The Vinyl Underground

by Rob Rufus

  “We’ve just gotta get you double numb, that’s all.”

  “You think that’ll work?” I asked.

  “For a few hours, maybe.”

  “Cool.” I nodded and took a matchbook from my pocket.

  I handed it to Milo. The wind blew the first match out.

  Suddenly, muffled rock music shook the house, signifying that the party had kicked into gear. Two matches later, the joint stayed lit.

  Milo took a long toke, working his eyebrows over his frames in that stupid Groucho Marx way that I hated. But I laughed in spite of myself.

  “Shhhhhh,” he hissed as he exhaled.

  But then he began coughing loudly, which made me laugh harder. He put his finger to his lips, choking down his coughs as he handed me the joint.

  I hit it with purpose, inhaling until the back of my throat caught fire and my eyes dried up. I held the smoke inside like that, there with the quiet pain. As I exhaled, the wind picked back up. The smoke whisked away like a tiny tornado and the tip of the joint blew out.

  “It’s almost 1968,” Milo said with wonder.

  “I know. It’s the eve of destruction.”

  “Nah, man, it’s the Year of the Monkey.”

  “The what?” I asked, clearing my throat.

  “Every twelfth year is the Year of the Monkey. The monkey represents cleverness. It’s, like, a year for smart people to thrive.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “That we’re fucked,” he said. “Majorly, majorly fucked.”

  And we laughed and we laughed and we laughed and we coughed and we laughed and we laughed and we laughed.

  ―

  The deeper into the night we went, the more crowded the party became.

  The wrestling team claimed the kitchen, and their lettermen jackets looked comically out of place with the décor. A pink stove and pink refrigerator sat tactfully on the pink tile floor; but so did the keg, which trumped any shade of emasculation. Milo and I could’ve hung out in there, but I knew I’d make the others uncomfortable (when your dad’s the coach, your presence is always suspect.)

  So we posted up in the living room, where most everyone else had gathered. The cigarette smoke was thick and dreamlike, drifting through bodies and conversations, filling up pockets of empty space. The coffee table and furniture had been moved, save the TV and an armoire cabinet displaying Rachel’s mother’s collection of carnival glass. The room had been transformed into an unsanctioned dance hall, complete with a live rock-n-roll band.

  They called themselves The Kryptiks—the band was comprised of three shaggy-haired juniors and a skinny sophomore on vocals. As they burned through the familiar tunes of 1967, I had to admit they were pretty good for a bunch of underclassmen.

  Their bassist stood next to the TV, which Rachel had left on. Big bands in tuxedos boogied on the muted screen while The Kryptiks played a garagey interpretation of The Hollies’ tune, “Carrie Anne.” I leaned against the green floral wallpaper and watched the other kids dance.

  Milo had been right—double numb was better than numb. My head didn’t feel as cloudy, which was kinda funny, since I was stoned. But my clarity came with heavy thoughts that left me with no urge to join the others on the dance floor.

  My gut was full of beer and my head was full of smoke, but I was hyperaware that every boy on that dance floor would be reporting to his draft board in the coming months, same as me. I didn’t understand how they danced around that fact, but they sure as hell found a way; they shimmied and shook around the new year like the hands of a clock that’s attached to a time bomb.

  “Hi, Ronnie,” someone yelled above the music.

  I turned to my right. Some majorettes giggled together and passed around a bottle of gin. They waved and giggled again.

  Flirty giggling—I still wasn’t used to the sound.

  Girls had never been into me before my brother died. But now I had a bleak sort of fame at school—not popularity, but notoriety—and near strangers were eager to lick up every ounce of trickle-down grief they could get.

  It’s messed up, I know, but girls were finally into me. So instead of complaining, I cleared my throat and walked over.

  “Hey y’all,” I said, smiling.

  “What?” Lena Jacobs, the one nearest me asked.

  “Hey,” I said, louder.

  I was used to repeating myself. Complications from a tonsillectomy had left me with a scarred vocal cord, which meant my voice was raspier than other boys my age. Medically speaking, this wasn’t a big deal. Socially speaking, it meant patiently accepting the fact that people couldn’t tell what the fuck I was saying.

  “You look real pretty tonight.”

  She smiled a bright-red candy smile, and her friends giggled again.

  She sure did look pretty. They all did. They had knowing eyes and delicate smiles, and bodies that only an old-timey poet could properly wax lyrical about.

  The band began hammering out Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love.”

  “Ask her to dance,” one of her friends dared me.

  But before I could respond, I heard a familiar rumble from the kitchen.

  “Ramrod! Ramrod! Ramrod! Ramrod!”

  I smiled as the boys in the kitchen chanted louder.

  “Ramrod! Ramrod! Ramrod! Ramrod!”

  The girls smiled, too.

  We all knew that chant. The entire school knew it. The entire town knew it. We heard it at every football game, every wrestling tournament, and every pep rally. It was the overture of Lewis “Ramrod” Gibbons, our reigning athletic superstar and my brother’s best friend.

  Bruce and Lewis had been running buddies off and on the court, and they stole the show at every sporting event they participated in. They functioned like opposite sides of the same coin—when Bruce was picked for quarterback, Lewis was picked for fullback. When Lewis qualified for the heavyweight division, my brother wrestled at 155. They procured trophy after trophy for our school, like they were a two-man wrecking crew.

  “Excuse me a second,” I said.

  Lena shrugged, and turned back to her friends.

  I moved down the hallway, stumbling more than I expected. I passed the oversized dining room, aka make-out central, and then moved beneath the harsh lights of the kitchen.

  The chants had died by the time I got there. Lewis stood in line for the keg, shaking hands with the guys from the team. The outline of muscle was visible under the sleeves of his jacket, giving him the look of an out-of-work superhero.

  “Ramrod,” I sang, waving as I entered the room.

  He smiled when he saw me. His smile was incredibly confident, big and toothy and undeniable. It was the grin of a winner. He should’ve been offered an athletic scholarship on that smile alone.

  I cut in line beside him.

  “Happy New Year,” I said.

  “That’d be nice, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yeah man, it would.”

  The line moved forward. We were up. Lewis filled two plastic cups with beer. He handed the first one to me.

  “Your daddy tell ya he wants me to help coach the team?”

  “What?” I asked. “And not wrestle? But you’re the best—”

  “I can keep wrestling ’til my birthday. But he said once I turn nineteen it wouldn’t be fair to the competition.”

  “Since when does he care about what’s fair to the competition?”

  “Beats me. It’s my own fault, anyways. Flunking last year screwed everything up, and now I just—”

  “Ronnie Bingham,” Lena hollered, rushing into the kitchen, “you better come dance with me!”

  I spilt half my beer on the bubblegum tile when she grabbed my arm.

  “If you don’t,” Lewis grinned, “I will.”

  He smiled at Lena. Her eyes bec
ame hearts.

  “Come on,” I said to her.

  I let her guide me back down the hall. As we got closer to the music, I registered the song: “Never My Love” by The Association. The Kryptiks’ guitarist handled the riff, which sounded surprisingly righteous in the absence of an organ. We walked to the center of the room, and were encircled by swaying bodies and drunken drama and nervous teenage tongues.

  I gripped Lena’s hips. She arched her arms around my neck, and laid her head on my shoulder. Her tits pressed right up against me as we started to sway. I memorized the feeling, closed my eyes, and got lost in the music.

  “You know,” she whispered, “I keep thinkin’ about how hard Christmas must have been for you, Ronnie. Like, without Bruce there.”

  She pulled her body closer against me.

  “Um, yeah,” I said clumsily, struggling to concentrate. “It was a drag—”

  Suddenly, the Kryptiks stopped playing. A squeal of feedback shot from the microphone, and we all turned toward it. Our host, Rachel Harris, stood at the mic. Her paper party hat drooped down at a sad angle.

  “Shh,” she yelled, “I need to hear the TV to know when the countdown starts! Shut! Up!”

  We shut up. I gazed at the television. Guy Lombardo was doing his standard New Year’s Big Band Bash. He held up his hand to count down with his viewers at home.

  “OK!” Rachel yelled. “Here we go! Nine! Eight!”

  The crowd joined in.

  “Seven! Six!”

  “Five!” Lena yelled into my ear.

  “Four!” the make-out couples yelled from the dining room.

  “Three!” the wrestlers yelled from the kitchen.

  “Two!” The Kryptiks’ front man yelled into the mic.

  “One.” I mumbled flatly, to no one at all.

  “HAPPY NEW YEAR!”

  Lena planted one on me. Her tongue slid into my mouth as Rachel’s champagne cork popped. The band kicked into a funky version of “Auld Lang Syne.”

  “Happy New Year,” she grinned.

  “Happy New Year,” I repeated unconvincingly.

  “Are you OK?”

  “Yeah.” I shrugged. “Just kinda wish people would quit askin’ me that.”

  She considered it for a moment, and then her expression changed. “This scene’s bumming you out, I can tell. How ’bout we go somewhere more private?”

  I nodded.

  The band transitioned into “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” with the guitarist once again handling the organ line. The crowd started dancing—slower now, pausing only to pull swigs off the champagne bottle as it made its way around the room. Lena led me through the dance floor, and then started up the stairs. I sluggishly followed.

  I glanced down from the staircase and took a long look at those carefree kids. Through the haze, I could see Lewis standing by himself at the window. He wasn’t dancing or watching the band. He wasn’t talking to anyone. He just stared out that window and sipped his beer.

  “Come on, Ronnie,” Lena called. “Let’s ring in 1968 right.”

  I kept moving up the stairs.

  The dancers kept dancing. The drinkers kept drinking.

  The band kept rocking and rolling.

  Lewis stood alone at the window, peering into the unknown dark.

  ―

  Dawn. Barely.

  I walked home alone with my shirt untucked and my jacket pulled tight against the morning cool. My head felt like a cracked jelly jar, and it leaked onto the ground with every hungover step I took. I didn’t remember how the night ended, or much of the blur before the black, but I woke up half-naked in Rachel’s little brother’s bedroom, tangled in a set of Lone Ranger sheets. Lena was nowhere to be found, and I figured Milo had gone home at some point or another.

  His mom worked the night shift, so she wouldn’t know I stayed out. Still, I walked faster. I was eager to crawl into my own bed and sleep off the night for the rest of the day.

  I turned onto my street and cut through Milo’s yard, into mine.

  One of Momma’s yellow ribbons had come loose from our holly tree and blown into a hedge. It was snagged on a thorn branch, flapping aimlessly in the breeze. I untangled the ribbon and carried it back to the tree.

  I crouched down to tie the ribbon, but then suddenly let my knees plant themselves down on the cold ground. I looked up at my house. My eyes were drawn to a loose shingle beating softly in the wind. That shingle had been holding on for dear life since I could remember. I looked at my window, then Bruce’s, then down at the garage where his car was stored. I looked at Milo’s house and then down the block, which led to the next and the next. I looked out at the streets of America, and felt tears sting at my reddened eyes.

  “I can’t go,” I whispered. “I can’t go to Vietnam.”

  I didn’t pray—I hadn’t once since Bruce died—but I came as close as I could let myself, and wished upon that shingle for President Johnson to end the war before I was old enough for the draft. The thought didn’t go any further—all I could do was wait and give peace a chance, as they’d come to say.

  So I turned back to the tree, and wrapped the ribbon around it as if it would tether me there to my front lawn, where my parents were close and everything was safe—felt safe—for that moment, anyway. Then I sighed, tied a knot, and let the ribbon go into the wind.

  That’s when I noticed someone watching me.

  I stood up and turned to the Criswells’ old place, which had been vacant for nearly a month. A girl was standing on the veranda.

  Her hair was long and straight and blacker than a funeral veil. It was striking against her frilly blue nightgown. But the jacket she wore smothered the girlishness of her pajamas like a boot heel to a match; the jacket was black leather with silver buckles, just like Marlon Brando’s motorcycle jacket in The Wild One.

  She stood there cloaked in leather, smoking a cigarette, looking at me.

  I threw her a tentative wave.

  She turned her head and exhaled coolly. The wind lifted her hair like a marauder’s flag, concealing everything but the smoke.

  When she turned back to me, she didn’t wave. But she nodded. Once.

  She flicked her cigarette into the yard.

  I stood there watching it die in the tall grass as she walked inside.

  two

  The Urge to Submerge

  My brother’s jacket was a size too big on me and was the bitter shade of bad coffee. The wool collar was matted and smelled like the cigarette smoke of strangers from faraway lands. U-S-M-C ran down the zipper flap.

  The government had shipped it to the house a few weeks after Bruce died. It came in the same package as his dog tags and his gloriously useless medals. There weren’t any patches on the jacket (his eyes had likely been X-ed out before he had a chance to sew any on), and I was glad.

  I wore the jacket daily. Other athletes would have been hassled for not sporting their lettermen jacket, and I knew it was for Bruce—not for me—that my teammates made an exception.

  I was wearing the bomber jacket as Dad drove me to school. He looked sleepy, grumpier than usual—that was the general mood at school the first day back from a break. I’d be the only one in the building that was happy Christmas was over, but I found school’s reliably repressive routine a great comfort in this cold new world.

  Dad waved at a crossing guard as we rounded the next block. I leaned back in my seat and counted the plastic yard Santas left out past their expiration. He pulled up to the edge of Cordelia High’s vast courtyard. He stopped, but left the car running.

  “Have a good day,” he grumbled.

  “You too, Dad. See ya at practice.”

  I grabbed my things and got out. Dad pulled the car around to the employee lot as I strolled through the grass, past a cluster of students chatting under a
large willow tree. I waved hello but didn’t stop to chat. My feet kept moving forward.

  Our school was two stories of scholarly brown brick. It stretched the length of the football field, which ran parallel to the building, and boasted a relatively modern design, including a veranda outside of the auditorium and a slanted awning that extended over the front of the building.

  “Bingham, my man!” hollered a wrestler smoking beneath it.

  I smiled at him as I went inside.

  The front concourse was packed. My ears rang with post-holidaze chitter-chatter as I looked around for Milo, but it was too chaotic to single anyone out. The first day of the semester was always a mess.

  Then the bell rang, and I joined the tide of students flooding the halls. I walked beneath a large, abrasive banner hanging from the railing of the second-floor balcony. It showed a crude drawing of a shark fin with discarded bird feathers gliding above it. In thick black print, it read

  SHARKS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR RUFFLED FEATHERS

  CREAM THE PELICANS THIS SATURDAY!

  I groaned, exhausted by the thought of that match. I didn’t get my kicks from confrontation, especially on the mat. I wasn’t very competitive. Unlike my father and brother, physical domination never filled me with pride. That’s not to say I wasn’t good at it; I was a solid wrestler and could’ve been a real contender if I put in the effort. But that was my fatal hang-up as an athlete: I never fought as hard as I could—or should.

  Why fight when you don’t have to?

  I found it simpler to ease up and let the current of the crowd do the work. That morning it pushed me forward, farther into the hall. Underclassmen bumped into each other as they checked door numbers and schedules. But I knew where I was headed—Room 112, by the gym. So I took my time, amused by the confusion.

  Then I saw something I didn’t expect: a mane of long, black hair flowing down a black leather jacket. The image disappeared into the crowd a moment later, a motorcycle mirage. I shrugged and entered Room 112.

  The classroom was the same as all the others, besides the theme of the décor. Pictures of dead presidents lined all four walls. Mr. Donahue was written on the blackboard in chalk. A map of Southeast Asia was tacked up beside it.