Renny Boy

Your audience matters.

If you’re playing a show for a bunch of scene kids, you’re not gonna play country music. If you’re rocking with some indie kids, you’re not gonna bust out the pop tunes. And if you’re the musical guest at a party swarming with “hardcore” kids, you will not, I repeat, will not play anything remotely soft or any songs with comprehensible lyrics.

Read it, learn it, remember it.

- - -

Chilly November air was breezing into my garage, giving all of us goosebumps. Even with guitar strings vibrating under our fingers and with us working hard to keep on beat, we were still freezing our asses off. Band practice was brutal in the heat and almost as bad in the cold. There’s no escaping discomfort even when you’re at home with music.

I was just lucky I didn’t have the issue of numb fingers pressed against frets. All I was doing was singing and silently I was a little arrogant about it.

Soria cupped her hands together and blew into them, trying to create friction with her cast. “Christ, it’s cold.”

“You guys are wimps,” Luke laughed. “You know how cold it gets up in ‘Jersey around this time?”

“Nobody cares, Luke,” Brendan deadpanned. “Can we just keep playing? Maybe that’ll make us warm.”

We all shut up and continued chugging on through “Hey Stranger,” an old new song Soria recovered a few days back. The lyric sheet was crumpled at the edges as I held it, focusing on remembering every word of it.

Cover songs are a staple of any beginning band. Before you learn your own stuff, you have to learn from the greats – the ones you look up to as a whole. Everybody takes from their role models and morphs each of their characteristics into the melting pot known as your band’s sound. We were just starting to do that, but alongside all of the covers we were learning, Soria was also coming to us with the stuff she’d written.

The covers made for good filler, just in case an emergency gig popped up and we didn’t know enough original stuff to play for a certain amount of time. I didn’t mind it. Well, I’d rather be making crap from scratch and doing something original, but it didn’t matter much to me.

But right during the second chorus, just before the bridge (my favorite part of any song, just so you know), somebody’s cell phone decided to go off.

And it was loud, too. A redeeming factor about it was that the ringtone was .38 Special, but still. It was a tad rude…

Everybody’s head whipped around to the source of the noise, and then three pairs of eyes were fixed on our drummer himself, Brendan.

He yanked the phone out of his pocket and flipped it open, grinning crookedly when he saw whatever was on the screen.

“Dude,” Luke deadpanned. “Now?”

“It’s Joey,” he replied.

“Oh.” Our bassist rolled his eyes. “What does he want?”

“Who the hell is Joey?” Soria finally said.

Brendan was busy texting away. “My brother.”

“Why’d he interrupt the song…?” I asked, mumbling the sentence.

He ignored me. Actually, he ignored all of us for a few minutes, just texting his brother back and forth. Until apparently, he got a pretty good message.

“No way!” he gasped.

Luke, Soria, and I were just huddled around the lyrics sheet when he said it, but when he did, we broke away and stared at him funny again.

“What’s up?” Soria inquired.

Brendan was biting his lip and cocking his arm, picking up one of his drumsticks and twirling it around his fingers nonchalantly. (I never understood how drummers do that.) “Joey’s going to a party this Friday and the kids there need a band. Y’all wanna do it?”

We’d never done a gig up until then. That was the first of them, and none of us really knew what to expect. Like naïve little kids, all of us nodded with big smiles on our faces, looking forward to playing music that the crowd would love and sing along with. They’d cheer for us and scream our names, asking for encores upon encores just when we were about to pack up our equipment and go home. They’d beg for us to release a demo full of original songs, and they’d be the ones calling us sellouts when we hit it big…

We were stupid, to put it bluntly. None of us had ever been in a band before – of course. We were 12. Did we know the first thing about playing music? Not really, other than the technical aspects like the actual chords and notes and time signatures.

The only things we knew were the songs we were playing.

- - -

I saw Joey before once or twice. Every time we held band practice over at Brendan’s house, he’d pop up in the garage occasionally to get a soda or something, and every time I saw him, he had his hands clamped over his ears.

Honestly, though, I didn’t even think he had ears. He had this real thick wiry hair that stuck out in all directions like he stuck his finger in an electrical socket, and in the front it sort of looked like he tried to shape it into a fauxhawk. It was too obvious that he’d used a flat iron and three cans of hairspray to fix it; his hairdo rode that fine line between punk, scene, and cockatoo. I never saw his eyes, but I saw the freckles on his cheeks that ran in the Veins family. He looked like a guy out of some crappy pop-rock band, but his condescending attitude didn’t match up with the typical peppy atmosphere of a band like that.

Joey never spoke to us when we were at his house. Though, judging by the skintight jeans he donned and the half-tucked-in polo shirts he wore, I didn’t think he thought much of us.

But he wasn’t too much of an outcast, apparently, since he pulled some strings with the kids he hung with and got us a gig at a party he was going to. None of us – not even Brendan – knew what to expect. I thought that of all people, at least Brendan would have a faint idea on what was in store for us.

My nerves were all bundled up real tight inside of me when I waited in my living room with nothing but my voice. This was the first of many live performances I’d have to sing through, and God knows I was shaking like a kitten just thinking about it. My hands were sweating and everything, too. It was awful. I just counted my blessings and reminded myself that at least I only had to focus on not screwing up the lyrics of the mishmash of covers and originals we planned on doing.

Joey pulled up to the edge of my driveway. I bid farewell to my parents, who actually, sadly, seemed pleasantly surprised that their son was going out on a Friday night.

Luke and Brendan were in the smoky-smelling van too, and when I got in, they both grinned cheesily like they were as anxious as I was. Their instruments were packed like sardines in the back; Luke’s bass lay in its case, leaning against an amp. Brendan’s drums were just a heap on the floor.

“We’re gonna kick ass,” Brendan said smugly, throwing his arm casually over the seat. The grin on his face oozed confidence.

Joey pulled us out of my neighborhood and toward Soria’s house. “You better. I ain’t doin’ this for you. I’m doin’ it for me. If you blow this, I’m gonna kill all of you.”

“Chill, Joe,” Luke assured. “We’ll do fine.”

“And you will not call me Joe. Got it?”

Luke tossed his hands up, palms facing upward. “Dude, I’ve known you -”

“Okay, everybody, let’s play the quiet game.” Joey pouted and slammed his foot down on the gas pedal, rocketing us out of the neighborhood. Flipping the mass of hair out of his face, he grinded his teeth. “My name’s either Joey, or Joseph. Not Joe.”

Brendan scrunched his eyebrows together. “Since when do you like being called Joseph?”

“Since forever. Now shut the hell up and focus on not fucking this up.”

Soria jogged down to the van when Joey parked outside of her ugly yellow house. Her dad stood behind her in the doorway, waving to us halfheartedly like he really didn’t know what the heck was going on. I didn’t blame him.

Luke helped her put her stuff in the back of the van, and then we were off, zooming to what would be the first exciting Friday night in my life.

- - -

There was a sea of teenagers standing in front of us. They went back as far as our eyes could see, crowding up in unorganized clumps together like moths gathering toward a common flame. All of them were high school kids – I didn’t see a single face I recognized from our junior high.

When we entered through the backdoor with Joey and this other kid I assumed to be the host, they led us around to a main living room that had police tape blocking off a chunk of untouched land that I guessed we’d be playing in. The hardwood floor was gleaming clean with scuff marks and scratches, and a wall of couches separated the area from the unenthusiastic partiers.

The dude held his arm out and frowned at us. Underneath his lower lip was a shiny piercing, going right along with the snakebites that so gracefully adorned the sides of his mouth. His jet-black hair was shaved on one side, the grown side pouring over his shoulder and framing his spookily angled face that was caked in sparkly makeup. “This is where you’ll be playing. There are a bunch of outlets you can hook up to. And if you need more room, you can jump over the couches if the crowd lets you. That’s only if you’re any good, though.”

I gulped.

He left.

Joey turned to us and sneered. “You better be decent. If we get kicked out, it’ll be your asses on the line.”

And we just stood there with our equipment in our hands, blankly staring at Brendan’s brother as he left us to fend for ourselves.

We climbed over the police line and set down our stuff. I helped to carry Brendan’s drum set along with him and even offered to help set them up, but he shooed me away and said something about singers not knowing the first thing about drums. Whatever. All I had to do was stand up the mic that the kid provided and then I was done.

Soria gently tapped my arm and nodded toward our crowd. “Dude. Are we gonna get knifed or something?”

Millions of kids, it looked like, stood before us, casually sipping out of beer cans and plastic cups. Not a single one had hair that wasn’t dyed a dark or neon color, and apparently none of them had ever heard of flare jeans, either, despite the fact that skinny jeans were just then getting popular again. Little t-shirts with unintelligibly scribbled band names adorned their chests. Everybody was wearing eyeliner, even the boys. And there wasn’t really a way to tell the boys from the girls except if you squinted; then you might see a few boobs.

None of them looked real happy to be there.

“I don’t know,” I snickered. “Maybe. I’ll use you as my shield if they kill me, though.”

She stuck her tongue out at me and turned around, going back to her amp.

I didn’t recognize a single face in this crowd, but that was sort of a mixed blessing. Nobody wants to make a moron out of themselves in front of a ton of strangers. But at least the odds were that I’d never see these kids ever again in my life.

At least, that’s what I told myself as I silently died on the inside, not talking to my bandmates who were finishing their setup.

Brendan flopped down on his stool, hiding his hands behind his face and snickering. “God, this is gonna suck.”

“Maybe we’ll win ‘em over,” Luke shrugged, smiling slightly. “Who knows.”

I just crossed my arms and kept my hands warm. Maybe then they’d stop shaking.

Soria was busy tuning her guitar, going up and down scales to test out the sound. When I glanced at the crowd, a few nasty looks were thrown my way, so I turned back around and silently hoped that that night wouldn’t be my last one alive.

“Dude, Ren, you look like you’re about to piss your pants,” Brendan hollered from behind his towering mass of drums. “Are you that nervous?”

I anxiously ran a hand through my hair, not caring if it messed it up. “Little bit,” I coughed. Like a kernel of corn, my voice cracked. “Hey, um, Sor. What song are we doing first?”

She looked up from her guitar and shook the pale hair out of her eyes. “I told you, we’re starting with ‘Big and Little.’ Then we’re going into a cover of ‘Me and Julio,’ and then ‘Common Sense.’”

Boy, I certainly hoped we got far enough into the set to do all of the songs we talked about. We had around twenty songs lined up, mostly covers with a few originals, but judging by those killer glares we were receiving, we would hardly get through the first song without being mauled.

But sure enough, we were done setting up and the kid throwing the party swung by us again. His eyes were bloodshot and he was barely audible, but he told us, “Alright, you can start whenever. Just let ‘em know when you’re playing. Give an intro.”

Parrots were soaring in my stomach, their beaks pecking at my insides and tearing the walls of my intestines.

Soria nodded for me to say a few words, and I looked back at Luke and Brendan. They had their instruments in hand, their picks and drumsticks ready to go. All of us were ready for this. Our very first gig. A milestone!

“Uh, hi, everybody,” I squealed.

Hundreds of shaggy fringes flipped in my direction.

“We’re your musical guest,” I quaked. “We’re, um…Plaster Caster. And we’re a band.”

Soria jutted her elbow into my ribs. “Just say something intelligent.”

“This song’s called ‘Big and Little,’” I blurted in a rush. My hands dug into my pockets so deep I felt new holes forming in them.

Brendan punched the drums into the mellow song’s beat. This wasn’t one of our faster-paced songs, and the lyrics were pretty sparse, but it was a neat little song to play. Every time we played it at practice, the guitar riffs in the verses were different. And the words never made sense to me, but whatever. I wasn’t one to question them.

“Giant star
And tiny star
Sailing through the sky
I’ll fly,” I sang. My words were muffled out by the intense bark of the guitars and drums, but I didn’t mind it. In fact, I was kinda thankful that they couldn’t really hear me.

And I say that they couldn’t really hear me, ‘cause they actually could, to an extent. They heard me well enough to decide for themselves that Plaster Caster did not belong at a party occupied by a bunch of scene kids.

Over the distortion of Soria’s guitar bellowing in my ear and Luke’s thundering bass pounding in my heart and Brendan’s clashing drums thumping through my feet, I heard foreign voices start rising in volume. They were getting louder, challenging my own singing voice into making me have to shout to be heard.

I didn’t really catch on in the heat of the moment, but all of them were just yelling a collective, “Boooooo!”

The only things I could make out were their mouths, little O’s formed just to taunt. Though I couldn’t see their eyes, I knew they’d be flashing with anger and hoping death upon our souls.

But I just kept singing the song like a robot programmed to do one thing and one thing only. The lyrics moved along in my head and popped out of my mouth, and my bandmates behind me also kept doing their things. They probably thought I was insane or something. I’d think so. But I wasn’t thinking about anything other than singing. I had blinders on and the only thing I could see wholeheartedly were the words that I had to sing.

About halfway through the second verse, something hit me.

And no, I’m not talking about some kind of life-changing revelation or anything corny like that. I didn’t come to the stunning realization that I was in love or I was born to do showbiz. It wasn’t that.

Something literally hit me. Like, right in the eye. And it hurt.

I was knocked back by the force of the hit and sent tumbling down on the hardwood floor, and with that, our very first gig ended. Painfully. My eye was throbbing as I clutched it with my sweating, trembling hands, and my bony ass didn’t cushion the fall, either.

Soria, Luke, and Brendan immediately stopped playing, cutting off the song with harsh feedback and the sound of strangled strings. And that’s when I finally heard it all with open ears – the booing, the swearing, the screaming.

“Get the fuck off the stage!” I’d heard.

Through my non-injured eye, I could see Soria grab at one of my hands and try to pull me up. Her face was red and her guitar was swung around her back. Luke, next to her, had ripped his bass off, unplugging his amp and yanking the plug on Soria’s. And I couldn’t see him, but Brendan was heckling the crowd right back.

“Holy crap, dude,” Soria groaned, struggling down a laugh. “Somebody just nailed you with a can of beer. Get up. We gotta get outta here.”

“What happened? Why’re we leaving?” I asked. The back of my head was also starting to hurt from when I knocked it on the bass drum.

And in an instant, the host kid was right in front of me, yanking me up by the shoulder angrily like I was made of paper. Through his ebony bangs, his eyes flickered with the fire of anger and betrayal. I didn’t know what to say back, so I just kind of whimpered like a puppy and hoped he wouldn’t kill me – even though I didn’t know what I did wrong…

“You get the hell outta here! Take your shitty guitars and shitty amps and go play that pussy shit for somebody else!” he’d seethed. He let go of me and pushed me back into Luke.

And as soon as we were thrown into the ring, we were kicked out with nothing but the instruments on our back and the jarring memory of the world’s crappiest venue.

Seriously. The kid – accompanied by a few others of his kind – pushed us out of his backdoor, tossing the guitar cases out behind. They echoed with a hollow thud against the concrete of his porch.

Damn, my eye stung.

We all just stood there, thinking to ourselves, ‘Now what?’ when Joey joined us, being wrestled out the door by the very same kid who kicked us out and let us in mere minutes before.

Brendan stepped forward, a deep scowl written all over his face. “What the hell was that, Joey?!”

“What the hell was that?! You go up there and play some of your damn pretentious shit? What the hell is wrong with you guys?! Are you blind?” Joey retorted with his arms spread wide.

“You could’ve told us everybody in there was a little screamo brat!” Brendan raged back at his brother. “Maybe we would’ve been prepared.”

The older Veins boy simply spit at the ground and folded his arms harshly across his skinny chest. Under that messy mop of hair, there was a brain boiling in blood hotter than hell. “Why’d you have to get us kicked out, man? All of you! I was so close to getting some ass, too!”

“Wait…how old are you?” Soria asked timidly.

“Older than you, and old enough to tell when somebody’s hot for me,” Joey grumbled under his breath, staring at his worn-down shoes. “I’m fourteen. I should be living it up, havin’ the time of my life and staying at awesome parties. But no! Thanks to my brother’s stupid band who apparently doesn’t know how to observe a crowd, I’m outta there! Nice job, Bren. Thanks a lot.”

Brendan squinted in disgust. “Fuck, man, I don’t wanna hear about what kind of STDs you have! And this is your fault, anyway – have you heard our music? You could’a picked up another band – one of those shitty-ass screamer bands. There’s a million of them in Jacksonville! You could’a just drove down there and asked one of them! I bet they’d have done it.”

Joey’s frown just got deeper and deeper.

I stood back with Soria, just shifting my weight from foot to foot and trying to ignore the sharp pain rocketing through my eye every second. It didn’t hurt as bad, but it still hurt like heck.

“I am never getting you guys another gig ever again,” Joey grunted, gnashing his teeth together.

“Good! Don’t! See if I give a crap!” Brendan sneered.

“Then shut up and stop arguing with me!”

“I would, if you stopped being a psycho and were actually a good brother!”

Luke got this real panicky look on his face and shuffled forward, stepping between the Veins brothers and putting his hands on their shoulders. “Guys, chill out. The last thing we need now is a fight between you two.”

Joey shoved Luke’s hand away and instead pointed a finger right in his face, licking his lips. “Ragan, you get your tasty little ass in that van right now or I’ll spank it there. Hear me? We’re going home.”

Our bassist just turned a bright shade of pink, slowly receding his hands and putting both of them into his back pockets. I couldn’t tell if he was flattered, embarrassed, or wanted to throw up, but any way you sliced it, he did manage to quell the fight and make us all shut up long enough to put all of our crap back and drive home.

And man, it was a long drive.