Charles Bock - Beautiful Children

From the back of the truck, the girl with the shaved head kept trying to make eye contact with Green Wool James, but he kept looking away, into his paperback, whatever. Someone said “Blowin’ in the Wind” just got sold to a chili company, and laughter was everywhere, the jokes started flying. “All Along the Watchtower” for high-range sniper rifles. That “aches just like a woman” one for maxi pads. People were laughing and pounding their fists together and having a good time, and out of nowhere, Green Wool James wondered if there was a different standard for someone like Bob Dylan and like a one-hit wonder. Dylan was this icon and was recognized for a kind of integrity and already had more zillions than he'd ever know what to do with, so yeah, what's he doing, but then again, what about the band that struck it big with one song but hadn't seen any money from their music for ten years and now all of them had shitty real-life jobs. Green Wool James asked whether preserving the integrity of the best song you'd ever recorded was worth giving up whatever financial benefits and renewed exposure selling your song to a commercial might provide. He pointed out that half of the people making fun of sellouts were wearing Old Navy gear, and he pointed out that clothing companies like Independent and Vans weren't any better, they just made their fortunes by marketing directly to punks and skaters. James said he didn't see anything wrong with this. He liked it when a commercial used a song he recognized. It was a treat, just like when a television show he enjoyed watching — or a video game he enjoyed playing — used a song he liked. It put the song back into his head, which was a good thing, especially if he hadn't heard the song in a while. Green Wool James said he'd barely even heard of Zeppelin until he'd seen the Cadillac commercial, but after he'd seen the commercial, he'd downloaded their greatest hits, which he enjoyed a lot. James wondered when exactly it had become a law that where your song got played and how it got used had any bearing on whether you had integrity or what kind of person you were. He said he thought it was a lot more complicated than this, and quickly brought up the techno artist who sold a song to a commercial for a car company, then gave all the money to a group that fought pollution. Was anything wrong with that, James wanted to know. How about if your wife had cancer and the only way you could afford treatments was to sell your song to some burger barn?

I think hierarchical elitism sucks, he said. Does that mean I shouldn't try to go to a good college?

The girl was lit, kinda, and sitting a ways from the roundtable, and with the distance and how sound was reflecting off the hull, it was hard for her to follow just who was saying what, what was happening: there was James glancing up from his paperback to commiserate with Piggy about something or other; there was Piggy laughing— Where the fuck did you get “hierarchical elitism”? Half an overheard remark caused James to defect from Piggy into an impromptu threesome with the other boys, before a fragment of something else changed the pairings once more. The geometric configurations of dialogue were perpetually shifting and none of their formulations included the girl with the shaved head, which was fine with her, whatever. She was cool just sitting there, chilling out, and she stopped listening to them, gradually occupying herself with the sight of the broad wooden plank that served as their table. It was interesting to the girl that every time someone put down a beer, the plank jiggled. And it was noticeable that every time someone picked one up, the plank jiggled worse. The girl started grooving on the way the dark green bottles kept inching their way toward the far side of the plank, as if by osmosis or something, all starting in one place and creeping down like that. The plank was balanced between a pair of cinder blocks and some old telephone books and the girl with the shaved head wondered if maybe cinder blocks came in different sizes. If probably the cinder blocks and the phone books were at uneven proportions. In the hull's darkness, lit cigarette embers looked like so many fireflies to the girl, and she took a drag on her clove and decided to remember that image for a poem. She told herself that a vindictive and evil witch would not think twice about having all the bottles slide down the side of the table and dousing someone. A vindictive and evil witch just might turn your heart to stone.

Even with the windows broken and the side door open, it was like a sweatbox in the ice cream truck, and rubbing a warm bottle of piss on her neck did nothing to help. She tore a nearby flyer off the back door of a van, planning to use the limp and ancient paper for a fan. Not to be FUCKED with read the flyer, a combination of cutout fonts and scratch-off stencil patterns. $8. 3 kegs. 10 warmup bands . cum get WASTED out in the desert . Off I-15 where the pigs don't cruise. In some ways it meant nothing, a paper creased into thirds and torn around the edges, a crude drawing of a skeleton with missiles for tits, some coarse advertisement for some long-ago desert bash. Only the girl with the shaved head had seen Not to Be Fucked With play live, she'd seen them like four times, actually, always at a party out in the desert, off I-15 where pigs never cruised. The girl referred to the band as the Nots and she had minor crushes on each of the band's four members and she totally adored their thrasher music, its hard and fast pace, power chords and violent hooks. This one song, it had this refrain; this boss oi oi oi thing in its chorus. Three short blurts, oi oi oi.

Zitty Mohawk guy lifted his beer in a toasting motion, took a dramatic swig, and sprayed beer all over Piggy, who squealed asshole. Glancing down at the flyer, the girl raised her hand and ran a palm over the part of her neck where her spinal cord ended and her skull took over. The follicles felt bristly and odd. Her knees jangled together and she popped her thumbs and squirmed in her seat and felt a faint urge to pee and looked down again at the flyer. Her foot tapped, oi oi oi. Her knees waggled, apart, together, oi oi oi. She kind of worried about giving the room a free show, and at the same time, it was like, fuck those fuckers, you know? Oi oi oi. The girl had played the song on her stereo hundreds of times, maybe thousands. Alone in her room. The girl with the shaved head had rocked out and geeked out and gotten wicked goofy to the Nots; their chorus of oi s had saved her soul more times than she could count. The needle of the battered record player inside the ice cream truck may have been scratching against the label of the old zydeco LP, but just then the girl with the shaved head could not have heard those oi s any clearer if Not to Be Fucked With had been playing right next to her. Without a doubt, she knew their demo had to be somewhere in the ice cream truck. Somewhere amid that pile of identical-sounding demo tapes and burner-produced compact discs that kids from incestuously connected local bands played late at night for one another in garages and dens and makeshift hangouts like this here ice cream truck. The possibility even existed that right then, someone might play the demo, the possibility existed that the demo would just happen to be cued up to the song, right at a part with the oi oi oi s. The girl with the shaved head wondered how to figure the chances. The formula that explained how light traveled through space popped into her head. She thought of partial statistics from a math paper she'd done, which showed the world famous Las Vegas Strip was undoubtedly visible from the moon. The girl thought about wasted power and that maybe it could be used to save people in Ethiopia and then she thought that nothing said PUNK more than a big white Mohawk. She wondered if maybe a Mohawk and a three-piece suit were just costumes, both of them. She started thinking about the difference between the song with the oi s and some song a corporation had bought for a commercial: how the song with the oi s had struck a chord inside of her, expressed her feelings better than she ever could herself, this kind of emotional bond it made, this sort of trust. And when a corporation bought a song to use in a commercial, they were trying to take advantage of that bond, trying to take all your good and secret feelings and transfer them to their lame product.