JEFF AND I PLAY IN A BAND. Blistering guitars and heavy drums, almost like punk but harder—hardcore—these devastating rhythms and insane screaming you can’t understand on the first thirty listens, but the music builds, it builds then explodes, swift rattling beats bursting through the seams, and I can barely breathe when we’re playing a song. I never listened to hardcore before Jeff, and I never thought I’d be in a band, but there isn’t a music scene in Dallastown, no hardcore or raging punk, so Jeff said we should start the scene ourselves. That we should start a band.
I have a decent set of drums that I haven’t practiced with enough but Jeff is good enough to cover, the way he’s good at everything. Sometimes when we play, I’ll drift away and imagine us on a stage, adrenaline rushing our veins, the mosh pits overflowing—filling to exploding—this massive crowd cheering for the best ever hardcore band in Pennsylvania.
“Dude, we suck,” Jeff says, sweeping his hair away from his eyes. The stray strands stick to his skin. “I know it’s only been a couple weeks but I figured we’d be better by now.”
We’ve been practicing every night in his garage but we haven’t gotten it down yet. We start to talk about what to play or how to play it but it’s tough to describe how fast you should go or when the pauses should break, then Jeff whips out the weed and we forget what we wanted to play.
“Definitely,” I say.
I get shy around Jeff sometimes, which is strange because I’m not that shy—I mean, I’m not some great conversationalist and I like to think before I speak, so maybe I am kind of shy, or people perceive me that way. But it’s hard not to think about him, the way I think about him, the way the sweat glistens on his skin in the garage’s flickering fluorescents, the tufted waves of brown settling over his ears.
We’re friends. He’s my best friend. I shouldn’t want more than this.
That’s what I keep telling myself.
“And we need a name. We can’t get anywhere without a name,” he says, wiping the sweat from his skin. The garage door is open but breezes die in August in Central P.A. “But it’s got to be something cool, you know, something permanent. There’s so many bands with shitty names.”
“Right,” I say.
“So I had this thought last night, like I’m lying in bed and I can’t even sleep because I’m thinking about the band, trying to come up with names and then it hits me—what if we called ourselves Satan’s Fingers. Like guitar strings?”
He tickles the strings of his ESP Viper, which is as good as a Fender, according to the guy at the York Music Shop.
“Or what about this?” He lets the guitar fall to his side and spreads his arms wide. “Young Vengeance. Or no, no, no. Velocity Fuck.”
I adjust the cymbals on my swiveled seat behind the kit. We arranged his garage like a mini studio, my drum kit close to the garage door, across from a set of shelves filled with his stepfather’s woodworking projects, the amp and speakers cater-cornered on the near wall.
“Dallastown Sucks My Balls?”
I laugh.
“You like that one?”
“Absolutely.”
Dad got me the drum set for my thirteenth birthday because he didn’t know what to get me, without Mom around to tell him, and I used to play a lot but I had stopped until Jeff suggested we start the band. So, I struggled at first. I mean, I knew how to set up the kit with the bass and the hi-hat, the snare to my left, cymbals to the right, and I knew how to grip the sticks but they kept slipping with every stroke, never the same force with each hit. And I keep striking with too much wrist, not enough rebound, this fitful movement and wasted motion, frantic stabs at forming a sound.
I’m not sure if Jeff has noticed. Sometimes he doesn’t notice things.
“You ready to try again?” he says.
“Absolutely,” I say.
The amp shoots out a spastic squeal and Jeff leans into it until the strings smooth into a crackling beat, his hands shifting up and down the spine, these wicked thoughts itching up and down my mind. I shouldn’t think of him like that, look at him like that.
“You playing?” he says.
“Oh. Right.”
I smash down on the snare, right foot on the bass, my sticks kicking up just enough to spark a series of sick rebounds, crashing cymbals ringing out like we’re on a stage somehow, like we’re stars now, the crowd below us roaring with the sound. Jeff’s fingers float on the frets in front of me, the amp pulsing and crackling behind me, my hands straining and cracking, my foot on the bass keeping pace with his pace and we end the verse at the same time.
“That was awesome,” he says, a wide bright smile spread across his lips, stepping toward my kit. “Great job, man.”
“Thanks,” I say. I’m not sure what to say. He sets his guitar against the wall and whips out the familiar Altoids tin from the pocket of his shorts.
“You want a break?”
The sweat is circling his skin—I can smell it on him, summer sun mixed with California beach, the scent of his Ocean Charge shampoo. I saw the bottle in his bathroom last week and I couldn’t resist the urge to sniff.
“Sure.” I set my sticks on the floor next to the kit.
“Oh shit, I forgot to tell you.” Jeff eases onto a broken stool by the overhead door, packing the bowl with buds from the tin. “Joyce Manor is playing in Philly.”
“Are you serious? When?”
“Next month. We should get tickets,” he says.
“One hundred percent,” I say, moving out from behind the kit to take a seat beside him on an upside-down milk crate.
Jeff is taller than me, five foot ten maybe, and not quite as thin—he has muscles where a body should have muscles, not just skin tagged tight to his bones.
“Do you think your sister could drive us?”
“She’s leaving for college next week,” I say.
“Damn, that’s right. I missed my chance.” He hands me the bowl.
“Relax.”
“What? You don’t think she’s hot?”
Jeff’s bowl is a small glass pipe only the length of my finger, not big enough to hold too much but it fits inside the tin for easy storage. I flick on the lighter and suck in the smoke before release.
“I mean, set aside for a second that she’s your sister,” Jeff says, shifting on his stool as I hand him back the pipe. “And female. You can evaluate women, can’t you?”
“Umm, no. Not her,” I say, offended by the suggestion. Angela is nothing but an evil presence sent to torment me. “Can you tell which guys are hot?”
“Sure,” he says, matter-of-fact. “I mean, I know I’m hot.”
I laugh. We never talk like this.
Jeff’s the only one at school who knows I’m gay. Not that I’m trying to hide, it’s just I am kind of shy, and I don’t have many friends other than him. After Mom died, I became the kid whose mom died, because twelve-year-olds don’t know how to react to news like that. My classmates treated me like I had some rare disease they might catch if they spent too much time with me.
“Hey, so do you think your dad would mind if we practiced in your garage next time?” Jeff says.
“Oh, um. Our garage is pretty full. We’ve got some old furniture and my mom’s clothes are packed away.”
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t know.”
“It’s okay.”
Mom knew. I know she knew. The way she never talked about girls or dating with me, like she talked to Angela. And I couldn’t hide anything from her anyway. We were always close—Mom and me, separate from Angela and Dad—so when she died, I felt disconnected from them, like they were mourning in their own way, exchanging memories as stories that I couldn’t bear to hear. It hurt too much.
“We could use the basement, I guess.”
“Yeah. The acoustics are probably better there anyway.” Our basement is small and half-unfinished and the part that’s finished is cramped as it is. But Jeff and I took over the space this summer, playing video games and listening to hardcore and punk on the stereo system I brought down from my bedroom.
“We’re not allowed to play in here anymore?” I ask.
“No,” Jeff says, handing me the bowl again. “The stepfuck told me to get our equipment out of here. Said we were ‘encroaching on his space’.” He air-quotes and intones like his stepfather’s speaking, lowering his voice an octave or two. “We’re not even in his parking spot. But God forbid we leave a stray strand of sweat in his path, the wrath of the righteous will rain down on our souls.”
A group of middle-school kids bike past Jeff’s front lawn, where a split-trunked maple with sprouted leaves obscures the view of the road. I take another hit as a smattering of red-and-gray finches on the maple’s low branches chirp their way into our conversation.
“I can’t take it, you know.” Jeff stands up. “Like I finally have something I’m interested in—which he’s been on me to show an interest in something—and I work all day at the Parks Department mowing lawns in the ridiculous heat to come home and have a little fun and now he says we can’t even play in here anymore.”
He lifts the wobbly stool he abandoned and smashes it against the floor, the splintered leg cracking across the concrete.
“Holy crap.”
“I hate him, Cy,” Jeff says. “Fuck his whole life.”
Jeff’s stepfather spends all his time at this crazy evangelical church in Red Lion, one of those places where the wife is to submit to her husband and sex outside of marriage is the unholiest of sins. My Aunt Donna says religions that focus on sex are afraid of women’s sexuality, which is odd to me. I mean, I’m afraid of sex too but I would still like to have it—not with a woman, or a man, but last month on vacation in California, I met this cute boy named Cody who recognized my Joyce Manor T-shirt and we’ve been talking ever since.
“You know, I’ve been thinking about leaving,” he says. “Maybe go live with my father down in Florida. Get the hell out of Dallastown for good.”
Leaving Dallastown is one of our constant refrains, with so little to do and nothing ever to see and you can’t get anywhere cool without a car or a license. Cody invited me to California when we spoke last night, said I could stay at his house. The heat presses into my skin.
“Have you been talking to him?” I say. “Your father?”
“No. He never reaches out,” Jeff says. “And I still love my mom so I guess I’m stuck with the stepfuck until I graduate.”
Jeff’s father drank so much that his parents stopped talking and then they started fighting and it got so bad that his dad left—his mother and Jeff and the state behind. Jeff’s pacing back and forth between our makeshift studio and the twin rows of shelving filled with shiny metal tools, paint, and glue.
“At least we have the band,” Jeff says, stopping in front of me. “I would shoot myself if all I had to do is work at the Parks Department and get high.”
He reaches forward like he’s going for the pipe, but he brushes my elbow, his fingers on my skin. His brown hair is almost blond from all summer in the sun.
“We need to keep practicing, okay? Every day. So we could get good enough to start playing shows. High school parties at first but then we’ll book gigs in town, or way out in Baltimore or Philly. Get the fuck out of this place.”
He picks up the guitar and shifts into a violent riff as I watch transfixed.
Sometimes I get shy around Jeff and forget I’m supposed to speak.