Road Rash (9 page)

Kyle and I used to go shoot around. Did you ever notice that you can talk better if you’re also doing something else? So we’d shoot or play a little one-on-one, and we’d also talk about our band or whatever at the same time.

Shooting hoops usually made me feel better, but now I ended up thinking about the whole band thing and the whole job thing. Yuck. I had to face it—Bad Habit had gone with another drummer, likely someone older and more experienced. I’d probably only gotten a chance to audition because I’d met Glenn recently. I bet he said something like
Hey, let’s give the kid a try—can’t hurt
. So they spent an hour humoring me, but that was that.

I also had to face the fact that I’d exhausted my fast-food options and I was still unemployed. So I was going to have to scrape around and take whatever I could find.

With that happy thought in mind, I went home to shower. As I was drying off, my phone let me know that I’d just missed a call:
G. Taylor
. Oh great …

I went to call back, then I stopped. Yeah, I’d been telling myself that I didn’t land the gig, but I still had this little one percent hope that I might get it. And I’ll admit that it wasn’t rational, but once I actually talked to them, that one percent would be zero.
Nada
. And somehow there’s a world of difference between
one
percent and
no
percent.

Okay, enough of that. I made myself pick up the phone and call.

“Hey, Glenn, how’s it going? My phone says you called.”

“Yeah. I wanted to know if you were available to come over, so we could talk about a few things.”

“Uh, sure. When’s a good time?”

“We’re getting together tonight, at Brad’s place. Can you make it around seven?”

“Yeah, that’d be good. Anything I need to bring?”

“Naw, we’re just going to talk.”

“Okay, see you there.”

“Thanks. See ya.”

Wow.

Jamie answered the door. “Hi, Zach,” she said. “Come on in. Can I get you some coffee?”

“That’d be great. I mean, if it’s already made. I don’t want you to have to go to any.…” God, I sounded nervous.

She smiled. “It’s no trouble. And I wanted to tell you, you sounded great when you were here the other day. Real solid.”

“Thanks.”

She handed me some coffee. “Come on back—the guys are already there.”

As we headed back, it occurred to me that she seemed pretty at home here. I heard myself say, “Do you live here, too?”

She kinda choked for a second. “Uh … no. Why do you ask?”

Suddenly I felt stupid. I shrugged. “I don’t know … sorry.”
Man, I have
got
to learn to engage my brain before my mouth.…

We ended up in the same room I’d auditioned in, but no one had their instrument out. They were just sitting around, drinking coffee and hanging. Well, Brad had a beer going, but you get the idea.

Everyone said hi, then Glenn grinned. “Hate to keep you in suspense, so here it is—we’d like you to play with us.”

I tried to stay cool, but I could feel a big-ass grin break out. “That’s great.”

I had the sense that Glenn was going to say something else when Brad leaned forward and cleared his throat. “We would have called you sooner, but we had some business we had to nail down first.”

“What Brad means,” Jamie said, “is we’re going on the road this summer. We just finalized it with a booking agency.”

Wow.

“Yeah,” Brad added. “There just aren’t enough good-money gigs around here, but if we tour, we can play four or five nights a week all summer.”

“So … when are you going? And when are you getting back?”

“We leave tomorrow, get back sometime in October,” Danny said matter-of-factly.

“Uh, but … there’s no way I can …” I looked at the others—they were all trying not to laugh. Except Danny. He had a poker face on.

“You’ll have to get used to Danny,” Jamie said. “That’s his idea of humor.”

He looked at me, palms up. “Hey, bro—just joshin’.”

I grinned. “No problem … you had me going there for a second.” I turned back to Brad. “So, when
are
we leaving?”

“We’re outta here the week after next and returning late August,” he said. “Does that sound doable?”

Okay, on the one hand, I could stay around Los Robles all summer and scramble for a job making french fries. On the other, I could get paid to play music and see the country. Boy,
that
was a tough one.

I nodded, trying to sound calm. “That sounds like something I could swing.”

“Cool,” Brad said with a nod. “We’ve got a little shakedown gig next weekend at Paisano’s. Do you think you could make it here a couple of times during the week so we could rehearse?”

“Sure. Could you get me a set list ahead of time? That’d make things easier.”

“How about a live recording from a month ago, pretty much all four sets?”

Man, that was about as helpful as it gets. “Perfect. So, where are we going?”

“Mostly the Rockies. We open in Bozeman, Montana, in twelve days.”

“No,” my mom said.

“What do you mean, no?”

“What don’t you understand about
no
?” my dad said. “
No
means negative. As in no-how, no-way, ain’t-a-gonna-happen.”

God, he could be so annoying. “I
know
what the word
means!” I shot back. “What I don’t understand is why you’re saying it. You don’t even know the details yet.”

“I know enough,” my mom said. “I know you want to go traipsing across the country in a van or a bus or something with a bunch of older kids you don’t even really know. What else do I need to know?”

“There’s a
lot
more you should want to know before you make a decision like that.” I glared at them. “But you know what? I don’t even want to talk to you about it—you guys are way too close-minded right now.…” I turned and left. They called me back, but I ignored them and went up to my room.

I sat on my bed, totally pissed. I mean, is it that freakin’ hard to just
listen
for once before jumping to conclusions? Don’t answer that.…

In the middle of thinking all this, my phone rang. I didn’t really want to talk to anyone right then, but it could be Glenn. Or maybe Kimber. I looked. Kyle. What the hell did
he
want?

“Hey, what’s up?” I said, not real friendly.

“Not too much. How about you?”

Well, I got the best job offer of my life, but it just got shot down
. I didn’t
even
want to go there right now. Especially with him. “Same-same.”

Then I just waited. After all, he’d called me, right?

He finally cleared his throat. “Well … You remember ‘No Life to Live’ …?”

“Duh.” That was one of our original tunes. I’d helped write the damn thing—it had some wicked off-beat sections that Kyle and I had come up with.

“Uh, do you think you could still play it?”

“Of course.” Where was this going?

“Well, um …” I could hear him take in a breath, then let it out. “Look. We’re trying to do some recording, and Josh is having a hard time really nailing some of the songs. And I was wondering … actually,
we
were wondering … if maybe … well, if you could help us track some of the tunes?”

The word of the day for today was definitely
wow
. “So you want me back in the band, then?”

“Well … you could play on a lot of the tracks. You’d get a credit on the record. And you’d get a chance to record in a real pro studio.”

“But I wouldn’t actually be
in
the band?”

“Uh, not exactly.”

It hit me. If I’m in, then Josh is out. And if Josh is out of the band, then the band is out of the studio … and they’re also out of his dad’s contacts and everything that went with all that.

“Sorry. I can’t do it.”

“You mean you don’t want to do it.”

“I actually don’t know if I want to do it or not. But it doesn’t matter, because I’ve got other plans.”

“Look, man, I’m sorry we can’t officially put you back in the band. It’s not my choice—”

“You know, I’ve gotten a lot of that from you lately,” I interjected.

He kept going like he hadn’t heard me. “—but if that doesn’t work for you, just say so. You don’t have to make up some bullshit story about ‘other plans’ or whatever.”

That did it. “No fiction on
my
side, man! You’re the one
that’s spewing the bullshit. Sorry dude, but I can’t bail out you and your spoiled-ass drummer boy right now … because I’ll be on the road with Bad Habit all summer.”

“What …?”

“You heard me,” I said, and I hung up.

God, me and my mad mouth …

Danny came up and tapped me on the shoulder. He spoke quietly so he wouldn’t wake the others. “Hey, bro, you doing all right up here? Need anything?”

“Thanks, man, I’m good.”

“Ten-four. Let me know when you need a break.”

“You got it.”

Driving a motor home is like driving a car once you get the hang of it. It’s just that getting the hang of it takes a while, and it was “earn while you learn” in my case. When they’d asked if I could take a turn behind the wheel, I’d said sure, like I piloted a thirty-foot motor home down the interstate every day. Or make that every
night
, since my turn came after we’d stopped for dinner at a Subway outside Vegas.

I figured it couldn’t be all that different from driving my dad’s pickup.
Wrong
. Especially when it came to getting up the on-ramp and back onto the freeway—that damn thing was
big
, and changing lanes was hairy-scary. It didn’t take me long to figure out that the best strategy was to pick a lane and stay in it.

At first that was the slow lane, but as we got out into the middle of nowhere and I got more used to the beast, I migrated into the fast lane and just tooled along at seventy-five or so. My plan was to try to make it to Salt Lake City before stopping to swap drivers. So far, the glamorous life of being on tour was a lot like being a long-haul trucker.…

Amazingly, my parents had been pretty reasonable once I’d actually talked with them. They didn’t care that Bad Habit were the hottest act in town, or that I’d improve my drumming skills by working with them, or that it was a feather in my cap that they’d picked me at all. And they couldn’t have cared
less
about what I’d flung in Kyle’s face. Nope. What convinced them was the fact that they’d replaced their old drummer because he was a druggie. Pretty funny, considering I’d done everything I could to
not
mention Bad Habit and drugs in the same sentence. And my mom was actually relieved when she found out that two of the people going were girls.… Jamie was bringing her friend Amber—I guess so she wouldn’t feel weird being the only girl. Mom somehow thought that having them along would make the guys more likely to “behave.” Whatever—it worked.

After we’d hashed it all out, my dad said, “I have a couple of things I want.”

I would have shaved my head and dyed my eyebrows pink for him at that point. “Sure.”