Scratch and the Sniffs Read online

  “So let me show you what my guy contributes to the organization,” I said to the feet. “Yo, Scratch, fire it up, will ya?”

  Scratch then unzipped his guitar from its soft case, unstrapped the portable amp from his back, and plugged in. As soon as he started his loud tuning up—which sounded awesome, like he was sawing a cat in half—he had everybody’s attention. Ling lifted himself out of the back of the car, and Steven slid himself out from under it. Jerome and Cecil, who had begun explaining to each other what life was like on their respective home planets, broke off talks to come and listen. Lars bolted for his office.

  “Oh my god,” Jerome said. “What is that?”

  “Music, ya fool,” I said.

  “That’s not music,” he shot back. “It sounds like dentist’s tools.”

  “Shows you what you know. My boy’s a genius.”

  “No, I’m not,” Scratch said, then turned the volume way up high.

  “Ouch,” Jerome whined. “It feels like dentist’s tools. Somebody give me Novocain.”

  I balled up a fist and waved it at him. “I’ll give you Novocain.”

  Steven was into it, staring at Scratch as he worked. He looked like a real guitar god, his wiry, ink-stained body bent over almost in half, his golden hair hanging way down over his face.

  “Hey, he’s really good,” Steven said.

  Scratch nudged his volume up again, then slashed hard across the strings.

  “Hey,” Cecil said excitedly. “Are we a band, too? This is so great. Is there a washboard around someplace? I gotta join in.”

  I think we were all about to jump on that when we were stopped short by Lars, who came streaking down from his office, headed straight for our new He-Man guitar man.

  Party’s over, I figured.

  “Genius,” Lars yelped, rushing right up to Scratch.

  This worried me deeply, Lars and me thinking the same thing.

  Scratch didn’t even look at him. He just played harder, faster, louder.

  “You’re a punk!” Lars screamed. “Kid, you’re a real live punk!”

  The Killer jumped between them, standing right up in Lars’s face. “You want me to bop this guy, Scratch?” he asked.

  “What’s a punk?” the punk himself asked. I couldn’t tell if he was just toying with Lars. Lars makes you want to toy with him.

  “What’s a punk? Come on. I can tell by the way you play, you know all about them. You know, the Ramones, the Stooges, the Pistols. I know you know Johnny Rotten.”

  “We know Johnny Chesthair,” Jerome cracked.

  “Do you know Johnny Shut-up?” Steven cracked back.

  Now, this was fun. Maybe it was punk, maybe it wasn’t, but I certainly liked the atmosphere around the club now. This was the style I wanted for my regime.

  “Well, as a matter of fact, Lars,” I said, “we are starting a band.”

  All together, like one dopey choir, my boys all said, “Huunnhh?”

  “See?” I told Lars. “We already do harmonies.”

  “I was in a band once,” Lars said. “We called ourselves the Blood Blisters, and I could show you kids a thing or two about—”

  “You guys play music?” Scratch asked.

  “Of course we do,” I said.

  “We do?” Jerome asked.

  “We do,” I reassured him.

  “No,” he said back. “I don’t think we do.”

  “What do you play?” Steven asked me.

  The problem I had here was, my guys had no imagination. They took everything so literally.

  “I, you know, play this and that.”

  “So tell us, what’s this?”

  You’re really starting to bug me there, Steve-o. “I’m the manager, okay?”

  He smiled. “And what is that?”

  Grrrrr. “I … sing,” I muttered, to my own great surprise.

  Well, if nothing else, I had managed to bring more humor to the club than our two previous leaders combined. Coincidentally, they were the very two who were now laughing so hard I looked around the garage floor for a stray tonsil or two.

  “I said something funny?” I asked coolly.

  “Anyway, we were the hottest band in town for a while, no kidding …” Lars plowed on.

  “I want to play the drums,” Ling blurted.

  Everybody stopped. We turned our attention to Ling-Ling.

  “Ever played the drums before?” I asked.

  “No,” he said.

  We waited.

  “But I know where I can get some. My grandfather used to play in a silent movie theater band.”

  “You’re hired,” Scratch said.

  “What, are you joking?” I asked Scratch. “Just like that? Is that how you select instrumentalists?”

  He shrugged. “That’s how all bands do it. Whoever has a drum kit is the drummer.”

  “I wanted to play drums,” Steven said.

  “I wanted to play drums,” Jerome said.

  “Tough,” I said. “You can’t all be—”

  “Why not?” Scratch said. “Ling, is it a big drum kit? Could you share?”

  Ling nodded. “But I want to play that big giant drum myself.”

  “Oh, this is stupid. One guitar and three drummers …”

  “Don’t forget my washboard,” Cecil said.

  “Oh no, we wouldn’t forget….”

  “And of course,” Lars added, “I have my own—”

  “Get outta here, you,” I barked. “Go fix a car or something.”

  Scratch was laughing now, for the first time since I met him. “This is gonna be fun,” he said.

  “If you say so,” I said. Then I rolled up close to whisper to him. “All kidding aside, Scratch, you will teach us, right? So we don’t make butts of ourselves.”

  “Teach you what?”

  “You know, teach us to play.”

  He laughed some more, his mouth opening all the way to show that just about half of his teeth were missing. “I don’t know how to play,” he said. “That was just screechy-noise I was doing before.”

  I deflated.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, putting a hand on my shoulder. “It doesn’t matter anyway. Knowing how just gets in the way.”

  I wished I’d said that.

  “What’ll we call ourselves? That’s the most important thing,” Steven said.

  “Well, I figure we should try ‘The Wolf Gang,’” one of us offered. “It’s got kind of a ring to it.”

  “Kind of a gong to it, you mean,” Steven replied.

  Scratch just shook his head. “You don’t name a band after the manager. You name it after the guitar player. Everybody knows that.”

  Scratch. Scratch?

  “No,” I said.

  He quietly started packing up his stuff.

  “Okay,” I said. “But ‘Scratch’ sounds like it’s just you. We need to be ‘Scratch’ and the … Somethings.”

  Once again, as in all our times of need, Ling-Ling stepped up to the plate.

  “I got this card,” he said, holding the card up in the air and examining it. “It fell out of my American Survivor magazine. It’s an ad for a deodorant for hunters called Moose Musk. See, what you do is you scratch this little circle right here—”

  “Yesss!” I said, and Steven seconded it.

  “Yeeee-haw,” Cecil yelled. “I love it too. Scratch and the Moose Musk.”

  Jerome jumped up. “I can’t take much more of this,” he squealed. He walked right up to The Killer—who was about three Jeromes tall—and started poking him in the belly with his sharp little index finger. “Scratch and the Sniffs, Huckleberry! They want to call us Scratch and the Sniffs!”

  Jerome was still poking the stunned Killer as I rolled it around. Scratch and the Sniffs.

  “I like it,” I said, making it official. “It’s pungent.”

  4

  The Rest Is History

  DAY ONE OF THE great musical venture. I arrived at the door to Lars
’s garage to find He-Man Cecil sitting there on the sidewalk strumming—no, he was not kidding—his washboard.

  Chikka-ching, chikka-ching, chikka-chikka-chikka-ching.

  At first, I couldn’t even speak. And we all know how unusual that is.

  I hovered over him as he played, his long legs spread out across almost the whole sidewalk from the base of Lars’s cinderblock building to the curb. He looked up at me with a simple, pleased smile, as if I would find all this entertaining.

  “Don’t you ever get embarrassed about anything?” I asked him.

  “Not most days, no,” he answered cheerfully.

  Then I noticed the big brown jug at his side. “Ah,” I said, pointing at it. “This explains a lot. You’re a drinker. Now it makes sense.”

  Cecil laughed. “That ain’t for drinkin’, that’s for playin’.” He put down the washboard—good—and picked up the jug—less good.

  Ooom-pah, Ooom-pah, Ooom-pah, Ooom-pah, Ooom-ooom-pah-pah-pah.

  “Stop that,” I ordered. “That’s enough now. Get all this stuff inside before people notice us.”

  People had already noticed. A man in a business suit stuffed a dollar into the mouth of the jug on his way by.

  “Don’t encourage him,” I said to the man.

  “Thank you, sir,” Cecil chirped, then gave the jug a shake. It jingled.

  I peeked into the jug. There was a blanket of silver and green at the bottom.

  “You made all that this morning?” I asked.

  “I gotta tell you,” Cecil said. “I thought Muscle Shoals was nice, but this is the friendliest town I ever been to. And do they ever appreciate the arts.”

  “Scratch probably wouldn’t make that much in a year,” I said, more to myself and to the gods of glorious money than to Cecil. My manager muscles were twitching like mad.

  “Let’s get inside, Jug-head, we got practicing and tour-planning to do.”

  “I don’t think I partic’ly care for that Jug-head term.”

  “Oh no, it’s a compliment. It means your brain is too big for any normal-size head….”

  Scratch was already there, practicing his chops.

  “This is good,” I said. “I like this. As manager, I have to say I’m very impressed with your work habits, Mr. Scratch. Brand-new to the He-Man Women Haters, and already you’re arriving to meetings before anyone else.”

  “Ya, well …” Scratch said sheepishly.

  “Ya, well … go on, why don’t you tell him?” Lars said, a little agitated.

  “Tell me what?” I wanted to know.

  “Tell you the reason I’m here first, he means. The reason I’m here first today is because I was here last yesterday.”

  “And all the time in between,” Lars added.

  “Oh,” I said. “I see.”

  “What?” asked Cecil, bringing up the rear of the conversation. “Did you forget to go home?”

  I just looked at Cecil. That’s all you can do with him, really.

  “What home?” Scratch mumbled.

  Everyone was quiet then. What do you say to something like that?

  Lars came up with something. “Ya, well, the rotten punk ate a whole can of Pringles and a tub of peanut butter out of my office.”

  Cecil whispered in my ear. “Now, rotten punk, is that a good—?”

  I shook my head. “No, it’s the other kind.” Then I turned back to Scratch. “You don’t have anyplace else?”

  The slamming of the door broke things up for the moment as Steven and Jerome came in.

  “Nephew, we need to discuss your new boy here,” Lars said, pointing at Scratch.

  Steven walked the length of the garage, approached the group, passed the group, and went right to his car. “That one’s not mine,” he said, sitting behind the wheel of the Lincoln.

  I turned to start up with Lars, but Steven interrupted things again.

  “Hey!” he yelled. “Where’s my steering wheel cover?” He bounded up out of the car. “The original, leather steering wheel cover that felt so soft and nice in my hands. Where is it?”

  “He ate it,” Lars said, again pointing to our guitar player.

  We all turned to Scratch now.

  “That can’t be true,” I said.

  Steven stalked toward Scratch, who started backing up. “That was a forty-year-old piece of leather,” he growled.

  “I guess that’s why it was so tender,” Scratch said.

  That was it, of course. Steven threw himself at the much bigger Scratch, but I guess Scratch was one of those lover-not-a-fighter types, because all he did was cover up. I laid rubber wheeling myself between the two of them, and when I got there we discovered the real heart of the matter.

  “… show you who’s boss …” Steven snarled as he locked his hands on my shoulders and tried to wrestle me down.

  I suppose it was only right that Steven and I should do a little brawling for the new guys. We shouldn’t have any secrets in the HMWHC.

  “Okay then, Mr. Chesthair,” I said, and grabbed him by his shoulders. He pulled, I pushed, and the two of us rolled from the wheelchair onto the greasy garage floor.

  “Oh my god,” Cecil said. “He’s attacking a crippled person. I never seen nobody do nothin’ like that before in my whole entire life.”

  “No?” Jerome said in a bored voice. “Stick around, you’ll see it here all the time.”

  I was trying to get my famous death grip on Steven, but it was a lot of work: the sneaky sonofagun, he’d been working out behind my back. His arms, his chest, his back, they all felt bulkier than last time I laid a beating on him.

  Bang! He got a hand loose and slapped me straight in the forehead. So I took a fist and clubbed him in the chest.

  I love that gasping sound he makes when I do that.

  But really, I found that it wasn’t as much fun as it should have been. Because, well, he was right. He was already feeling bad because I was in charge of the club that used to be his, and then I brought in a guy who was eating parts off his car.

  I felt bad for him.

  Whoa. Who said that?

  I owed him something.

  “Ouch,” I said when he got me in a headlock that really didn’t hurt that much. Then he squeezed tighter, rolled me over, and pinned me to the floor.

  “There,” he said, and gave me one last little shove as he got up off me. As I lay very flat on the floor, ten feet away from my chair, Steven started walking toward his seat in the car—the place he usually goes to decompress—when suddenly he stopped, turned, and stared at me.

  I was cool. Started humming, stared at the ceiling, tapped my fingers on the filthy floor.

  He came over with my chair, offered me both hands, and helped me back up into it.

  Not that I really needed any help.

  When the dust had settled, Steven and I were hardly even an issue anymore. Cecil had already picked up on the club trick of ducking under the Lincoln for escape. Jerome was over in one corner helping Ling-Ling with the entire percussion section he’d carried in on his back. Scratch was off in another corner trying to fend off Lars.

  “So we’ll call it a wash,” Lars said. “You don’t have to pay me anything for the Pringles, and you let me play with your band.”

  “Ummm, I really don’t know …” Scratch said.

  I hurried to his rescue. “What’s the matter with you, Lars? All your own friends off at summer camp or something? Go play someplace else.”

  “All right then,” Lars snapped. “I’ll go play someplace else. But so will he. No more living in the garage.”

  Scratch shrugged. He really didn’t seem to care one way or the other.

  “Wait,” I said as Lars stormed away. I looked at Scratch, who was plucking quietly at his strings. I felt sorry for him.

  That was twice I felt sorry. In one day!

  I knew I was going to hate myself in the morning.

  “What do you play, Lars?” I asked in a whispery, cautious voice.
r />   He was psyched, much more excited really than a person his age should get. “Guitar, of course. Just like him. Only better, because I’m a pro.”

  Hated myself already, well ahead of schedule.

  “Well, Lars, maybe we could let you just sit in with us, once in a while, after we hear you play.”

  “Yeeee-hoooo!” he said, jumping up and kicking his heels together like the green moron on the Lucky Charms commercials. “I’ll bring my axe tomorrow,” he said as he skipped off to his office.

  “You do that,” I said. “You bring your axe, and I’ll bring mine.”

  Scratch and I looked at each other and sighed. “How bad could it be, right?” he offered.

  I shivered.

  The six actual members of the club—the deep six—gathered around Ling’s grandfather’s big old drum kit. Ling, Jerome, and Steven, our drum team, were already negotiating their parts.

  “But why?” Jerome moaned. “Why, why, why am I always stuck with these jerky, demeaning jobs?”

  “There is nothing wrong with being the percussionist,” Steven said as he clutched the snare and tom-tom with what was left of his might. Ling-Ling had already made it clear to everyone that he was claiming the family right to his grandpap’s bass drum. Ling was happy. Steven had then carved out his territory with the other two drums. Which left Jerome with … the other stuff.

  “I quit,” Jerome huffed.

  “It’s no reason to quit,” I said. It probably didn’t help that I was laughing at him while I said it.

  “See, Wolf knows. Only the geeks get to play this stuff.”

  “Hey, there have been some hot tambourine players in music history,” Steven said.

  “Shut up,” Jerome said.

  “No, really, the Beach Boys have one, I think.”

  Now Scratch started laughing.

  “And I saw some at the airport in Atlanta when I flew up from Muscle Shoals,” said a very helpful Cecil.

  “I mean it,” Jerome said, his little head throwing off steam in the July heat. “I’m really going to quit over this one.”

  “And there was that little girl in the Partridge Family,” Lars called from way off. “She was a dynamite tambourinist.”

  “Right,” Jerome said. “And what else do I have here? Triangle. I get to play the stupid triangle! What do you think, that I don’t know what this means? Playing triangle makes you like king of all the dweebs. Look at school bands—which are filled with geeks to begin with, right?—even in the school band, the lowliest lame-o of them all gets assigned to ping the triangle. Even guys in band beat up on the triangle player, and that is as low as it gets.”