Broken Piano for President (7 page)

Blank.

Finally, Deshler slips behind the wheel. Other than how to barely work a stick, Deshler knows nothing about cars. He grinds the gears and pulls off. Dean does, however, know a cool car when he drives one, and this isn’t the coolest by a long shot.

• The Batmobile
  

No shit,
the
Batmobile. Not the space shuttle-looking piece of crap Michael Keaton drove. The original from the sixties. The owner was in town for a comic book convention and decided to stay at Deshler’s hotel. No fenders were dented.

• The Pope Mobile
  

A few years ago the Pope was in town speaking to 50,000 people at the arena. This was actually the backup Pope Mobile. It was little more than a bulletproof pickup truck with a Kevlar phone booth in the back. No doors were scratched, amen.

• The Oscar Mayer Wiener Mobile
  

There is a giant hotdog that drives around the country spreading goodwill and news about franks. The driver said he wanted to eat at the hotel’s restaurant but couldn’t find adequate street parking. It was amazing the giant dog was allowed in the city limits, this being such a hamburger town. By some miracle Deshler convinced the wiener man to let him find a spot. It was a lot like driving an eighteen-wheeler, which Deshler has also done. No buns were burned.

• A Giant Slice of Tofu
  

Not nearly as exciting as the hotdog, but slightly more memorable. Some woman named Wilhelmina was in town, trying to promote healthy eating. She wouldn’t stop talking to Dean about the protein benefits of tofu as opposed to meat. No beans were curded.

Out of habit, Dean reaches in his breast pocket for a burned Lothario Speedwagon CD. Slipping a copy into everyone’s player is his form of guerrilla marketing. Though, he’s pretty sure it never converts any fans.

Deshler zones out and wishes his band had a more artistic name, like the Butthole Surfers. He wishes people would take them seriously. He wishes people would listen. He kind of wishes audiences would stop throwing things, but kind of doesn’t. Shaking up listeners’ anger and confusion is the price an artist pays, he is reminded.

Dean parallels the car and the passenger door lets out a painful squeal, grinding against a parking lot guardrail. The opening bass notes of
Broken Piano for President
fill the stereo so Deshler doesn’t hear the impact. It’s too bad, too, because Deshler likes to keep a tally of all the fancy rides he ruins.

Jogging through the lot back to his post under the hotel awning, Dean snaps out of that band-focused haze. There she is again, across the street with a white bandage wrapped around her head like a World War One casualty. The girl doesn’t see Deshler. Words bubble up to the surface of his throat, but hold back. He’s not sure if this Malinta’s the kind of woman he should ever talk to again. Maybe he’s not the kind of guy she’d like to talk to again, for that matter.

“Dude, do you know who that guy was?” Napoleon says, jealous.

“Possibly?”

“Roland Winters.” Napoleon’s fingers make a ridiculous
ta-da
move.

“What? The hamburger guy? Christopher Winters’ kid?”

Napoleon slowly nods as if Deshler just came back from the dead and asked for a cigarette. “What was that shit he said to you?”

“I wish I knew.” He realizes this isn’t a lie.
What
was
that slob babbling about?

“Dude, I can’t believe I let you drive his car,” Napoleon says with kid brother awe. “That guy is
Mister Hamburger
. What did it smell like?”

“Oh, you know,” Dean tries to remember, but goes back to lying. “Space Burgers.”

“Ahhh, I knew it. No wonder he looks like that, it’s gotta be impossible to stay in shape eating junk all day. Though, I hear that new Space Burger only weighs about a third as much as a regular Winters Burger. Crazy huh?
Healthy
burgers.”

Napoleon parks an elderly woman’s Lincoln. She walks syrup slow to the door Deshler holds.

Napoleon wanders back to the awning jingling keys, tossing them from hand to hand. “God, man,” his hefty partner says. “You look like shit. Do you have any clue what you did last night?”

Lothario Speedwagon has played together for half a year and is banned from all but one bar around town. The electricity has been switched off the stage fourteen times. The band has only finished its set five times. Five that Deshler remembers, at least.

Shows usually end early when the singer throws things, which include, but are not limited to:

• Chairs.
  

• Ziploc bags of water.
  

• Microphone stands.
  

• Hamburgers.
  

• Ziploc bags of ketchup.
  

• Other bands’ equipment.
  

• Beer bottles.
  

• Punches.
  

• Ziploc bags of urine.
  

The band self-released a cassette,
Broken Piano for President,
a few months ago. Tapes, being insanely outdated, are cheaper than CDs and seven-inch records, while being a million times cooler than MP3s—at least to the band. The lowest deal they could get was for five hundred copies pressed without artwork. In lieu of professional cover art, the band slapped on a Lothario Speedwagon sticker and randomly glued pieces of junk to the plastic tape cases. Dean’s favorite copy features fingernail clippings and bloody band-aids. At the time of this publication, three hundred and five copies have been sold. Two hundred and sixty went through the band’s website to Japan.

The band is confused, since Lothario Speedwagon has never played in Japan and none of its songs feature Japanese lyrics.

Practice is held in the drummer’s basement. His house is seemingly kept standing by thumb tacks. There’s a stiff breeze even when the windows are closed and what chunks of paint still hang to the slats are, at best, colored primer.

Downstairs, mismatched scraps of carpet are nailed along the basement walls to dampen noise. For decoration, Pandemic hung a couple thousand Christmas bulbs. Every string is set to a different blinker schedule. The effect is close to LSD sequences in sixties movies.

Behind Hamler’s amp is a garbage heap of bright painted masks. Dean came up with the band’s image one hungover morning after waking up in a costume shop/arts and crafts store: Day-glo papier-mâché masks and a lot of black lights around the stage.

The mysterious look also keeps their identity a secret, which has come in handy more than a few times after rocky performances.

At nine-thirty, Pandemic and Deshler lie around the practice space floor sharing a bottle of Night Train wine. The taste isn’t unlike kerosene cut with Kool-Aid.

“What is wrong with your roommate?” Pandemic says. “I don’t have time for his slow-ass screwing around.”

“Beats me,” Deshler says, bum wine burning a pool in his stomach. “He was crying about being on time this afternoon. Here we are.” Dean recognizes a familiar germ growing inside him thanks to the wine. Some call it creativity, others call it trouble.

Dean’s heard rumors that Juan Pandemic is rich. He and Henry’s friends, who have played in bands with Pandemic before, back this theory up. Trust fund baby, they say. But from every angle Dean doubts that nametag applies to his methamphetamine-smoking drummer.

Juan Pandemic’s skinny face and shaved head are scattered in welts from uncontrollable scratching. His everyday wardrobe consists of stained sweatpants and no shirt. He’s thin as a coat of paint and, occasionally, when he stays up for five nights in a row, carries a vinegar cat piss stink soaked into his skin. This aroma, Dean learned, is a signpost of brewing a batch of crystal meth. Hardly the calling card of a man who gets a check from daddy every month, Deshler thinks.

With all this raggedness, though, one can’t spend more than a minute with Pandemic without getting the impression he thinks he’s better than you. As far as vain meth addicts go, he tops the leader board.

All flaws aside, Pandemic is a madman drummer. He beats a fairly standard drum kit, plus his homemade Konkers, with brutal power. Pandemic’s Konkers include a metal trashcan—sometimes ignited with lighter fluid—cookie sheets, an oil drum, hubcaps, industrial springs and a mutilated car hood. His hands are scarred and enormous and bash away like sledgehammers. When the band is at full-tilt, Pandemic’s a junkyard in an earthquake. He’s the perfect backbeat for a group like Lothario Speedwagon.

“You want more of this shit. I can tell,” the drummer says, picking something hard and yellow from his eye.

“Well.”

“You haven’t started talking weird yet. That’s not right. I have a couple more in the fridge.”

“Yeah, dude, it’s not so bad after a few sips.” Deshler swallows a breath, scaring away building heartburn. “Hey, wait, talking weird?”

Pandemic runs upstairs and Dean loses himself, thinking about Malinta.
God, what a woman. But then again, I did nearly kill her.

Didn’t I?

I should stay away.

“I don’t normally drink this shit, but I’m slumming it tonight.” The drummer stomps back down. “One for each of us. You can thank me later,” Pandemic says, holding two bottles of electric green Night Train.

With each sip Dean senses that little germ graduating into a plague of creativity. There is no talking, just wet gurgles between the men. It’s satisfying, Dean thinks, to wait and just build up this magic pressure.

That steam pushes against Dean’s temples, tight, right as his roommate thunders down the rotting wooden stairs.

“About time, Henry.”

“Don’t start, man, just don’t.” Henry’s stomach still feels oily and evil. “Can we just jam a while? I don’t want to practice our old shit today. I want something new. Something slow and dark.”

Nobody argues and the band slithers through some riffs. Lothario Speedwagon is Pandemic on percussion, Henry on bass and Dean on vocals with occasional urine-tossing. They have a reputation among a tiny percentage of fans as a revolutionary live act. However, the vast majority of crowds around town think they are, at best, art school masturbation. Or, as the local alternative weekly said: “A kick in the shin to anyone with functional hearing.” Deshler taped that article to the refrigerator.

Henry plucks some strings. His bass is detuned and hot-rodded to sound like a table saw through a stop sign.

Deshler’s mile-long vocal chords come across somewhere between southern gospel preacher and Navy foghorn. That deep voice rattles his guts when hitting low notes. He never sang for school or for choirs or suppers. One day he just tried out the microphone and fell in love.

An hour into practice, the magic pressure builds a bomb from countless sips. The singer is frustrated because his creative plague didn’t explode. It’s close, but he can’t light the wick. Dean snarls lyrics he hates, but can’t stop repeating: