Emil DeAndreis
Scrotus Operondi was the result of six kids from high school band with nothing better to do than jam. On the weekends, we banged out songs in a dank San Francisco garage, emerging after hours blistered and hungry for chewy granola bars. Our first shows were in backyards or at skate parks under the shell of Sunday fog, where teens wore controversial shirts and pretended to be drunk and at risk. We recorded a six-song demo, the album cover of which was a sketch of hairy balls printed off a Laserjet. When we graduated from high school, we toured dive bars up through Mendocino, Eureka and Portland. Nobody paid attention to us or bought our demos, but we were cool with it. That was the thing about ska–you never felt alone in a band that big.
If you were watching late-night VH1 in the 2000s, you probably saw our music video for “Cherry Pie Hangover.” It was the one at the golf course with offended ladies in umbrella hats, and later the cops breaking us up. We didn’t get a permit for it, just set up amps and started shredding. That video was our breakthrough, got us on the Warped Tour in ’01, then headlining tours in the US and Japan. We weren’t Bosstones or Less than Jake, but we had a merch table and a section at Amoeba. People came to know me for my tank tops and top hats and for smoking cigarettes through my teeth during solos. A couple of our songs had these breakdowns that our bassist Lefty and I would jump to, and I can still picture dusk at Warped Tour, when the crowd, oranged by what was left of the sun, jumped en masse with us.
No one would’ve pegged me as the first to settle down and have a kid, especially in the years of couchfucking in the garbage truck dawn. This type of loneliness felt like art in my twenties, but by my thirties had lost its varnish, and as it did, Celeste appeared, someone for whom music was part of her life, but not her everything. She more acknowledged the evocative capacity of a song more than she felt it. She could tell you what Wordsworth poem Bob Dylan was alluding to. She could also name all fifty states. She knew about investing money, and how to grow a garden. Her body, exotically, lacked a tattoo. Living together, I learned of cross breezes, clean sheets. I did not embrace, but could understand the sanctity of a morning, and why Americans exploited each other for a life in the cozy medium.
The hospital released us with our son Henry two days after he was born. At first, he slept beside us in his bassinet, which looked like a building in a futuristic city. Swaddling him into a dolma delivered a sense of adequacy different than a kickass show, a left-brain right-brain thing. When the time came for Henry to learn to sleep by himself, we laid him on his back in his crib awake and confused. Outside his door I cried, imagining his small mind coming to terms with abandonment. With each month, my sense of helplessness acquired dimension. One morning, when Henry could walk but not yet talk, he pointed up at a neighboring balcony where there once lived a St. Bernard that fascinated him. The tenant had recently packed up and vanished with his dog.
“Dah dah,” Henry said quietly at the balcony, this being his communication for everything at the time. “Dah dah.”
He looked at me like he was trying to explain the emptiness he felt, or summon an explanation from me, which I did not have even with all my words.
Scrotus Operondi picked up a regular gig at the farmer’s market when Henry was a toddler. Our audience was mostly cartwheeling kids and their dads. We sunsetted our thrashy songs, converted them to acoustics with tambourines. This was a time of Henry sitting on a knoll red-cheeked, legs crossed under him. Never was he more intrigued by me than at these shows. At home, I was the dude who licked peanut butter off the knife with him, who pinned him to brush teeth, whereas here, his eyes followed me as though some instinct told him I was a spectacle. Scrotus incorporated little call and response oi oi parts for the kids, and in these moments I found Henry and we’d thrust our fists in unison. At home after gigs, I took his hat off and put my nose in his hot hair. What a smell that was. Grilled cheese, wet dogs.
At three, Henry unlearned how to sleep. The internet said this was common, his mind a cyclone of new information. For this regression, we got a noise machine, which was not an automatic solve. On bad nights, I dragged a blanket in and slept on his floor. I listened to his breaths slow, with an occasional trembling sigh. Sometimes his head would dart up, and I’d feel his eyes searching the dark. He’d stick out his hand through the bars of his crib. Holding it, I felt like I was escorting a timid alien into our world. Most of the time, the sound that came from the machine was an infinite blare, but occasionally, there were patterns and rhythms. If I rotated my head, I heard sounds that weren’t there. Swing era horns. Stadium chants. Nine Inch Nails distortion. Other times I swore I heard another baby, not Henry, as if calling from another universe it was trapped in.
By the 2010’s Scrotus Operondi had aged into an old house pet, low and high maintenance at once. At the farmer’s market, we put out a tip jar in case we struck a nostalgic chord in a venture capitalist. I wore Dr. Scholl’s inserts and our drummer, Teddy Turds, played with wrist braces. Our unspoken future was maybe one more album. Ska had undergone an extinction, which in my estimation was just a shade less humiliating than that of rap-rock. While it gave us hope to see other old genres graduate to retro status– Gen Z kids in Nirvana shirts– for now ska was a punchline. Thrift shops wanted nothing to do with your plaid or berets.
In middle school, Henry still came to our shows, but wore earbuds and stared down at his phone. We’d had a nice run of wearing matching shirts of our favorite bands–The Strokes, The Beatles–but now he’d moved onto earth tones, which I saw as a wish to be unseen. To try to be a presence, I worked on the homework he struggled with, but this was mostly me looking at the madness of Common Core and rubbing my eyes. When the time for high school came, the decision was less dramatic than we’d always envisioned. There was no friend group tugging him, no team recruiting him, no prestigious admission he qualified for. His neighborhood school was a school, and that was where it ended. We told ourselves there was nothing wrong with that, or him, or us; we went to our neighborhood schools, and we turned out fine, right? These assurances always wound up feeling like diet soda to thirst.
“What are you listening to anyway?” I said one night in our silence. Henry was eating dinner with his earbuds in, which was one of those things that alarmed us, but we had no way to tell if everyone his age did that; he had no friends for us to observe. We’d wondered if, among his peers, lonerdom was a kind of cool, as well as doing nothing. Henry had sold his guitar, hadn’t ever really taken to it. The furthest he went was an interest in production. For that, we’d gotten him some software and a keyboard for Christmas. The silence in his room that summer I assumed was him plugging away, learning to make beats off YouTube. But one afternoon, the technology was gone. He’d sold that too. To attempt a balm of perspective, I told Celeste that Miles Davis had once said the best musicians he’d ever known weren’t musicians, but she wasn’t having that; after a moment of looking off, she said– and I’ve never figured out if she meant this– that maybe Henry had a future in sales.
“Gamestreaming,” Henry said finally.
I topped off Celeste’s wine.
“Is that a band?” I asked.
Henry sighed and then touched his buds, ostensibly pausing them.
“It’s when you stream people gaming,” he said, pressing his buds back on.
Later, I sat on the couch scrolling Scrotus Operondi’s Facebook page. We had about 7k fans, mostly gray-haired people with tattoos and mild derangement in their eyes. We were engaging with fans more these days, replying to comments and giving away memorabilia. It seemed to benefit our band more than making new music. We had a new notification, a selfie of a woman in our beanie with the caption, “Snug w/ my fav band.” I reshared with devil’s horn emojis and the link to our merch shop. I scrolled through photos we’d been tagged in over the years, visited the profiles of the strangers who’d tagged us, clicked through their changing hair and wedding days and growing families. I woke up in the middle of the night on the couch and went to bed without brushing my teeth. The next morning, I had a text from Lefty: Noice.
A video had been posted on our page six hours earlier and now had hundreds of comments and shares. When I was on the couch, I’d somehow thumbed the “live” button and broadcasted myself triple-chinned staring into the screen. A thoughtless, ten-minute porpoise in reading glasses. The Scrotus group chat went back and forth all morning about whether we should take the video down. It was quasi-viral at this point–that couldn’t hurt us. Plus most people in the comments thought it was a performance, some kin of social criticism, performed by me. So we went along with it, allowed the public to think Scrotus was more than skater music, that with age we were getting abstract.It made its rounds for a few days
Summer before Henry’s senior year, he told us he was going to hang out with a friend. I searched his eyes for mischief. Had this happened before, Celeste and I couldn’t remember it. Lately she and I had been plotting how to get Henry to speak with a professional. Maybe there was a diagnosis, social or otherwise. A look at his school pictures over the years was a flipbook of a fading smile. But now the mention of this friend made our world feel fresh and possible. Even if Henry was lying, this was a brief triumph.
They hung out a few times, Henry and this mystery kid, before I asked if they were a boy or girl, and he said boy in a way that suggested I was not meaningful enough for him to be annoyed by my question.
“Well? What do you do when you hang out?” Celeste asked sweetly. I wanted to kiss her cheek and come away with its scent, take us back to our nervous coffee years.
“Videogames, Smash Burger.”
“How did you meet?”
“School.”
“How do you meet one at school?” I asked. “I forgot how that works.”
Henry squinted at me. I put my hands up in surrender.
“You ever wanna bring him over?” I pressed. “Wild as your activities sound, they could be carried out here as well.”
“Sure,” he said, which felt chilling.
Recently I’d been choreographing imaginary showdowns between us in my mind, Henry saying I took my cartoon band more seriously than fatherhood. I fired back that I was always here, waiting to give him whatever it was I had to offer. These imagined fights would reach a point where I said: “You were once so sweet you would hold up a book and crawl into your mother’s folded legs for the simple honor of having a book read to you.” But they never happened, just billowed and dissipated in my gut, leaving me in a putrid state of hope and dread.
On the Saturday that Henry’s friend was supposed to come over, I heard Celeste letting out loud sighs throughout the house like trains at stations. The sound brought me back to when she was nine months pregnant. She waddled and snacked in the day, and at night we watched foreign films and discussed them to distract us. When Henry’s friend arrived, Celeste’s shrill laugh, customary around new people, brought me out of my room. The boy introduced himself as Beckett and gave a performatively firm handshake. I appreciated it, which made me feel old. The boys took the pinwheel wraps that Celeste had bought them to Henry’s room, and Celeste and I listened to the sound of video game controllers being mushed. She and I made love that night, pulled at handfuls of each other, gasped words that had been unsaid in our house for years. After, we got stoned and grazed at our kitchen island, delighting over possibilities, like Henry participating in senior projects, trips abroad.
“What if he gets invited to go skiing or something?” she dreamt.
Henry and Beckett spent the twilight of summer together and entered their senior year as friends. It became ordinary to hear two voices from his room. Beckett and I had spare conversations. I’d caught his eyes on my forearm tattoos, the checkered flag and cheshire cat. He showed an interest in the guitars in the living room.
“So, Scrotus Operondi?” he asked as though phonetically working through a new language. The sides of his mouth hinted at a smile, then straightened out.
“Yeah,” I said. “Like, a play on words.”
“Nice,” he said with suspicious gusto.
“Do you listen to music?” I asked.
“Oh most definitely.”
“Like what?”
An expression crept back into his face. He chewed his cheek in his teeth. It made me feel as if there was a different conversation happening at a frequency I couldn’t pick up.
“All kinds.”
“An artist, or genre?”
“Not gonna lie, it depends on the vibes, am I right?”
I studied his face, which felt familiar somewhere in the folds of my consciousness, like a song from a childhood summer. He held my eyes, indicating he was experiencing the same connection. When he stuck his hand out in front of me, I looked at it briefly then shook it, again unnecessarily firm, and this time instead of being impressed I was wary; had we just come to an agreement or understanding? I felt vaguely territorial for myself, my family. I could snap this boy in half if I had to.
“Later sir,” he said.
When the boys had gone out–and where were they always going?— I asked Celeste if she picked up on anything weird from Beckett.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Like his eye contact, or something, gives me the feeling that I forgot to lock the doors.”
I shrugged and retired to my room under the pretense of important emails: a book called In Defense of Ska was coming out next year, and the author had reached out to our manager about documenting us in a chapter. We were debating whether appearing in the book would be advantageous or sad. I went back downstairs.
“I mean, do you recognize him at all? Is it possible we’ve met him somewhere before?”
“Dude stop. Henry has a friend. It will take more than some fishy looks for me to do anything but support them. I could catch them tearing each other’s clothes off and I’d ask if they wanted the lights off. You know? Come on.”
Her voice was burly. In a way I felt reassured by her opposition. It showed we were both, in our ways, on edge about the delicate potential of Henry’s new friend. That night, we were together on the couch, Celeste asleep beneath a quilt. On ESPN was an amateur golf tournament in Europe. A boy was shown eating an energy bar between holes, and I had a tender vision of his mother packing it for him that morning. The camera panned from one serious, wind-chapped boy to the next. With commentary on mute, I gradually felt like I was not watching the hopeful beginnings of careers, but documentary footage of kids tragically lost too soon. The aerial views were lulling. I was beginning to drift off when a wave of alarm fluttered through me; I had met Beckett before, and now I remembered where.
When Scrotus Operondi recorded the music video at the golf course seventeen years earlier, Lefty and I became interested in trying golf for real. We bought clubs and found ourselves back out there a couple nights a week. The course was a diorama of our San Francisco childhood, the Cypress trees and lean coyotes, the distant static of waves. Sure there were finance dudes but they weren’t always nauseating, and no one gave us shit for our punk shirts and high-laced boots. When Celeste was a few days from her due date, Lefty and I tried to squeeze in one last round. I’d imagined the night would proceed with him asking how I’d been feeling about being a dad soon, and I’d share that lately I’d had the sensation of drifting away from Earth toward the stratosphere without a rope.
We’d booked a late tee time in hopes of having the course to ourselves, but a boy was waiting at the first hole, studying us as we neared. His face was as smooth and repeatable as a toy, making it hard to determine his age. His eyes though appeared more calculating than a child. We offered for him to play ahead, saying we would probably hold him back, but he declined with eyes that told us nice try.
On the course, he walked what felt like inches behind us, which to a casual observer probably looked like the younger brother trying to keep up. When he spoke, it was typically unprompted, and suspect, as if he flipped a coin in his head to determine what to say. His parents were on vacation in Russia right now and we could come over and party if we wanted. He made 20k last month selling Jordans on eBay. Owls lived in these trees and in bleak seasons mothers let their weaker owlets starve to death to serve as food for the stronger ones. This meant eating and regurgitating her young. As the round wore on, the boy became worse at golf. I wondered if his clubs were too big for him; something about him seemed meek, collapsible, like the kind of kid whose parents had to beg to eat protein.
“I’m my high school quarterback,” he said at one point, and I felt his eyes search our reactions. It struck me that this must be customary for first encounters with him, these moments of everyone deciding what they believed, calibrating how to proceed. By my sixth beer, night had set in and I couldn’t tell where I was aiming. We told the boy we were going to have to call it. He decided to keep playing in the dark.
“A wise man once said you only get one life,” he said.
Golf clubs clinked in our bags as we descended toward the parking lot.
“I got a hole in one here once,” he called from where we left him; I turned around but he’d already disappeared. When we were near our cars, Lefty held out a crumpled piece of paper.
“This fell out of his pocket.”
“What is it?” I asked.
Beneath a streetlamp, we unfolded it: a letter from school stating he hadn’t been seen in months. Lefty called him The Nameless. He texted about him in the days that followed, coming across as mostly amused: We should start an emo side project called The Nameless haha. Eventually though, it was clear that like me Lefty was haunted by the encounter. Celeste detected something was off with me, because amid her exasperated breaths and bounces on her exercise ball, she gave me prolonged glances and asked if I was alright. I was preoccupied with the idea that at one point, The Nameless was a boy, sunscreened with a lunchbox, his life ahead of him.
LMK if you wanna kill him… There are some A+ joints to dump a body here…
I received this message from Lefty after texting him that The Nameless was back in the form of my son’s friend. I listed what the boys shared in common, their husked bodies and oracle eyes. I didn’t know what I actually thought was happening, if Beckett was a relative of The Nameless, or The Nameless had slipped through a tear in time, or if I was hallucinating threats to my family.
Lefty was 12 hours ahead. He’d taken a job with a company that produced DJ sets in stunning locations across the world. This week he was in Sri Lanka atop Sigiriya, an ancient fortress, with a DJ from Serbia. Lefty liked having a job in music, but tired of scrambling with cords and generators for these EDM artists whose waving empty hands bragged their lack of musicianship.
Follow them one day when they leave, he followed up. Case them out.
Lefty was probably at the hotel bar, a little too ready for this topic.
In what? My Saab? The most conspicuous piece of shit in SF.
Can’t be too careful with Nameless back in the picture. Forget magnifying ants, he’s probably money-muling and hacking into security systems, starting wars in Africa.
__________
Henry and Beckett come home from school and go to the kitchen, shutting cupboards, dropping dishes in the sink, and as quick as they enter they are gone. The door sounds to have been shut discreetly so as not to raise alarm, which of course it does. I look outside; Beckett’s car pulls off. I do not follow them per Lefty’s recommendation, but I do walk up to Henry’s room to investigate. For what, I’m not sure. The door is closed. For so long I’ve honored his privacy, only peeking when it is open. Today I turn the knob and enter. If he’s booby-trapped it to know it’s been breached, then whatever.
The room is odorless. No posters, just silvers and screens, wires connected and lifeless. My son, the neat exchange student. There is a sound that I have to close my eyes to locate: earbuds by his bed. I bring them to my ears, brace myself for a podcast on cheat codes. Instead, I am surprised to hear melody, a song that takes me back to Henry’s little breakfast voice, when he still called our satellite dish a kwash cymbow. I smell the diesel of my Saab fifteen years ago as I drive Henry home from soccer. I see his cleats, not yet touching the floor. In the stillness of the room, I wonder how often Henry listens to this music he first heard with me, and if the sounds now give him the same sense of irrecoverable life.
The sun warms my forehead against the window. With shuffle on, the album out of order gives an excitement so sweeping thatwhen Beckett’s car returns after thirty minutes, I am disappointed. I do not want to rush to place everything back where it was as though I was never here. I see Henry behind the wheel. Henry, who doesn’t have his license, or even permit. The car is stopped in the middle of the road and the boys are in conversation. Am I inventing that it looks secretive? Beckett reaches over, which gives me the feeling that I’m about to see something I’m not supposed to. The car begins to creep slowly backward. I am at a loss of what they are up to beyond a scheme, or crime. In moments though, Henry seems to be attempting to parallel park. The car inches but Henry doesn’t cut it enough. Henry pulls up and tries again. Mid-laugh, Beckett gives instructions but the car reverses on the same plane.
“Bro. Turn the wheel,” I say to myself, preparing to watch him stripe a car.
“You being creepy?” Celeste asks. I find her in the doorway looking tired. I sigh and hold up my arm. She walks over and into my body. I put one of Henry’s earbuds in her ear and watch as she orients herself with the song. There is her sweet look of epiphany, like her first ultrasound all over again.
“Don’t get any, big ideas,” she sings, and places her head on my shoulder. “They’re not gonna happen.”
Henry and Beckett are idling in the middle of the road. Their hands are out the window, waving cars to go around. As they do this, they are laughing so hard I can tell they can’t breathe. An old driver in a wide Buick refuses to pass, causing a pile up. People start to honk. Beckett hangs out a jolly thumbs up, which causes them both to keel forward, incapacitated by the hilarity. Celeste and I burst into laughter, our faces inches from one another, her smell without the cigarettes and leather of our first kisses. Memories replace memories about every ten years, I find, like sets of waves. I am less myself with each set, but a sad or pretty chord is only sad or pretty from the chord that came before it. Henry yells something out the window at the line of cars. I do not hear it, but I know it is him, I will always know it is him. He yells it again, and this time I understand.
“Almost got it!”