The Last Rock Star Book by Camden Joy

Author:Camden Joy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781891241857
Publisher: Verse Chorus Press

My twenty-first birthday came at me like a funnel cloud moving slow and deliberate across the prairie. I could see it approaching from months away, I could turn and run but never get away. It would descend on me no matter where I hid, suck me into its black, junk-filled swirl, and deposit me in some stupid land of grown-ups where I’d be obligated to spend the rest of my days, where everybody voted and behaved responsibly and spoke with the utmost sincerity. Considering all the dangerous things I’d done and all the stupid chances I was willing to take, it bummed me out that I was still around to turn twenty-one. I felt I deserved to be dead or at least to be celebrated as if I were dead. Acey and I were still doing our band thing, as we’d been doing for the last thirty thousand years since man first walked upright: playing loser bars where people pretended their heavy hands hurt too much to applaud, playing student rec halls where kids our own age winced at us like we were freaks from outer space. We were constantly looking for a really good bassist, and constantly settling for less. As my twenty-first birthday neared, the only things that started sounding good to me were minor-key dirges and so that was all I would play. Our rehearsals began to sound like funeral marches. Acey drummed along obediently, though with an expression of distaste.

Once I waved a song to a halt to ask, “Do you know what the Rolling Stones were doing by this time? by the time they turned twenty-one?”

“Ummmm… No.”

“I don’t either, okay? but you can bet they weren’t sitting around here in nowheresville.”

Acey nodded, clicked his drumsticks, and we started up the funeral march all over again.

Suddenly we just stopped rehearsing, stopped gigging. It wasn’t doing us any good at all. Plus, now that I was turning twenty-one, all my free time would probably soon be taken up by PTA meetings and income tax protests and feeding squirrels in the park and trying hard to hobble my rickety way across the intersection while cars zoomed past barely missing me with my walker.

“Listen. We need to talk.” This was Shaleese speaking. I was at the kitchen table, looking sadly at my plateful of scrambled eggs. “Listen. I need to be alone today. I hope you can understand.”

“So?”

“I was wondering if you could go out.”

“I guess.”

“Until five or so.”

“Five? Oh, great. What, you got someone coming over or something?”

She jumped at that, and stammered, “I need some, I have some art I need to finish up, really. That’s all.”

I nodded, like I believed her, like I was totally calm with it, and glared at my fork. Something was wrong, something was going on. And now the soap opera begins, I thought. It suddenly made sense why she insisted on being so secretive about her “art.” I grew up in a house run by an unfaithful woman, I was plenty

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