Generation Why Bother

Johnny Cool felt helpless in his position. It was never directly stated, but the artistic talent that went into the comic could clearly let the reader see that from the way he slumped when his apartment went dark again, dimly lit by the traffic outside his window, his eyes tired and dragged down. He sighed for a long time and stared at the plump white cat sitting in front of him, still trying to wrap his head around why this cat wore clothes. Then he was reminded of the screen bearing his bad news.

Of course, the cat was an alien. It probably wasn’t even a cat. Johnny didn’t have time to think about it much.

So he sat there for a few minutes, thinking about what he’d done wrong in his life to deserve such a tragic turn of events. But Hoshiko was purring, and he was purring loud enough to attract Johnny’s attention, who didn’t see any harm in petting him behind the ears. Hoshiko plopped over in pleasure and accepted the pets, and for a moment, Johnny was at peace with the universe.

“You hungry?” he said aimlessly. He didn’t expect a straight answer.

However, Hoshiko stood up again and meowed happily, his bright blue eyes shining with the streetlights. With his tail poking up through his jeans, it was obvious what the answer was.

For the first time that night, Johnny laughed to himself and stood up, moving over to his mini-fridge. “Let’s see what we have here…” He poked around inside, finding a can of sardines. “You like sardines?”

Hoshiko let fly a huge meow that Johnny took as a yes.

Feeling a little better when he popped open the can and set it on the floor, he lost the ability to care whether or not what had just happened was reality. There was a hungry cat in his room, and even if it had broken his door, it was probably just lonely. He smiled as Hoshiko buried his face in the oily fish.

So he sat down on his bed and relaxed for a few moments, thinking about the gig he’d just done with his band and how well it went. Every night, the crowd loved Johnny Cool and the Dudes – even for a bar band, they had a talent that went beyond just doing silly cover songs. He didn’t like to toot his own horn, but – beep beep – he even thought he was a pretty great singer and an even better guitarist. What’s the harm in being confident? Even if they were a little late to the party, being a rock n’ roll band in the 1980s when hair metal was the fashion, they still kicked it.

Suddenly, Hoshiko’s purring stopped. He’d been purring so loudly while eating those sardines that it caught Johnny off-guard when it suddenly came to a halt, and peeking over the edge of the bed, Johnny saw Hoshiko crouched into a loaf-like position, seeming unsettled.

“Y’okay, buddy?” he cooed, holding out his hand as if it would help.

Hoshiko’s pristine white fur turned green, and his perky whiskers drooped. Then, quicker than anybody would have expected from a twenty-pound cat, he raced toward the sliding glass window that separated Johnny from the bustling sounds of New York City, and stared out of it briefly.

“Hoshiko?” Johnny asked, knowing in part that that wouldn’t do anything.

No, Hoshiko had melted through the window with the bright lasers that sprouted from his eyes, and the next second, he had jumped through the hole he made and was plunging right for the city streets.

First, the cat had laser vision. Then, he jumped from the near-top of a huge building. Johnny leapt off of his bed and raced right towards the window, pressing his face and fingers against it in disbelief.

Contrary to what he predicted, though, Hoshiko didn’t splat in a disgusting pile of cat guts at the end of the fall. Nope, quite the contrary – normally, when something falls and you stare at it, it seems to get smaller. But Johnny noticed something distinct about the way Hoshiko fell: he grew bigger. Huger. So big he could have taken up the entire street just if he sat down! Again, Johnny rubbed his eyes in confusion. He had to have been dreaming, or maybe someone slipped something in his drink earlier that made him hallucinate out of his butt.

He stood with his back to the window, bracing himself for a loud thud that would send tremors through New York. While he clenched his jaw, however, a distinct voice flashed through his head…

“USE YOUR STAR POWERS, JOHNNY! GRAB YOUR GUITAR, PUMMEL HOSHIKO, AND SAVE NEW YORK!”

Somehow the Stars had found their way into Johnny’s head and were giving him valuable instructions that Johnny would soon find more out about, but all he could think to do was obey those commands. After all, what did he have to lose?

He yanked his angular guitar out of its case and looked back towards the window. At that point he could hear screaming and the beeping of horns, but there was no earth-crushing impact. He edged towards the scene. When he looked down after opening the window, teetering on the edge, he saw Hoshiko, stationary at the foot of the building and inflated to tremendous proportions. The poor cat couldn’t even put its paws on the ground.

“Of course. I give ‘im my anchovies, he destroys the city,” Johnny grumbled to himself.

With his axe in his hand, he hesitated. Jumping from the window would give him some wicked trajectory, but if he missed, he might as well have said goodbye to Maryanne and his band, alongside the whole world.

Before he could think too much about it, though, Johnny had fallen, with his guitar in his hands ready to strike the inflated feline beast yowling and trying to stand up. He aimed right for Hoshiko’s belly, the pinnacle of his girth, and when he was close enough, he swung – bright lights emitted from his guitar and from Hoshiko upon impact, lighting up the entire street even more than the city lights did themselves. Holding his guitar in place, he felt the cat shrink down, further and further, lower to the ground, until Johnny was kneeling with his instrument laying against asphalt, and Hoshiko was laying on his back with his eyes wide as if he didn’t even know what just went on.

All around him was a huge crowd of New Yorkers who had seen the events and had seen him pull it off with such a small amount of trouble. And those were the same people who landed his peculiar name in the news and revealed his identity as the frontman for Johnny Cool and the Dudes, thus skyrocketing him into such fame as a superhero and rock star that he hardly even knew what to do with himself.

He knew what he could do that night, though. He scooped up Hoshiko, unscathed, and they went right back up to Johnny’s apartment to get a good night’s rest, Johnny’s head spinning at the crazy night he’d encountered, completely out of his grasp.

I’m not sure what exactly tipped Johnny off that what was going on was real, and I don’t think anybody knows that except the author, who won’t even release his true identity. But for me, I think what tipped me off and let me know that this whole saving-the-world thing was legitimate was the fact that I completely did not see it coming.

I mean, if Put’emup, Put’emup was known for being pranksters, their fans would have heard about them kidnapping people and bringing them to their apartment to talk to them about something bogus. Only one member was known for putting on a real show, and of course, it was Andy, but there was a genuine look in his eye when he was telling us about that threat.

Tegan and I were freaked when we found out that they were struck by lightning that one time, and we tracked their statements about it online until they came out and said that they were fine, just shaken. Back then we didn’t know of the danger they were sucked into; we just wanted to know that they were alright. God, they were practically hometown heroes. If a band gets famous and they’re from your city, you’d bet your butt they’re gonna cause a ton of worry if they slip off the wagon or get hurt, even if we lived in a Chicago suburb.

Tegan and I were pretty quiet when Chance drove us home. He was a lot better at driving than Andy so there was no need to hang on to the nearest handle in the backseat of his truck, and he wasn’t fishing for awkward conversation, which was nice. He just smiled at us every so often and asked where to turn to get to our houses. For a guy who got so into playing the guitar onstage, he was a lot more reserved in person.

He let us out of his truck with a, “Good luck, you guys,” just a friendly little sendoff that I was sure I would need. Even though my dad was able to be convinced by Andy earlier that day, I doubt he’d be all over the rest of the story.

Tegan nodded at me with a knowing smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. “Your old man’s gonna flip tables, Osh.”

“Or he’s gonna start lecturing me in a different language,” I told her. I didn’t get yelled at often, but every so often I didn’t do my chores that well and he would go off on tangents in Spanish and then I got caught up and started my sentences in English and ended them in Spanish too, and then after a while it devolved into my broken grammar battling all of his figures of speech and neither of us really understood what the other was saying. Then he’d tell me, “Lo siento,” or, “I’m sorry,” and I’d smile and say, “De nada,” or, “It’s nothing.”

Tegan laughed and went to her house, while I went the opposite direction to mine and mentally prepared myself, rehearsing all of my best comebacks to the arguments I knew he’d come up with. When I opened the door, my dad was sitting in the living room with the newspaper in his tired hands, and when he saw my standing in the doorway right before closing the door, he said to himself, “Oh, thank God.”

“I’m back,” I said through tight lips. “And I’ve got some news…”

The kind of smile he had was anxious. “Really now?”

“I think everything he said was true, too,” I said quietly.

He sighed and muttered, “Ay ay ay…”

“No, you don’t understand!” I think I was getting ahead of myself a little bit there, but like I said, I was preparing for every comeback he could throw at me, even if he hadn’t even thrown any yet. “There was a huge computer monitor in their apartment with a map of the world on it with a bunch of radars, and there were tracking maps that were tracking the lightning, and according to them, me and Tegan were chosen to be guardians of the Earth because we’re gonna get attacked by aliens at some point and there are supposed to be eight guardians and we’re the fifth and sixth that were chosen!”

The more I continued, the more I noticed how nonsensical it was going to be to my father. It literally sounded like something straight out of a bad comic book, especially coming from my inarticulate tongue.

When I finish, Dad is staring at me with his lips flattened into a thin line and he’s got his eyes squinting at me, so suspicious.

“…Oshie. Mijo. You…you can’t honestly believe this is true.”

There we go.

“There is no such thing as aliens. Especially ones that are supposedly bent on destroying Earth. You are on the honor roll, you should know better than that,” he spoke in a hushed tone, sinking into his chair.

I took a seat near him on the couch. “Papá, I’m not totally sure about it myself, but I have been feeling a little weird since last night. I mean, look at my scar.” I pulled up the sleeve of my t-shirt to reveal the dark lines trailing down my arm, leading up my sleeve and spreading over my chest underneath. “It’s changing colors – it’s getting even darker. I mean…what reason do I have to believe that something’s not going on?”

He didn’t answer my question directly. “Mijo, I don’t want you to go all out on something that sounds like it came right out of your cartoons!”

“But what if it is real?”

“Then I still wouldn’t want you doing it, because I don’t want to lose you just like we lost your mother!”

He sat forward in his chair at the words, his face flushed over with crimson. There were only a few times in my life that I’d seen my dad completely angry, and those times were always brought on by me being a kid. I once spilled my building blocks all over the kitchen when I was five, and he lost it and threw them all in the trash. When I was twelve, I accidentally broke his car’s window with my basketball when me and Tegan were trying to build a slingshot, and he didn’t say a single word in English for the whole rest of the day.

At that moment, we froze. I think time even froze. I couldn’t even look at him because I was so scared; I just set my eyes on the floor and stared at endlessly. Not one second during that exchange did it occur to me that I wasn’t thinking about my dad at all, not even when I acknowledged the fact that our planet would end up destroyed. Selfishness is painful when you realize that you’re guilty of it.

Just…geeze. It didn’t occur to me how my dad might have felt, outside of the fact that he wouldn’t approve of me going off to save the world. I was so bent on proving him wrong that I didn’t think that maybe, he might have had valid reasons for thinking the way he did.

My eyes locked on the floor, I didn’t notice when my dad reached over and gently touched my shoulder.

“I mean, I don’t even know that guy. What if he just drugged you and told you all of that when you were drugged?” he went on. “I would have to see it for myself before I even consider it.”

Things looked up for a second, but before I could add anything to that conversation to grab at the brief glimmer of hope, the front door crashed open and there was Tegan with a big smile, saying, “Honey, I’m home!” like she was the happiest girl in the world.

When she saw my dad and I sitting there staring at her blankly, though, her face fell and she just kind of awkwardly shuffled in.

But my dad pointed at her and asked, “Tegan. What did your mother say? Did you give her this crazy story about aliens like Oshie just did to me?”

She laughed and took a seat in her favorite chair in the room, the loveseat, propping her legs up. “Oh, she told me exactly what she told me when I came out, Mr. Olayos – it’s my life, I can choose what I wanna do with it, she can’t truly bar me from anything, blah blah blah…”

My dad just groaned in defeat. “Dios mio, that woman…loca y bonita…”

Calling him out on calling Ms. Tracey pretty would have probably made things worse, so I held my tongue.

“Yeah, I halfway expected her to put up a fight,” Tegan sighed, kicking off her shoes. “I can’t complain, though.”

I heard my dad shuffle as he stood up, and he stepped over and gave me a halfhearted hug over my shoulders. It was too brief to be very personal, but it was just significant enough to rub dirt in the wounds.

“I’m gonna have to think this over, Oshie,” he sighed. “Give me some time.”

He walked into the garage, closing the door behind him quietly, probably turning on the TV out there and kicking back a cigar. I never really knew what he did out there; it wasn’t really any of my business. I found myself staring a little longer than I wanted, but to soften the mood, I forced out a little laugh and nodded towards Tegan.

“Man, I wish my dad was as lenient as your mom,” I said.

She snorted loudly and replied, “I wish my mom had a spine like your dad.”