THE NEXT NIGHT, we were eating pizza, the four of us around Relly's kitchen table. Real greasy and gooey and still bubbling hot. And as usual, I bit into a slice without waiting and burned a blister on the roof of my mouth. But I guess I didn't care that night because I kept on eating and burning myself, shoveling the pizza in.
We had a couple of quarts of Relly's Panther Blood that he got from the old Italian market. You know, a place with bulging yellow cheeses hanging down and Frank Sinatra crooning in the background and guys with big hairy arms cutting meat in back. They had drinks from Italy too, and this stuff was Relly's fave. It had some fancy Italian name nobody could pronounce. So we went with what Relly called it: Panther Blood.
It tasted kind of like Pepsi. Only there was something bitter mixed in too, like orange rind and cinnamon and cloves. At first I hated the stuff. It was purplish brown and had a little fizz to it. I'd sniffed it and put it aside. "Go on. It won't hurt you," Relly'd said. "Matter of fact, it's better than Mountain Dew and Jolt mixed together. Puts a shine on everything."
Relly was all cranked up, excited about defeating Smoking Man and about our next gig too, opening up for Kruel and Unusual at the Bug Jar. "It's all coming together," he said. "We're strong and we're getting stronger all the time."
He had another slug of the Panther Blood. "Putting together a band is alchemy," he went on. "Like making a secret formula. You got to have all the right elements and you mix them together under exactly the right conditions."
Jerod just wanted to hear about the gig. Money, we were going to get paid real money to play. And we'd be on the bill with a real band from out of town. Kruel and Unusual even had a CD that got some college radio play. We were heading for the Big Time, and heading there fast.