This is what these people have.
All they have.
And right now, it’s what I have too.
The song ends, and we give ourselves a round of applause.
“Did you feel it?” Tommy says to me as he pulls off his Quiet Riot mask. “The noize?”
I nod and even tousle the kid’s hair.
What the hell was that? I’m never affectionate with children.
“Time for bed. You can show Ms. Kane your bedroom, and then it’s lights out, mister!”
“Uncle Chuck made this when he was little.” Tommy hands me the mask.
I look at the inside and read these words:
Chuck Bass
Quiet Riot Rocks!
1983
“I turned twelve in 1983,” I say absentmindedly.
“So did I, remember?” Danielle answers.
“The mask keeps the bad dreams away.” Tommy snatches it out of my hands. “Uncle Chuck promised. And it’s true!”
Danielle smiles at me, and we follow Tommy into his bedroom. He jumps up on his bed and hangs the mask on a nail over the headboard, just like in the old music video where the kid wakes up, his room is shaking, and the band finally breaks through the walls.
I think about Chuck being a boy himself, watching that video on MTV just like Danielle and I did, back in the day.
“Uncle Chuck made the mask. He sleeps over there.” Tommy points to the single bed on the other side of the room. Over the headboard hangs a collection of everyday objects painted in bright colors on little four-by-four-inch canvases: a cell phone, a TV remote, a coffee filter. Weird.
“This is actually Chuck’s place,” Danielle says. “We’re temporary guests.”
“I like living with Uncle Chuck!” Tommy says as he slides into his bed.
“You better scrub those pearly whites!” Danielle says and begins to tickle Tommy. “I don’t kiss boys with rotten teeth!”
When Tommy runs into the bathroom, I return to the futon and wait for Danielle.
I wonder why Tommy sleeps in Chuck’s room and not Danielle’s.
A few minutes later Tommy comes out in PJs to give me a kiss on the cheek, says, “Keep rocking, Ms. Kane,” gives me the devil horns, which I return twofold, and runs back into his bedroom. I hear Danielle reading a book to him—something about a shark who wants to be a librarian and makes books out of shells and seaweed so that she can teach fish to read, because literate fish “taste better,” which seems like a very creepy children’s book. Danielle seems to be rushing the story a little, like she’d rather be out here with me.
As I wait, I start to think about Mr. Vernon again, and I wonder if he’s dead. Could the news be that dramatic? I mean, it’s been more than twenty years.
Danielle returns. “Jack on the rocks?”
“Hell, yes.” I join her in the kitchen, which is just the left side of the living room really.
She puts ice into two small plastic cups and pours the Jack liberally.
My cup is from a fast food restaurant and advertises an Iron Man movie starring Robert Downey Jr. in a robot suit. I remember when Robert Downey Jr. was just doing regular roles about regular men.
I also think about the Baccarat crystal glasses Ken and I drank from nightly in Tampa and wonder how many hours working at the diner it would take Danielle to earn enough money for just one of those. An entire week’s worth of pay and tips, maybe more.
“To good ol’ Haddon Township High School,” Danielle says.
“To rock and roll,” I say.
We touch plastic and sip.
The burn is the same, but whiskey definitely tastes better out of fine crystal, no matter what your roots happen to be.
That’s the problem with money—it changes your tastes. You can never go back to liking some things, like drinking alcohol from plastic cups, as much.
We return to the futon, and Danielle puts on Mötley Crüe’s first album Too Fast for Love with the volume much lower than when we listened to Quiet Riot.
“You have this on vinyl?” I say.
“Original pressing,” Danielle says proudly as Vince Neil sings “Live Wire.” “It’s Chuck’s. He has quite a collection. Tells Tommy it’s his when Chuck dies.”
“Cool uncle.”
“Did you fuck Mr. Vernon back in high school?”
“Excuse me?”
“That was the rumor. It was decades ago, Portia. No one would care anymore anyway. They’re not going to send him to jail now.”
“There were really rumors about that?”
“Sure. You were always spending time with him alone after class and before school. Some girls are into older men. Daddy issues. I heard you used to go to his apartment too. So of fucking course there were rumors. It was high school!”
“Unbelievable.” I shake my head. “Mr. Vernon was the closest thing I had to a father figure in high school, so thanks for making my one good teen memory weird. Jesus Christ, Daddy issues? Yuck!”
“So you didn’t fuck him?”
“No. I did not fuck Mr. Vernon. You didn’t know him if you could even think that.”
“Was he gay?”
“I have no idea.”
“People used to say he was gay.”
“Kids said everything and everyone was gay back then. It was the default adjective of our homophobic MTV generation.”
“So what did you talk about all alone with Mr. Vernon?”
“Literature, writing, what I wanted to do with my life, becoming a novelist, if you can believe that,” I say, leaving out the thing we talked about most—my mother—and the Christmas Eve I spent with Mr. Vernon senior year because Mom thought the government had bugged our house, so she was refusing to let me speak, and I was too embarrassed to tell anyone else but him. “What’s happened to him? I’d really like to know.”