Gone Bad Read online

  After school, Kelsey found me. “Come clear your drums out of my garage. I want them out of there. Today.”

  I thought I’d try a different approach. We’d had some harsh words. I knew better now. You have to handle women with a certain kind of psychology so they think they are winning the battles. My old man taught me that. It was probably the only reasonable word of advice he ever gave me. But then he, of course, always took things too far.

  “Tell me about the street,” I said, wanting to change the subject. “Tell me what it was like.”

  I caught her off guard. She turned her back on me like she was going to walk away but then she wheeled round. “Jeffrey was one of the few good dependable people I knew there. He’s a little odd. You’re right about that. People pick on him for it. Guys like you. I’ve seen Jeffrey and his friends get thrashed before — just for being who they are.”

  “It comes with the territory,” I admitted.

  “Why?”

  I could see I was heading down Dead-End Alley again. Big mistake. I took a deep breath and looked down at my shoes. “I wouldn’t have beat on him,” I said, “if I’d known he was your friend.”

  “Oh great,” she said sarcastically. “I’ll make you a list of all my friends so you won’t beat on them. What about everybody else? Who you gonna grind into the dirt next?”

  “I get over-excited sometimes,” I tried to explain. “It’s something that happens when I’m around guys like Jordan and my other friends.”

  “You think you impress them by beating up street performers?”

  I blinked. That was exactly the way it worked but I’d never admitted it to myself. I sure wasn’t about to admit it to her. “Nah. I do it ’cause I have to.” I swallowed hard and tried to pretend I felt sorry about it. “But it’s different now. I’m changing.”

  “On the street, I knew guys like you. They acted that way because they were hurting inside. Hurting bad. In that sense, they were just like me. Only I didn’t have to send somebody to the hospital to make myself feel better.”

  She was looking at the watch again.

  “If that guy was so down and out, how come he had something like this? Somebody paid big bucks for this beauty,” I asked.

  “Jeffrey was freestyling in front of the lineup at the Palace one night. This guy came along. Turned out to be Vin Grecko from the band Crime Therapy. He was in town for a concert. Vin liked the way Jeffrey performed. He gave him the watch. It blew us all away.”

  “Too much.” I looked at the watch on my wrist and thought it was pretty cool that it had once belonged to Vin Grecko.

  “Jeffrey thought it was a good omen.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like good luck. He wants to make it as a hip hop artist.”

  “Fat chance he has hanging out on street corners.”

  “Some people don’t have many options.”

  “What about you? You had options. You went back home. How come?”

  “Home sucks. My mother and father argue a lot when my father comes home . . . which isn’t often. The rest of the time, my mom watches soaps and tells me how messed up her life is. I thought my life was too, until I lived on the street. That was worse.”

  “I get the picture.”

  “I didn’t miss much about home except for the fact that it wasn’t quite as dangerous as the street. And the music. I didn’t have my keyboard. I wasn’t writing songs. I felt really lost.”

  “I felt the same way when my band busted up. Lost.”

  “Alex wants you with us.”

  “I know. But you don’t.”

  “I did.”

  “Before you found out about the thing in front of the library.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Maybe I’ll grow out of it. That’s what my mother says.”

  “You mean you’re admitting that what you did was wrong?”

  This was getting tricky. Kelsey was looking for a big time confession. “I’m not always right, I guess.”

  Her eyes opened wide. “I don’t believe I’m hearing this.”

  “Well, I want to be in your band. I like that song of yours. I liked the words. They made sense.”

  “I thought content didn’t matter. ‘Nobody listens to words,’” she said, as if she had read my mind.

  “That’s what I mean. I was wrong. I listened. You were singing about what it feels like to always be on the outside. How it hurts. I know that feeling. I’ve been on the outside a lot.” I wanted to go on and tell her about the line that had just been drawn between me and the guys but I figured I had already said too much.

  “You’d be nothing but trouble if you were in our band.”

  I smiled and shook my head. “I’ll try to be good,” I said. I suddenly felt like a little boy making a promise. And for a split second, looking at Kelsey, I almost thought I was telling the truth. I’d do just about anything to be around her.

  * * *

  Session number two in Kelsey’s garage was a wild success. I tried real hard to be good, to be co-operative, and it paid off. I picked up quickly on about three of the tunes Kelsey had written. They were dark. It wasn’t exactly my style but I was getting the feel of it. The music felt good. The drums beneath my sticks felt like they were working on their own. Alex was beaming like a little kid as he picked through a series of serious licks with his distortion pedal to the limit. I bet you could hear us five blocks away at the Canadian Tire store.

  “Okay, let’s try this,” Kelsey said. “You know how they used to do protest songs in the old days?”

  “Ah, c’mon,” I groaned. “I’ll do anything but folk music. Don’t go sixties on me.”

  “No way. No sixties. This is now. But it is a protest song.”

  “What’s the issue?” Alex asked.

  “Condoms.”

  Alex looked puzzled.

  “Alex, you know how the school board muzzled the student council for wanting to have condom machines installed in the school washrooms.”

  “We voted in favour of it. We just couldn’t make them do it. They argued that kids shouldn’t be having sex and that putting the machines in the school would be promoting . . . what was the word . . . promiscuity.”

  “So?” I asked. “What’s wrong with promiscuity?”

  “So I wrote this. You’ll love it, Cody. It’s very angry, very loud. Play as loud as you want.”

  She ran through it once so I could hear the lyrics and she explained the chords to Alex.

  “Don’t you think it’s just too limited in its appeal?” Alex asked. He didn’t seem that keen on the song. “We should be thinking about a broader audience. This is just about a measly little school issue.”

  “But it’s a real issue, Alex. I need to write songs about real issues. Things that matter.”

  “Content, man,” I told Alex. “Kelsey wants the words to mean something.” I would be on her side for this one. I still didn’t care what she sang, as long as she sang it loud and sang it with punch. Condoms or condominiums, who cares?

  Alex gave up. “Is that an F after the A minor on the bridge?” he asked Kelsey.

  “D first, then A minor.”

  “Got it.”

  Three weak tries and then on the fourth time I found the right beat, hammered on the floor tom for the bridge, and then piled on the wood for the end. Kelsey was beaming. My ears were ringing. Music was making me deaf.

  “We need a name for the band,” Alex said when the song ended. “We need something that fits.”

  It was some kind of commitment that we were in fact a band, not just a trio of losers making noise in a garage.

  “Good idea,” said Kelsey. Another commitment. “But it can’t sound too wimpy.”

  “I got it,” I said. “Scream Static.” That was the name I had kicking around in my
head for weeks now.

  The name stuck like peanut butter to the roof of your mouth.

  Chapter 6

  For a couple of weeks, music took over my life. We put in long hours practising in Kelsey’s garage. We recorded some of our stuff with a program on her computer and it sounded pretty solid.

  I only ever saw her father once. He came home early from work one day and started yelling at Kelsey.

  “How come I can’t park my car in my own garage?” he demanded.

  “We’re practising,” Kelsey said. “We need the space. Who cares if your car sits outside?”

  “I care,” he said. “It’s my garage.” The guy looked like some kind of angry rooster.

  I thought I could help out in the argument so I walked over.

  “What is this?” dear old dad asked his little girl.

  “This is my friend, Cody,” she said.

  I held out my hand but the dude just shook his head and walked off towards the house.

  “I think you scared him,” Alex said.

  “I was just trying to be friendly.”

  Kelsey’s mom had begun to like me okay. I offered to take the trash out and stuff like that. So I thought I could also impress her old man into seeing that I was okay. Guess it didn’t work.

  “Don’t mind him,” Kelsey said. “He was born with a bad temper.”

  A few minutes later I could hear him inside the house arguing with Kelsey’s mom.

  “We better get back to work and make some noise to drown out the lovebirds so the neighbours won’t hear,” Kelsey said.

  Thanks to my drumming, the music was starting to have some real muscle. We mostly did original material that Kelsey wrote, like “The Condom Song.” And it was her songs that made life pretty interesting for SS.

  Word reached us that the school was going to have a dance. A couple of the teachers, Mr. Alphonse and Mrs. James, were holding auditions to select a band, instead of hiring a stupid DJ for once.

  “No way,” I said. “They’ll never hire us in a million years.”

  “We should give it a shot,” Alex insisted. “Look, if we get the gig, it would be the first time kids from this school play live music for a dance.”

  “Oh yeah, right. Just as long as no one listens to our lyrics,” Kelsey said.

  “So we don’t play anything to offend them, that’s all,” Alex responded.

  Kelsey gave him a foul look.

  “Mr. Alphonse likes me,” Alex said. “I’m getting an A in his class.”

  I slammed the high hat with my sticks. “Look, like I said, we won’t get hired. They ain’t gonna hire us. Let’s just forget it.”

  Alex went bug-eyed and I felt like belting him just for being such a douche.

  “I say we try out anyway,” Kelsey said. “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Just no controversial songs, right?” Alex said. “And no heavy bashing. We keep it real tight and real clean.”

  I dropped my sticks and held my hands in front of my face like I was about to pray. “I promise not to play anything I wouldn’t play in church,” I said.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Kelsey smile. I think my charm was starting to get through to her.

  We learned a couple of cover tunes of stuff you’d hear on the radio. I went along for the ride. The two bands before us were older — guys in college, I think. The first band did old songs that made me want to throw up. All clean-looking dinks in ties and polished shoes. My guess is they had been locked up in a time capsule and were just released after thirty years underground.

  The next group had a guy on a turntable and two wannabe rappers trying to look hard-ass and inner city. I had to leave the room until they were through.

  One other band failed to show, so that left us. Alphonse and James went out for coffee while we set up. About twenty kids had heard the music and sneaked into the gym. It was dark at the back and when the teachers returned, they didn’t notice that we now had an audience. I felt a lot better about having some real humans in the room, instead of just teachers. I tightened down my drums. Alex and Kelsey got in tune and we were ready.

  We were very tame through two songs. I knew we were doing okay because Alphonse hadn’t told us to quit. We had one more tune to do. Alex said we should do our last song — “Waiting out the Dawn.” Real middle-of-the-road monotony, as far as I was concerned.

  But, hey, you can only keep a pound of dynamite in a closet for so long before someone gives it a match. And I looked way in the back of the gym and saw some of the kids starting to leave. We weren’t impressing anyone.

  I looked at Kelsey. “We do ‘The Condom Song,’” I said.

  “No,” she said. “Let’s stick to the plan.”

  “Don’t blow it now,” Alex whispered to me, and hit the first chord to “Waiting.”

  I nodded to the back of the room. Kelsey saw the kids leaving. A couple of her friends were back there, I think, because now she saw what had become of us — a trio of wimped-out, gutless musicians on the road to Muzak. We had to act quickly if we didn’t want to lose our audience or even our reputation (before we even had one).

  “One, two, three,” I counted off and then — slam. I did the drum intro, setting up the backbeat for “The Condom Song.” Very original. Very loud. And full of meaningful lyrics. Alex had no choice but to go along since the song was already rolling.

  The kids stopped dead in their tracks. Alphonse and James looked up from their coffees and stared at us like we had all just changed into werewolves before their very eyes. Kelsey belted out the words loud and clear:

  When there’s problems that you just can’t hide,

  Don’t cover it up, that’s suicide.

  No head in the sand, got to make a stand;

  It’s just a condom machine, not a lie routine —

  Put your fears aside, let the kids decide,

  let the people decide,

  let us all decide.

  Well, maybe there was some language even stronger than that. But to Kelsey, these were the words that mattered. The song had so much pounding energy and anger that you could feel it in the air when we hit the final note. The kids in the back of the gym started to cheer. Alphonse turned around and shouted at them.

  “You are not supposed to be in here. This is a closed session. Now leave immediately or I’ll take down your names.”

  I had a sudden craving to zero in on the back of his head while he was turned around and launch a big gob of spit straight at his bald spot. But I was trying to be good — for Kelsey and for the band. Besides, I wasn’t as skilled as, say, Eric who could have picked off a sparrow flying across the yard.

  Instead, I sat quietly, waiting. Waiting for what? For somebody to say something, I guess.

  Alex was mad, yes, but he was trying to be cool. “Now we wouldn’t be playing that song at the dance, Mr. Alphonse. We just want to let you see that we have range in our music. We’re very versatile.”

  “I’m sure you are, Alex,” Mrs. James interjected. “But we feel that the, um, style of your music is a bit too . . . volatile for a school dance.”

  Volatile? What the hell was that supposed to mean? I didn’t know if I had just been insulted or what.

  “What Mrs. James is trying to say,” Alphonse kicked in, “is that we couldn’t tolerate anything that loud. Or that provocative. It would, after all, be a school-sponsored function.”

  I gripped onto my sticks and felt the drops of sweat forming in my armpits. School-sponsored function? I’d like to show him a school-sponsored function.

  “What is it you are trying to say, Mr. Alphonse?” I asked.

  Alphonse sighed. “I really am impressed by your range, as Alex calls it. I just don’t think anyone could dance to your music. The beat is all wrong. I just think you might cause too many problems.”r />
  In other words, we didn’t get the job.

  “You don’t like us because we’re too original,” Kelsey shot back at him through her mic. The words echoed in the gym.

  “We don’t need to justify our decision,” Mrs. James said softly.

  The kids were still in the back of the room. No one had left. Somebody back there in the darkness was giving us a thumbs-up.

  We had just been rejected and I was mad. When I felt like that, I was used to busting something, but this was school and I was in dangerous territory. I started to bash away on my drums — just some hard, brutal sounds, rolls on the floor tom, heavy pounding on the snare. A couple of kids clapped but Alphonse and James were in the back of the room now shuttling them all away. And then they too were gone. We were alone in the empty gym.

  Chapter 7

  Alex was real upset about the way things went. I guess it would have been a big deal for him to have a chance to play at a dance in front of all his snobby friends. I could never figure the guy out. He wouldn’t come out and say anything to Kelsey but he put the blame on me. “You blew it, Cody. It was all your fault.”

  Big freaking deal. We had made our point, didn’t we? I figured I could get back at both Alphonse and James by simply doing some damage to their cars in the school parking lot. All my time hanging out with Jordan, Eric, and Logan was not a waste. The boys had taught me life skills — tire slashing, gas tank modification, and even engine damage. It was just a matter of selecting the right tactic to fit the crime.

  I tried to explain this to Kelsey. I was sure she’d understand. We’d been muzzled. Our music, her song, would not be heard by the student body.

  “Cody, you think in very crude terms.”

  “Thank you.”

  “It wasn’t a compliment.”

  “It sounded like one, coming from you. You always have such a sweet way of saying things.”

  “Stop calling me sweet.”

  “Oh, sorry. I forget you’ve been brainwashed. Girls aren’t supposed to be sweet anymore.”

  “Forget sweet. Try sophisticated.”