i really have no idea what to say in response to this, but i feel as though i owe you some sort of “thank you”. I dont really feel as though my work is THAT praise-worthy… esepcailly it being a rough draft and all. however, i appreciate the feedback, and you support most of all. I’m thrilled… and quite frankly… speechles. I’m glad you’re enoying it… you almost made me cry.
Novel Treatments / Garage Band Anthems Ch2
“I don’t think this is coming out of the ground, man,” Blake insisted. He put his might and fury into the task, pulling the metal pole, trying to free it from the ground.
I was smoking a cigarette, conscious of the neighbors spying form their windows. “Did you try just pulling the actual sign from the pole?”
In the midst of a light drizzle, Blake gave me a tired look. He leaned on the sign with one arm, and motioned for a drag of my cigarette. I handed it to him, and shoved my hands in my pockets, trying to figure out how to do this quickly and efficiently. I’d had my eye on this street sign for a long time, but being on the corner of a main road, with cops flying by every fifteen minutes or so, the objective had been a tricky one. . A street sign that says, “Mohawk Ave” is just begging to decorate my bedroom walls… accompanied by other stolen (ahem! collected) properties.
I looked at my best friend in thought, wondering why, in the pouring rain, with soggy ground, the sign wouldn’t budge. I kicked at the dirt several times, mud flying every which way, thinking how long it would take the numerous, riled residents to call the cops. I wondered this without concern or anxiety, but with anticipation. Half the fun of vandalizing is the retreat, the sirens, and often times the handcuffs. With mud covering my shoes, splattering up to my waist in globs and chunks, I struck something –not quite gold, but concrete.
Blake ditched the cigarette, and smirked at me. “The thing’s cemented in the ground.”
I looked around, thinking that, with such an obstacle before us, the reward was no longer the sign itself. The reward, my friends, is in the adventure, the story of it all. New obstacles infer creative methods and unruliness.
Reading the growing grin in my lips, Blake asked, “What are you thinking?”
It was only moments later that I had him in my dad’s pick up truck. Ten years old, with not a clue how to even work the clutch, I was stalling out several times before even making it to the main road again. Blake was sitting there laughing, saying, “Great, I’d rather get arrested, than wake up your parents.” My best friend, my accomplice… he had a good attitude about it all. He could dread the wrath of my father, and scoff at it in the same sentence. I, on the other hand, feared neither the authorities nor my family. My father, a regular military brat if you will, had done all he could to invoke some kind of fear in me… and fell short in doing so.
My father was a tyrant. I was a car theft. We were two peas in a pod – one in the same.
I somehow managed to rev the engine at five grand, only to launch head on into the sign… naturally snapping it in half as the pole itself ripped into the bumper and hood of the car – the windshield wrecked. Before Blake and I had time to realize the amount of damage we’d caused, a woman on the corner was running out in front of our car with a cell phone in her hands.
“Are you boys ok? How old are you? You’re not old enough to have a license! Yes, may I please have the police department? I’m here on South Sycamore, by Mohawk… that’s right. Yes, Sycamore.”
Laughing, Blake and dashed out of the car to retrieve our prize, the sign I’d been wanting for months. Never missing a beat, I had the car screeching in reverse before he could close the passenger door. With our trophy rattling back in the bed, and Blake so suitably noted, “Funny how quick you learn to drive this thing, when you’ve got to.”
I smirked as I blew through a red light – not in panic, but in the thrill of the moment. Red and blue lights raced after my father’s stolen Chevy, and I, Chase Hughes, wasn’t ready to surrender just yet. I pressed the clutch, and slammed the car into fifth, somehow a pro at a manual transmission, and perfecting the rules of the road. Blake’s upper half out of the window, giving the authorities behind us the good ole Jersey wave with both hands.
My best friend, smiling like some sort of perverse king, having no choice but to sit back down in his seat, or fall face first out of the car – he was liberated.
Blake Ferarro, do you remember those days?
I may not have known how to drive very well at age ten, but one thing I did know were the streets of my small town. I had the back roads memorized better than any ranger or hick within miles. I new the turns, the lefts and rights, and dead ends. I was grinding gears as I didn’t think to downshift, turning down a narrow trail.
“Here comes another one!” Blake shouted in excitement. “Ha! And another!” Three local police cars tried followed me down the trail, but it only took the first large mud puddle before we lost them for good. We bumped and crashed around in the truck, hitting the side mirrors on branches, and still somehow managing to see through the annihilated windshield. I snapped my fingers at Blake, silently demanding a cigarette. He lit one for himself as well, and said, “I wasn’t kidding when I said I’d rather have the cops take care of us.”
I took a drag, and exhaled. “You say you’re not kidding, but you’re still smiling. Besides, what’s the worst he can do?”
“You just destroyed his new truck. I’m pretty sure he’s going to kill you.”
I laughed along with him. We sat there, smoking in a vehicle that had never seen a match, much less a puddle or scratch in its lifetime. “Was worth it, wasn’t it?”
He grinned and slouched in his seat, putting his feet up on the dash. With a Marlboro red between his lips, he replied, “Always is.”
I recalled this occasion with a choking sob in my throat, and a sudden uneasiness. One fight ruined a history of memories… recollections that were shot to hell. There were no pictures, journal entries, video recordings, or songs written in remembrance of our past. No proof aside from witnesses. Hell, Blake and I had always managed to make the papers (a credit to our mayhem), but as minors, they kept our names anonymous. It wasn’t so much that no one believed us… anyone who’d been around long enough knew the spontaneity that Blake and I possessed. It was evident to any peer at school that Blake Ferarro and Chase Hughes running away on a Greyhound for the weekend, at fifteen and sixteen years-old, was nothing out of the ordinary. Getting arrested for possession, vandalism, or (my personal favorite) arson was just another day’s work. I didn’t have to prove to anyone who or what we were. I wasn’t exactly striving to pursue my status as a juvenile delinquent – I just was.
“That smirk is going to get you in trouble one day, Chase” my mother would tell me with a sweet smile of her own. “You get it from your father.”
That last bit was enough to make my twisted smirk diminish instantly. “You’ve got a twinkle in your eye like you’re up to something. This is all a faze… you’ll grow up to be a respectable man. Before we were married, I was always bailing your father out of jail.”
Moments like this kept the gears grinding in my mind. Does everyone forget? Will Blake disregard our good ole days the way my father did? Will he too become a soldier and forget how to smile? Will he rough up his children – backhand his sons for slouching or putting their elbows on the table? How does someone forget where they came from and who they were? Where has my best friend been for the past eight months?
I brought myself to grips with about as much reality as I could handle momentarily. Nothing shy of pessimism drove me to grant Scarlet the on thing she’d asked.
“What was it that the boys were talking about?” I asked her immediately,
Scarlet stood at the front door of her house, and opened the door wider, allowing me inside.
“I’m serious,” I demanded with my feet planted on those steps. “What’s going on that I don’t know about?”
Scarlet thought a moment, and hesitated. She slowly made her way outside, closing the door behind her. “I thought you didn’t care about it.”
“I thought about it, ok? What’s going on that I don’t know about?”
Scarlet knew better than to play games. She knew not to push me… not to send me straight over the edge. She knew what happened when that fist fight broke out – the one that tore my most beloved relationship – a friendship – to pieces. She knew what I could take and what had me tearing my hair out in handfuls. She knew that I had the animosity inside to rip a person apart in nothing more than self-defense. I could ruin a human being with my hands, but preferred to accomplish it through words.
Sticks and stones could have only broken my bones, but your words have ruined me.
Scarlet knew these things, and yet she provoked me anyway. “You put yourself in check sooner than I thought.” She smiled like she won a little battle of her own. I was getting tired… weary of butting heads with her. “Everyone has accepted the fact that he’s not coming home. Everyone but you, Chase – and you’re the reason he left in the fist place.”
I ground my teeth in frustration and defeat. Clenching a fist, I glared at her. “Don’t make me ask you again,” I warned.
“Do you remember little Corbing Ferarro?”
I was digging my nails into the palms of my sweaty, white-knuckled hands. “What the hell about her…”
Scarlet took a cautious step back… I could feel the redness swelling up to my cheeks – the blood boiling in each and every vein.
I half expected Blake to come running out of the shrubs by her front porch. It would have hardly been funny had he jumped out and pointed a finger at me, joking as he normally would, and said, ‘Joke’s on you! I never even left town! I’ve been here this whole time! What a sucker!’ It was in a moment of excruciating silence that I was once again drowning in denial.
“What’s the problem with her?” Scarlet asked, defensively.
“No one even asked me,” I said, ready to wail my fist at something – preferably Scarlet herself. “They had the temerity to replace him? You knew about this? No one said a word to me? I suddenly have no participation? What’d they go get another bassist too?”
“They wouldn’t do that, you know –“
“Well looks like they’re going to have to, doesn’t it?” I shouted. “Looks like Damon and Spencer just lost the best bassist for miles.”
“You’re being so ridiculous. You put a whole universe of talent inside of you into that band. You cant just quit because you don’t like how things are panning out. This is your fault, and for some reason you keep trying to get around that fact.”
I snickered at little Scarlet Hayes with a chilling glare that only my own pair of arctic, sinister eyes could personify. I wouldn’t let her have this one. “You keep pointing the finger at me Scarlet, and see what happens, ok?”
“She’s a good guitarist, you know. She’s better than good.”
I grabbed Scarlet by her wrist, and dragged her to the driveway. Whether or not her parents were home, watching from windows, or if she’d screamed until her vocal chords gave out completely was none of my concern. “You’re coming with me,” I demanded. Dragging her down the sidewalk, my bear hands clamped onto her frail wrist, she wasn’t about to object. She didn’t have to ask where we were going… she already knew.
My destination wasn’t more than five minutes away even with traffic lights on nearly every corner of the town. Scarlet had nothing to say in the car – the tread marks in her driveway were more than conversation alone could say. I had the music cranked up as high as it would go, but I wasn’t singing along. I wasn’t tapping my thumb on the steering wheel, or tapping my left foot on the floor of the car. Instead, I whipped around turns and ran through stop signs. Just after I peeled out of her driveway, Scarlet threw on her seatbelt. She sat erect, and gripped the seat I passed cars on doubled lines. She threw her hands over her face when I almost hit a pedestrian. Over the music, she shouted, “You moron! What are you trying to prove, Chase? Knock it off!”
I didn’t even dignify her terror with a mischievous smirk. My eyes didn’t sparkle with that triumph of victory. I lowered the music just enough so that she could hear me say, “Shut up or I’m sending us into the woods.”
I raised the volume again, and Scarlet said nothing the rest of the car ride.
The only satisfaction I received that day was the sight of Spencer’s ’67 Camaro parked in Damon’s driveway. I sent the accelerator through the floor as I tore into the freshly cut grass that was Damon’s own property. I left the car in the middle of his front yard, neighbors watching and all, and ripped Scarlet out of the passenger seat. I stormed through Damon’s front door, and (with Scarlet still dragging behind) made my way to the basement where I could hear Spencer railing into a drum set… playing solo.
“Chase…” Damon greeted me over the ruckus.
I shoved Scarlet onto the withered couch that we kept in the damp basement. “You want to talk to me about something?” I got in Damon’s face the way I did Blake’s.
Damon, lead vocalist of the band I cherished, a friend of mine from grade school and on, he backed away from me. He held his hands up in defense, in such a typical way. “What’s the problem?”
Spencer’s solo had abruptly ended, and he watched from a short distance. Silence reigned over the room, as I waited for Damon to answer his own question. My hands were shaking, my knees weak and ready to give out any second.
Damon’s eyes traveled to Scarlet, but my own remained fixed on him.
Rule of thumb in car sales: when negotiating, whoever speaks first loses. The same applies to scenarios such as this.
The guilt on Scarlet’s face gave her away. Her inability to look neither Damon, Spencer, and especially not I in the face had been a dead give away. “I’m sorry, Damon.”
“You’re sorry?” I demanded. I switched my tone over to Damon… who I could hardly stand to be mad at. I looked at him with sincerity and indignation. “You replaced him? It’s only been a couple of months.”
“Six months, Chase,” he said quietly… but not in fear of me. Damon was the last person who wanted to send me plummeting into reality. “I’m really sorry.”
I had no idea if my best friend was in New Jersey or across the country. I didn’t know if he was living large or eating out of garbage cans. I had no idea if he was dead or alive. No letters. No phone calls. Nothing.
“You just assumed I’d stay bassist?”
He sighed, not prepared for this. “I thought if you wanted it that badly, you would.”
“Oh ok, so you just wanted me to betray my best friend.”
“You did that already,” Spencer chimed in from the other side of the room.
Damon’s conscience forced him to stare at the floor.
“One argument,” I said with resentment in my tone. “One argument, and it’s my fault he never came back.”
“It’s not the point, Chase,” Damon tried. “It doesn’t matter why he left or why he’s not coming back, the fact is that he left us… he dropped all of us. You’re not his only friend, you know… everyone else misses him too. If none of this was worth sticking around for, then he doesn’t belong here anyway. I don’t care how good of a guitarist he is, he’s not serious about it. I want to make music… all of us do. We’re the best musicians this town has to offer, and I know what we’re capable of. You can miss him all you want, but don’t let that interfere with your future. You’re talented, Chase. This isn’t a hobby for you, it’s a lifetime of dreams that most people never fulfill. You’re crazy if you give up on us, too.”
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Kels66 reviewed Version 1 -
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Seaswept reviewed Version 1 -
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Brunny reviewed Version 1 -
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one in the same – I think is mean’t to be one and the same ?
faze – phase
Same as chpt 1 the story flows okay but some problems with narrator thoughts and character interaction, you may be better trying to seperate the narator from your main character, just a thought but it is a complicated relationship.
The first part was quite long to suddenly jump back to a different time, if you fleshed it out a little with more location feelings and descriptions you could have it as a seperate chapter.
Time jump from chapt 1 to chapt 2 was a little uncertain, my initial reaction was that the eight months was a mistake. It wasn’t supported until quite late in the piece but then it was 6 months – need to be careful with facts and figures as they are key information that readers record subconciously.
Just on the notes from chpt 1 you said this was the middle ? don’t see why this needs to be the middle, you appear to have a nice level of subplot happening to use into a main plot.
Just my thoughts
Good luck
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CeramicMessias reviewed Version 1 -
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Interesting character build. They seem to wrapped up in each other that it’s as if they miss out on the rest of the world. I can really see from your writing that they are extremely close. Maybe I’ll hear more about their relationship and how it developes later and I’d like to. They also seem so young and naive…. maybe its because they believe in their band so much that they dont see it realistically? Anyways, i want to see wehre this goes, write more.
JRQuick628 reviewed Version 1 -
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I read a earlier part of this story and still like where it is going. It is defianelty unique and I qouldn’t mid reading more of the next chapters. You have a few questions I would like to see answered and hope I can.
iiyamuzai reviewed Version 1 -
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This almost made me cry. Its so great. Its like the Platonic Bonnie and Clyde. Aside from a few spelling errors, this is very well-written. I love the character descriptions; I can honestly say they’re some of the best I’ve EVER read in a single chapter, or even a whole book. I especially like how Chase takes pride in all these faults he has, but won’t accept that it was he that drove Blake away. Even Damon and Spencer, who were only worked into the last bit, are well described and we get a great idea of who they are. Damon’s this really sweet, consciencious person; and Spencer’s kind of an ass. I adore it. I’m going to add this to my favourites, and I’m also going to add you as a favourite artist. This was the best read I’ve had in quite a while.
September 20, 2006
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time326 reviewed Version 1 -
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good peice, strong everything well done.
Jason reviewed Version 1 -
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Now, I reveiwed the first chapter as well, and again I identify with the characters. Which I don’t know, maybe they should evolve as the story goes on in order to learn a point. But thats just my idea. But other than that little thing nagging me it was good. Keep up the good work.
dead_poet reviewed Version 1 -
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the chapter two is even better and i really do like the title a whole lot. sorry i don’t have criticism. i think it’s all good but these are my favorite parts:
” I looked around, thinking that, with such an obstacle before us, the reward was no longer the sign itself. The reward, my friends, is in the adventure, the story of it all. New obstacles infer creative methods and unruliness.”
and
“The only satisfaction I received that day was the sight of Spencer’s ’67 Camaro parked in Damon’s driveway. I sent the accelerator through the floor as I tore into the freshly cut grass that was Damon’s own property. I left the car in the middle of his front yard, neighbors watching and all, and ripped Scarlet out of the passenger seat. I stormed through Damon’s front door, and (with Scarlet still dragging behind) made my way to the basement where I could hear Spencer railing into a drum set… playing solo.”
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