faultline
on the rope. “Are any of you innocent? You who have come out tonight with expectations of spectacle?” Johnny ties the rope around the trunk of the tree. The crowd silences. A few throw out “fuck yous” and Johnny lifts his chin. “Yes, fuck us all. This word with its neutered connotation that used to make the establishment cringe and now makes their movies authentically gritty, their music explicitly provocative, their sweat-shop T-shirts stylishly edgy. Yes, ‘fuck you’ has been good for business, thanks to our subcultural subversion. Fuck us all, indeed.” Johnny bows his head, motions the sign of the cross using his middle finger. The death-pendulum of his Epiphone slows. “Free Bird,” someone shouts. Someone else shouts, “Blitzkrieg Bop.” Johnny bends, picks up a rock. “I am not innocent, but I will take the lead. All of you may follow, like you always like to do, you sycophantic sheep.” He throws and the rock smacks the guitar’s back. The smack clangs through the Marshall amp, then dissipates into feedback whine. Oh-No realizes now that Johnny has plugged in. There is sound here. Sound he knows, wants, needs. Sound is what he prayed for every night as his dad stomped through the house, threw himself into walls, wailed about the end. As his mom chuckled over Wheel of Fortune, chanted at his dad, You’ll never have the balls to do it. “I lead us in cleansing ourselves of three-chord choruses and catchy riffs,” Johnny says. “The first stone is cast.” The crowd holds their breaths. Then a beer can sails. The crowd bows to pluck stones, and Oh-No remembers how at church they’d all kneel at the front, waiting for the wafer. When he was eight, he wondered if the priest’s palms sweated into the pieces of Jesus. He imagined the wafer salty. Christ’s body salty. But when he tried to go, his father weighted down his shoulder, whispered, “What have you done wrong?” Oh-No’s spine jammed against the hard pew. “This family does nothing.” Oh-No’s family was best at doing nothing. The gameshow reruns hissed and his father never needed a 9-1-1 call, despite his threats that tonight—every night was tonight, the night, this night—he’d open up all his veins or lodge bullets in his brain. Oh-No would tap his fingers against the mattress and feel a sound he wanted to make a million times louder. Louder than living. The Epiphone’s strings wail to one hundred rock throws. Wobbling flashlight beams illuminate a chipping black finish. Oh-No hops off the stage, bends to the dirt and sifts for a rock. He squeezes a jagged chunk of concrete. A flashlight catches a humbucker pickup hanging by its last screw. And then the guitar’s body gives, falls, will never strum another Fugazi cover or chug another Circle Jerks tune. Oh-No is too late to contribute, and he’ll have no part in this -8-