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By Root 994 0

from Johnny’s He-Man thermos. Johnny would skip school on Ozzy Osbourne’s birthday and grew his blond hair down to his ass. He’d keep notebooks full of drawings shelved in his closet, full of superhero chicks and space-age cars and guys with thighs muscled like Rottweilers. He spent a lot of time chasing the boys out of the room he shared with Teddy, but he taught them both how to play guitar, and even let them play in his band, with Delph on bass and Kram on drums, Teddy and Jude sharing one untuned, spray-painted guitar, Johnny playing another, singing without a microphone. Everyone huddled on Queen Bea’s front porch in their hooded sweatshirts and black jeans, bodies chattering in the cold. Jude’s fourteen-year-old fingers stretched into cramps, frozen as wood, trying to follow Johnny’s through Hendrix’s “The Star-Spangled Banner.” On Johnny’s mismatched stereo, they’d play their stolen tapes—hard rock, heavy metal, hair metal, black metal, death metal, thrash metal, metalcore, hardcore, grindcore, punk—Black Sabbath and Whitesnake and Black Flag—and then methodically, with ears tilted to the speakers, they’d copy them. They dragged out the old orange extension cord and chugged away on Johnny’s practice amp, decorated with Metallica stickers and glow-in-the-dark stars. They were Demon Semen, Baptism of Jism, the Deadbeats, the Posers, and finally the Bastards, which most of them were, more or less.

That was two years ago. Then Johnny turned sixteen, quit school, and left for New York with his pockets full of snow-shoveling money and two guitar cases, his guitar in one of them and his clothes in the other, to live with his father, who it turned out wasn’t dead after all, and maybe Teddy’s wasn’t either. Turned out Queen Bea was maybe a big fat liar.

Teddy and Jude, on the other hand, were going to New York to start a band, and to get fucked, and to get the fuck out of Vermont, not to find their long-lost dads. Jude wasn’t even going to tell his dad he was coming. He wasn’t even going to look him up in the phone book. If he ran into him on the subway, he’d be like, Hey, how’s it going, you fucking chump? Okay, see you around.

Lintonburg, Vermont, in 1987 was not a place of surprises. There was the second-run theater, the rec center, Wayne’s Billiards. There was the Tap House, the jock bar, and Jacque’s (Birkenjacque’s), the hippie bar. There was the drive-thru creemee place, the pawnshop-music-store, and Champlain Park, where when you skipped school you could hide in the construction tunnels and smoke up, and there was decent skating at the university if you didn’t get kicked off campus. There was enough to do so that you didn’t necessarily want to put a hole in your head. It was the biggest city in Vermont, and this fact was reflected with smugness in the busy gait of its residents down Ash Street, the brick-paved pedestrian mall; in their efficient street plowing; in their towering thermoses of coffee; in the dexterous maneuvering of their four-wheel-drive station wagons and their one or two tasteful bumper stickers: BERNIE; GREEN UP; I L♥VERMONT. Lintonburg’s relatively metropolitan status confused but did not ease the state of small-town disgruntlement that Teddy and Jude had perfected. There was, finally, the Ash Street Mall (the Ass Street Mall), where after leaving their post under the bleachers and skating down the hill through the bitter, lake-blown wind, they came across Jude’s mother. She was sitting on a stool next to the entrance, smoking a cigarette and reading a paperback. Beside her was a table disguised by an Indian print tapestry and cluttered with glass ashtrays, vases, pitchers, bowls, in blues and sea greens and swirled, psychedelic pinks. Harriet’s single professional fixture was a wooden sign, propped up against a set of mugs, that read HARRIET HORN HANDBLOWN GLASS.

No sign hung over the door of the greenhouse in their yard, where Harriet blew her glass and where she sold her bongs and pipes, the items that paid the bills, the items she couldn’t sell on the street and had to hawk at summer music