“We need to practice the songs we have.”
“Balls to that,” he said. “What if we have to play an encore?”
“There’s no time to write another song.”
“We won’t write one,” he said.
He threw the geometry book from his lap and hopped off the bed. He moved over to a pile of discs, stacked in an unwieldy tower near his closet. He sat down cross-legged on the floor and started weeding through them. In a second, CDs were winging over his shoulder and landing behind him.
“Why are you throwing everything today?” I asked.
He kept sorting until he got to the case he wanted. I recognized the cover from a distance. He opened it up to make sure the actual disc was inside, then he tossed it to me. I managed to trap it against my chest.
“Track five,” he said. “Play it.”
I could hear the song in my head before it even commenced. But I did as I was told and inserted it into the disc player. The drumbeat exploded out of the stereo in seconds. The bass and guitar started in:
Bom, Bom, Bom-Bom. Da-Dah Dah Dah Dah!
Again and again and again. That menacing sound. “Teenagers from Mars.” I looked at Jared with obvious anxiety. The song was fast. Much too fast. And it was also slightly profane. (
“Inhuman Reproduction. We’re here for what we want!”
) But mostly, I didn’t think I could make my fingers do what fingers seemed to be doing on that song, especially with just an hour or two of practice.
“Listen,” he said. “It’s the perfect cover for us. Now nut up!”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll show you,” he said. “We’ll make the bass part easier. We can cut a couple of notes. I don’t have time to argue with you about this.”
He picked up my bass and started tuning it. Suddenly, there was a wild look back in his eye, and I knew that I should do whatever he instructed. He was slipping back into character, getting ready to orchestrate this thing properly. I could already feel my muscles relaxing. And when he stood up and placed the bass guitar in my hands, I experienced a touch of that rush I’d first had running through the woodland around the dome. I draped the strap over my shoulder. It hung with a pleasing heft, straining my neck. I ran the palm of my right hand over the strings. I activated my amplifier. Jared grabbed his guitar.
“We know this song,” he said. “We know it in our sleep. Just follow me for a while. Find the notes and play what sounds right. It’s all on the E string.”
Of course, Jared already knew it on guitar. But I was surprised how much his playing sounded like the track on the CD. He adjusted his distortion just right until it had that same crackle, that same power-tool roar. Then he just let loose with his vocals. He even tried for a deep resonant tone in his voice, and it almost worked. He pressed his lips right up to the cheap microphone in his room and belted it out. It wasn’t until the second verse that he really started to find his footing.
“We are the angel mutants!”
he yelled,
“the streets for us seduction.”
I had trouble keeping up, but I hit the right note more often than not. And when we leaped into the chorus, it all came together. The room was buzzing with something almost musical. Jared was screaming the chorus.
And we don’t caaaare Teenagers from Mars! And we don’t . . . Teenagers from Mars!
I jumped up and down, moving my finger from the third to the fifth fret. And for five minutes while we circled through another verse and yet another chorus, I was positive that we were going to conquer the Immanuel Methodist Talent Show. We were going to take the prize money. We were going to record a tape. And then we were going to spend the rest of our years doing exactly this. It was destined to happen.
THE CHURCH WAS EERILY QUIET WHEN WE ENTERED, pushing our amplifiers on their squeaky wheels, our instruments slung over our bony shoulders. I had presupposed that the place would be filled to capacity with milling spectators and performers, but we were one of the first acts to arrive. Janice withdrew from the church as soon as we had wheeled through the front doors (she would be coming back when the action commenced in about one hour; she had “errands” to run). So we were all alone in the hallway leading to the one large space that Immanuel had reserved for services. And when we opened the door to the rows of long empty pews, all I could see was a lone thin girl twirling a baton near the altar, and another larger girl holding a clipboard against her chest.
Above the makeshift stage was a banner that read, “And We Shall Sing His Praises! Winter Talent Contest.” The banner was aslant and as Jared pointed out, “Totally fucking wonky.” But here we were, making our entrance. I couldn’t believe it was actually transpiring.
We guided our gear up the same red carpet (with plastic shoe-guard) that the pastor used to enter the congregation on Sunday. Jared had explained the process of a church service to me once, and I had assumed that no one else would be allowed to walk where the pastor walked. But we rolled the heavy practice amplifiers over his path, plodding toward the zenith of the chapel. The stained-glass windows cast a blue light on the pews nearest the windows. I could see the dust floating in the rays of the setting sun. The girl with the clipboard looked up. I recognized her as Lindsey from Youth Group.
“Finally,” she said, checking something on her board. “Somebody’s frickin’ here on time.”
She smiled at us, showing two cavernous dimples.
“We should have showed up late,” Jared whispered to me. “This is unspeakably lame.”
All I could do was nod.
“Names?” she said.
“Lindsey,” said Jared. “You know who I am. You spend half of every Youth Group meeting staring at me, waiting for me to do something awful. And this is Sebastian.”
“Fine,” she said. “Okay. Great.”
She marked something on the paper in front of her.
“You guys are third,” she said. “You should set everything up ahead of time so you can just come onstage and play your music. And not too loud, please. There’s going to be children here, and people from the over-sixty bell choir.”
“Don’t worry,” said Jared. “We’re a family-friendly act.”
Lindsey gave a hearty thumbs-up. Then she walked away to greet a kid wearing a magician’s hat. Jared and I rolled our amps up onto the raised platform.
“Hey,” said Jared when we stepped up there. “Look up.”
I craned my neck. Hanging above us was an enormous gold cross with a halo over the top. It was suspended in the air with surprisingly thin cables.
“If God doesn’t like us,” he said, “he’s probably going to drop that thing right on your head.”
“Why mine?”
“I’ve been baptized,” he said.
We immediately busied ourselves, wrangling some bright yellow extension cords from a supply closet and plugging in our equipment. There was an amplifier planted at each end of the small stage. We leaned our instruments against the amps. Our performance clothes were bundled in a white garbage bag that Jared carried in a big wad under his left arm. He also had his bottle of gel in the bag. We set off to the bathroom to change, but stopped in the hallway when we heard Meredith’s voice behind us.
“Hold on, guys,” she yelled. “Wait up.”
I turned around and she was running toward us.
“What the hell do you want?” Jared said. “Sebastian’s busy.”
She didn’t even glance at me. “I want to be your stylist,” she said, huffing. “Please don’t dress yourselves. I’m begging you not to.”
Jared looked her up and down. She was panting.
“For Christ’s sake,” he said. “Did you run here?”
“To save you,” she said.
“From what?”
“From your own disastrous hairstyles.”
She glanced over at me for the first time and I thought I saw a wink. Jared turned to me and then back to her. He was grinding his teeth.
“She made the poster, Jared,” I said. “Our poster. She designed it and drew it. I think she knows what she’s doing.”
He looked at me in disbelief. “You can’t be serious,” he said.
“When have you ever observed me drawing anything?” I asked.
He returned his gaze to Meredith. “Well, I’ll be neutered.”
He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.
“I just want to help,” said Meredith. “I want to be part of it.”
They stared at each other for an awkward few seconds. Then Jared thrust the white garbage bag of clothes in her direction.
“C’mon, then,” he said. “I know you’re no stranger to the boys’ bathroom.”
We reconvened by the urinals. Jared and I each stood in front of a mirror over a sink. The room reeked of lemon cleaning solution. Meredith dumped the contents of the plastic bag on the counter and frowned down at them. She was regaining her breath, and her face was flushed in the way that drove me completely crazy. She walked around us, examining us like poorly made sculptures.
“First of all,” she said, “no Mohawks. I know it’s part of the image, but you guys already look like you’re ten years old, and that style isn’t going to do you any favors.”
“Just do what you’re going to do, Meredith,” said Jared. “And spare us the expert makeover analysis.”
She set to work on Jared first, shaping his shock of ratty black hair into something more stylish. She combed it down over his ears and brought it up off of his glasses in front, pushing the bangs to the side. Next she went after his clothes. And because Jared dressed in approximately ten layers whenever he left the house in the winter, there was a motley array to choose from. She pulled his band T-shirt on over a long-underwear shirt, and put a zip-up hooded sweatshirt over that. When she concluded, the changes weren’t drastic, but they were noticeable improvements.
She worked on me next, while Jared glumly puffed a cigarette in the handicapped stall. He was displeased, I think, because he had nothing bad to say about his appearance. I could hear him vocalizing our lyrics in a gruff whisper. Meredith actually made use of the gel with me, but she only applied a small dollop. She didn’t speak as she worked, and it was all I could do not to reach out and put a clammy hand on her waist. But I knew it wasn’t the time. She circled around me, pushing my hair up into a messy batch of spikes, adding bits of the pink stuff here and there. My scalp tingled each time she touched it. When she was done with my hair, she jerked my T-shirt on over my flannel the same way she had done with Jared’s. She rolled up my long shirtsleeves and pulled my jeans down a little lower on my hips.
“All right, Jared,” she said. “Get out here—I need to see the full effect.”
I heard the sizzle as Jared extinguished his cigarette in the toilet bowl. He smacked open the metal door to the stall and stood reluctantly in front of the sink, looking in the mirror. His eyes moved over his reflection. I looked in my mirror next to him, and pushed up a wilting spike. We looked okay. Better, most likely, than either of us had thought possible.
Jared took something out of his pocket. It was his bottle of pills. He dumped out a large one and held it up to the light. I watched him swallow it dry. Then he ran cold water out of the tap and splashed three quick handfuls on his face.
“Be honest, Meredith,” he said. “How big of a disaster is this going to be?”
He dried off with a stiff brown paper towel.
“A big one, I would imagine.”
He looked over to me and clapped a hand down on my shoulder.
“Then we’ll all go down in flames together!” he said.
He let out a high-pitched yelp and punched the paper towel dispenser. The sound echoed across the bathroom. I followed suit, smacking the dispenser and screaming. Jared laughed and slapped me on the back. Then the door behind us opened and the kid with the magician’s hat peeked his head inside. He took one look at Jared and me and stayed where he was in the doorway.
“Who are you guys supposed to be?” he asked.
“We’re the guys who are gonna beat your ass in the talent show,” Jared said. “That’s who.”
“Oh,” said the kid.
He delicately closed the door.
31.
The Intervention
WITH FIFTEEN MINUTES LEFT UNTIL SHOWTIME, THE Youth Group volunteers finally fashioned some kind of real stage out of the altar space. They cleared away all of the accoutrements of Sunday service and hung a high black curtain behind the altar to form a backstage area. It wasn’t a conventional performance space, but it wasn’t a hopeless one, either. The dim lighting and the stained glass provided a mildly theatrical atmosphere. And the large pipe organ that sat off to the left added at least one token music-related object to the surroundings. Finally, the church was, above all else, an intimate venue. The first couple of rows of pews were directly in the action. In fact, we would almost be playing on top of the people sitting there.
They let the small gathering crowd into the place at five minutes until seven. Jared and I watched from the slit down the middle of the curtain. We didn’t say anything as we saw our audience file in, laughing and confabbing with one another. As Lindsey had predicted, there was a host of older people. I could hear Jared’s breathing steadily accelerate as we watched men with elastic-waisted dress pants enter with their wives who had shapely bouffants that could have rivaled Nana’s. Next came a group of eight- or nine-year-olds who insisted on sitting up front, plopping down on their sneakered feet only ten feet away from our amplifiers. Last came some mothers and fathers and a handful of people our age, dressed conservatively and entirely unsmiling.
“Where did they find these people?” I asked.
“These are the people who go to my church,” said Jared.
“What about our posters?” I asked. “Where are all the music fans?”
Jared shrugged.
“Do we play the same set?”
“Hell yes, we play the same set,” he said. “And we play to win.”