Lou is a music producer who knows Bill Graham personally. There were gold and silver record albums on his walls and a thousand electric guitars.
The Flaming Dildos rehearsal is on Saturday, in Scotty’s garage. When Jocelyn and I get there, Alice is setting up the new tape recorder her stepfather bought her, with a real microphone. She’s one of those girls that like machines—another reason for Bennie to love her. Joel, the Dildos’ steady drummer, comes next, driven by his dad, who waits outside in his station wagon for the whole practice, reading World War II books. Joel is AP everything and he’s applied to Harvard, so I guess his dad isn’t taking any chances.
Where we live, in the Sunset, the ocean is always just over your shoulder and the houses have Easter-egg colors. But the second Scotty lets the garage door slam down, we’re suddenly enraged, all of us. Bennie’s bass snickers to life, and pretty soon we’re screaming out the songs, which have titles like “Pet Rock,” and “Do the Math,” and “Pass Me the Kool-Aid,” but when we holler them aloud in Scotty’s garage the lyrics might as well be:
fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck
. Every once in a while a kid from Band and Orchestra pounds on the garage door to try out (invited by Bennie), and every time Scotty ropes up the door we glare out at the bright day shaking its head at us.
Today we try a sax, a tuba, and a banjo, but sax and banjo keep hogging the stage, and tuba covers her ears as soon as we start to play. Practice is almost over when there’s another banging on the garage door and Scotty pulls it up. An enormous pimpled kid in an AC/DC T-shirt is standing there, holding a violin case. He goes, I’m looking for Bennie Salazar?
Jocelyn and Alice and I stare at one another in shock, which feels for a second like we’re all three friends, like Alice is part of us.
“Hey guy,” Bennie says. “Good timing. Everybody, this is Marty.”
Even smiling, there’s no hope for Marty’s face. But I’m worried he might think the same of me, so I don’t smile back.
Marty plugs in his violin and we launch into our best song, “What the Fuck?”:
You said you were a fairy princess
You said you were a shooting star
You said we’d go to Bora Bora
Now look at where the fuck we are…
Bora Bora was Alice’s idea—we’d never heard of it. While everyone howls out the chorus
(What the fuck? / What the fuck? / What the fuck?)
, I watch Bennie listen, eyes closed, his Mohawk like a million antennas pricking up from his head. When the song ends, he opens his eyes and grins. “I hope you got that, Al,” he goes, and Alice rewinds the tape to make sure.
Alice takes all our tapes and turns them into one top tape, and Bennie and Scotty drive from club to club, trying to get people to book the Flaming Dildos for a gig. Our big hope is the Mab, of course: the Mabuhay Gardens, on Broadway, where all the punk bands play. Scotty waits in the truck while Bennie deals with the rude assholes inside the clubs. We have to be careful with Scotty. In fifth grade, the first time his mom went away, he sat all day on the patch of grass outside his house and stared at the sun. He refused to go to school or come in. His dad sat with him trying to cover his eyes, and after school, Jocelyn came and sat there, too. Now there are permanent gray smudges in Scotty’s vision. He says he likes them—actually, what he says is: “I consider them a visual enhancement.” We think they remind him of his mom.
We go to the Mab every Saturday night, after practice. We’ve heard Crime, the Avengers, the Germs, and a trillion other bands. The bar is too expensive, so we drink from my dad’s supply ahead of time. Jocelyn needs to drink more than me to get buzzed, and when she feels the booze hit she takes a long breath, like finally she’s herself again.
In the Mab’s graffiti-splattered bathroom we eavesdrop: Ricky Sleeper fell off the stage at a gig, Joe Rees of Target Video is making an entire movie of punk rock, two sisters we always see at the club have started turning tricks to pay for heroin. Knowing all this makes us one step closer to being real, but not completely. When does a fake Mohawk become a real Mohawk? Who decides? How do you know if it’s happened?
During the shows we slam-dance in front of the stage. We tussle and push and get knocked down and pulled back up until our sweat is mixed up with real punks’ sweat and our skin has touched their skin. Bennie does less of this. I think he actually listens to the music.
One thing I’ve noticed: no punk rockers have freckles. They don’t exist.
One night, Jocelyn answers her phone and it’s Lou going, Hello beautiful. He’s been calling for days and days, he goes, but the phone just rings. Why not try calling at
night?
I ask when Jocelyn repeats this.
That Saturday, after rehearsal, she goes out with Lou instead of us. We go to the Mab, then back to Alice’s house. By now we treat the place like we own it: we eat the yogurts her mom makes in glass cups on a warming machine, we lie on the living room couch with our sock feet on the armrests. One night her mom made us hot chocolate and brought it into the living room on a gold tray. She had big tired eyes and tendons moving in her neck. Jocelyn whispered in my ear, Rich people like to hostess, so they can show off their nice stuff.
Tonight, without Jocelyn here, I ask Alice if she still has those school uniforms she mentioned long ago. She looks surprised. Yeah, she goes. I do.
I follow her up the fluffy stairs to her actual room, which I’ve never seen. It’s smaller than her sisters’ room, with blue shag carpeting and crisscross wallpaper in blue and white. Her bed is under a mountain of stuffed animals, which all turn out to be frogs: bright green, light green, Day-Glo green, some with stuffed flies attached to their tongues. Her bedside lamp is shaped like a frog, plus her pillow.
I go, I didn’t know you were into frogs, and Alice goes, How would you?
I haven’t really been alone with Alice before. She seems not as nice as when Jocelyn is around.
She opens her closet, stands on a chair, and pulls down a box with some uniforms inside: a green plaid one-piece from when she was little, a sailor suit two-piece from later on. I go, Which did you like better?
Neither, she goes. Who wants to wear a uniform?
I go, I would.
Is that a joke?
What kind of joke would it be?
The kind where you and Jocelyn laugh about how you made a joke and I didn’t get it.
My throat turns very dry. I go, I won’t. Laugh with Jocelyn.
Alice shrugs. Ask me if I care, she goes.
We sit on her rug, the uniforms across our knees. Alice wears ripped jeans and drippy black eye makeup, but her hair is long and gold. She isn’t a real punk, either.
After a while I go, Why do your parents let us come here?
They’re not my parents. They’re my mother and stepfather.
Okay.
They want to keep an eye on you, I guess.
The foghorns are extra loud in Sea Cliff, like we’re alone on a ship sailing through the thickest fog. I hug my knees, wishing so much that Jocelyn was with us.
Are they right now? I go, softly. Keeping an eye?
Alice takes a huge breath and lets it back out. No, she goes. They’re asleep.
Marty the violinist isn’t even in high school—he’s a sophomore at SF State, where Jocelyn and I and Scotty (if he passes Algebra II) are headed next year. Jocelyn goes to Bennie, The shit will hit the fan if you put that dork onstage.
I guess we’ll find out, Bennie goes, and he looks at his watch like he’s thinking. In two weeks and four days and six hours and I’m-not-sure-how-many-minutes.
We stare at him, not comprehending. Then he tells us: Dirk Dirksen from the Mab gave him a call. Jocelyn and I shriek and hug onto Bennie, which for me is like touching something electric, his actual body in my arms. I remember every hug I’ve given him. I learn one thing each time: how warm his skin is, how he has muscles like Scotty even though he never takes his shirt off. This time I find his heartbeat, which pushes my hand through his back.
Jocelyn goes, Who else knows?
Scotty, of course. Alice, too, but it’s only later that this bothers us.
I have cousins in Los Angeles, so Jocelyn calls Lou from our apartment, where the charge won’t stand out on the phone bill. I’m two inches away on my parents’ flowered bedspread while she dials the phone with a long black fingernail. I hear a man’s voice answer, and it shocks me that he’s real, Jocelyn didn’t make him up, even though I never supposed such a thing. He doesn’t go,
Hey beautiful
, though. He goes, I told you to let me call you.
Jocelyn goes, Sorry, in an empty little voice. I grab the phone and go, What kind of hello is that? Lou goes, Who the Christ am I talking to? and I tell him Rhea. Then he goes in a calmer voice, Nice to meet you, Rhea. Now, would you hand the phone back to Jocelyn?
This time she pulls the cord away. Lou seems to be doing most of the talking. After a minute or two, Jocelyn hisses at me, You have to leave. Go!
I walk out of my parents’ bedroom into our kitchen. There’s a fern hanging from the ceiling by a chain, dropping little brown leaves in the sink. The curtains have a pineapple pattern. My two brothers are on the balcony, grafting bean plants for my little brother’s science project. I go outside with them, the sun poking into my eyes. I try to force myself to look straight at it, like Scotty did.
After a while, Jocelyn comes out. Happiness is floating up from her hair and skin. Ask me if I care, I think.
Later she tells me Lou said yes: he’ll come to the Dildos gig at the Mab, and maybe he’ll give us a record contract. It’s not a promise, he warned her, but we’ll have a good time anyway, right, beautiful? Don’t we always?
· · ·
The night of the concert, I come with Jocelyn to meet Lou for dinner at Vanessi’s, a restaurant on Broadway next door to Enrico’s, where tourists and rich people sit outside drinking Irish coffees and gawking at us when we walk by. We could have invited Alice, but Jocelyn goes, Her parents probably take her to Vanessi’s all the time. I go, You mean her mother and stepfather.
A man is sitting in a round corner booth, smiling teeth at us, and that man is Lou. He looks as old as my dad, meaning forty-three. He has shaggy blond hair, and his face is handsome, I guess, the way dads can sometimes be.
C’mere, beautiful, Lou actually does say, and he lifts an arm to Jocelyn. He’s wearing a light blue denim shirt and some kind of copper bracelet. She slides around the side of the table and fits right under his arm. Rhea, Lou goes, and lifts up his other arm for me, so instead of sliding in next to Jocelyn, like I was just about to do, I end up on Lou’s other side. His arm comes down around my shoulder. And like that, we’re Lou’s girls.
A week ago, I looked at the menu outside Vanessi’s and saw linguine with clams. All week long I’ve been planning to order that dish. Jocelyn picks the same, and after we order, Lou hands her something under the table. We both slide out of the booth and go to the ladies’ room. It’s a tiny brown bottle full of cocaine. There’s a miniature spoon attached to a chain, and Jocelyn heaps up the spoon two times for each nostril. She sniffs and makes a little sound and shuts her eyes. Then she fills the spoon again and holds it for me. By the time I walk back to the table I’ve got eyes blinking all over my head, seeing everything in the restaurant at once. Maybe the coke we did before wasn’t really coke. We sit down and tell Lou about a new band we’ve heard of called Flipper, and Lou tells us about being on a train in Africa that didn’t completely stop at the stations—it just slowed down so people could jump off or on. I go, I want to see Africa! and Lou goes, Maybe we’ll go together, the three of us, and it seems like this really might happen. He goes, The soil in the hills is so fertile it’s red, and I go, My brothers are grafting bean plants, but the soil is just regular brown soil, and Jocelyn goes, What about the mosquitoes? and Lou goes, I’ve never seen a blacker sky or a brighter moon, and I realize that I’m beginning my adult life right now, on this night.
When the waiter brings my linguine and clams I can’t take one bite. Only Lou eats: an almost-raw steak, a Caesar salad, red wine. He’s one of those people who never stops moving. Three times strangers come to our table to say hello to Lou, but he doesn’t introduce us. We talk and talk while our food gets cold, and when Lou finishes eating, we leave Vanessi’s.
On Broadway he keeps an arm around each of us. We pass the usual things: the scuzzy guy in a fez trying to lure people inside the Casbah, the strippers lounging in doorways of the Condor and Big Al’s. Punk rockers rove in laughing, shoving packs. Traffic pushes along Broadway, people honking and waving from their cars like we’re all at one gigantic party. With my thousand eyes it looks different, like I’m a different person seeing it. I think, After my freckles are gone, my whole life will be like this.
The door guy at the Mab recognizes Lou and whisks us past the snaking line of people waiting for the Cramps and the Mutants, who are playing later on. Inside, Bennie and Scotty and Joel are onstage setting up with Alice. Jocelyn and I put on our dog collars and safety pins in the bathroom. When we come back out, Lou’s already introducing himself to the band. Bennie shakes Lou’s hand and goes, It’s an honor, sir.
After the usual sarcastic introduction from Dirk Dirksen, the Flaming Dildos open with “Snake in the Grass.” No one is dancing or even really listening; they’re still coming into the club or killing time until the bands they came for start playing. Normally Jocelyn and I would be directly in front of the stage, but tonight we stand in back, leaning against a wall with Lou. He’s bought us both gin and tonics. I can’t tell if the Dildos sound good or bad, I can barely hear them, my heart is beating too hard and my thousand eyes are peering all over the room. According to the muscles on the side of Lou’s face, he’s grinding his teeth.
Marty comes on for the next number, but he spazzes out and drops his violin. The barely interested crowd gets just interested enough to yell some insults when he crouches to replug it with his plumber’s crack displaying. I can’t even look at Bennie, it matters so much.