my spotlight. Scratch yawned, shrugged, and went over to sit on it. “Anyone got a pen?” he asked.

  Lars clomped onto the scene, wearing his own guitar. He pulled a pen from behind his ear and took his place next to Scratch without having to be told. I had to say this for Lars, he made a great guitar sidekick. If only we could get him to sound a little less musical.

  Jerome came in wearing a baseball hat and a long rubber raincoat, eyes darting, checking every corner of the building for danger.

  “She’s not here, is she?”

  “Ness the Mess?” I asked.

  He shuddered.

  “Nah, you’re safe.” I pointed him to his box.

  “Don’t you have something a little more toward the back?” he asked.

  “Sorry, that’s where drummers go. Don’t worry, Studley, you’ll be fine. Just don’t throw off any clothes or anything.”