Have Mercy (Have a Life #1) Read online

  have mercy

  BY MADDY WELLS

  have faith

  have love

  have mercy

  A have a life novel by

  Maddy Wells

  Blue Heron Book Works, LLC

  Allentown, PA

  www.blueheronbookworks.com

  Copyright 2014 © Maddy Wells

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Registered WGAE

  This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to any person living or dead is completely coincidental.

  To

  Maude Apetow

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Write to Maddy Wells at [email protected]

  Chapter 1

  Tim, my bass player and I wasted an hour of practice time arguing about how we were going to present ourselves to The Griffin—a world famous metal rocker and incidentally my dad who was visiting me and my mom in two days. The argument this time was about a gimmick, a device, a trick to make us different from the other eight million rock bands out there, of which—according to “Sleep Walker” on Yahoo Answers—seven million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine suck. “Sleep Walker’s” humble opinion, but still. Eight million freakin’ rock bands. Wikihow says in their excellent article, How to Form a Rock Band, which I refer to on my iPhone at the beginning of the argument: “Try to find something you could do like always wear a certain head band when performing or (if you can) twiddle your ears while singing or playing the instrument you do.” Which, honestly, might work if we were a novelty band and sometimes when I’m looking at a Ziggy Stardust video or something, it seems to me that those are the only ones that everyone loves. I mean Bowie’s a giant, sure, but still. And what about Lady Gaga? I’m not saying she isn’t talented, I mean how could I say that, look where she is, but it doesn’t hurt that she dresses like an alien slut and that she cuts Madonna, who is exactly like her when you analyze it except Madonna is old enough to be her grandmother, but they both keep it going like Family Feud or Judge Judy or something and everyone’s glued to their fight, which isn’t music, it’s a gimmick. I wish there were a study of the young musicians that started out with just talent and energy and those that started out with a gimmick and the study would tell you what happened to them both in ten years. Which ones were still playing and which ones got jobs in pest control. The thing is, I think we—Tim and I—have enough talent and energy to make it without putting on the clown nose, but then again, we haven’t gotten a lot of valuable feedback.

  “We’re living in a very militaristic world and berets say we’re on top, we’re winners,” I told Tim. “The entire Olympic team is going to wear berets. And we both look good in berets.” I’d picked up some berets, epaulets and jackets at Crazy Duffy’s Army Navy store and made Tim try a couple of things on before we started practice. “No one’s done that since Michael Jackson.”

  “Yeah, and Michael Jackson’s dead. And this shit is wicked hot. It’s like a thousand degrees in here. On stage, with all those lights, it’ll be even hotter.”

  I admired Tim’s clear-cut vision of us—of himself at least—on a stage with Klieg lights burning our eyeballs out, with him definitely shirtless, or maybe an open leather vest showing off his hairless chest which he flashes every chance he gets and which he is sociopathically proud of. He shrugged off the woolen Russian officer dress coat, checked out his triceps which were nicely pumped from heaving cases of Vitamin Water at his job, picked up his guitar, turned up the amp on his bass, let go an E flat—the key I sing in—on reverb and segued into a riff á la Jimi Hendrix.

  I followed him down the scale on my guitar, a Fender that The Griffin gave me for my last birthday. It was much more satisfying playing music than arguing costumes. I mean, what’s the point of having a rock band if you spend ten percent of your time on music and ninety percent of your time on packaging? Why don’t you just form a marketing company?

  But it was stupid to think that someone was just going to be walking by my garage studio, hear our incredible riffs, be rightfully astounded and sign us up for a world tour with a recording contract. That was a fairy tale and at almost-sixteen I was too old to believe in fairy tales. Eight million bands. And those were just the ones with Facebook pages.

  Tim unplugged and packed up his guitar. “I gotta go to work.”

  Tim’s job at the Seven-Eleven was becoming a total pain because we had to turn down gigs—okay, one gig—because he had to work on Saturdays which were party days and the only gigs we could get were at parties of kids our age and they always happened on Saturdays when parents were out of town.

  “Try to fix your schedule so you can have off on Saturday from now on,” I said.

  He rode down the driveway on his bicycle with his guitar case flung over his shoulder just as Jane was coming out of the house. Jane was my size exactly which gave me no hope whatsoever for adding more inches to either my height or my chest. The doctor told me last year, when I finally got my period and Jane dragged me there so Doctor Frazier could tell me all the things that Jane was disinclined to tell me about being a woman, that sometimes girls had growth spurts, but not to get up my hopes of being the next Beyoncé. The most I could hope for was five seven and breast implants and what’s that? You’re not an Amazon warrior, but you’re not an adorable elfin princess either. The vision I had of myself—six foot tall in leather pants, bustier, and magenta gelled hair—didn’t work on five-five unless I wore ten inch platform heels, but then I’d be Lady Gaga, right? With my conventional looks—pretty, no tattoos—yet—I should be a freakin’ folk singer playing acoustic, but there’s only so much tolerance in the world for sincerity, Jane says, and the world passed that mark without a goodbye party way back in the last century. So five-five with brown hair and hazel eyes is the numbingly average raw material I have to work with. Thanks a lot, Jane.

  It doesn’t matter to Jane if she looks average, she’s just a high school teacher. Jane tries to dress hip and she’s always getting in trouble for not wearing the K-M
art formless that the school principal holds up as a mature standard. She brought home the dress-code-for-teachers brochure that Principal Thwaite had printed up and we almost peed our pants laughing at the clothing in it.

  Actually, Jane didn’t meet any mature standard. Jane was the only teacher left on earth—certainly the only mother—who chain smoked right in front of me, showing her total disregard for my health with her second-hand smoke.

  She flicked her cigarette butt into the driveway, watched Tim do a wheelie as he turned the corner, muttered “not bad,” and opened the car door to the Kia—a Christmas present from The Griffin—before she saw me.

  “Oh, hi,” she said.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “School. Proctor senior make-up exams.”

  Which was a complete joke, because Jane just did not care if students cheated. An upper classman told me she read her iPhone the entire time his class was taking a math final, kids actually moving their desks closer to the smart kids to cheat and she did not even look up at the sound of metal scraping linoleum. “Why should I care?” she’d ask. “The rest of the world doesn’t give a damn if kids cheat. Why should I hold the bag?”

  Of course, no one was asking her to hold the bag for the whole world’s cheating. No one dared ask Jane to hold the bag for anything, which is why, it seemed, I so often ended up holding it for her.

  “Close up the Trap before you go out,” she said.

  Jane calls my practice space in the garage the Trap because she thinks I’m trying to trap my dad, The Griffin, into staying during one of his rare stops at our house, always on his way to somewhere else. The Griffin has big gigs: The Wells Fargo Center in Philly, the Toyota Center in Houston, and so on. I keep a record of his whereabouts on Google Tracker. A couple of times I looked at his house in Texas on Google Earth, but it’s not like you can see people on Google Earth, so I can’t verify that two people named Marjewel and Isak actually live there, even though they do according to the article on The Griffin in Wikipedia and on Isak’s Facebook page—which I checked out, I couldn’t help myself—and then sent him a friend request, which he accepted with a cryptic “nice to meet you.” I don’t know if he even knows who I am: he has more than 2,000 friends. I checked out Isak’s clips on YouTube as well and, honestly, he’s a seriously good musician and he’s only a year older than me.

  Anyway, The Griffin’s on the road two hundred and sixty-five days of the year and Jane laughed when I asked her what he did on the other one hundred days.

  “You’re such a control freak,” she’d said, “What do you care what he does?”

  It’s not that I care per se but I would like to know why Jane won’t talk about The Griffin’s house in Texas, or Marjewel, or Isak, who would be, I guess, my half-brother, and I would like to discuss the possibility that that’s where The Griffin spends his time. I mean, if he’s my father too, why does he spend more time in Texas than he does here? I know he’s married to Marjewel and had Isak before he met Jane, but then he met Jane and they had me. And when I ask Jane about our specific status she just says, “You and me and The Griffin are a special and talented family, Mercedes. You can’t define us the way you can define ordinary families.” Here’s the thing: in my mind I have this box with all the information about The Griffin in it and I can’t shut the lid until I know what he does with those other one hundred days. He rides around in a black windowless band bus with mythological creatures like himself spitting flames painted on the outside. When he visits us, he arrives in the band bus with the other band members who love to use our toilet and shower and sleep on the couch and spare bedroom as if they never saw a motel room. We order Chinese and pizza because god forbid Jane turn on the stove. It isn’t like a big happy family or anything with The Griffin and the band and every wannabe in a fifty mile radius who shows up uninvited, but at least there’s some sound in our house besides the music I make in the garage and Jane hacking her head off from smoking too much. When they come it’s like a tornado, with music and take-out cardboard and Jack Daniels bottles and red plastic cups getting caught in the whirlwind. I grab for a little fun and when the band drives away all that’s left is debris from the storm for me to clean up. Anyway, it bothers me that I don’t know where his bus is parked when his time isn’t accounted for.

  “I’m not going anywhere. I’m auditioning drummers,” I told her. “I’ll be right here.”

  “Well, if you go out.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “You should, baby. It’ll do you good.”

  I wanted to say, “What good did going out do you, Jane?” but it would’ve just been mean. When she went out at my age she went backstage to see The Griffin and the result, nine months later, was me and our special and talented family. So, it would’ve been more than mean, it would have been self-loathing.

  “You’re too hard on yourself. When you’re done with that, take a break, Mercedes. ”

  Jane is the only one who calls me Mercedes and it’s one of the few things she does that reminds me she is my mom. She says if she wanted to call me Mercy like everyone else does, she would have named me Mercy.

  “I’m having fun,” I said. “I don’t need to go out.”

  I had one drummer come for an audition this morning, Ruth Shilogh. I had toyed for a while with the idea of having an all-girl band because I philosophically agree with the concept and I have a poster of Patti Smith in the Trap and everything, but the fact is that more than two girls in the Trap at one time becomes something other than a rock band. Boys are much easier to control because their motives are clear-cut. Girls end up talking about everything except the subject at hand—music, hello! —which is actually what Tim accuses me of—talking about a marketing gimmick for example—and he’s probably right. But it’s my Trap and I control the number and sex of whoever I decide to let in.

  Anyway, it was a relief that Ruth couldn’t actually keep a beat so I didn’t even have to make up an excuse not to let her drum in the band.

  “What was that supposed to be?” I asked her after we went through a bare bones Highway to Heaven. It wasn’t like she was way off, just a quarter beat, but a narrow miss in the rhythm section throws the whole band off.

  “I know, I know,” she whined, “But my mom thought being in a band would help. And I bought this jacket just so I could be in the band.”

  Ruth actually wanted to be a ballet dancer, but since she couldn’t keep time she was going to have a tough road there. Sometimes it seemed to me that there are so many people who are born excellent at what you want to do that you are disqualified before the race even begins. Like, Ruth. She has everything she needs to be a ballerina—she’s medium height and skinny and has incredible energy and poise and that tragic look dancers always have—but she can’t keep time. And you know there are thousands of medium height, skinny, energetic, tragic girls out there who can feel a beat. I feel sorry for Ruth in that regard, I really do. But I’m not about to be her freakin’ teacher. I have other things to do. Her leather biker jacket really did look cool, but it didn’t help her drumming. Music goes in one box and fashion goes in another. And how is that any different from my berets and fake military jackets? No different at all, if I’m honest. I hate that.

  Chapter 2

  Here’s the thing I need to tell The Griffin: When I turn sixteen in January I am going to drop out of school and move to Houston where there is a terrific music scene. Everything is on the internet so please tell me what I’m doing riding in a yellow bus like a prisoner going to highway cleanup or en route to pluck chickens with illegals at the Turbo Chicken Processing Plant behind South Mountain? Riding a school bus is just demeaning. And it’s not as if I have actually learned anything in school in the last year. The teachers spend three quarters of class time trying to keep the Gitanos Reyes from killing the Nuestros Barrios or the other way around and the rest of the time stressing out about the PSAA tests, which, if a significant number of students don’t
pass, the teachers will lose their pathetic jobs. I think, but don’t know for a fact, that teachers get demerits every time they send a kid to the principal’s office because once a kid goes to the principal’s office a lawyer gets involved in making sure the kid doesn’t get his right to an education—a right he clearly doesn’t want to exercise which is the funny part—trampled on. That’s probably why Jane doesn’t even pretend to care about her students’ moral compass, which Principal Thwaite is always harping on. The first day of school and every Monday in assembly she lectured us on how finding her moral compass saved her and if anybody knew what she was talking about you couldn’t tell because half of us were sleeping and the other half were texting “wtf is thwaite talking about?”

  Anyway, everything of value that you learn in school is on the internet: TED lectures, the Khan Academy, whose tutorials saved my ass more than once in trig class when I fell asleep during Miss Horvath’s endless talk on how her surveyor husband uses trig for scoping out building lots for new McDonalds or whatever. Everything is on the net and you don’t have to pity the teachers for their pathetic lives and unbelievably sad fashion choices—like Miss Horvath who is, Jane says, an old hippie who had too many abortions and couldn’t have kids when she finally wanted them and wears this thing over her shoulders that’s supposed to be a poncho, but it looks, I swear to god, like a table cloth with a hole for her head cut in the middle of it. I mean, what’s that supposed to be? I want to cry every time I look at her—because, unlike her, the TED people are smart and well dressed and don’t have to teach gang members for a living. Maybe that’s the difference.

  So everything I could possibly want to know is on websites and files and easily accessible anytime I need to learn something. Google “How to Write a Song” and a zillion entries come up. I must have looked at half of them. So, considering that I am not stupid, it amazes me that my lyrics suck and I always feel like I’ve heard them before. Maybe it’s because I was raised around music, riding inside Jane who rode the band bus and sang to me through the umbilical cord or something until I was born. Maybe I’m a plagiarist and don’t even know it. If I unconsciously steal someone’s song, does that make me a plagiarist or am I just tripping on the zeitgeist? That’s the one thing The Griffin gets on me for, not being original. Jane, too, now that I think about it, is always harping about being original. They both think you’re nothing if you’re not original. And my lyric box is empty.