Joe Schreiber: Perry's killer playlist

“Okay.” Paula took in a deep breath. “With all due respect, I think we’re focusing on the wrong things here.”

“For once we’re in perfect agreement.” Linus put his arm around my shoulder and led me aside, lowering his voice. “Perry, you know I respect you. You know I want what’s right for the band. I’ll go to the mat for you every single time.” He held his head as if it were in danger of flying apart. “But these terms-”

“What about if we all went with you?” Mom said. “We’d stay out of your way, let you play your shows…”

“Wait.” That was Annie, from all the way upstairs in her bedroom, where she’d apparently been monitoring the entire conversation through the ductwork. “We’re going to Europe? ”

At that moment the entire east wing of the house exploded with the heavy, chugging drum and guitar notes that meant Caleb and Norrie had plugged in and were warming up at top volume, waiting for me to come out and join them. Sasha, our lead singer, wasn’t here yet-he was always the last to arrive, and ever since he’d bought a vintage Indian motorcycle that broke down every other week, it wasn’t uncommon for him to show up in his mom’s Volvo, or even on a bicycle.

“Family summit.” Annie moved past me in a cloud of conflicting perfumes and hair treatment smells. “Oh, hi, Linus.” She looked at my dad. “Are we going to Europe?”

“No,” Dad said.

“How come Perry gets to go?”

“Don’t worry, sweetheart,” Linus said, glaring over her head at Paula. “Uncle Linus isn’t going to let the evil lady take anybody to Europe for this kind of chump change.”

“Perry’s going on tour,” Mom said, “with his band. Isn’t that exciting?”

Annie rolled her eyes. “I’m all a-flutter.” Irony was her new ketchup, and she was putting it on everything.

“I think I’d better take a look at that contract,” Dad said, reaching for his reading glasses, which weren’t in his breast pocket.

“Don’t bother,” Linus said, and his hands had gone from his head to his stomach. His initial wave of outrage had passed, leaving him with what looked like chronic dyspepsia. “Just let me kick you in the balls and you’ll get the idea.”

“Linus,” Paula said, “I know this is your preferred method of negotiation, but-”

“Negotiation?” Linus wailed, flung back by the very apogee of disbelief. “What is there to negotiate? How am I supposed to negotiate with nothing? ”

“In case you didn’t notice,” Paula said, putting her arm around me, “I’m on Perry’s side here. I’m kind of crazy about the guy.”

“Oh, that’s rich. You’re good.” He waved his hands to anyone who might listen. “ She’s good. This is worse than the Jacksons’ Victory Tour back in eighty-four, when we had to leave Tito in Vancouver.”

“Linus, that’s enough,” I said. “Let’s just listen to what she has to say, okay?”

“This is how it starts,” Linus moaned. “This is how it always starts…”

Out in the garage, the guitar and drums had stopped, and I heard Caleb and Norrie come blundering inside, Cokes in hand, to find out what was taking me so long. They saw Linus standing there with Paula and my folks and stopped in their tracks.

“Hey, dude,” Norrie said. “What’s up?”

“I think you’ll find that the terms are boilerplate for any new band with no track record internationally,” Paula said. “Armitage is working out the merchandising deals with promoters for shirts and promotional items, and the exposure for Inchworm-”

Caleb blinked. “What’s she talking about, Perry?”

There was a clattering noise, and I looked out the window and saw that Sasha had arrived. He was wearing leather pants and a feather-plumed boa and pedaling the old twelve-speed Schwinn, which meant that his motorcycle had broken down yet again and was drooling oil somewhere in the back of his mom’s garage-but for once, none of these setbacks seemed to be bothering him in the least. Instead, he leapt off the bike while it was still rolling, letting it rattle to a halt into our garbage cans, and came sprinting up my front steps, bursting into the house, taking in the sight of me and Caleb and Norrie with a huge grin on his face.

“Did you guys hear?” He pumped his fists. “Did Linus tell you? We’re going to Europe, bitches!”

“Wait,” Caleb said. “Whaaaat?”

Norrie’s mouth dropped open. “Seriously?”

“Hell, yeah! Inchworm’s first world tour! Linus says once he negotiates the contract it’s gonna put us over the top, and-” He turned around. “Oh, hey, Linus.”

Linus dropped his face in his hands. Through his fingers I could hear him murmuring to himself, praying for strength to persevere in the face of insurmountable obstacles-first among them, the band that he’d agreed to represent.

“So,” Paula said, “can I call Armitage and tell him we have a deal?”

“Man,” Norrie said, “anybody else feel like wuh-we’ve been doing this for about tuh-ten years already?”

It was eight-thirty at night, Italian time, and the Inchworm European tour had just rolled into Venice’s Santa Lucia station-meaning that we were lugging our own gear down onto the platform, having spent the better part of the last two days on the train playing Nintendo DS and trying not to drive each other crazy.

Time had become a blur. With Linus leading the way, we’d left London yesterday at midday, taken the Chunnel into Paris, and left after lunch today on the way into Venice.

Things had started out a little shaky. At our first gig in London, Caleb couldn’t find his Stratocaster, Norrie was still sick from the airline food, and half our amps weren’t wired to run off European power outlets. Backstage, Linus was pacing a hole in the dressing room floor, chain-smoking some obscure brand of foul-smelling British cigarettes while reassuring everybody that it was going to be okay. Outside, the crowd was getting antsy while the roadies fiddled with the amplifiers until finally, at a quarter past nine, Sasha stood up and said screw it, he didn’t know about the rest of us, but he for one hadn’t flown halfway around the world to sit in some dressing room like a bunch of American losers.

Then we went out there and rocked.

In the end it had taken approximately thirty seconds to realize what we should’ve known from the start: When the four of us got together, it didn’t matter if we were playing in New York, in London, or on the moon-when it came right down to it, at this particular moment in our lives, when our backs were to the wall, we could set that shit on fire.

Even with half the amps off, Caleb’s loaner guitar squealed and soloed like the devil’s own chainsaw, Sasha was pulling out moves that none of us had ever seen before, spoonfeeding the crowd until they were shrieking for more, and Norrie sounded like he was setting off cherry bombs in the drum kit. We roared through every song on the set list, including a few new ones that we’d only practiced a couple times, until even the bouncers came up front and started dancing. Midway through the show, I glanced back at Norrie and saw him grinning back at me, a perfect reflection of that slightly dazed feeling of wonder. This is real, we were both thinking, at the exact same time. Holy shit, this is actually happening to us right now.

Up front, Sasha gave his patented Navajo war whoop and a flying helicopter kick that just cleared the microphone stand. “Hello, U.K.!” he yelled. “We are Inchworm and we are here to rock you-’kay?”

The place went absolutely bonkers. Finally, after playing almost three straight hours and closing with a rousing cover of Sham 69’s “If the Kids Are United” that had the whole place up on its feet and singing along, we stumbled offstage, exhausted and soaked with sweat, grinning like fools, and collapsed into a cab back to the hotel with a couple of girls from the front row. I called Paula in New York and told her how it had gone, while Sasha leaned out the window and howled, “Who wants to do that again?”