Nancy Springer - Rock My Soul.rtf

Rock My Soul

by Nancy Springer

* * * *

Her secret slogan was, “I don’t get mad, I get even.” With this motto in mind she sat pressing her bedroom phone’s redial button with grim per­sistence until she had gone into a trance of spite and was startled when she actually got through.

“Dedication Hour, this is the Soul of Rock and Roll, hel-LO! Who are YOU?”

It was the first time she had done this. She took a heartbeat to answer. “Michelle.”

“Michelle. Well HEL-lo Mike. Does anybody ever call you Mike?”

“No.” She was sort of the class nerd, too inward, always thinking too much, even though she had traded in her glasses on contacts. Who would call her Mike?

“Mickey? Shelley?”

“No.” Where did he get off making fun of her name? He didn’t even use his own name on the air, just called himself the Soul.

“Just plain Michelle, huh?”

Plain was the word, all right. “Yes.”

He gave up on getting a reaction out of her. “Well, what can I do for you, Michelle?”

“I want to make a hate dedication.”

“A hate dedication!” He pounced. “Oh, my goodness! How come? What has somebody done to you, Michelle?”

“Well. . . .” Well, why not? Auto­matically she edited her speech to sound more like a typical teenager and less like the geek she was. “There’s this guy, see, and we were supposed to go to the junior prom tomorrow night. And I’ve got the dress and everything . . . and today in the middle of the cafeteria he informs me he’s going with his old girl­friend instead.”

“No kidding! Like, what a slimeball!”

“Yeah.” For the moment she let it go that the Soul of Rock and Roll was an obnoxious deejay, his reaction felt so good to her. Though in fact she had not managed to convey to him a quarter of the story. The boy who had broken her heart was Robbie Diehl, a biker with a messed-up head and long bleached hair and a skull painted on the back of his denim jacket, the only cool guy who had ever liked her. She had thought she loved him. And what she had gone through to catch his eye, and get her father to let her date him, and make her mother buy her a prom dress he wouldn’t laugh at, was a soap opera in itself.

“He is really horse boogers, you know that?” the Soul expanded, using to the fullest the limited vocabulary he was allowed on the air. “Like, this guy is cow snot, Michelle.”

“Yeah,” she fervidly agreed.

“He did a tap dance on you, Michelle! Nobody should treat you like that. Tell you what. I, the Soul of Rock and Roll, am going to take you to the prom my­self.”

“Sure.” Her voice went flat again. Some people had the balls to make fun of anything.

“I’m serious! I want to take you to the prom. It’s tomorrow night, right? I’ll see you then, okay?”

She said sarcastically, “Right.”

“There, that’s settled. Now, what song do you want to send out to this piece of crud?”

She loved to listen to rock music, but the demands of her parents concerning her schoolwork didn’t leave her much time for it. No longer sure that she knew which were the cool songs, she said, “You choose.”

“All riiiight! Michelle, I got a song here I been just waiting for a real wad of scum to dedicate it to. What’s this guy’s name?”

“Robbie.”

“Okay, Michelle, your song’s going out to Robbie right now.”

She hung up and lay back on her bed, turned up her bedside clock-radio and listened. After a few lines of the song she started to smile. The lyrics made her feel much better.

You’re just a big ding-a-ling

Can’t keep your hands away

from your thing Look at you.

My oh my If you ain’t the

Lord Of The Fly.

That was Robbie all right. She hoped he was listening somewhere public, like the Sub Shop hangout where he used to take her. The Soul of Rock and Roll had done good.

A few lines into the next song, a sticky love ballad, the phone rang. Her parents always expected her to pick it up. Without enthusiasm Michelle did so.

“Hello?”

“Hello! Were you afraid it was going to be Robbie?”

It was the Soul. She recognized his brash young voice and wondered briefly how he had gotten her number when he did not know her last name. There must be some sort of tracing device at the studio, she decided. Tracing calls was not as big a deal as TV cop shows made it seem. Her parents had once ordered a trace to stop the nuisance phone calls she got from kids who didn’t like her in seventh grade.

She told the Soul, “I wouldn’t care if it was Robbie. I hope he heard that song. It was perfect.”

“Hey, I’m glad you liked it.” His tone had changed completely. “Michelle, lis­ten, I guess you think I’m kind of a prick, but that’s just on the air. Really, I — I’m a thumbsucker, okay? I hug my teddy bear every night and cry myself to sleep. Listen, I’m a lonely guy. If you still want to go to the prom, and if you need an escort, I really would like to take you.”

“Give me a break!”

“I mean it! Listen, it’s not like you’d look stupid with me. I’m only a little bit older than you.”

He had to hang up then and take the next dedication, then call her back. He had done this twice before she began to believe him.

“I don’t know. . . . What do you look like?”

“What do you want me to look like?”

“Would you get real?”

“Hey, I’m the Soul. You’d be amazed how real I can get. Who’s your favorite rock star?”

“Jon Bon Jovi.”

“You got it.”

“You kidding? If you come here with hair like Jon Bon Jovi’s, my parents won’t let me out the door.”

“Hey, Jon’s been talking about get­ting a haircut anyway. It’ll be cool. Trust me. What time should I come?”

“I haven’t said you should come at all!”

He said, “In time to take you out to dinner beforehand, right? That way if you really hate me. . . .”

He sounded hurt. She said, “Oh, for God’s sake,” and he knew he had won.

“I’ll pick you up around six, then.”

In the morning she told her parents that her best friend had arranged for a cousin to escort her, an obliging big-brother sort of boy, very nice. Though they did not say so, she could tell they felt relieved that she was going, not so much for her sake as for the sake of the money spent buying the prom gown, which might have gone to waste. Not to speak of the hassle spent buying the prom gown. Michelle’s mother had wanted long, lacy and pink, with white gloves and little puff sleeves. Michelle had wanted short, strapless and black. The compromise, lipstick red with swoop hemline, pleased neither of them.

Standing in the harlot-scarlet thing on prom night at six, pretending to fuss with her hair, already feeling the sweat crawling in her naked armpits, Mich­elle felt certain not only that she was going to be stood up but also that she somehow deserved to be. Sweet sixteen and almost never; who could want such a dweeb? Though she herself knew what she wanted, exactly what she de­sired of this magical night. She wanted someone good-looking and male to avail himself of the terrific access provided by her low-cut gown and touch her vir­ginal breasts. She wanted maybe even to stop being virginal. And with such sluttish thoughts she would be stood up, she deserved to be stood up —

A throaty rumble sounded in the driveway out front. Michelle hurried to her bedroom window, took a look and for a moment believed that fairy tales do come true: there in the warm late-day May sunshine sat an impeccably restored 1956 Thunderbird convertible, lily white. And getting out of it was a guy who looked like Jon Bon Jovi with Michael Damien hair.

Facing him in her living room a few minutes later, she began for the first time in her young life to understand the feeling of superstitious apprehension people get when things are too good to be true.

Her date did not look just like Jon Bon Jovi after all: he looked better. Electric-blue eyes in the shadow of his dark, dark hair. Face worth fainting over. And the mouth, that sensitive, mobile, wide and full-lipped mouth — somehow every singer she had ever worshipped was in that mouth.

What the Hell did he want with her?

Yet there on her mother’s sensible Sears carpet he stood, in a classic black tux — not a rental, that tux, it fit him too well, its fabric clung to the lines of his broad shoulders, its shining lapels were ever so slightly worn. It had to be his own, he wore it with an ease most guys gave only to jeans, and there he stood charming her parents with a well-bred young man’s poise and manners, and smiling at her. Smiling at her. Just a little, as if to tell her he knew she knew what he was doing.

Who was he? What was he doing?

Once her mother had mistily pinned onto Michelle’s red satin bodice the white corsage he had brought her, once under way in his purring T-bird, she asked him in a small voice, “What am I supposed to call you?” The name he had told her parents had been a joke only an adult would miss.

“Soul. What else?” He turned on his expensive, deep-voiced car stereo, and it played oldies, classic rock, stuff so good that she who listened to her radio all summer every summer should cer­tainly have heard it before. But she had never heard it, any of it.

“I thought maybe you had another name.”

“Hey, Mike, I got lots of names. Just call me Soul.”

“Where are you from?”

“Everywhere.”

He looked exotic enough for that to be true. Skin like tan satin. High cheekbones under those shadowed eyes.

“Soul, what are you doing this for, really?”

He looked at her, and his eyes made her think of both fire and ice. She knew her parents had been fooled, that he was not nice. The knowledge thrilled her; she felt as if she had straddled a beautiful, dangerous stallion. While she was with him people would look at her in awe; his beauty augmented hers. In answer to her question he said only, “You are exquisite in red,” and she knew she had a right to believe him.

“Want to cruise?” he asked her.

Of course she did. Just out of sight of her house she had removed her mar-ibou capelet and the rhinestoned spa­ghetti straps her mother had insisted on. Of course she wanted to be seen, in that wind-splitting albino bird of a car, bare-shouldered, her hair blowing back. With him.

She had the satisfaction of seeing heads turn all along the town loop.

“Hey. Can I tell my friends you’re the Soul of Rock and Roll?”

“You want to show me off? Radical affirmative, Mikeybabe. Where are the cool dudes and their dates going for din­ner?”

Into the city.

His charm was not only for her par­ents. By the time they got in sight of the skyscrapers he had her giggling. He took her to a tony place, bribed the headwaiter with a fifty because they didn’t have a reservation, walked be­hind her to the red-leather booth and slid in on the same side as her. From other booths some of her classmates gawked at her, or rather at the con­junction of her and him. Without di­rectly looking she saw their heads, spiral-permed or bristling with mousse, come up. The moment could have been made better only if Robbie and his pre­cious Apryl had been there.

No. She was better off not seeing Rob­bie yet.

Where was he?

Damn him, what did she care?

Soul ordered them wine with their dinner and got away with it. After the bobbing waiter had gone he turned to Michelle and said to her gravely, “Mike, before we go much farther there’s some­thing I want to get out of the way,” and he leaned over and softly, expertly kissed her. Startled, she stiffened but did not pull back, then surprised herself by laughing out loud. He settled back into his seat and grinned.

“There, isn’t that better? Now we can enjoy the dance. We won’t have to spend all evening wondering about later.”

She felt weightless with delight and terror, as if she could walk through walls and see mysteries. “You hot dog,” she said, though not at all harshly. “Who the Hell do you think you are?”

“I know who I am.”

She said, “So do I.” She said, “Just a backwoods kid, right? Born in a little place on a road with no name, right? A sharecropper’s cabin, maybe a row house in a steel-mill town. Your mother died when you were little. You never got along with your father. Always a rebel, always a loner —”

His head jerked around, and his eyes hushed her, frightened her for a mo­ment, not because they blazed blue as coal fires but because they looked so naked. He said, “How do you know all that?”

“I just know.” Because she thought too much about things, especially about the things schoolteachers considered peripheral, such as the music she heard on her radio and the Soul of Rock and Roll. And since he had kissed her, she felt bold and challenged and entitled to fluster him a little if she could. As if a friendly devil sat on her shoulder and told her the words she said, “You al­ways grew your hair too long, you fought everybody, you knocked your father down and ran away from home before you were through school. You had your first girl when you were twelve, your first drink before that. Probably drugs too.”

Without looking at her he said, “Reefers. That’s what we called grass back then. The hard junk came later.”

“I guess you did every kind of sex and drugs before you were done. You were an outlaw.” She spoke the last word not without admiration.

He said quietly to his hands on the candlelit table, “Don’t forget the gam­bling.”

“Right, okay, so you shot craps too.”

He looked at her then with a wincing smile. “You don’t know everything after all. The gambling was the best and the worst part. Not craps. I mean the kind I did onstage, with the guitar.”

“Right, I forgot to mention the guitar. About the same time as you got the first girl you would have got the guitar and learned how to make it do everything but the dishes.”

Straight to her he said, “Are you gonna listen to me, Michelle? Being onstage, singing to people, it was every­thing to me. It was my chance to be — accepted. I’d risk and risk for that. I’d put my heart on a platter, give my soul, spend everything I had on those faces in the dark beyond the spotlights if they’d just—”

His voice faltered. She reached over and touched his hand, finding it warm and very human, like his lips. “All right,” she said softly. “I’m sorry. We don’t have to talk about it anymore.”

“Don’t ever be sorry. Hey.” He re­covered quickly, giving her a madcap grin. “Don’t mind me. It’s like I told you, I’m still crying for my mama. Never gonna get all the way grown up like you.”

She made a face at him. Their dinner came; he didn’t eat much, but sat and played with the black lace gloves she had laid on the table. With hungry eyes he watched her swallow lobster. He urged her to order dessert. Smiled as she forked strawberry pie.

On the way out he handed her the car keys. “You drive.”

“You’re putting me on, right?”

“Don’t you want to?”

“Drive the Bird? Does a jock want to spit?”

She turned the radio up high, floored the Thunderbird up the ramp and onto the expressway, broke the speed limit all the way to her home town and its country club.

“Here?” Soul, loafing in the passen­ger seat, straightened and looked around as she turned in at the gates, showing dismay when all her wild driving had caused him none.

“Sure. Where’d you think it would be?”

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