“Okay, so, this one year, I must have been nineteen or twenty, because the band hadn’t started venturing far enough from home yet to miss the holidays,” he began. "My aunt Cassidy stood up and point-blank asked my uncle Glen who the woman was who kept calling the house and hanging up. My uncle swore up and down that there was no woman, even after my aunt threatened to call the number and see just who picked up.”
“Oh shit.”
“You know how in cartoons, when characters are watching a tennis match, their heads keep turning back and forth as they watch the ball? That’s what it was like at the table when they were sniping at each other. Forks were poised above plates, food completely forgotten about as everyone waited to see how it played out. Then my aunt pulls her cell phone from her pocket, dials the number, and a phone rings across the table from where my Uncle Glen is sitting.”
“No way.”
“Yes way. Turns out my Uncle Glen had been telling the truth after all. It wasn’t a woman’s phone; it was my Uncle Erik’s. He was married to Uncle Glen’s sister, my Aunt Marigold. I say "was" because, well, Uncle Erik and Uncle Glen are married now. While everyone else sat there too stunned to move, my Uncle Barry, he’s the one that lives in California, chuckled and made a crack about the gays beginning to outnumber the straights in the family.”
I nearly snorted my coffee when he said that. “See, that’s where he made his mistake right there, calling the house phone instead of your uncle’s cell.”
“That might have worked,” Rebel said. “If Uncle Gene hadn’t been firmly anti-cellphone at the time. Like I said, you never knew what was going to happen. I’m just glad I was at the table for that and not in the kitchen with the rest of the kids. It would have sucked having to wait for a secondhand report.”
“That kid’s table is no joke,” I said.
“It’s like being voted off the island.”
“Oh man, I never thought about it that way before, but it fits.”
In that moment, we sat there laughing as we finished our breakfast. We weren’t bodyguard and rockstar; we were just two men sharing history while learning all we could about one another.
In short, it was positively perfect.
Chapter 6
(Kit)
“And now it’s official,” Draven declared when I finished signing my contract. “Kit Michalson is the newest member of Blissfully Immune.”
We’d decided to live stream this moment, along with an extremely abbreviated story about why the band was adding a second drummer. Ozzy had yet to go public with the full details of what was going on with his hands, so for now, the less said about it, the better. It was a lot for him to process, and I hoped, by being here, I’d be alleviating some of the stress that went along with it.
Cheers went up from my new bandmates, who’d strung streamers off every surface in the hotel room and littered the place with balloons.
“We’ve got cake, wings, and a batch of Dash’s infamous punch,” Johnny announced. “It’s celebration time!”
“Wow, um, damn, I didn’t expect all of this,” I muttered as Ozzy pulled me into a hug.
Ozzy just snickered and guided me over to a cake shaped like a drum kit. “Cake and wings are the band's traditional celebration dinner. The punch was added later, after a couple of Dash’s cousins sent him the recipe.”
“What’s in it?” I asked, warily eying the lime green bottle.
“Rivers of tears and a thousand regrets,” Johnny declared.
“Green fruit punch, booze, and every wrong decision I ever made in my life,” Dash amended. “Seriously though, it’s an old family recipe. My old man made it for every barbeque. He’d hide it in the garage so us kids couldn’t get into it. It wasn’t hard to figure out that something interesting was in there, since all the cool adults were constantly wandering in and out of there with their cups. The look on my old man’s face the summer I turned 17 and my cousins and I siphoned the adult punch into empty gallon jugs and refilled it with regular green fruit punch was priceless. One of my uncles started bitching up a storm about the punch being weak, so Dad tasted it, frowned at the cup, then tasted it again, cursing, because he knew he put alcohol in there, but he can’t taste any.
“Did he ever figure it out?” I asked as I accepted the cup of punch Rebel handed me.
“Cheers,” Rebel said, touching our red plastic cups together.
I took a swig, shocked that the alcohol didn’t punch me square in the face. It was noticeable but not overwhelming, with enough tangy sourness to mellow the whole thing out into a pleasant drink.
“Oh yeah,” Dash said. “The moment he spotted my cousins and me passed out in lawn chairs beneath our old tree fort, a half a jug of the evidence leaning against the trunk.”
“I’d have been grounded until bell bottoms came back in style,” Ozzy said. “My mom was forever threatening me with that. Ozius Mikal, if you don’t stop beating those drumsticks on my counter, you’re going to be grounded until bell bottoms come back in style!”
“My old man said the hangover was going to be punishment enough,” Dash admitted, “and holy shit, it was. I woke up to him mowing the lawn right under my window, and then he decided to wash the windows on my side of the house, blaring Slayer the entire time. For an encore, he cooked liver and onions for lunch and served it up on hoagie buns with a big ol’ smile on his face.”
“Did you eat it?” I asked, grimacing at the memory of the one and only time my aunt had served liver and onions when I’d been at her house.