“Yeah, Beth?”
She discards the straw wrapper and grabs a napkin. She reaches up to my face and wipes a piece of egg off the corner of my mouth. She smiles. “Something on your mind?”
“Nope.” I shake my head. “Nothing at all.” I’m a very good liar.
Chapter fifteen
The Monsters of Rock. Kingdom Come, Dokken, Metallica, Scorpions, and Van Halen performing consecutively on stage over the course of twelve straight hours from noon to midnight.
Halfway into Dokken, I traded my concert tee for a few joints. The shirt looked authentic—black and red, flying “VH” Van Halen logo on the front, tour dates on the back—but it was a cheap knockoff I got in the parking lot for five bucks.
The weed isn’t a cheap knockoff. Fifteen rows up on the second level of the Hoosier Dome, through the soupy haze of tobacco and marijuana smoke, I’m pretty sure Metallica has just come off an extended version of “Sanitarium.”
James Hetfield steps to the front of the stage, long stringy hair, goatee, pitted face, wearing black from head to toe. He pumps his fist in the air, grabs the microphone. “Fuck yeah!”
Sixty-seven thousand fists raised in unison respond, “Fuck yeah!”
“I hope you fucking know that we’re just getting fucking started, because…”
Cue Kirk Hammett on guitar…
Camera two on about sixty-seven thousand bobbing heads…Camera one back on James… Go James, go…
“I got something to say-ayyy!!!”
Metallica’s signature cover of the Misfits’s “Last Caress/Green Hell” sends the crowd into a chorus of frothing-at-the-mouth shouts. The careening, paralyzing, manic headbanging is a perfect accompaniment to the song’s affirming themes of killing babies, raping mothers, and cold, sweet death.
Mom and Dad gave me a free pass for the night. Knowing the concert wasn’t supposed to end until midnight, they said, “Call us sometime later just to let us know you’re okay, and be home before we wake up in the morning.”
My parents’ misplaced trust stems from my grades—straight As for the semester, again. Tonight is their reward for me “keeping my head in the game despite everything.” Logic dictates a kid that smart can’t simultaneously be that stupid. But then again, logic has nothing to do with drinking a six-pack of beer and most of a fifth of whiskey, followed by three joints and a hit off an opium pipe administered by a biker chick who wanted to take my “cute little ass” home with her.
Van Halen squeezed out an anticlimactic twelfth-hour encore that sent us home mute, deaf, drunk, and stoned. Kent Hagen invited us to his apartment for a post-concert party, his invitation made more enticing by the fact that Neff and I were too fucked up to argue or consider our other options. That, and our car was parked in front of Kent’s apartment.
Kent’s party is like any high school party in which you don’t know anyone, hovering between cool and alienating. Kent used to live in Empire Ridge, but he moved up to Indianapolis after his freshman year. Some of Kent’s Indy friends have been there all night—a couple of freakishly tall black dudes from the North Central High School basketball team, and a handful of girls way out of my league. Kent and Neff and their feathered heads of parted-down-the-middle hair entertain from behind the bar, serving weak drinks and even weaker jokes. As if a half-day of their music wasn’t enough, a Kingdom Come-Dokken-Metallica-Scorpions-Van Halen mix tape plays on the stereo.
I’ve been alternating between waters and Diet Coke for at least an hour. I’m still pretty drunk. I think I already called my parents. I know I called somebody when I got here.
There’s a knock at the door.
Kent turns down the stereo. “Who is it?”
Another knock.
Not a one of us in the apartment is eighteen, let alone twenty-one. I remind myself that this is the west side of Indianapolis, a place where underage drinking ranks somewhere beneath armed robbery, drive-by shootings, and good ol’ fashioned homicide on the list of things cops have to worry about.
“It’s Laura,” the disembodied voice says. “Is Hank here?”
Kent throws me a look, his feathered bangs, furrowed brow, and thin mustache running in almost parallel lines across his face. He opens the door. “You about gave me a heart attack.”
“Sorry, Kent.” Laura sees me over his shoulder and flashes me a dimpled smile. She’s wearing her favorite white miniskirt with a teal off-the-shoulder sweater, matching teal socks, and white flats. Her hair, its Florida gold taunting me still, is teased out to her shoulders.
Laura approaches me. “So you’re the one I called?” I say, smiling a little too hard.
Her lips are on mine before I know what’s happening. Our kiss is long, wet, and tactless, right there in the middle of the living room. Laura kisses me hard, her teeth biting and pulling my bottom lip as she backs away from me. She smells of peach schnapps.
“Yeah, I’m the one you called.” She kisses and bites me again.
Kent slams the front door. “Get a room, you two.”
We force a laugh but keep kissing.
“No, seriously.” Kent pushes us toward the stairs. “Go to my room. Top of the stairs. Second door on your left.”
I turn to Kent, letting go of Laura. “Thanks, Kent, but we’re fine right here. Aren’t we, babe?”
I look up and notice my girlfriend is gone. She’s already at the top of the stairs.
Laura locks the door behind us. The room is dark. We feel our way to the corner of the room and start to sit down on what I hope is a bed. I hear a cracking sound and jump up, startled. “What the hell was that?”
“Your back pocket.”
“My what?”
“Something’s in your back pocket.” Laura walks behind me, her left hand on my shoulder. She stands between me and the bed, pulling Scorpions’s Savage Amusement cassette out of my back pocket.
“Shit,” I say.
“No worries.” Laura holds the cassette up to me for inspection. “You just cracked the case. Tape is fine.” She throws the cassette on the bed. In one fluid motion, her lips are on my ear and her left hand drops down the front of my pants.
Laura runs her hand up and down between my legs. She rubs it a little. I don’t know what to do next. I push her down toward the bed.
“Not so fast.” She bites me for a third time, this time on the ear. She grabs my Scorpions tape, walks around me to the stereo on the opposite corner of the room. My eyes are still adjusting to the darkness. A mini-blind wraps Laura’s silhouette in horizontal stripes of moonlight. She pulls off her shirt and reaches back to unfasten her bra with one hand, her back still to me. She pops in Savage Amusement, presses play, and spins on the ball of her right foot to face me, bare-chested. Her breasts seem to stare at me, but only briefly. She crosses her arms in front of her chest from force of habit—hiding what she regards as more blight than beautiful.
I acknowledge and counter her insecurity. “You’re hot, you know that, right?”
“You’re just trying to get in my pants.”
“Maybe, but you’re still smoking hot. I hate to break this to you, but I’m very superficial. If you were ugly, I wouldn’t go out with you.”
That gets a smile out of her. She drops her arms by her side. “You know just what to say to a girl, don’t you?”
Her breasts are staring at me again, like the cover of Exotic Music of the Belly Dancer. For a second, I see only my longtime headless companion. Things seemed so much