Californium (8 page)

T
uesday morning I can't wait until English to talk to Treat, so I make Keith come with me to his locker before school even though I haven't even told Keith what's going on yet. Treat comes walking up alone, this green satchel slung to one side. It's canvas, kind of beat up, and has a star and
US Army
painted on it. “What's up,” he says and looks at Keith, “besides a preposition?”

I slide one of the backpack straps off my shoulder so it's hanging just on one side. “Well, I was thinking that Keith's got, what”—I look at Keith—“those three guitar lessons and a little amp?” Keith nods. “And I've never played anything. How do we make a band out of that?”

Treat doesn't move or even look in my direction. Keith looks stunned, the same way he did when I told him Madison Square Garden isn't really square and definitely isn't a garden. “What about Treat's Mohawk?” Keith says.

“I know,” I say, “that helps. But I've got nothing. No instrument,
no money.” I look at Treat. “The only way my dad's going to be okay with this is if we play all Frank Sinatra songs while donkeys fly over a frozen hell.”

“A frozen hell?” Keith drops his backpack off his shoulder and lets it fall down until it's sitting on his feet. “Donkeys flying isn't enough?”

Treat steps around me and starts opening his locker, the dial spinning fast and the door popping open. “First off, we're not doing covers. Maybe some Black Flag. Maybe. But Frank Sinatra? Are you kidding me?” He slams his fist on the locker next to his and the rattle makes people nearby look over like maybe there's going to be a fight. “We're going to play what we feel.”

I nod and step closer to Treat. “Okay. I feel nervous.”

“Good,” Treat says. “Nervous has energy. It's the next best thing to anger.”

Keith holds out his arms like he's soaking wet. “Look at me. I'm wearing a used shirt some guy probably died in. You know why?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Because you begged me to is why.”

“I know, Keith.”

“You can't quit before we start.”

“Nobody's quitting,” Treat says. He's calm and pulls two cassette tapes out of his satchel. He hands one to each of us. “It has begun.”

Keith glances at his tape. “‘The Germs and Other Afflictions.' Sweet.”

Treat's left the label on mine blank. “It's the same five songs on
both tapes,” he says. “But this will get you started on song ideas, and I'll make you guys a better tape when I've got more time.”

I take the tape.

Keith's happy again, stuffing the tape into his backpack. “What are we going to call ourselves?”

Treat puts his satchel in his locker and shuts the door with a quiet click. “Good question,” he says and turns to face us again. “Let's brainstorm all day. Write down whatever comes to you on the wind and we'll vote on the best ones after school.”

“Sweet,” Keith says.

Treat points the Mohawk right at Keith and corrects him: “Bitchin'.” He turns it to me. “Remember, whatever you come up with needs to sound cool and look killer when you write it.” His face is so wide-eyed and excited he looks more like a kid on Christmas than this fierce Mohawk guy nobody will look at directly. He waits until I nod, says, “Okay,” then does a half spin and takes off.

I take a step but Keith doesn't move. He stares at me like he's asked a question, so I answer: “I said, ‘Okay.'”

He nods, says, “Okay, good,” and we start walking to class.

.

While Mr. Krueger's talking atoms, I'm scribbling band names in the margins of my notebook:
Mohawk Jacket, Mohawk Jock, The Mimes,
and
Mime's the Word.
Then I start thinking about where I am, you know, what's on the wind:
Atomic Anarchy,
The Splitting Adams,
and
Gone Fission.

After class, Keith looks my ideas over, then shows me what he did: no names but a really good sketch of a tour bus.

In Algebra, more names arrive on the wind:
The Variables,
The Unknown,
and
Solve for X.
Mr. Tomita is talking about prisms, so as soon as I write down
V
=
Bh
I'm back at it with
Volume!, Volume = Base x hate,
and
Prism Bound.
My head jumps to fourth period, Spanish, and I get a head start with
Los Punks, Vamos Loco,
and
¿Habla Anarchy?
It's going really good until class is about over and it hits me how the margins of my notebook paper are crammed with ideas and the middle of the page is blank except for that one formula. I peek behind me, and Edie has a full page of notes, formulas with prisms and pyramids, really complicated-looking stuff, and sharp drawings. She smiles. “What?”

“Nothing,” I say.

She leans closer and whispers, “It's my new shirt, isn't it? You can't take your eyes off it.”

Edie's wearing a plain white button-up, except it doesn't button all the way up. It's not like Edie's got much of anything to show off, but now I see these speckled white puka shells I've never noticed before because I've never really noticed anything below Edie's neck. And suddenly I really can't take my eyes off her because her skin looks smooth and tight and there's this hint of a lacy bra just peeking out, and even though Edie probably doesn't need a bra, it's still a bra.

“Yeah,” I whisper. “I've never seen a white shirt before. It's so exotic.”

She grins and leans back. Then I hear Mr. Tomita clearing his throat. He's at the board, chalk in hand, solving a problem and staring at me. “Mr. Houghton, should I move the chalkboard to the back of the classroom?”

“Sorry.”

“Should I move Miss Okuda in front of you?”

Everybody laughs and Mr. Tomita raises on his toes a little and bounces, which is his way of laughing without laughing. “That's okay,” I say.

“Good,” Mr. Tomita says. He looks at the clock at the back of the room. “Now, it is almost time to go.” A couple people thump their books shut. “But”—Mr. Tomita is bouncing on his toes again—“until it is time to go, it is time to work.” He goes back to carving away at the board and for the last five minutes I take real notes.

On the way to the stairs after class, Edie says, “What were you writing?”

“Some band names for a friend.”

“Who?” she says.

“Keith. He's thinking about starting a punk band.”

We stop at the staircase. Edie pulls her folder and book into her chest and squints at me, all Superman X-ray vision. “Are you in the band too?”

“Kind of.”

She tugs my math folder out of my hand and writes
Innocents,
only she spells it
I
nno¢, like money. She puts her phone number underneath and hands the folder back to me.

“You want me to call you if we use the name?”

“No.” She rolls her eyes the way she does whenever she's waiting for me to get the answer she's had for five minutes. “Call me if you need help with the notes you didn't take today.”

“Okay, thanks,” I say. “I'll tell the guys about the name, too. It's cool.”

“I know,” she says without even grinning. Then she jumps into the stream of people heading up the stairs.

.

We meet in Treat's garage after school. It looks cramped at first with boxes stacked everywhere and a VW Bug right in the middle. The Bug doesn't seem old like you might think. It's shiny and has that plastic smell, new and fresh and tasteless. Even the boxes around the garage are in good shape, not ripped and coming apart with old baby clothes or Christmas lights spilling out. They're perfect two-foot squares, sealed with clear tape and as solid as bricks. Treat says they're computers. Not the kind you see in movies where they're as big as trophy cases and light up like skyscrapers. Treat's dad helps design and build them, and he sells them to stores too. That's why Mr. Dumovitch can have a ponytail, because smart people always have freaky hair. When you think about it, Albert Einstein looks as punk rock as Johnny Rotten. And the only difference between Adam Ant's hair and Thomas Jefferson's is the color of the ribbon they put around their ponytails.

Mr. D is fine with us practicing in the garage as long as we stack all the boxes along the two walls that are connected to the house. I'm thinking it's to keep us from breaking something. Treat says it's to soundproof the room.

Treat opens the door to the Bug and says, “I'll get this out of the way.”

“You can drive it?” I say.

“I've got my permit,” he says.

Keith looks in the passenger-side window, then up at Treat. “How old are you?”

“Old enough to know.”

“Know what?”

Treat leans on the roof of the car to get closer to Keith. “Know where to hide your body if you ask too many questions.” He smiles and Keith does this chin-scratching, squinty-eyed nod, like,
Yes, that's exactly what I thought.

I run my hand along the curvy back fender. It's so smooth and waxy the metal feels soft. “Where'd you get it?”

“My dad's had it since college,” Treat says and climbs in. “It's still pretty cherry because as soon as he got a good job he stopped driving it.”

“Why'd he keep it?”

“I don't know,” Treat says. “Sentimental shit, I guess.” He fires up the engine and it sounds like a baseball card when you strap it to your bike so the spokes hit it—loud and trilling and sputtery. “Somebody get the garage door.”

With Keith backing away from the car and heading over to the door to the house, I walk to the garage door. Just as I'm about to start pushing it open, the door moves on its own and I almost fall over. With the car's engine zinging and the springs on the door creaking and popping, I'm as confused as a rookie in an all-star game. Then I look back at Keith standing by the door to the house, his finger on some little box on the wall and laughing at me like he's the Great Oz.

Once we start stacking boxes along the two walls, we get this rhythm going where I hand Treat a box, he spins and places it on
the wall, then turns around and Keith's handing him the next box. Treat's twisting and placing so fast the shaved parts of his head start beading up and the Mohawk sags a little. He climbs up on the wall, four feet high now, and says, “You guys got any band names yet?”

“How about the Tix?” Keith says. “With an
X.
Or Fluff Knuckle?”

“Yeah,” Treat says without turning around from the box he's slamming into place. “If we wanted to tour with the Village People.”

I hand a box up. “Sometimes girls like stuff like that. Like if we were called Innocents but we spelled the last part with a cent sign?”

Treat slaps my box up against another one. “No.”

“Wait,” I say. “Do you get it? We don't spell it out all the way—”

“I get it,” he says. He starts walking along the box wall he's built, rubbing the shaved parts of his head, getting his hand right up to the base of the Mohawk before sliding it back down to his neck. “Punk is about going against that candy store shit. Punk walks right up to the cops, knocks the doughnut out of their hands, and says, ‘Oh, and one more thing, Officer Swine. Fuck the po-lice.'”

Treat walks back to the middle, stops, and stares down at us. He's already half a foot taller than me and I've got a couple inches on Keith, and with four feet of boxes beneath him and the Mohawk reaching up to the rafters, I'm not sure if we're supposed to bow or clap or what.

Before I talk, I put my hands in my back pockets and pull my head back. I think I saw this on an album—maybe it was Mick
Jagger—but it looked kind of cool. “So, punk is about saying, ‘Fuck the Man'?”

Treat folds his arms, which only makes them bulge out bigger, and gets this little grin on his face.

Keith nods. “How about Fuck Knuckle?”

“Almost,” Treat says. He counts bands off on his fingers: “The Sex Pistols, Black Flag, the Clash, the Dead Boys, Buzzcocks.” He waves Keith up for the next box. “Think like that.”

It takes a few more boxes for us to get our rhythm back; then the names start coming: the Convicts, Screaming Mimes, Second Thoughts, and Kurfew with a backward
K.
Treat says the names sound better, but he just isn't seeing them on album covers. We take a break and Treat brings out a Dead Kennedys sticker to show us how the initials
DK
look like a tomahawk the way they're pushed together with the stem of the
K
extra long like a handle.

“My dad loves Richard Nixon,” Keith says. “How about him?”

Treat looks at the rafters. “Dead Nixons?”

“Tricky Dick?” Keith says. “That's his nickname.”

Treat shakes this off. “Sounds too much like Soft Cell, and that's just one step above disco.”

All week in Science, Mr. Krueger's been talking about how combining two things doesn't make them half of one and half of the other; it makes a third, totally new thing. “Dick Nixon,” I say. “We leave out the
c
and push it all together, d-i-k-n-i-x-o-n.”

“Diknixon,” Treat says. “But with the
N
capitalized right in the middle.”

I can see the name coming out of his mouth as he says it. The Mohawk starts moving up and down, Treat smiling and
saying faster, all one word, and angrier: “Dik-Nixon. DikNixon. DikNixon!”

A smile creeps across Keith's face. “It's good,” he says. “It's got the word
dick
in it.”

.

As me and Keith walk home, we feel good about being DikNixon. All those guys playing soccer in the park, who knows they're soccer players when they're not in their uniforms? Who can tell if you're in Math Club or Spanish Club when you aren't at the meetings? But when you're in a band, people know. They know it exists because of you, and if you quit, it goes away. That's huge.