Styrofoam Throne (19 page)

At Axe’s request, his girlfriend opened up three beers and passed them around the car.

“So I lay back down,” he said, taking a heavy drink. “Start eating my sandwich again, another song gets played on the radio, DJ comes back on. No one’s named it. So I’m just like, fuck, man. This is bullshit. My boss tells everyone, ‘Get back to work,’ but I’m all, ‘That song is “Gypsy Dream,” and everyone can suck my dick.’ I didn’t really say that but I was like, ‘Can I go use the phone real quick?’ Boss says break’s over. I go back to work, radio’s still on. Man, ten minutes later, still no one’s claimed it. So I had enough, man. I had enough fucking dipshits telling me what to do. I knew the answer and all these assholes were telling me to sit down. Well, I’m not wrong, you fucks. I tore my belt off, jumped in my car, and hauled ass to the nearest pay phone. Called ‘em up and said, ‘“Gypsy fucking Dream,” motherfucker!’ Boom! ‘You got it,’ they said, ‘Come get your tickets.’ And I did. And here we are. And here we go! Believe in yourself, brother! Woooo!”

The dude was so wrapped up in his tale that we got lost on the way there and ended up late. When I met up with Renaldo he was pacing back and forth outside the gates.

“Hey, fucker! Over here!” he said and motioned me over to meet him crouched down behind a car.

It turns out Renaldo’s version of “getting tickets” meant to make them on a copy machine.

“Dude, just help me make some perforations with this paper clip,” he said.

“Is this gonna work? These tickets look super sketchy.”

“It’ll work. But we should go in separately. And if they call you out at the gate, just tell ‘em a black guy in a red sweatshirt sold ‘em to you for twenty bucks.”

“Why a black guy?”

“Well, if you say Mexican, maybe they’ll try to fuck with me—guy standing in the parking lot. And if I say Mexican, they’ll look at me like, ‘Why is this Mexican talking about how he bought them off a Mexican?’ And if I say white guy, they just won’t believe it.”

“So why a red sweatshirt?"

“When your mom asks, ‘What did you do tonight?’ and you went out getting wasted and boning chicks, you don't say, ‘I went to the movies.’ No, you say, ‘I went to see this but it was sold out and we had to see that instead and it sucked. We were totally bored and I choked on a Gobstopper.’ See how it just sells itself? Details are what makes it real, man.”

“Dude, I dunno.”

“To the ticket taker, the black guy detail makes it like, ‘Oh, of course he did.’ The red sweatshirt detail makes it like, ‘Yeah, yeah, that guy,’ and the rip-off price makes them feel sorry for you. Now go before we miss King.”

The ticket gate didn’t have many people going through since everyone was already inside. I got nervous because it meant my ticket would be inspected that much more closely. I handed my ticket to a paunchy guy in his forties with a cop mustache.

He tore the stub off the ticket, but the paper ripped instead of a properly perforated tear.
 

“Where’d you get this?” he asked.

“A black guy in a red sweatshirt sold it to me for twenty bucks,” I said.

His cop ’stache wiggled and he sighed.

“Go on in.”

Holy shit, it totally worked. I walked over to the outside T-shirt booth and waited for Renaldo. After a couple minutes, I saw him approach the gates and the same ticket taker. He got stopped, started giving the story, but was then turned away. We hadn’t factored in the ticket taker’s own racism. What was I supposed to do? I was on the inside staring at Renaldo a hundred feet away, trying to decide if I should bail. He was waving his hands like, “Fuck it, dude. Let’s split.” But I couldn’t. I walked inside. It was a cold-blooded ditch but I was powerless against the lure of the arena.

Renaldo’s fake tickets were for shitty seats. I was way in the back of the place and all the way up top. I thought it was weird he didn’t make rad fake tickets. I was perched among a patch of burnouts and people who came to the show to make out.

The lights went down and I didn’t expect the rush that came with it. It was different than some touchdown cheer. Different than the Castle. Instead of scaring one person at a time, it was like scaring fifteen thousand plebes at once. A tubby DJ from KRIF came out to jeers and cheers from the crowd.

“This is Ragin’ Rick from KRIF! Are we gonna break the knob off or what? I said, are we gonna break the knob off?! Ladies and gentlemen,
King
!”

The curtain dropped and revealed something more amazing than the Castle. Renaldo was right. But it wasn’t really the music that made me stoked. It was the insane stage set. A mix of a futuristic city and Egypt, it took up the whole other end of the arena. A floor-to-ceiling pyramid dominated the back of the set, with ramps leading up its sides for the band members to run around on. The singer, King himself, came up from the ground inside a giant crystal ball that cracked open with smoke and lasers. There were twelve-foot-tall mummy robots that battled each other with magic explosions and more lasers. Lording over the drum riser, a massive, animatronic sphinx head split open to reveal an evil robot dinosaur that spit fire. Almost every song had its own theatrical element to it. The whole thing made me forget about ditching Renaldo and Melody ditching me. At least until the show ended, and I went to the parking lot.

There she was. Melody holding hands and hitchhiking with a girlfriend I had never seen. They were both wasted and yelling at cars to let them in. I kept my eyes on her and tried to stand around like I was doing something important. Renaldo was nowhere in sight.

“Piss Bucket!” It was Colin in his mobile bedroom Mustang, patrolling the parking lot, looking for fish in a barrel. He must have booked it up here after work just for that purpose because he always said metal was for losers.

I ignored him and went back to staring at Melody. I shouldn’t have, because he followed my eyes and zeroed in on her and the other girl.

Colin flashed a wide-eyed, toothy smile at me and popped his polo shirt collar like it was his cape. He did a burnout and drove toward the girls. The burnout caught Melody’s attention, and then she saw me staring at her. At the same time, Colin leaned across his front seat and opened the passenger-side door. Melody flared her eyes at me and jumped in the car, giggling with her friend. Colin stuck his middle finger out the window and did an even bigger burnout than before. I wanted to throw myself under it.

I was pissed and needed to blow off some steam, so I headed over to the new homes on Sea Grave Road. When I got there, I saw Renaldo being put into a cop car. I didn’t know if I should run away or try to help. What could I do? I’d ditched him once already and needed to face up.

“Hey!” I yelled to the cops while walking up to the scene.

“Take off, kid,” one of the cops said.

“I called you guys to catch the guy smashing up the homes.”

The cops looked at each other.

“Well, we finally caught the punk,” the other cop said. “He’s going away for a while.”

“No. You’ve got the wrong dude. I just saw a black guy in a red sweatshirt running in the other direction with a sledgehammer, covered in drywall dust. Seen him around here before.”

Renaldo’s eyes lit up. “See?! I told you, I fucking told you!” he said at the cops. The two officers looked at each other wearily and nodded.

“Which way did he go?” one of them said.

“Down there,” I said, pointing toward wherever.

“Can you provide a more detailed description?”

“Yeah. He was . . . uh, black, and uh, had, like, a red sweatshirt on.”

“You told us that. Any other characteristics?”

“He was just really black.” I felt bad subscribing to Renaldo’s vague racism but it was clearly working. I would have felt worse if it didn’t.

The cops uncuffed Renaldo without apology and took off in their cruiser.

“You’re a fucking genius, man. You saved my ass! I owe you one,” Renaldo said.

“You don’t owe me, man. I’m a dick. I shouldn’t have ditched you. You know, at the show and, like, you know.”

“Man, I probably would have done the same thing. All of it. It’s cool.”

“Right on.”

“But the show was sick, right?”

“Yeah, dude. The stage was awesome,” I said while being reminded about Melody and Colin.

“Don’t sound so stoked, bro.”

“I think Colin is fucking Melody right now.” That asshole. I couldn’t hold back my depression over it. “And probably some other chick too.”

“It’s not time to be bummed, bro,” Renaldo said. “It’s time to get fucking revenge.”

11

The next day at roll call, Colin really wanted me to know something because he would never seek me out to have a conversation. I felt like I already knew what it was.

“So, how about that Melody?” he said, nodding.

“What about her?”

“I guess she was down for the Count.”

“Bullshit.”

“Oh, yeah? I don’t think that birthmark of hers is bullshit,” he said. If Colin knew about the birthmark, then he had been there. The place I wanted to call my own.

I pulled Melody aside in the makeup room. She was rubbing some white on her neck, trying to cover a big hickey.

“You fucked Colin?”

“Kinda. So?”

“That’s your response?”

“Who said I owe you one?”

Questions on top of questions were a bad way to start. I tried to turn it around but kept thinking of Colin sinking his teeth into her.

“Seriously?” It was the best I could come up with.

“Tell the Countess I said hi,” she said and walked away.

I kept my walkie on our channel six at work, hoping for anything, a response to a sheepish “hey” or a bad joke. There was nothing but silence. Working as Wolfman that day became primal scream therapy. When a plebe would come through, I used to just go “Grrrr” or “Arrrggh” but now it was a full-on, raging
“Ahhhhrrrrrggggaaahhhhgrrrrrrrr!”
I was really intense the whole day. The same way some of the old cast members and crazy people were. I buried myself in the role and let the Haunted Forest swallow me up.

Renaldo and I smoked a joint under the pier and talked about how we’d had enough of Colin’s shit. I wanted revenge but I didn’t want to get kicked out of the Castle or get Renaldo banned from the pier. I still needed this place. Its cracks were mine, painted or real.

“We’ve gotta figure out a way to get him back with no way for him to find out who did it,” he suggested, taking a long draw off the joint and passing it to me.

“Yeah, but I don’t know, man.”

“Fuck this ‘I don’t know’ shit. Get pissed, bro!”

“You think I’m not pissed? I’m so pissed, I’m breathing fire,” I said, blowing a huge plume of smoke.

Renaldo’s face brightened.

“Dude, I’ve got it.”

“Yeah?”

“Oh, yeah. We spike his nachos.”

“I don’t get it.”

“With acid.”

“Oh shit. Man . . . how will we know the tab won’t get lost in the cheese?”

“I have a whole sheet of bad acid at home. I tried one tab when I got ’em last year and woke up in jail, wearing those paper clothes they give you when the cops find you naked.”

“What’d you do?”

“Uh, not important. What’s important is that this shit will fuck him up. I’ll put in, like, a few tabs so he’ll be sure to scarf one or two at least.”

“Will it kill him?”

“Nah, he’ll just take the express elevator to hell for a while.”

“How will we know it’s working?”

“Oh, dude, we’ll know. Let’s do it on your next day off so we can go through as plebes and watch him melt.”

Sounded like a great plan to me. Colin always had nachos and Renaldo was usually his go-to nacho bitch. I had never done acid—it seemed too scary, and the idea of bad acid seemed really scary.

I went back to work for the next few days and Colin proceeded to be an asshole as usual. It didn’t faze me like it used to. His comeuppance was around the corner. Every petty thing he did was just another nail in the lysergic coffin Renaldo and I had waiting for him.

“What are you smiling about, Piss Bucket?” he said to me while eating nachos from another break table a few feet away. I wish I had known earlier that a sly grin was the best way to get under his skin.

“Nothing, man.”

“You’ve got nothing to smile about.”

“It’s just a great day out.”

Colin was clearly unsettled by my happiness.

“You’re a fucking weirdo,” he said, getting up from the table and whipping his cape around. He went back inside the Castle.

I called Renaldo up the ramp.

“Dude, he knows,” I said.

“He doesn’t know shit. It’s on tomorrow. Don’t puss out. We’re fucking him back.”

The next day Renaldo brought the sheet of acid and a hole puncher to the pier. We punched out little circles of the bad acid and Renaldo slipped them into his vest pocket.
 

“Okay, you should go hang at Circuit Circus and play video games until I come get you. Then we’ll get Castle tickets and watch the show.”

“How long does it take to work?”

“About an hour.”

Dracula usually took his break around nine o’clock but Renaldo planted himself by the break tables for hours so he wouldn’t miss it. I went to the arcade to kill time but I couldn’t concentrate on anything. My stomach was in knots. I was too amped up and nervous. I wasn’t really sure we should even be doing this. I’d put a quarter in a game, just stare at it, lose my three lives without a struggle, and put another quarter in. I thought about all the money I was wasting. At the beginning of the summer, I risked my life for this many quarters and now I mindlessly handed them over to the machine. I switched from video games to skee ball but didn’t give a shit about all the tickets coming out at me, so I walked away. Some kid who had been watching me swooped in and grabbed them all and took off running. Good for him. I wandered around the arcade and looked for anything to fill the dragging time. None of the games were distracting enough to keep me from biting my nails. I sat down in a car simulator game and just watched the demo screen without playing. The high scores screen came up and the top three initials read
DIK
,
FUK
and
VAG
. Renaldo was clearly good at this one.