Broken Piano for President (23 page)

*Another excerpt from an eye-rolling conversation between Deshler and a friend.

Friend:
This is the worst music I’ve ever heard.

Dean:
Lighten up, it’s just expression.

Friend:
That dude just sang a song about seeing an X-ray of a girl passing gas.

Dean:
Well, sure, that’s rough…but it’s kind of like Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding, right?

Friend:
Yeah, they always sang about farts.

Dean:
Right, okay, probably not. But when they started screaming and hollering soul music, most listeners thought it was just noise because Sinatra didn’t sound like that.

Friend:
So?

Dean:
So, I’m saying, sometimes the population doesn’t start listening when you’re right underneath them. Sometimes it takes a long while to get the message across. But you have to keep plugging, they’ll catch up. Pickett and Redding just found a new way to express themselves. Just like Gibby.

Friend:
I saw an X-ray of a girl passing gas
?

Dean:
Check it out, my dad—back when he acknowledged my brother and I were alive, before his problems started—told me his parents grounded him once just for saying Elvis’ name at the dinner table. The King was obscene to most of America. Now he’s on a postage stamp.

Friend:
I saw an X-ray of a girl passing gas.

Dean:
Give it a decade. It’ll be the new
Heartbreak Hotel
.

For once, the band practices on time. Ceremonies begin as Pandemic sits on his stool pounding a pickup truck suspension spring. There’s a wiggly
doink
each time he smashes the coil.

The overhead lights zip and pop Christmas colors at staggered moments. The wet air and stale beer aroma reminds Henry of his dorm. He sits on top of the amplifier cabinet—eight ten-inch speakers stacked tall—a mini-fridge of low-end bass. Plucked strings stir a seismic rumble up his body.

Deshler is splattered across the cement on his back, those sore ribs and chest sting less this way. He runs his tongue over gap teeth. One is cracked from Delia’s left hook.

Deshler’s microphone weaves through a dozen effects pedals until he sounds like an underwater drive-through window. The PA speakers are polka-dotted with gouges. Once, he is told, the Cliff Drinker drunkenly jabbed tiny holes in the tight fibers with a screwdriver. The amplifier blasts like CB radio traffic on Neptune. Deshler loves it.

Busted my tooth

On the twenty-eight rail

Picked up my pantleg

And stumbled back to jail

I go—bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang

Like a creepin’ kitten

Doin’ the midnight stalkin’

Why don’t you kiss my hands

And let my fingers do the talkin’?

Bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-hey-hey-hey

Practice started an hour ago, but nobody’s actually played a song or jammed on an idea. The three sit around warming up, ignoring one another, each too wrapped up in his own crisis.

Doink Doink
, go the drums.
Blump, Blump, Blump
goes the bass.
Doink, donnng, blump blum
.

Deshler rolls onto his stomach and chokes down the microphone, “Sscrrshttt, Krrrrath, chk, chk, chraaaah,” comes through the twisted amplifier system.

“Huh?” Pandemic screams, noticing the singer’s eyes are wild and focused in his direction.

Blump, ba-blump, blump, blump
.

Deshler drops the microphone. The thump echoes like a gunshot down a well. “I said, what’s with your face? It looks…clean.”

“Man, give me some room. I’m not a bottle of vodka,” Pandemic’s voice lifts over the bass, finishing his sentence with an explosive snare shot.

Deshler reaches for a warm forty of malt liquor. “I hate vodka.”

“Vodka hates you, too.”

Blump, blump, blump, blump, blump, blump.

Henry watches his shoes hang a few feet off the ground. Most of a cigarette is a pile of ash in his lap. He can’t stop thinking about work or Martin’s goatee and shattered nose.

“How did you get
that
?” Hamler asked Martin back at the office, pointing to the spot where Dean busted the man’s face. Hamler wanted to rub Martin’s cheeks, sweetly kiss that nose. Henry wanted to whisper, “There, there, there,” in his ear.

Martin shrugged and mumbled. “Some asshole, this hotshot
everybody
hates, was talking shit at the Beef Club last night. This rookie spouting off about Bust-A-Gutters
and
Winters people. We shut him down. Sometimes little jerks like that have to be taught a lesson, kind of an initiation.”

Hamler pictured his roommate. This wasn’t a surprise, but it made him mad. Drunk Deshler ruining another part of his life.
Son of a bitch
, Henry thought.

“Anyway, it’s not important. You aren’t leaving me, are you?” Martin said.

“Oh, well, here’s the thing…” Henry said. He was sorry, but something better came along—something about delivering pizza. He was really sorry. He held the elevator until it impatiently pinged.

“Oh, okay, gee that doesn’t sound like you, Henry.”

“We should…” Henry managed to say until Martin’s eyes fell to the floor. “We could…” the doors slowly brought themselves together and sliced his heart in two. “Bye, Martin.”

Henry threw up twice in the ground floor bathroom. Waiting for the bus, cigarettes and a peanut butter cup didn’t make anything better.

Deshler rises from the floor and thumps his head on a low-hanging pipe wrapped in lights. “Dude, Juan, what are you talking about?” His walk jiggles a little, balance slightly lost. “Your scabs are all gone, you look…” Dean swoops close and squints through the green and red and blue flashes of light. Pandemic’s skin shines where crusty flesh used to welt. “Do you have a suntan?”

“Dude, I’m warning you,” the secret Timothy Winters says. He points a drumstick at the wobbly singer. “Drop it. It’s none of your business. Just lie back down and beat the shit out of your liver some more.”

Blump-blump-blump-bl-blummmmm
. Low notes drown out their voices in Henry’s head. He syncs their lip movements with thick bass plucks. He dreams of kicking Dean in the nose.

This new job doesn’t sound as easy as Tony says
, Hamler thinks. His mind wanders away from Deshler and Pandemic’s argument into a feathery dream.
Killing Malinta sounds like hitting golf balls off the moon by comparison.

“Just tell me if you’re a cross-dresser,” Deshler says. “I’m okay with it. Everybody needs secrets. It’s what keeps people alive. Everybody feels important and special with them. Who wants to be themselves?”

“Then why would I tell you if I had a secret?”

“Because you didn’t keep it secret
enough
.” Deshler is close to his drummer’s face. He counts beige makeup spots covering meth-fueled scratches. Pandemic’s teeth are still a destroyed picket fence. “I know there is a secret, now you have to tell.”

“Lay off, man. I will break your stupid orphan neck.”

Dean’s face goes a little childlike. Its sharpness softens, like his eyes are preparing for tears. But tears don’t factor in. “Dick.”

“Leave me alone.”

“No,” he sneers, sick of being the only one ever expressing himself. “Tell me.”

Blump-blump-blump-blump-blump.

Pandemic’s movements go edgy, like he wants something proper to hit Deshler with.
Dean might be bigger than me,
he thinks.
But still a skinny jerk
. Pandemic hasn’t smoked in two days. He feels weak and empty. His bones stutter like the marrow is drained.

An icy clarity hits Hamler—a solution to his problems. The answer’s always been there, he realizes, but didn’t shine obvious until now.

Pandemic and Dean bicker on. Dean licks his thumb and leans toward the drummer’s head, like a parent rubbing at a kid’s sticky jelly cheeks. “Hold still. Hold still.”

Henry cuts in, determined to start living life on his own terms. “You know, I’ve been thinking.”
There’ll be other Martins
.
There’ll be other jobs
.
This starts right here
. “The band needs a change.”

The other two shoot stares as he blows smoke into the lights.

“What fun is art if people don’t enjoy it? I want to make music people will clap about. Something I won’t be embarrassed to let my mom hear. Something at least on CD.”

Deshler slugs down the rest of that warm bottle. Pandemic digs a rut into his cheek, centimeter by centimeter. A speck of purplish red scab shines through flaky makeup.

“Check it out,” Deshler smiles at the drummer. “Cat Stevens is playing bass now. Yeah, you buy an acoustic guitar and I’ll write some songs about my grandma and getting to bed on time. It’ll be a hit.”

This conversation reminds Henry of trying to tell Tony to stop giving him unwanted assignments.
Nobody listens,
he thinks.
Take control
.
“Look at us, bro. We’re not going anywhere. This band is an
enormous
waste of time. People threw vegetables. What are we ever going to get out of this? It’s not supposed to be this way. This isn’t why I joined.”

“It’s art,” Deshler says, voice rising in defense. “Art isn’t supposed to be fun. It’s supposed to be challenging. It’s
fun
to shock people and make them think and express something.”