Eric Puchner: Model Home

“All right,” Dustin said, trying to avoid an argument. It often occurred to him that his main function as bandleader was keeping the peace. “So we’ve got the Turpitudes, Viet-Nun, and Toxic Shock Syndrome. We each get two votes, the rule being you can’t choose the same name twice.”

“What about mine?” Tarwater said. The fact remained that Tarwater was a good bassist, so you had to take his suggestions seriously no matter how stupid they were. If you pissed him off, he might threaten to leave the band or refuse to turn on his amp until you performed one of the dreadful ballads he’d written, perhaps “Despair Is My Silent Angel” or “Brothers Won’t Be Shackled (White, Red, or Brown).”

“Okay, Tarwater,” Dustin said equably. “What’s your idea?”

“The Butt Hawks.”

“The Butt Hawks?”

“Yeah.” He smiled proudly, despite the silence.

“What signifies this breed of hawk?” Biesty asked.

“What do you think ?” Tarwater said.

Dustin cocked his head, trying to look encouraging. “Is it, like, a hawk that flies out of your butt?”

“No. Jesus.”

“I’m just trying to get my mind around it.”

“A bunch of guys who like women’s butts?” Starhead offered.

“No, you fuck-brains.” Tarwater paused, perhaps for emphasis. “It’s a mohawk that grows out of your butt. ”

“Wow,” Dustin said.

“That’s disgusting,” Biesty said. Dustin shot him a glance over Tarwater’s head. “Disgusting, but ambiguous.”

“How about Asshawk?” Starhead suggested. “Just for, like, brevity.”

To settle things, Dustin shredded a piece of paper into little pieces and then handed them out. Everyone wrote down their top two choices and stuck them in a baseball cap. Dustin had a sense of something historic in the making. He tallied the votes. In the end, Toxic Shock Syndrome won out narrowly with three ballots. (The Butt Hawks got two, which could only be explained by illegal voting.)

So began the first official practice of Toxic Shock Syndrome. Dustin tuned his Stratocaster with a feeling of long-awaited departure. He’d worked all spring at Randy’s Audio Emporium so he could have enough money to take the summer off, his last before college, and steer the band toward greatness.

“Are you going to tell your dad our new name?” Starhead asked, twirling a drumstick.

“Why?”

“He’s our number one fan.”

Dustin frowned. “He’s not a fan. He likes barbershop quartet records. I think he’s just had a head injury or something.”

“It’s pretty weird,” Biesty said, wedging a cigarette between the strings of his fretboard. “The way he veges on those steps. I’m waiting for him to shotgun one of those Cokes and start moshing around the garage.”

They warmed up with some covers—“Los Angeles,” “TV Party”—but the image of his father, nodding along to the beat and tapping his foot, kept messing with Dustin’s groove. Who’d ever heard of a punk band whose biggest fan was a forty-three-year-old real estate developer in boat shoes? He was impossible to avoid, because you never knew when he was going to be home anymore. If Dustin turned up the amps to an ear-blistering ten, his dad would just shut his eyes and lean his head back against the wall. The louder they played, the more he seemed to enjoy it.

Today, sure enough, he wandered into the garage in the middle of “Mandy Rogers,” Dustin’s paean to loss and suffering in a godless universe. (You prayed to Him at night like a good little nun, the one person, you thought, who wouldn’t shun or make fun.) As usual, his dad got a Coke from the fridge and then sat on the steps with that lost look on his face, as though he were waiting for a life-changing message to wash up on the beach. Biesty grabbed the mike from its stand and began prowling the garage while he belted the chorus, as though searching for Mandy or God or both; nor mally Biesty’s stage antics inspired Dustin, but now they seemed dumb and overwrought. It was his father’s fault. Somehow, just by sitting there, he had a way of making everything seem ridiculous. Why couldn’t Dustin just have a normal dad like Biesty’s, who never took any interest in anything and jerked off in his bedroom all the time to his ten-year stash of Hustler s?

“Would you play that one song you wrote?” Dustin’s dad asked while they took a cigarette break. He didn’t care if they smoked, which — despite Dustin’s griping — gave him a measure of respect with the band. “About the shit hitting the fan?”

“Dad, this is practice! We don’t do requests.” Dustin glared at his father’s polo shirt. “Anyway, that’s the Circle Jerks. We didn’t write it.”

“The Circle Jerks?”

This had always seemed to Dustin like the perfectly irreverent name — but now he began helplessly to doubt it. Wasn’t it a bit juvenile? Before Dustin could stop him, Biesty turned to his father with a courteous expression.

“It’s when you stand in a naked circle of men,” he explained, “and masturbate the participant in front of you.”

“Are they homosexuals?”

“ No, Dad. Jesus.”

“Do you have a recording of it?”

Dustin shook his head.

“I’ve got it at home,” Tarwater said. “I could tape it for you, Mr. Ziller.”

“Thank you, Brent. That would be great.”

“You might like the Ramones, too. They’re more middle-aged.”

Dustin raised his voice. “Look, Dad, do you have to be in here?”

“It’s chill,” Starhead said. “He’s only listening to us practice.”

“It’s not chill. Christ. What are we going to do next? Invite the neighbors over for juice and cookies?”

The way his dad stared at his Coke, smiling as though he had indigestion, gave Dustin a twinge of guilt. Still smiling, his father hunched up the stairs — the back pocket of his khakis pulled out like a rabbit’s ear — and disappeared inside the house. Dustin remembered the Halloween when he was seven, how some teenagers had run by on his way home from trick-or-treating and stolen all of his candy. He’d come home in tears. Dustin’s father had taken him out later in the dark, carrying him on his shoulders under the strange high buzz of the streetlights, through the clumsy swooping of bats, knocking on people’s doors and rousing them out of bed in their pajamas, until Dustin had filled three bags of candy. But what was he supposed to do now, start doing whippits with the guy? Going on double dates?

“Finally,” he said. “Safely locked up.”

After band practice, Dustin drove to the beach to meet Kira, who’d been there since eleven working on her tan. He would have liked to be going straight to the beach, since the vision of his beautiful girlfriend lying in the sun — that sexy, inviting dip at the small of her back, like somewhere a kitten might curl up — was giving him a hard-on. It was bad enough to have a hard-on with your sister in the car, but he had to drive all the way to Miraleste to drop her at the library. He couldn’t even blast the stereo, not with Jonas sitting in the backseat next to the only speaker that worked, gazing out the window at God knew what. How Dustin’s mom had convinced him to drag the kid along with him to Rat Beach, he did not know. Somehow it had to do with the car shortage. Dustin got a kick out of Jonas, he was strange and hilarious and dressed for the second day in a row entirely in orange, but this did not mean he wanted to show up at the beach with an Oompa-Loompa.

Still, it was hard to be bummed out when you were driving basically beachward and the air would soon sting of salt and the fog had burned off into a spectacular California day, the sky so blue you had to remind yourself it was real, like those textbook photos of the Earth’s atmosphere. They drove past the Courtyard Mall, which made Dustin feel sorry for the consumer zombies inside. He felt sorry for dead people. He felt sorry for anyone not from California (perhaps the same thing). He felt sorry for his bandmates, who were holed up in Starhead’s house, high on his mother’s Percocet and watching The Decline of Western Civilization for the zillionth time.