by Len Vlahos
Miss Chardette—“Bulldog Chardette”—the warden of my sixth-grade class, stood over me. I was alone, lying there on the ground, looking up at her, silently pleading for help. She just shook her head and walked away.
That was the last time I talked back to a bully.
When the last bell rang that day, going outside seemed like a bad idea, so I hid in a coat closet. This was right after Dr. Kenny had first taught me to use lists as calming devices. I began with the only one other than lightning that I’d memorized to that point: US presidents. I ran through the list forward and backward. I counted the even-numbered presidents, and then the odd-numbered presidents. I figured out that the most common letter of the alphabet to begin a president’s last name was “H”—Harrison, Hayes, Harrison, Harding, and Hoover—and that only one president’s last name began with the letter “L”—Lincoln. The exercise must’ve worked, because I fell asleep.
When I woke up and dragged myself out of the closet, the clock on the wall of the classroom said it was four p.m. The school was deserted. That’s when I went outside and found Dana Dimarco crying on the swings.
As I walked by, she looked out from underneath her copper bangs. She didn’t say anything, but I know she saw me. She cast her eyes back to the ground and started crying louder.
I figured I had two choices:
Choice #1: Sit down on the next swing over and ask her what was wrong. Experience taught me that would only lead to disaster. I would do something—or rather, I was something—that would make her cry harder.
Choice #2: Walk away.
I chose door number two, and I’ve regretted it every day of my life since.
If I had talked to Dana Dimarco, maybe I would’ve made a friend. Truth is, she wasn’t totally awful to me most of the time. I bet if I had bothered to ask her what was wrong—and I think she wanted me to ask—maybe my whole life would’ve been different.
I sat down next to Cheyenne, leaving a healthy buffer between us. She didn’t say a word, but she didn’t have to; something in the air told me that being there was the right thing to do. She needed company.
I don’t know how long we sat there—the two of us on that stoop, saying nothing—but the sky turned from the color of a plum, to the color of faded blue jeans, to dawn, and Chey had stopped crying. I’d almost forgotten she was next to me. I was just starting to hatch this crazy idea that we should steal a van to finish the tour when Chey cleared her throat and brought me back to reality.
I turned to face her. She must have sensed that she had my attention because she didn’t look up before she spoke.
“We had a big fight.” Her voice was flat, matter-of-fact. I didn’t have to ask who we was. I knew who we was.
“Oh.” I didn’t know what to say next, so I said nothing.
Chey plowed on, not realizing that I was the last person on the planet who wanted to hear about her problems with Johnny. “He wants us to leave, to go home. I told him we all agreed to wait until the end of the week, but he says he doesn’t care, he wants to leave now and I should go with him.”
“Mmm-hmm,” I said.
I know what you’re thinking. This was my chance to pile on Johnny, drive a wedge between him and Cheyenne, but honestly, I didn’t have it in me.
“He has money, you know.” This caught my attention.
“No, I didn’t know.”
“Yep.”
“How much?”
“Like five hundred dollars. His parents gave it to him for emergencies. Chey,” she said, mocking Johnny’s voice, “if this isn’t an emergency, I don’t know what is.”
Johnny had money? He and Chey were fighting? I didn’t know what to do. I’d only just barely pulled myself back from the edge of a breakdown and I felt empty, hollowed out, like someone had removed all of my internal organs and replaced them with bags full of sand. Nothing in me was real.
Chey started to cry again, which was the only sound in the world less bearable than the silence.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Are you going with him?”
“To do what?” she said, unable or unwilling to sniffle the edge out of her voice. “Spend a week following him around until he leaves for Syracuse? Then what? Follow him there? He begged me to go, but I don’t see the point.”
“Johnny begged you to go?” I couldn’t picture Johnny begging anyone for anything.
“I guess that’s not the right word. He kinda ordered me to go. That’s what started the fight.”
I nodded. Something about Johnny ordering Chey to go with him reminded me of my father, maybe because it had the unmistakable ring of moral superiority. It never occurred to either one of them—Johnny or my dad—that they could possibly be wrong, about anything, ever.
Case in point: Once, a few years earlier, Johnny told me that he’d heard “they” were breeding six-legged chickens.
“Huh?” I responded.
“Yeah, I saw it on a TV show. They want to sell more drumsticks.” Johnny was always bringing some crazy bit of information like that to our rehearsals:
“They’re using coffee enemas to cure cancer.”
“A nail punch will shatter your car’s windshield if you ever drive into a lake.”
“Carrie Fisher is really a dude.”
Crazy as these tidbits sounded, this was Johnny, so I just accepted whatever he said as true. The chicken thing though, sounded just a bit too crazy, so I put up a meager and casual resistance, which for me was a lot.
“C’mon,” I said, “that can’t be for real.”
Johnny was flabbergasted. You could almost hear him thinking, How dare you talk back.
He quoted every detail he could remember from the television show—except its name—and kept pushing, not letting us rehearse until I said I believed him. I never did. I finally shrugged my shoulders, thinking the whole thing was funny, and that the incident was over. But Johnny was so hell-bent on proving his point—just like my dad would’ve been in the same situation—that he actually wrote a letter to Frank Perdue for validation. Really. Frank Perdue. I kid you not. As far as I know, the letter went unanswered.
When I think about it now, I wonder if Johnny wasn’t some sort of surrogate for my dad. Freaky. And beside the point.
“I don’t know what to do, Harry,” Chey said. It was more or less an open plea for help, but I had nothing. I wanted to help Cheyenne—more than anything in the world I wanted to help Cheyenne—but I couldn’t even help myself.
The last time I’d felt this way was the afternoon I’d been rejected by Gabrielle. That day Johnny was there to pick me up. “We should start a band,” he’d said. It was like a magic phrase—abracadabra, hocus pocus, and open sesame all rolled into one. It made me forget the pain for just long enough to move on to the next thing.
Sitting there with Chey, I wished for that magic phrase again. Strike that. Not for the phrase, but for how it made me feel, full of wonder and promise. I wished I had bottled that feeling, let it age, and uncorked it there on that porch.
And that’s when it hit me. The only thing in the world that could ever make anyone feel truly better.
“I have an idea,” I said, “that will help us both.” I reached out my hand for Chey. This was so unlike me—taking action and initiative, being direct—that I’m not sure she knew what to do. After a moment she put her hand in mine and let me help her up.
“Let’s go.”
HIT ME WITH YOUR BEST SHOT
(written by Eddie Schwartz, and performed by Pat Benatar)
During our first sixty hours in Athens, we’d done the following:
Athens Thing #1: We found the mechanic and got the bad news about Dino.
Athens Thing #2: We listened to Johnny whine that we needed to give up the tour and go home.
Athens Thing #3: We waited outside the downtown phone booth while Johnny called his parents and told them that the van had broken down and that we
were stranded. He made them promise to be in touch with everyone else’s family. They made him promise to call again the next day.
Athens Thing #2: We listened to Johnny whine that we needed to give up the tour and go home.
Athens Thing #4: We watched Richie try his hand at skateboarding. With his arms flailing and whirling, he managed to stay afloat all the way into the trough of the half-pipe, but as the momentum carried the board up the opposite slope, he fell backward and landed hard on his ass. It took him a minute to realize he was okay, and when he did, he raised both arms and yelled, “Fucking A!” in triumph. Tony, Chuck, and the other skate punks shrieked with delight.
Athens Thing #2: We listened to Johnny whine that we needed to give up the tour and go home.
Athens Thing #5: We explored downtown Athens. We found a secondhand record store (we had no money so we browsed), a local sub shop called Judy’s (where we learned that subs were called “po’boys”), and the University of Georgia campus (where a steady stream of unpleasant looks suggested we were less than welcome).
Athens Thing #2: We listened to Johnny whine that we needed to give up the tour and go home.
Athens Thing #6: And we—meaning me—read a book in the living room while Johnny and Cheyenne sat on the front porch swing and made out. (Not true. I pretended to read a book while I spied on Johnny and Cheyenne through the venetian blinds.)
Those were the things we’d done after crash-landing in Athens. Here’s what we hadn’t done:
Athens Thing #0: Play music.
Cheyenne followed me inside, and I led her straight to her bass. “Here,” I said, “I’ll get the other guys.”
Cheyenne smiled. “Good idea. Where?”
“Richie set his drums up in the basement.”
The basement of the skate house was a strange space. There were four rooms, each separated from the others by brick walls, all but one with a hard-packed dirt floor. There were odd pieces of furniture scattered about, including a giant cherry wood dresser, a rolltop desk, and a toilet, which for some reason cracked Richie up.
The other things of note in the basement were the jumping spiders.
I don’t know if they were technically spiders because I’d never seen anything like them before, and haven’t seen anything like them since. In fact, I’m not entirely sure they were of this world. They were dime-sized bugs that hopped vertically in the air, moving with precision and menace. A group of them together looked like the tiny pistons of a tiny car engine. (Notice that I didn’t say van engine because as you now know, FAP, van engines do not work.) There were hundreds of the little monstrosities. They were mostly restricted to a back corner of the basement, which left the rest of the space safe for human habitation. Every so often one of the spiders would venture into the green zone, which made it fair game. The only house rule Tony and Chuck had was to never go into the basement in bare feet.
I kicked Richie’s foot as I walked into our shared bedroom, waking him up. He made an unintelligible sound, a breathy amalgam of “what” and “fuck,” and looked at me. “Jesus, Harry, what time is it?”
“I don’t know. Six or seven maybe?”
“Is the house on fire?”
“No.”
“Then piss off.”
“We’re jamming.”
Richie’s eyes opened all the way and he smiled. He got up and grabbed his drumsticks and pants, in that order, and headed downstairs.
Johnny was in the room he and Cheyenne had been sharing, sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at his fully packed knapsack.
“I told you guys I was going to college,” he said to me as soon as I crossed the threshold, defending himself before I could say a word.
“C’mon,” I told him, waving him to follow me.
“Where?”
“We’re jamming.”
“Harry, I think I need to leave.” Johnny sounded exasperated, defeated.
“I know,” I said, looking at my shoes. “Cheyenne told me. But why don’t you come jam first?”
“What? Why?”
“I dunno.” It was a coward’s answer. The truth was that he should come jam because he was my best friend and music was the only thing left holding us together. That whatever he and I had once meant to each other was seeping away like water from a drought-stricken lake, too slowly to be noticed, until one day it would just be gone. That even if he was going to leave, he should go out, literally, on a high note. But I wasn’t programmed to say those things. I wanted to, but didn’t know how.
“If you don’t know, then I sure don’t know,” he answered. His voice had an edge and a meanness that hurt, and I reacted.
“Cheyenne says you have money,” I said. It felt good to catch him in a lie, to force him to the moral low ground.
Silence.
I looked up at Johnny and met his eyes. It’s important to understand that I’d never said anything so directly confrontational in the entire history of our friendship. This was new ground for both of us.
“It’s none of your business,” he finally answered.
“It’s not?”
“No.”
“You didn’t seem to mind spending the money my dad gave me.”
“That was your choice, Harry. Besides, my parents told me this was emergency money.”
“And the van breaking down? That wasn’t an emergency?”
“My emergency, not your emergency. And like I said, it’s none of your business.” He was defiant, smug and secure in the rightness of his actions to the last. I couldn’t take it.
“Asshole.” I muttered the word under my breath. It was dripping with malice, and it was out of my mouth before I could stop it.
Johnny’s eyebrows arched so sharply in surprise that they looked like two garden slugs trying to crawl off his forehead and into his hair. “I’m sorry, did you say something?”
My utterance of “asshole” was so far off the script of our well-defined relationship that I knew I’d crossed a line and it scared me. I shook my head no.
He stared right through me and with all the cruelty he could muster, said, “You. Are. Such. A. Pussy.” And then he smiled.
When I think about it now, I know that Johnny was feeling the same stress, or at least his own version of the stress, that the rest of us were feeling. And when I think about it now, I know that Johnny’s best defense has always been a good offense. But that’s only if I think about it now. In the heat of that moment, something in me snapped. It was like when the cotter pin on Dino snapped; the clutch was still there, and the gears were still there, but any connection between the two was gone. I had no control. Strike that. In some weird way, I think I had total control. I’d switched to autopilot. All feeling and all thought peeled away from me like a snake’s skin molting.
Maybe I snapped because I hadn’t slept. Or maybe it was a hangover from the flood of emotions I’d experienced the night before. Or maybe it was the years of abuse and neglect, the cruelty upon cruelty inflicted on me. Or maybe it was that Johnny had broken the promise we’d all made not to date Cheyenne, ever, and that he did it before I’d had the chance. Maybe it was all of those things, or maybe it was something else entirely. But when I look back, I think it was his smile that pushed me over the edge.
Time froze. I saw everything as a collection of brightly glowing pixels, each point of light so intense I couldn’t look straight at it, but all the pixels together rendering the world in perfect, stark clarity, as if illuminated by a prolonged flash of lightning. Every nerve ending in my body was humming. Strike that. Not humming, thrumming, like what you feel if you’re standing too close to high voltage power lines. I was either going to float away or explode.
I didn’t float away.
I dropped my arms to my sides and looked Johnny in the eye. He didn’t flinch. My right hand opened itself into a flat paddle, and with all my might, my arm swung out wide and slapped Johnny in the face. I hit him hard enough that his head swiveled to the side and his cheek tu
rned red.
He looked back at me stunned. “Did you just slap me?”
I turned and walked out of the room.
PUMP IT UP
(written and performed by Elvis Costello)
“Where’s Johnny?” Chey asked without looking up. She was sitting on the edge of her amp tuning her bass.
“Upstairs,” I answered as I plugged my guitar in.
After my open-handed slap I made straight for the basement. I saw Chey and Richie exchange a glance as I pulled the guitar strap over my head. They could tell something was wrong.
You’re probably thinking that I was feeling one of the following emotions in that moment:
Anger.
Joy.
Relief.
Fear.
Guilt.
Sorrow.
The truth is, more than anything, I was embarrassed. Embarrassed that I’d slapped Johnny and not punched him in the face. When someone calls you a pussy, an open-handed slap only proves his point. That’s what I was thinking when I went downstairs. The whole episode showed how damaged my friendship with Johnny was. I didn’t know if he would come down the stairs or not, and by then, I really didn’t care. I just wanted to move on.
“Let’s play a song,” I said.
“Is he coming?” Cheyenne asked, looking worried.
As if on cue, the sound of stomping footsteps upstairs made the ceiling shake. We all stopped—me standing and holding my guitar, Richie sitting behind his drums, and Chey perched on the edge of her amp—and waited. Then we heard the front door of the house open and slam shut.
No one moved for a least a full minute, probably more like two.
Cheyenne broke the silence. I don’t know what was going through her head. She probably thought Johnny had left because of her. She set her jaw in the locked position and started playing the bass line to our nastiest, fastest song.
