The Latent Powers of Dylan Fontaine (2 page)

Two

O
N THE DRIVE HOME
I explain to my dad how Franz Warner mistook me for Randy, and how, like an idiot, I forgot to toss out the bag of weed before entering Century 21. My dad doesn’t say much, but I can tell he’s pretty upset. Part of me wishes he would blow up, pound the steering wheel, scream profanities,
anything
. Instead, he sits there like a ticking time bomb.

It’s close to five o’clock when we arrive home. I haven’t even set down my basketball, but I can already tell from the air quality that Randy’s friend Moser is here. Moser doesn’t believe in bathing—something to do with his rare form of eczema—and he smells like the dead squirrel we had to fish out of our gutter last summer.

“Dyl, is that you?” Randy calls from the living room.

“Yeah, it’s me.” I glance at my father, who is wincing at the sound of Randy’s voice. I can almost picture the acid in Dad’s stomach burning a deep, festering hole.

The two of us walk in together. As usual, the whole crew is here—Randy, Nick, Moser, and Headbone. Last year, the four of them got kicked out of a high school for gifted and talented kids who supposedly think outside the box. Which is what they claimed to have been doing when they showed up for English one morning tripping on magic mushrooms. It was the beginning of Randy’s demise. The guys had recently formed their band and begun dabbling in mind-altering substances.

“Dad?” Randy says, startled. “What are
you
doing home?” The rest of them sit up. Moser takes his feet off the table, and Headbone slips an empty beer bottle between two sofa cushions. It’s a Heineken—my father’s brand.

“Well, Randy, I
do
live here.”

Randy shrugs. “Really? Could have fooled me.”

My dad doesn’t respond, which is probably a good thing. I wouldn’t want to see him convicted on four counts of homicide carried out in his own living room. In the past, he definitely would have gone ballistic. My mother, too. After the mushroom incident my parents searched Randy’s room, found his stash of weed along with a bong and some rolling papers, and after a lot of crying, tried everything to reform him—grounding, home drug tests at fifty dollars a pop, family counseling. Headbone’s and Moser’s parents, who had high hopes for their sons getting into Harvard, freaked out too, but Nick’s folks, professors at Brooklyn College and former Woodstock attendees, chalked it up to teenage experimentation.

Anyway, all parental intervention failed, and after a while I think my mom got tired of all the strife and screaming in our house. She figured it was a stage Randy was going through and it would pass. Besides, it was only marijuana. Randy swore off mushrooms due to the nasty taste and never did anything harder. My dad wasn’t so keen on giving up, but when my mom left us for Philippe LeBlanc earlier this summer, that’s exactly what he did.

My dad glares at Randy for a moment, then walks straight past and heads for the stairs. Except for Headbone’s slight beer buzz, the rest of Randy’s friends appear straight—no inappropriate giggling, no dark circles under the eyes. And then I realize—of course they’re straight; the weed they were supposed to be smoking is now in the hands of my good buddy Lieutenant Burns.

Upstairs, the door of my father’s bedroom slams shut. “Hey, Dyl,” Randy says, “what’s the deal, man, what are you doing home with the Vagina Head at five o’clock in the afternoon?” Believe it or not, Randy is not poking fun at our father. As far back as I can remember, Vagina Head has been Dad’s nickname due to his occupation.

I pluck the empty beer bottle from the sofa cushions and toss it into the trash. “I got arrested,” I say. “He had to bail me out.”

While Randy sits there stunned, Headbone laughs. “Awesome, dude!” He holds out one hand and, reluctantly, I do that slap-grip thing with him.

Just when I’m about to explain how the Dead Musicians Society is responsible for landing my sorry butt in jail, I hear a female voice say, “That’s disgusting! Randy, how could you call your father a…God, I’m not even going to say it!” I crane my neck and see a girl sitting cross-legged on the floor beyond the far end of the sofa. She’s holding one of my prized vintage LPs,
The Jimi Hendrix Experience,
and looks like she’s about to fling it at Randy.

“Chill, Chloe,” Nick says. “Randy’s dad delivers babies. It’s what they call those guys. He meant no harm.”

She looks at Randy and narrows her eyes. “It’s true, Clo,” he says. “Even my mom calls him that.”

I hold my breath at the mention of my mother. Randy must have slipped, because he hasn’t spoken her name since she left. He hasn’t even mentioned Philippe LeBlanc, who we’d been taking art lessons from and had thought was our friend. Yeah, right, some friend.

The girl, Chloe, lowers the LP and I can breathe again. At first it’s hard to tell if she’s pretty—her brows are deeply furrowed, her lips are pursed, and her straw-colored hair is tied up in a messy knot. But when she uncurls her face I see that she is quite beautiful—clear skin, no makeup, light brown eyes with pale lashes. She’s not pretty in a conventional way, but in a way that I like. “I still think it’s disgusting,” she says. “
And
sexist.”

Moser puts his feet back on the table. Thankfully, his shoes are on, otherwise I’d have to fumigate later. “So, Dylan,” he says, tucking a few strands of long, greasy hair behind his ear, “what’d you get arrested for?”

“Shoplifting,” I say without even thinking. Chloe is looking at another one of my LPs—Bruce Springsteen’s
The Wild, the Innocent, & the E Street Shuffle,
and it’s making me nervous. “I stole a couple of packs of underwear.”

“What?” Randy says. “Are you nuts?”

“And possession of marijuana,” I add. “But they dropped that charge.”

Headbone starts laughing again. “Dude!”

Very slowly Randy and Nick turn to each other. From their expressions I can tell they’re piecing together the events of the day. Suddenly Nick says, “Shut up, Headbone! Don’t you see what’s going on here?”

Headbone looks confused. “No…what? Ohhhh.”

Now Moser gets it too. He shakes his head, and I pray to God the white stuff in his hair is dandruff and not larvae.

“Franz Warner gave you the weed, huh, Dyl?” Randy says. “Asked you to give it to me?”

“Close, Einstein,” I say, “but not entirely correct. Franz Warner thought I
was
you.”

Chloe looks up with a smile, which turns out to be her most amazing feature. “Ha, ha!” she says to the four of them. “Serves you guys right! Besides, you need to stay straight if you’re serious about music.” She tosses a pillow at Nick. It skims the top of his head and hits Randy in the face. They all laugh. I wonder which one she’s in love with. Obviously, not Headbone or Moser. That’s simply out of the question. My guess is Nick—he’s good-looking and has what I suppose you’d call charm, but then again, so did the serpent in the garden. Randy could be the lucky one, I think, but honestly, I’m hoping it’s me.

She sets down my LPs and gets up. Her clothes are unusual—loose and mismatched—and there’s a tear in the knee of her jeans. She walks over to me and, on tiptoe, plants a kiss on my cheek. “Thank you, Dylan. Only, sorry you had to take the rap for these dopeheads. You didn’t deserve that. I’m Chloe, by the way.”

I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. I’m glad she doesn’t say anything about the underwear. I can’t even believe I mentioned it.

“Randy and I were in the same math class last year. That’s how we met. My band broke up this summer, so the guys asked me to sing with them. We’ll see how it goes. Oh, wait a minute.” She goes back, picks up the LPs, and hands them to me. “These are yours. I’m sorry, I hope you don’t mind that I was looking at them. I was really careful.”

“Oh, no,” I manage to say, still stunned by the kiss. It’s the first time a girl has touched me in, well, a long time. “That’s fine, really.”

“Okay, okay,” Nick says, obviously annoyed that Chloe is fawning over me. Well, not exactly fawning, but close. “Let’s get to work, guys. Henshaw’s party’s next weekend and we’ve got a lot of songs to cover.”

This is what Randy has been doing all summer—playing gigs with his friends at parties around town. Sometimes they get paid in cash, more often in pot, I suspect, but mostly they just do it hoping someone important will hear them. Someone in the music industry.

As they shuffle downstairs to the basement, where their instruments and amps are set up, I go into the kitchen, stick a sweet potato in the microwave, and pour a glass of milk, glad that there are only two ingredients in this predinner snack and I don’t have to read any labels. Soon I hear Headbone warming up on drums, Moser plucking the bass, and Nick strumming his acoustic while loosening up his vocal cords.

But the one who stands out above the rest is Randy, who is on another planet musically, compared to his friends. When he picks up a guitar and begins to play, I swear, he owns it. Right now he’s warming up with an awesome riff, something that must have just popped into his head. Randy used to write his own lyrics, too, but since he teamed up with the Dead Musicians Society a year ago, he’s been doing nothing but covers.

Actually, that’s the whole point of their band—covering dead singers. They play Hendrix, the Doors, and—since Moser is obsessed with Kurt Cobain—lots of Nirvana. Lately, though, they’ve been mixing it up with John Lennon, Duane Allman, and Stevie Ray Vaughan, and now, as I drain my glass of milk and pour another, I realize they’ve added a new singer to their list. Chloe is Janis Joplin, and she’s good.

About halfway through her version of “Me and Bobby McGee,” the phone rings. I swallow the last bite of sweet potato and pick up. It’s the hospital, calling for my dad. One of his patients has gone into labor. It’s not urgent, but the nurse is recommending a nap, since Dad may be up half the night.

I rinse my dishes in the sink, but before I go upstairs to give Dad the news, Randy opens the basement door. “Hey, Dylan, listen, I forgot to tell you. Angie stopped by this afternoon. She wants you to call.” We lock eyes, and in that moment I am truly grateful that my brother is not stoned. Besides my mom, he’s the only person who understands how I feel about Angie, who, technically, is my best friend, although we haven’t spoken in two months. Not since she left for her summer acting course at NYU.

Randy taps his hand against the door a few times. “You okay, man?”

“Yeah, I’m all right.”

“You gonna call her?”

“No. But thanks for telling me.” As he goes back to his friends in the basement, I plod up the stairs, weak-kneed, trying not to think about Angie. Right before she left, I told her exactly what I thought of her asinine boyfriend, Jonathan Reed—a junior on the debate team who thinks he’s all that because he reads Jack Kerouac and James Joyce. But the truth is I wanted to be more than just a friend to Angie, only I was too much of a coward to tell her.

I look around for my dad—in his bedroom, in the bathroom, in his study—but I can’t find him anywhere. Maybe he’s already left for the hospital. It wouldn’t surprise me.

I’m not feeling well, so I go to my room and lie down. Later, when the guys leave, when things are quiet, I’ll take out
my
guitar—a handmade classical beauty from Spain with a body of pure cocobolo rosewood. My friend Jake, who’s the starting point guard on our basketball team, is the one who got me hooked on classical guitar. Before that I used to play rock and blues on electric, just like Randy—he’s the one who taught me—but when you have a brother who’s a musical genius it’s kind of hard to measure up. So, instead of trying, I chose a different path.

After a while I hear Tripod meowing.
Stupid cat.
He probably got locked in some closet and is now frantic to get out and use the kitty litter. Since I’m the one who would have to clean up the mess, I go into the hall and listen carefully. The noise seems to be coming from my mother’s studio, which is really weird because as far as I know, none of us have gone in there since she left.

I push the door open. My dad is sitting in a chair, staring at a half-finished self-portrait my mother started over spring break. It’s a pastel with a lot of purple, green, and yellow—colors that will eventually be blended to form the contours of her face, neck, and shoulders. That is, if she ever comes back.

Tripod is sitting on my dad’s lap, and surprisingly, my dad is petting him. He’s always hated that cat—a scraggly, half-feral tabby with three legs and a stump for a tail. My mother rescued him from a boatyard in Sheepshead Bay a few winters ago. She wanted to take him with her when she left, but Philippe LeBlanc’s landlord has strict rules about pets.

I pull up a chair and sit next to my father. His eyes never leave the pastel. Tripod looks at me, meowing angrily, and I don’t have to be Dr. Dolittle to understand what he’s saying. My mother has abandoned him, too.

“Dad?”

“Hmm?” He looks my way, but his eyes are glassy and unfocused. Suddenly Tripod sees the open door, digs his claws into my dad’s thigh, and bolts. “Damn,
stupid
cat,” Dad says.

“Are you…okay?” I ask.

“Yeah,” he says, “I’m fine.”

“Well, I just wanted to tell you, one of your patients went into labor. A nurse from the hospital called. She suggested you take a nap.”

He smiles a little. “Oh, did she now?” The reason this is funny is because we all know that if one of his patients is in labor, he’s right there, by her side, the entire time. That’s the kind of doctor he is.

He’s about to get up from the chair, but I stop him. “Dad, wait, please. I want to explain why I ran out of the store today, you know, with the underwear.”

“Oh?” He cocks his head. “You mean there’s more to the story?”

I nod. “I thought I saw Mom walking out the door so I ran after her. Only, of course, it was someone else.”

My dad doesn’t say anything, and suddenly I can feel the emptiness in every corner of the room. Her room. He places a hand on my shoulder and his Adam’s apple slides up and down. It’s one of those rare male bonding moments between my dad and me, which, frankly, I find embarrassing. Finally, he says, “Dylan, as you know, I’m not exactly…
thrilled
about what happened today. But honestly, you’re such a good kid and, well”—he looks around the room—“you don’t deserve this.”