you want to listen to him.
“What’s your name, anyway?” asks Pierce.
The guy’s back is shaped like a question mark, probably
from leaning over mixing boards all day, but then he straight-
ens up and suddenly is about four inches taller.
“Fnu Lnu. First name unknown, Last name unknown. You
can call me Fnu.” He starts dragging mic stands and amps
around the room while muttering to himself. Fnu makes
Hector and me trade places, and then stands in the middle of
the room, squinting at us. “You guys have potential. That’s not
to say it won’t take a miracle for me to pull it together in there,
but if anyone can do it, it’s me.”
Wow. That may be the biggest compliment we’ve gotten
since my mom said that our music helped her sinuses drain.
“Where’s your bass player?”
“He couldn’t make the trip,” I say cautiously. “But on the
way here I sang the song to him over the phone. He recorded
his track at home and then emailed me an MP3 file.”
“Resourceful. I like that,” says Fnu. He grabs my phone and
walks back to the booth. “I’ll download it and cue it up. You
guys get ready for your first and final take. It’s almost eleven,
and I’ve got things to do today.”
Way back when Hector and I were in elementary school,
our moms made us join the glee club. Who knows why parents
do these things? Maybe they just figure that emotional scar-
ring is cute when it’s dressed in a red vest and a bow tie. There
was one big holiday concert, and the kid who was supposed to
sing a duet version of “Jingle Bell Rock” with me threw up on
the woodwinds during the opening number and had to go sit
in his mom’s lap for the rest of the show.
Our music teacher, Mrs. Henn, knew that Hector and I
were best friends, so I guess she figured that we could sing
together. No rehearsal, no warm-up, just a shove in the back,
and we were standing in front of two microphones center stage
with a white-hot spotlight on us. Neither one of us could move.
But then I remembered one of the baseball signs we made up
in Little League.
It meant to hit a home run or “shoot for the moon,” which,
okay, never even came close to happening, but it was really
cool to a have a signal for it anyway. When Mrs. Henn started
playing the intro, I knew what had to be done, so I just gave
Hector the signal.
Needless to say, we tore the place up, and Mrs. Henn retired
midyear.
“Rolling tape,” says Fnu from the booth. I look over at
Hector, and he shoots for the moon. Yeah. We got this.
We don’t even wait for an answer.
“NAILED IT,” yells Pierce.
You know how it feels when you hit a grand slam or a
killer tennis shot, or even ace a multiple-choice test? Me
either, but this is probably like that. We’re giving each other
high fives and jumping around the studio like a bunch of
idiots. Pierce even kisses his bass drum/suitcase, and I
text Tim to let him in on the celebration. “Dude,” I text.
“Awesome session.” And then I add, “We killed it like your
uncle’s roaches,” and press Send. As I’m putting my gui-
tar back in the case, Fnu flicks on the speaker and says,
“Congratulations. The hard drive failed. I guess you’ll get a
second take after all. Stand by.”
As Sara would say, “It’s so quiet in here, you could hear a
jaw drop.” Pierce, Hector, and I just stand there staring at one
another for a while. There’s nothing really to do but tune up
and go again, so we do, and it’s good. Not killer good, like the
first take, but it’ll do. Oh, well . . . there will always be other
once-in-a-lifetime performances.
A few hours later, Hector is asleep in the van, and I’m
sharing a victory box of graham crackers and bean dip with
Pierce while we watch storm clouds build over the lake.
Sheboygan looks like a pretty cool place, if you don’t count
weeds, trash, and decay were scraped away, even this dump
would have a certain charm to it.
The side door of the building falls open—literally—with a
thud. Fnu mumbles something about the door not being right
since Meat Loaf knocked it off its hinges trying to get to the
lunch wagon. He picks it up, props it against the wall, and calls
us over. We all gather around, looking at the cool silvery disc
in his hands.
“This is your stamper disc. Don’t scratch it. We never give
these things to the customer, but since my boss is both under-
standing and also not here at the moment, I’m making an
exception.”
He’s holding the stamper by the edges really carefully, like
it’s made out of silver or something.
“What’s a stamper disc and what are we supposed to do
with it?” Hector asks.
Fnu rolls his eyes and heads back into the building with us
right behind. “The stamper is a negative mold of your record.
You press it against warm vinyl to make a record, you idiots.”
“And that isn’t occurring now because . . .” I say.
Fnu waves an arm toward a hulking, wacky-looking piece
of machinery that occupies most of the room. “A Chinese com-
pany bought all of our equipment and is going to use it to make
cell phones or something,” he says. “Anyway, it’s time for me
to move on. Make your own records. The coupon lied. Deal
with it.” Fnu picks up his backpack from a dusty corner of the
building and heads for the door.
“No charge, by the way. Not even for the miracle I just
performed in the mixing booth. You should be proud. That
was the freakiest tune I’ve recorded since Enya went reggae.
Fitting that it’s the last.” He’s unchaining his bike from the
cement post and I step forward.
“C’mon, man! How are we supposed to make our own
records?”
Fnu hangs the bike chain around his neck and throws his
leg over his junkyard bike. “How? Figure it out is how.”
My phone starts vibrating again. It’s been doing that about
every ten minutes for the last few hours, but since it was my
mom calling, I’ve been letting it go to voice mail. It says she’s
left eighteen messages, so I figure that it might be wise to
answer this time. I wonder if she’s pissed.
“Mom. Mom. Mom. Mom. Mom. I’m sorry. I didn’t pick up
earlier because I was busy, um, doing stuff with Grandma.
Yeah, like eating Neapolitan ice cream and stuff. Yum!” Man,
even I’m not believing me. “You want to talk to her? Um, she
can’t now because she, uh . . .”
“ . . . is playing bingo!
Yeah. It’s a madhouse!”
I wave at Hector to join
in. “What? I can hardly hear
you, Mom.”
I cover my other ear so I can hear better, and my mom says,
“Okay, Jeremy. We’ll discuss this later. Your father and I have
to leave for the award ceremony now. Tell Grandma that I’ll
call her tomorrow. Oh, and tell Pierce that the I numbers only
go from sixteen to thirty.”
I disconnect, and we all collapse against the side of the van,
laughing the way you do when you realize that you probably
just got away with something big. After a while the laugh-
ing dies down, and then somebody sighs. This is like the
turducken of feelings: incredible relief stuffed with remorse,
stuffed with overpowering guilt. We’re three hundred fifty
miles, a hundred records, and a web of lies away from home. I
feel a raindrop splash on the end of my nose. We’re all quiet for
a minute, then Hector looks over at me and says, “You know
we’re going to hell, right?”
“Yeah,” I say.
CHAPTER 10
e drain the last of the Chunky’s chicken oil into the
fuel tank as mid-afternoon squats down on Sheboygan.
W
Ordinarily, eighty gallons of oil would have taken us a couple
of thousand miles or more (with a good tailwind), but Pierce’s
stupid hamster chewed through the bungee cord that was
holding it upright, and the whole thing dumped over. We
didn’t discover it until just a while ago, and it’s taken me
almost an hour to unload the van and squeegee the spilled
oil through the rust holes in the floor. Just when you think
your life can’t get any worse, some cosmic force turns up the
suckage. Hector and I start cleaning up the last piles of empty
snack bags, while Pierce stands there, staring into the back
of the van. My grandma’s Pilates machine, once buried under
several boxes of nacho cheese whatnot has been exhumed
and sits strapped in the middle of the floor. Pierce slides the
padded bed of the thing back and forth, muttering something
to himself and scribbling notes on his arm. He seems pretty
into it, so I just concentrate on jamming all this stuff into the
Dumpster. Then I hear the van’s goofy little Looney Tunes
horn honking.
Sure. Why not? Maybe we’ll run across a press-your-own-
records store on the way to my grandma’s house. It’s my turn
to drive, so I climb in and get situated. As I’m adjusting the
rearview mirror, I hear Pierce and Siri making plans in the
back, so I guess he’s the navigator. I roll the van out to the cor-
ner of Burned and Defeated and wait for instructions. Pierce
keeps messing with his phone in the backseat, so I try to start
a civil conversation about the crapitude of our lives.
“Anybody know of a good warm vinyl shop nearby? Because
maybe they have a drive-thru window that we could just pull
up to and—”
“Turn left,” barks Pierce. Call me old-fashioned, but I find it
extremely rude when someone talks while I am pouring out a
serious downer on everyone around me.
“Good idea,” I say, hunching over the wheel. “I was just
thinking that what we need right now is a ten-gallon barrel of
multicolored paper clips.”
“Just turn,” Pierce says, and despite the lessons I’ve learned
from three years of friendship with an impulsive maniac drum-
mer and his underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, I do.
It’s raining pretty hard by the time Pierce waves us over to
pick him up at the curb in front of Staples. Hector leans back
and opens the rear door, and Pierce tumbles into the backseat
carrying a George Foreman Lil’ Georgie Portable Deluxe
Electric Hot Plate and a half-dozen bags of random supplies
that almost crush Lucifer, who was chilling in an open plastic
jug of turkey jerky. He gives Pierce the hamster stink eye and
Pierce apologizes, “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”
Okay, maybe that is a good sign. I yank at the bag of kettle
corn that we had jammed into the hole to waterproof the roof.
It was sort of working, but the rain is coming down harder and
I’m hungry again, so I shove the Hello Kitty umbrella through
it and duct-tape it into place. Much better. Now we look just the
right amount of insane. Hector grabs a handful of my kettle
corn, turns around in his seat, and says to Pierce, “I found a
Home Depot three-tenths of a mile away, like you asked me to.
Maybe they’re still running their buy-a-skid-of-mulch-and-get-
an-Elmo-glow-in-the-dark-hairband special.”
Twenty minutes go by, and Pierce emerges from Home Depot
pushing a squeaky orange flatbed cart loaded with a huge
battery, an industrial hole punch, and more rolls of duct tape.
We have to rearrange some junk food boxes to get everything
into the van and I’m getting a little peeved. I lock eyes with
Pierce before cramming him in like a Tokyo subway rider, and
he meets my stare.
I point the van toward I-43 and start doing the math. If we
hit every light, we’re about six hours to Serene Surroundings,
Grandma’s retirement village. Figuring four to five minutes
to deliver the Pilates machine, use the bathroom, answer her
questions about how I’m doing, and meet all her friends, we
should beat my mom and dad home by at least a couple of
hours. I’m beginning to breathe a little easier when Pierce
shouts out, “Stop! That’s it! Pull into this pizza joint!”
“Pierce! It’s getting late!” I yell. “Absolutely n—”
Ordinarily I’d say that I’m as hungry as the next guy, but
the guy next to me is Hector. The dude burns more calories
sitting in a chair than most people do in an hour on a spin
bike. I’m clearly outnumbered here, so I hit the blinker and
reluctantly pull in to the You Wanna Pizza This? parking lot.
While Hector and Pierce pile into the restaurant, I stew in the
car and watch a parade of big doughy Wisconsinites come and
go, licking pepperoni grease off their meaty fingers. A few
cross the parking lot and line up at the fried cheese curd cart
and others duck into the hot donuts shack next door. Which
reminds me . . .
“Dude, you’ll love it,” says Hector, handing me a pizza
box through the driver’s-side window. “It’s the Swine Lover’s
Special. Bacon, sausage, ham, and pulled pork, and they give
you a little plastic lard bucket to drain the excess fat into. I got
the Jumbo Dairy Land for myself, with nineteen cheeses and
the lime Jell-O casserole dipping sauce.”
“What did Pierce get?”
The restaurant door swings open and Pierce comes out
backward, carrying a swaying tower of empty pizza boxes.
Whatever. I just find the highway and spend the next two
hours in my own head, cataloging some evasive half-truths
that I’ll need for the answers to the questions that I’ll be
pelted with when I get home. It’s just getting dark when I
spot Killian Street. It’s in a normalish-looking neighborhood
full of sturdy Wisconsiny houses and one picked-over yard
sale. I pull over to the curb at 1043, and a guy with bright
red cheeks wearing a pair of tortured Dockers sets a heavy-
looking box down.
I
am not fluent in adult speak, and really bad with dialects,
so I point at Pierce. He opens the side doors and smiles.
“Hi der. See, we’re music lovers, oh yeah, and the fellas and
me were hopin’ you had some old record albums fer sale. ’Zat
possible?”
“Oh, I hope you’re not pullin’ my leg,” the guy says. “I was
just puttin’ dese boxes of LPs out on the curb for da trash man
ta take in da mornin’. Der yours free if you want ’em. ’N you
can take dat old turntable, too.”
“Tanks,” Pierce says, and proceeds to cram three crates
of the world’s most heinous musical crimes into the van. Two
minutes and a couple of cheese-centric recipe exchanges later,
we’re waving good-bye to Kenosha and rolling south again. I
try to keep from steering the van into a ditch while Pierce and
Hector read the titles of the albums.
The Walmart parking lot that Pierce directs me to stretches
across a vast swath of Wisconsin farmland. The store is closed,
and the only occupants besides us are a few random shopping
carts and several RVs circled wagon train–style under a tall
streetlight. Pierce, Hector, and I are all crammed in the back
of the van twisting wires, tightening screws, and generally
following the blueprint that’s scribbled on Pierce’s arm and
much of his left shoulder in red ballpoint ink. Pierce sits on the
sliding bed of the Pilates machine and adjusts the tension on
the springs. He pushes his feet against the piece of plywood
that we duct-taped to the horizontal bar at one end and nods
his head.
“Heating up,” replies Hector. The battery Pierce bought
has wires wrapped around both poles and is pumping juice
to the hot plate and the shredder Hector won from Chunky’s.
I press the shred button and the beast growls to life. Pierce