Born to Rock (2 page)

Am toying with the possibility that people aren't such total boneheads after all. I think it might be PMS.

For security reasons, the senior algebra classes took the big test together in our cafeteria. That was how I wound up at the same exam table as Connecticut's former 180 IQ.

I shouldn't have cared. I'd done more than my bit for Melinda's friend. But when I saw Owen sitting there, lost at sea—
again
—I couldn't keep my eyes off his test booklet. Sure enough, he was on question twelve—vectors.

I wanted to scream. I thought of three weeks of study hall, countless hours, searching for a way to get through to that guy. And at last, success—or so I'd thought.

He forgot it! He actually forgot it!

So I took the fateful step. “Owen—” I hissed. “The pinballs! Remember the pinballs!”

I felt a hand on my shoulder.

[3]

LUCKILY, MR. BORMAN LIKED ME. ONE
of the big advantages of the Young Republicans was that I had a decent reputation among our teachers. They thought I was going places, which reflected well upon the school.

But talking during an exam—that didn't look good.

“Copying answers from Owen Stevenson.” He frowned at me over his reading glasses. “Why don't you explain what's going on here?”

I told the truth. “I didn't copy from Owen. I've been tutoring him during study hall. It wasn't cheating, Mr. Borman. He
knows
this stuff.”

The assistant principal shuffled some papers and shot me a glance that was suspiciously like a smirk.

A little confused, I forged on. “He was having a hard time with vectors, but he finally got it. I didn't give him any answers. What I said was a buzzword to jog his memory a little.”

He sat forward, eyes alert. “So what you're saying is, it was Owen who did the cheating, not you.”

“No,” I insisted. “Nobody cheated. It was just—”

“I think I know what cheating is,” Mr. Borman interrupted. “You said yourself that Owen didn't understand vectors. He made you give him the answer. That's a violation of school rules.”

“But that's not how it happened,” I protested. “He didn't ask me for an answer. If anything—” I fell silent. The last thing I wanted to do was get myself in trouble over this.

“You'd better speak up, Leo,” Mr. Borman warned me. “There was an ethics violation, and someone is to blame. You're a gifted young man with a bright future. If it wasn't you, now is the time to say so.”

An alarm bell went off in my head. Mr. Borman had no interest in giving me a hard time over this non-incident. He was gunning for Owen.

I almost understood it. I mean, here was this kid who showed up with a file a foot thick from the Connecticut Department of Education proclaiming him to be this mental messiah. Paperwork up the wazoo as the state painstakingly nurtured its little jewel into adulthood. And it all would have been worth it if Owen really was a genius. But by high school, the IQ thing was ancient history, and he was no smarter than the rest of us.

“It's admirable to tutor another student and take a leadership role,” Mr. Borman went on. “But you're a man now; your actions define your character—what you say, what you do, the company you keep.”

And I just knew. There were plenty of reasons to find Owen annoying, and I subscribed to most of them. But that wasn't what Mr. Borman was getting at. He didn't like Owen because Owen was gay.

I felt
him
then—my genetic hitchhiker. It was
my
jaw stiffening, yet the cussedness making it happen was all McMurphy.

For a year and a half I had been a Young Republican, talking about things like character, when what was really on my mind was getting into Harvard and how Shelby Rostov probably looked in a bra and panties. But
this
, McMurphy seemed to be telling me, was the true meaning of character. Could I face myself in the mirror if I let the assistant principal use me to set up another student?

“I didn't cheat, Mr. Borman,” I said gently but firmly. “And neither did Owen.”

“Careful, Leo. Someone is going to pay for this. You should make sure it isn't you.”

McMurphy and I stood up. “If that's all, I've got a class.”

Whatever friendliness this meeting once had, it was gone now. Mr. Borman glowered at me. “Think about what this means, Caraway. Do you want a black mark like this on your permanent record?”

“I didn't do anything wrong,” I repeated, and got out of there before McMurphy said something I'd regret.

All day long I suffered the tortures of the damned. For years, my genetic hitchhiker had been safe under lock and key somewhere inside me. What a time for him to show up again. When my permanent record was on the line and I had early acceptance to Harvard!

By the time I got home, I was a basket case. I locked myself in my room and called Mr. Hazeltine, my adviser from Harvard admissions.

I must have sounded pretty desperate, because he was kind to me. “Take it easy, kid. Harvard doesn't care about one test once you're already accepted. If you get a diploma, your place here is secure.”

I allowed myself to breathe again.

“I heard you got caught cheating on the big algebra test.”

Fleming placed his tray next to mine on the cafeteria table.

Shelby sat down beside him, her luminous eyes all concern. “What happened, Leo?”

“Big misunderstanding,” I mumbled. “You know Borman. There's no talking to the guy. I won't bore you with the details.”

“You weren't copying off that Stevenson kid, were you? Because that's what people are saying.”

I snorted. “If I ever have to copy off that guy, save me a cyanide capsule. I took a zero, and it's all over.”

“Well—” Fleming wasn't comfortable. “I don't want to be a jerk about this, but the club rules say your record has to be clean to be an officer.”

The club
was what Fleming called the Young Republicans. Like we had our own golf course or something.

I was disgusted. “Who came up with a stupid rule like that?”

He looked surprised. “You did.”

“Don't worry,” I promised. “I'll straighten it out.”

“Hey, Leo.” Melinda plopped her tray down across from me. “Hi, Shelby, Flem. How's the portfolio hanging?”

Fleming didn't like being called Flem, he didn't like Melinda, and he definitely didn't like discussing his portfolio—at least not until Pfizer bounced back.

Melinda swiveled on the bench and waved Owen over to make a fifth. That pretty much completed my joy.

Owen had an unerring capacity to say the absolute wrong thing. “How'd you guys do on the algebra test?” He had the gall to look inquiringly at me.

“You know exactly what I got,” I growled, “and why I got it.”

“Well, I'm done,” Fleming announced, having wolfed down his entire sandwich in record time. He turned to Shelby, who had taken a grand total of three bites from her lunch. “Ready, Shel?”

“I'm still eating,” she said, a little annoyed.

Fleming swept her tray out from under her and began dragging her away. “Keep me posted, Leo,” he tossed over his shoulder. “The club needs to know.”

“That guy is majorly constipated,” Melinda observed mildly.

Owen nodded wisely. “He needs to get in touch with his gay side.”

I choked on my V8. “Gay side? Fleming?”

“He suppresses it,” Owen explained. “That's what makes him so—”

“Republican,” Melinda supplied.

Desperate to change the subject, I picked up the sheaf of papers from the edge of Melinda's tray. “What's this?”

“My English project,” she replied. “I've been working on it since Christmas.”

“It looks like a PhD thesis,” I commented, glancing at the title page: “Poets of Rage: A Sociological History of Punk and Its Offshoots.” Twenty-seven pages. “I pity your teacher.”

Owen stuck up for her. “What do you know about music?”

“More than you know about vectors,” I returned bitterly.

And that would have been the end of it—if it hadn't been for that damn Web site.

Ever since Gates had alerted me to Melinda's blog on Graffiti-Wall, I'd been checking in periodically to see what KafkaDreams had to say. And even though I disagreed with most of it, I found it strangely compelling. It wasn't so much Melinda's commentary on life, the universe, and Tater Tots that captivated me. It was the fact that she had fans—real Web-surfers from all over the world who genuinely derived enjoyment and spiritual guidance from Melinda's oddball ideas. Like DarthLightning03 from Missoula, Montana, who wrote:

rock on kd, u grok the BIG UNREALITY, boycott all government till somebody in washington gets a Mohawk, u'r the greatest, u totally suck.

Sucking, I gathered, was a
good
thing on Graffiti-Wall. It was used as high praise in many postings.

There was also CzechBouncer from Prague, who became emotional when Melinda mentioned living in the United States:

My American jewel, you restore my faith in superpowers, be my oracle, be my guru, sorry can't worship you in person, your country may be strong, but the beer tastes like—

Some kind of content filter apparently kicked in here, since the sentence was never finished. It led me to suspect that CzechBouncer was actually writing from a computer in his middle school in Prague or possibly New Jersey. Just because the guy claimed to be European didn't mean it was true.

KafkaDreams made no direct response to her admirers. Instead, she wrote:

Hey guys, forget the jocks, the senators, the principals, and all those morons who don't get it and never will. Smash your CD collections, melt your parents' vinyl, chuck your iPods. This is what it's all about!!!

Posted directly below that was Melinda's essay: “Poets of Rage: A Sociological History of Punk and Its Offshoots.”

This is the music of the damned, the anthems of outcasts and addicts and felons. From the scum of the earth comes the assault of distorted guitars, the shriek of vocals barely reclaimed from the depths of madness, boiling over in waves of anger and frustration. It is the roar of not just songs, but revolution, and the world will never be the same again.

Leave it to Melinda to take the crappiest music ever recorded and turn it into an earthshaking historic event. But give her credit—I was reading it. How could you not? I was mostly interested to see what she could possibly say to back up those outrageous statements that her topic was anything more than garbage noise. Believe me, if I'd switched off my computer in disgust then and there, the course of my life would have been radically different, and I would have saved myself one cavity search in the bargain.

According to Melinda, punk had its roots in the 1960s. But the genre itself came into being in 1970s New York, and went prime time with the British band the Sex Pistols toward the end of the decade. In the '80s, punk dropped off the radar screen (maybe all its fans had gone deaf). The underground scene was alive and well, especially in L.A. But no punk group stepped forward to carry the Pistols' banner until 1984, with the arrival of Purge, the undisputed “angriest band in America.”

Behind the tortured lyrics and vitriolic rants of front man King Maggot, Purge united the disparate tribes of hardcore and heavy metal, forging the headbanger's road map for years to come. For that reason, Melinda believed that the key moment in the modern history of punk was the formation of Purge by guitarist Neb Nezzer and King Maggot himself, born Marion X. McMurphy.

The room became a vacuum as I wheezed every molecule of air into palpitating lungs.

McMurphy.

[4]

A SILVER BALL RICOCHETING ACROSS
the angled tabletop of a pinball machine, battered by flippers, jolted by bumpers, snared in traps, and just as suddenly sent careening around again. It was the image that taught Owen Stevenson vectors.

It was also the story of my life.

My first run-in with the flippers happened before I was born, but I wouldn't feel the sting for another ten years. Fourth grade—the field trip to Montreal.

You don't need a passport to travel to Canada, but you have to be able to prove your citizenship. Mom dragged my birth certificate out of mothballs, and she was plenty weird about it. Dad too, although he covered it up a little better.

Something didn't make sense. My name was on the document, but my last name wasn't Caraway. It was Davis, Mom's
maiden
name. Even stranger, Dad wasn't on there at all. On the line marked “Father” was typed—

“Marion X. McMurphy?” I read. “Who's that?”

He had a look on his face like the gas company had started digging in the exact spot where he'd buried that dead body last year.

He cleared his throat carefully. “It's nothing for you to worry about.”

“That's easy for you to say. What if Canada won't let me in? I'll be the only kid who doesn't get to go because there's a mistake on my birth certificate.”

Mom: “It's not—
technically
—a mistake.”

“Technically?” I turned to Dad. “You mean your name used to be Marion X. McMurphy? Did you get beat up a lot at school?”

I was sent out of the room so my folks could have a heated argument in whispers. I couldn't pick up every word, but Dad's refrain was “Don't you think it's time we told him?”

“Tell me what?” I called through the doorway.

My father faced me. “Leo, I love you more than anything on this earth. I've loved you since you were a little baby—”

“No!” my mother barked. “Over my dead body—”

“He has the right to know,” Dad insisted. “He'll have to know sooner or later.”

“Then let it be later,” she pleaded. “Much later. Like when I'm dead.”

To this day, I believe the only reason they finally did tell me was because I looked so cowed that even the truth couldn't possibly be as awful as what was running around my terrified imagination.

Dad took a deep breath. “What I'm trying to say, son, is—I'm your father in every way but one. Biology. Your biological father was a man named McMurphy.”

“What do you mean, biological father? What are you talking about?”

My mother tried. “You know how babies are made, Leo. When a man and a woman—”

“Oh, come on,” I interrupted, “I know all about sex—” And then it hit me. “You mean you had sex with Marion X. McMurphy?” I wheeled on my father. “Dad! Why didn't you stop her?”

“I didn't know your mother when you were born,” he replied stiffly. “Or when you were—” His voice trailed off. “Haven't you ever noticed that you're ten, and your mother and I just celebrated our ninth anniversary?”

I kept waiting for them to tell me it was all a joke—a sort of April Fools' Day in October. They never did. Eventually, Dad went to lie down with a splitting headache. But Mom had been steeling herself for this confrontation for a long time. She was prepared to go all fifteen rounds.

To her credit, she never once told me it was none of my business. It obviously very much was. But she refused to discuss word one about the man who had contributed fifty percent of my DNA. On that, she would not budge.

So I went on the class trip, and McMurphy went with me, on my birth certificate and in my veins. Canadian immigration officials didn't mind him. But I did.

I wasn't quite me anymore. Leo Caraway wanted to see St. Joseph's Shrine and Old Montreal. It was McMurphy who acted up and spoiled the trip for everybody else.

“Leo, what's gotten into you?” my teacher exclaimed.

She'd hit the nail right on the head. Something
had
gotten into me—or more precisely, someone. I'd try to be good. I'd try to be interested. And then I'd feel McMurphy rising.

I don't recall the specifics of my misbehavior, although it has become legend in the faculty room of my elementary school. At one point, I allegedly climbed over the railing of a freeway overpass and tap-danced on the concrete precipice while traffic zoomed by forty feet below. I was probably lucky not to have fallen to my death, which might explain why I've suppressed most of the details.

Mrs. Novak sent my folks a letter after the field trip was over. For weeks I waited for Mom to bring up the subject. She never did. She knew exactly what had ailed me in Canada.

“You've got to control yourself,” Dad told me.

But he was wrong. I had to control McMurphy. I even called it that in my mind—The McMurphy Solution, or Project X. Of course, McMurphy shared that mind with me, which was kind of a security breach. That was the scariest part—were my strange impulses coming from my genetic hitchhiker, or were they my own, manufactured by paranoia, because I knew I wasn't alone in there? After all, I'd been a pretty normal kid
before
I'd learned about McMurphy, hadn't I? It became an obsessive game for me, replaying my entire life. Every misstep, broken rule, and temper tantrum—had that been
him
, hovering just below the radar screen?

By high school, Mom had filled in a grand total of zero details regarding my birth father. But as I got older, I became savvy enough to bombard her with some alternate theories of the crime:

“What was it, Mom? Soft music? Candlelight? Rohypnol in your ginger ale? Contraceptive failure? Beaker mix-up at the sperm bank?”

My mother would have made a great secret agent. Even under torture, she would reveal absolutely nothing. If I pressed the issue, she'd pull a jigsaw puzzle out of a cabinet, and begin fitting pieces together. To watch her painstakingly assemble a reproduction of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, just to avoid telling me the story of my own origin, was maddening beyond belief.

She'd murmur generalities while searching for the right corner piece. “I was very young then, Leo.” Or “I wasn't thinking straight.”

I couldn't let it lie. “Were you drunk? High? Feverish? Did you get bitten by a tsetse fly?”

“There are no tsetse flies in Connecticut,” she informed me. “It was more like temporary insanity. Now, I don't want to talk about it anymore. It's in the past for both of us.”

“Was he a quarterback?” I persisted.

And when she took out a 1,500-piece macro-puzzle of an extreme close-up of the inside of a pomegranate, I howled, “That's why I need to know!
I
wouldn't ask such a rude question! That had to come from the McMurphy side of me! Don't you get it? I'm carrying around a time bomb, and I don't know when it's going to go off!”

At least now I had the answer to that question—April of senior year, while reading “Poets of Rage” over the Internet.