The main reason I was so taken aback by the Skoomacker factor was that I had recently broken down and tried to call her on an unauthorized day. I suppose I had been hoping for a little “I’m so glad you called” action and for a feeling that I had more or less made it through the maze after all. As it turned out, though, here’s what happened: She picked up the phone without screening and, when she realized it was me, said, “My boyfriend’s here right now, and I’m sure he’s wondering who’s calling me at this hour.
You want to talk to him?” I quickly hung up and went searching for a place to hide till I was done hyperventilating. I guess the Monday/Thursday schedule was there for a reason. I had reached a dead end and was still in the pseudorelationship maze after all. Yet now here she was, cutting class at Immaculate Heart Academy to see my band play. Or maybe it was her lunch period and they had open campus.
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Now, if they ever make a TV movie called The Chi-Mo Story, they’ll probably try to present our performance at the Festival of Lights as a grand triumph of the underdog, a tribute to the noble spirit of the alienated and abused. We shamed and changed society. Because we three claimed our freedom, all are free. Hooray for us. In fact, our set did have a pretty significant impact on Hillmont High School society, but it was mostly negative, and entirely by accident. And it wasn’t a triumph. In fact, it totally sucked.
The first thing that went wrong was that unlike in movies and afterschool specials, where the sound would have been done by sympathetic people from the Math Club or something, the people in charge of the PA were totally normal guys, so they were psychotic and hate-filled and wanted us to die. And they wouldn’t let us use the PA. Or rather, they wanted a hundred dollars for the PA and fifty for the lights.
I’m sure they hadn’t tried to charge the other bands, but they weren’t interested in arguing on that basis. Clearly, we didn’t have the money, and we had to resolve the issue quickly. The act before us was a normal backward-baseball-hat guy who was “rapping” to a backing track about how he had ramoned everybody’s mother or something. He was deeply into his second appalling minute and we knew it would end soon and we would be on. But the normal PA guys wouldn’t budge on the hundred and fifty bucks.
Sam Hellerman did a little Ronald Reagan voice and said,
“I paid for this microphone,” which I thought was funny but which didn’t go over so well with the normal PA guys.
“Oops,” said one of them, and knocked Sam Hellerman’s Slurpee into his chest, all over his lovingly hand-lettered
“Mao Is Murder” T-shirt. Sam Hellerman got that familiar
“I’m totally gonna bleed all over this guy” look on his face, but he restrained himself and started to wheel and deal with 252
them instead. In the end he got them to rent him one microphone and to turn on two lights for fifteen bucks, which was all we had on us.
We had to work quickly, but we knew what to do. I found a hand truck backstage and duct-taped Amanda’s karaoke mic to the handle, while Sam Hellerman taped the rented microphone to one of Todd Panchowski’s unused cymbal stands. Todd Panchowski wasn’t too pleased about that but allowed it, presumably because he was worried that otherwise Sam Hellerman might be tempted to express his disappointment by bleeding on his drums—it wasn’t like it hadn’t happened before. Although the stand was pretty short, it was about Hellerman height after its legs had been taped to the seat of a metal folding chair. In fact, since he had to slump so far to reach the strings of his low-slung bass with the fingers at the end of his half-dislocated right arm, he still had to tilt his head up Lemmy style to sing into the mic after all. My mouth was level with the taped-on karaoke mic if I lowered my body by spreading my legs wide enough. It almost worked.
Sam Hellerman, true to form, had brought along an XLR-to-quarter-inch adaptor, so we were able to plug both mics into the Frankenstein Bassman/Magnavox amp, just like at home. Living room rock. Live. In concert.
The fake rap guy finished, saying how he had “mad love”
for his “hood” and “da funk,” and wanted to “shout out” to his
“homies” about how he had nine millimeters for “they ass”
and wanted to put his “gat” to “they dome” just as we were ready to go. It was more like an abortion than music, but he got a wildly enthusiastic response from the crowd. Well, we’re all pro-choice out here in Hillmont, after all.
I hadn’t meant to, but it turned out that here I made what I guess you’d call a fateful decision. I was standing at the 253
taped-on mic thinking about how Amanda’s banned banner had really been the best thing about Balls Deep, and how Sam Hellerman’s costume had been ruined and how Todd Panchowski had refused even to consider wearing his, and how everyone else got to use the PA without paying, and how nobody was ever going to understand the seventies porn/communist guerilla concept, and how I was tired of the name anyway, and how I would never know why my dad was dead, and how I really hated all normal people with every fiber of my being, not only because of the PA and Sam Hellerman’s Slurpee, but because of Charles Evan Henderson’s Brighton Rock and Bobby Duboyce’s helmet and Yasmynne Schmick’s pain and suffering and everybody’s Catcher in the Rye hypocrisy and Mr. Donnelly’s cruelty and Matt Lynch’s sadism and Mr. Teone’s idiocy and so many, many other things, including pretty much everything that had ever happened to me or that I had ever seen happen to anybody else. So as the student body’s white rap/poetry slam euphoria started to fade, and they gaped at us and several of them started trying to instigate a “you suck!” chant, I positioned my mouth about an inch from the karaoke mic (so I wouldn’t get shocked too bad) and—well, I think right up to the end I had intended to say, “hi, we’re Balls Deep.” But instead, what came out of my mouth was:
“Hi, we’re the Chi-Mos.” Then I didn’t know what to say.
Sam Hellerman stared at me, but he quickly recovered.
“Yeah!” he yelled in a high-pitched Paul Stanley voice, with a surprising degree of (devil-head) bravado, under the circumstances. “All right! We’re the Chi-Mos! That’s the Reverend Chi-Mo on guitar! And I’m your Assistant Principal Chi-Mo on bass and being aware of my own mortality, and back there we have Chi-Mo Panchowski on percussion and counting to four! Well, close enough, anyway! This song’s 254
called ‘I Saw Mr. Teone Checking Out Kyrsten Blakeney’s Ass’!”
Now, what was supposed to happen next was that Todd Panchowski would count off with four stick clicks and we would launch into the song. And that would have been pretty cool. But what actually happened was that Todd Panchowski just sat there for a while. Then he took his little towel and wiped off his face. Then he stood up and adjusted his drum seat. Then he raised his sticks in the air and twirled them around. Then he bent down to pick up the stick he had dropped. Then, around four hours later, he finally did the count-in, except that he did only three not-quite-regular clicks and started a beat ahead of the rest of us. Well, he always did have a hard time remembering what comes after three. And here’s a valuable lesson I learned that I will share with anybody who may want to try to have a band one day: the fewer songs you have the drummer start, the more chance you’ll have of getting to do more than a couple of them in twenty minutes. Have them start with the guitar instead. Trust me.
I have to admit, our “music” was, in its own way, no less abominable than the white rap thing had been. Most of what we had accomplished in all those practices just evaporated under the pressure of the “gig.” The Hillmont student body were unimpressed, and not even moved enough to join in the