grins, then slaps his forehead and winces.
“I forgot the labels! A record has to have a label in the
center. Everybody look around for some paper we can use—
preferably something round, about the size of a . . . a . . .”
“Perfect!” Pierce
plucks Lucifer out of
the turkey jerky jug
and puts him on his
little exercise wheel to
keep him out of the way. “Punch a
hole in the middle of those with that
big hole punch over there.”
Easy. I do the whole package in
about five seconds. Sometimes it pays to tick off a waitress.
“Then what?” I ask, handing him the stack of punched
coasters.
Pierce grabs an Up with People album out of the box and
snaps it over his knee. “Then we begin ridding the world of
bad music by turning it into good music. Observe.”
Oh.
My.
Gawd.
We actually made a record! And it plays! Maybe we’re not
completely hosed after all. Pierce adds the title and artist info
on the label with that red pen of his. I gotta admit, it looks
totally Etsy and very, very cool. People are going to go nuts
for these.
“Shredded Records is officially in business! Now we just
have to make ninety-nine more of these,” says Pierce.
“In the back of a VW van while driving all night in a rain-
storm,” I point out.
“Powered only by sugar and caffeine,” says Hector. Pierce
grabs Hector and me around our necks and squeezes.
“We’ll be legends,” he says. “Just as long as the battery
holds out.
“Or not.”
CHAPTER 11
y phone rings, which I naturally decide to ignore
because it can’t be important. Nobody worthwhile
M
ever calls without texting first. I glance down at the caller ID,
maybe just to see whose name I’ll be adding to my Clueless
Contacts list. That won’t be necessary. She’s already on it.
“Jeremy, you’ll never guess what,” she gushes. I can always
tell when she thinks she’s giving me good news because she
uses my first name in every sentence, like she has to remind
herself who she’s talking to.
“Let me guess . . . Dad won the Golden Overbite Award and
a few old people are twerking on the dance floor?” As I say
it, I throw up a little bit in my mouth and then swallow. Eww.
Yogurt-dipped pork rinds taste even worse the second time
around. I’ve been to these award dinners before, and, trust
me, you do NOT want to see a bunch of orthodontists getting
their freak on to eighties hair band hits. Just sayin’. I can tell
that my mom is going to start flinging questions about the
trip, or worse, asking to speak to my grandma, so I wind up
the call. “Tell Dad that I’m really proud of him. Everything
is fine here. We’ll be home tomorrow before noon. Love you,
Mom.”
“Okay. Bye, Jeremy. Love you, too, Jerem—”
I toss my phone on the seat and walk around to the other
side of the van, where Pierce and Hector are hopefully formu-
lating a brilliant strategy.
“Without the battery,” Pierce says, “we have no shredder.
Without the battery, we have no hot plate. Without the shred-
der and hot plate, we can’t shred and melt vinyl. And without
melted vinyl, we’ve got no records, the fund-raiser is toast, and
we end up in clown college.” Pierce is staring at the hamster
wheel as Lucifer spins it in another one of his manic episodes.
“What we need is energy,” he says, and then he looks at me.
“Energy,” he repeats. Hector’s eyes widen.
“Exactly,” Pierce says. And then his thumbs are flying over
the screen of his smart phone as he barks out orders at Hector
and me. “I need both your phone chargers, a roll of duct tape,
“What are we doing?” I ask.
“We are channeling Mr. Sporka’s physics class—the
section on principles of electricity,” Pierce says. “I think I still
have some notes somewhere.”
“Dude, everybody but Gilbert Merkey slept through most of
second semester,” I say. “If he hadn’t traded me guitar lessons
for tutoring, I would have gotten a D in that class for sure.”
“Yes, and two great things about Gilbert are one, he’s really
smart, and two, he likes everybody to know that he’s really
smart.”
Pierce puts Gilbert on speaker and we all do our best not to
nod off as he drones on about amperage and current and blah-
de-blah-de-blah-blah. After about five minutes Pierce speaks
up and says, “Okay. Yeah. You win. That sounds exactly like
Sporka, Gilbert. You the man. Bye.” Pierce plucks Lucifer off
the hamster wheel and gives him a kiss on the nose before
dropping him into the turkey jerky jug. “Take a rest, buddy.
You’re going to need it.”
I must be really tired because it makes perfect sense to me
that a hamster-powered generator can create enough juice to
run a George Foreman hot plate and a paper shredder. I pop
another can of warm Red Bull and take a gulp. I’m definitely
going to cut down on caffeine after this trip is over because
I think I can feel my fingernails vibrating. I watch as Pierce
and Hector start assembling our mini power plant. They seem
to know what they’re doing, so I stay out of the way and offer
helpful wisecracks to keep them entertained. Pierce shows
Hector a phone app that boosts the output of something or
other, and they patch it into the system. It’s pretty amazing,
really. The whole thing is coming together with ingenuity, ran-
dom office supplies, and the stuff Gilbert told us, which Pierce
scribbled on the inside of his elbow. To me, it looks a little like
a big Mouse Trap game, but less tidy and without a guy in an
old-timey bathing suit diving into an empty tub.
Pierce puts Lucifer on the hamster wheel and whispers in
his ear.
The squeaky wheel starts to turn, slowly at first, then faster
as Lucifer gets going, until the squeak becomes a constant
high-pitched whine. The vinyl on the hot plate starts to bubble
again, and we are back in business!
It’s around two o’clock in the morning, and since we have
to be at my grandma’s place by eight, I climb behind the wheel
and head out of the Walmart parking lot. Shredded Records is
going mobile.
Hector slides an album out of its sleeve and drops it on the
turntable, which Pierce wired up to the cigarette lighter.
“A little mood music, gentlemen?” he says. And the next
thing I know, we’re listening to the Chipmunks doing ZZ Top
covers.
Okay . . . it takes the guilt out of shredding perfectly good
records once you’ve experienced the full terribleness of their
music. Pierce laughs and grabs the Chipmunks record. He
feeds it into the shredder with one hand and puts the next
recor
d on the turntable with the other hand. Pizza Party
Polka gets another howl from Hector, and I crack up, send-
ing a fine Red Bull mist out my nose and onto the dashboard.
With Lucifer running his stubby legs off in the hamster wheel
generator (with short breaks only for back rubs and energy
snacks), Pierce and Hector work together in a synchronized
vinyl ballet, turning out disk after disk, while I chew up miles
of highway. Before he hangs the freshly pressed records on a
clothesline that Hector improvised from shoelaces and uphol-
stery strings he pulled out of the backseat, Pierce adds the
final touch.
It’s kind of hard to
describe the weird-
ness of making vinyl
records with a
Pilates machine,
a hot plate,
and a paper
shredder pow-
ered by a hamster wheel generator in
the back of a Volkswagen van driving south through
Wisconsin and Illinois at fifty-five miles an hour . . . actually,
maybe I just did. I never thought I’d hear myself use these
words in a sentence, but I turn my head and yell to the guys,
“Let’s just hope the hamster holds out through William Shatner
Sings Barbra Streisand’s Greatest Hits.”
The sun has been blazing in my eyes since I turned east outside
Indianapolis a while ago (just half a revolution on the beltway
this time, thank you very much). I dig around under the seat
and come up with some sunglasses that may have been there
since the old guy who sold us the van raged at Woodstock.
I try a little spit and the sleeve of my T-shirt, but I can’t get
enough crud off the one remaining lens to see through it, so I
toss them back. We’re looping through the identical streets in
my grandma’s retirement village, which was clearly designed
by a disgruntled psychologist after one too many rats-in-a-
maze experiments. I hear the shredder powering down and
the hamster wheel stops squeaking. There’s some shuffling
around, and then Hector’s sweaty face pops up over my
shoulder.
A hundred records in just over four hundred miles. Not
bad! That’s actually friggin’ amazing, so I reach back and get
a halfhearted high five returned from Hector.
“What’s wrong?” I ask. “We got the records pressed,
right?” I spot a beige condo that looks exactly like all the other
beige condos, except this one has a skull and crossbones
needlepoint flag waving on the front porch. My grandma
rocks! “We’re here! Time to celebrate!”
“I guess,” says Hector. And then Pierce climbs into the
shotgun seat next to me. His hands are cupped to his chest,
and his panicked face looks like somebody just tried to steal
his nipple ring.
CHAPTER 12
m, maybe we should let Pierce talk to the doctor alone
“
for a few minutes,” I say. Hector nods in agreement,
U
and the two of us shuffle down the long, barking hallway and
back into the waiting room. Lucifer was limping pretty badly
by the time we got to the vet, and Pierce is afraid he might
have developed patellofemoral syndrome from the six hours
of running around the hamster wheel. I have no idea if rodents
can even get runner’s knee, but I wouldn’t be surprised in this
case. I’ll tell you one thing: the little dude has heart.
Hector and I plop down in a couple of the fiberglass chairs
that line the walls. Mine smells faintly of dog fur and pee,
but I haven’t showered in two days, so the chair might have
a complaint of its own. It’s nine thirty, and I text my grandma
to explain why we’re going to be late. Again. She was cool at
seven last night when I told her we wouldn’t get to her place
until this morning, but now it feels like I’m pushing it.
She acts tough, but the two of us are really okay with each
other. We can just sit and talk without her getting all bent
out of shape if I slip up and accidentally tell her something
private or especially truthful. One time I admitted to her that
the volume knob on my amp isn’t really wonky, I just like to
see how high my parents can jump. She laughed for, like, an
hour, and then hid in my room with me while we messed with
their nerves. It’s not like I see my grandma a lot, just a couple
of times a year now since she moved to that repurposement
village (or whatever it’s called when a lot of geezers huddle
together in condos behind walls). She and her friends there do
old people stuff together, like yoga, biking, and aerobics. They
also spend a lot of time bragging about their grandkids, and I
assume that’s why she’s been so juiced about me bringing her
Pilates machine over. For these old guys, parading a grandson
through the cafeteria line is the next best thing to bragging
about their latest gallbladder attack. I guess I owe her that
much, so I text her a thoughtful reply.
With all the time it took us to reinvent record pressing,
and now this detour to bring Lucifer to the vet, I’m starting
to get a little worried about getting back by noon for the fund-
raiser . . . and ahead of my mom and dad.
“How long do you think it’ll take us to get home from my
grandma’s house?” I ask Hector.
“Fifty-three minutes, according to my app,” he says, pull-
ing a sheet of blueberry fruit leather out of his pocket and
stuffing it into his mouth. “Give or take a few seconds.” Hector
has been getting hungrier the last six or seven hours. I can
see it in his eyes. Dangerous eyes. It’s like looking at a grizzly
bear that hasn’t caught a salmon for a couple of days. I made
the mistake of telling him about the pancakes my grandma
makes. The ones she fills with applesauce, pecans, bananas,
and crumbled bacon. They’re as
filling as wet cement, but soooooo
amazing. One time I ate thirty-
seven of them and almost
had to have my stomach
pumped. Good times.
A door closes somewhere, and we see Pierce coming
around the corner.
“Let’s go,” he says.
“What about Lucifer?” I ask. “Is it his knee?”
Pierce shakes his head. “No. Hip. The doctor says that
everything is going to be fine.” He takes a deep breath, and
then adds,
Back in cul-de-sac hell, I find my grandma’s place on just
the fourth lap around the development. The needlepoint
skull and crossbones flag is still flying, and she’s standing
in the driveway, waiting with a huge platter of her pancakes.
What a woman. We jump out of the van, trade a few hugs, and
she leads us into her kitchen, or the feed trough, as my dad
calls it.
The pancakes taste unbelievably good after two days of
chips, jerky, and truck-stop food. The more we eat, the hap-
pier it seems to make her, so we keep shoveling them in. Her
walls are covered with framed needlepoints that she’s done,
along with a really lousy picture of a red barn with cows in
front of it that I made with a paint-by-number kit when I was
about eight. The needlepoint pictures are mostly corny cli-
chés straight off the coffee mugs in the Cracker Barrel gift
shop, but I notice a brand-new one conveniently hanging
right in front of my face.
“Real subtle, Grandma,” I say. She wipes her hands on her
apron and shrugs.
“Your dad was just
like you when he was
your age. He thought
your grandpa and I
didn’t know what he was
up to, but we could read
Walt’s face like it was a large-print
edition of Doofus Weekly. It was
actually kind of pathetic watching
little Waltie try to get away with stuff.”
“What kind of stuff?” I say between
gulps of milk.
Grandma shrugs. “You know . . . missing curfew . . . telling
us he was one place when he was actually someplace else . . .
silly nonsense.
“More pancakes?”
Hector lets out a painful moan that tells me he’s almost full.
“Naw. I think we’re good. Besides, we’d better get going.”
“Yes, I let your mother believe that you left early this morn-
ing,” Grandma says. “Why don’t you go get my Pilates machine
and think about getting on the road before we all get busted?”
And then, right on cue, my phone vibrates with a text from my
mom.
“Leaving motel now :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-),” it says. “Have
you been home long? :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-):-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-)”
I just text back “No” and head for the door.
Once we work the legs free from the sugar/grease/vinyl
paste that’s built up on the floor of the van, the three of us
wrestle the Pilates machine out of the van and onto the drive-
way. I forgot how heavy this stupid thing was.
Pierce and I grab the left side while Hector picks up the