As Cruel As School Children, An Album As Short Story (in progress)

Fiction As Inspired By the Gym Class Heroes’ 2006 album “As Cruel As School Children

“Palisades High School has had some really dope bands, man. The Smokeshifters had a cool skate punk thing in the 80s, Massive I.C.E. is the only gangster rapping valedictorian who averaged 46 points a game in the history of Vermont State High School basketball, and now, there’s us, Over The Edge. It’s crazy. Five dudes, doing it for the glory and yeah, the chicks! High school rock! Yeah! But I’m joking, though. We had a six-city run in like, Iowa and Nebraska last semester. That almost broke us. I flunked midterms, yo. Algebra II and Honors Chemistry. But Crossing Brooklyn Ferry had the number one song on the college radio charts, so it was an opportunity we couldn’t turn down.”
- quote from Over The Edge bassist Aleksandr Pedersen taken from an article entitled “Are Over The Edge Up Next For Stardom?” published May 19, 2006, Palisades High School Sentinel

Aleksandr Pedersen is the bass guitarist of Over The Edge. OTE’s the kind of band that, if you did things like read Thrasher Magazine or play Tony Hawk-style “Skate or Die” video games, is a band you know will be huge one day. His school, Palisades High, is in Fairlee, a town almost dead smack in the middle of Vermont, with a population of 1,000 residents. The most exciting thing that happens in town is roaming down the five-mile ice skating trail that empties out to the frozen pond where the hockey tournament happens every year. Yeah. Exactly. The best skateboarding? Well, aside from listening to James Jamerson playing the bass on Motown hits, that’s what’s cool to him. The skating in Fairlee is “hella rad, kinda” and it’s best under the bridge that leads to Chapman’s General Store.

Aleksandr is the son of Doris X. Sanchez, 52, an America’s bicentennial year graduate of Dartmouth College with a major in Political Science who went to college with a MacArthur Fellow, ten CEOs, four American governors, Ronald Reagan’s speechwriter, and two NFL Pro Bowlers. However, instead of achieving similar acclaim, she, according to her mother, Tanya Sanchez, 67, a Dominican immigrant, of West Orange, New Jersey, “stayed up there with them hippies after pissing away a college scholarship. Got hooked on weed, LSD, and being a half-black, half-brown girl with a kinky ass afro, down with some Socialist Islam Hotep bullshit.”

Doris met Tom Pedersen, 40, a pipe welder, at the Juleafter Danish Holiday Bazaar located directly off of a stretch of Route 5 in Caledonia, Vermont on December 18, 1988. What intrigued her at first was Tom’s 19-inch biceps directly aligning with the seams of the sleeves ripping on his fading forest green and electric yellow “John Denver 1985 Farm Aid Crew” t-shirt.

Moreover, his bleached blonde mullet crown of hair and blue to damned near faded white, tight-fitting jeans tucked into blood smeared Timberland boots grabbed Doris’ attention. Back then he still had an excitingly peculiar touch of an actual Danish accent when she asked him where she could find the tins of Royal Dansk cookies at the market. As well, his cracked front tooth and Lombard Street of a broken nose from years of recreation league hockey made the soft violet hue in his cerulean blue eyes stand out like a shot in the dark on an otherwise rugged and weathered visage.

Aleksandr was born two years later after Tom and Doris got shotgun married following an incident where Tom and Tanya got into a fistfight at a Living Colour benefit concert at The Ritz Nightclub for Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress. Tom had gotten Doris and her mother into for free because he was a roadie for the show, and all things considered, it was a big deal. However, at this point, Doris was an alcoholic, and around midnight, thought that Tom was grabbing Madonna’s ass. Not that this was true, but this played into the narrative that Tanya had of this 6'5" and 240-pound musclebound Nordic freak that Doris, her air-headed failure of a daughter, had brought home to visit.

Doris was born three months early after a pregnant Tanya was pushed down a flight of stairs in a Lower East Side tenement house. This horrible event took place when her husband, Paul — a honey-skinned, dread-locked, and sleepy-eyed hospital nurse and failed Jamaican Olympic shot putter — got laid off from his job and reacted violently. To Tanya, the idea that a similarly muscled and differently handsome man was now in his daughter’s life frightened her. Thus, when she saw what she believed was impropriety, she sprang into an attack, her square, stubby, and French-tipped manicured nails ripping violently into his eyes with the fervor of 35 years of pent-up angst and depression.

Later that night, a mortified Doris and a battered and bruised Tom settled into a Times Square motel. As the sounds of pimps peddling streetwalkers, car horns bleating, and what seemed like a loop of Run-DMC’s “Run’s House”blaring outside, Tom spooned Doris in bed. Her afro was clumsily in his face, as they laid there, naked, slightly uncomfortably, in a double bed, on an unseasonably sticky February night.

Nine months later, eight-pound and 13-ounce Aleksandr Pedersen debuted in a wail of shock and a hail of tears from Tom, proudly gripping his new wife Doris’ marriage band bedecked right hand. Impressively, it was a short three-hour process from water-breaking to childbirth. Aleksandr was college Socialist Doris’ contribution. It’s a Russian take on a Greek name, meaning “defender of men.” Pedersen, Tom’s surname, was a Danish name, meaning “son of Peder.” It is the fourth most common surname in Denmark and sixth most common in Norway.

Eighteen years later, here’s Aleksandr Pedersen. Rockstar, leader of men, son of Peder. Over The Edge has just sold out the vacated Filene’s space at The Maine Mall, and their goodbye concert at Palisades High School is in two weeks, in front of 300 people, at the Palisades Senior Prom. Though he’s just given Palisades Sentinel editor Arthur Montenegro an uplifting interview, he’s emotionally bereft. Aleksandr has no desire to play this gig. He would much rather be attending the prom. But, as things work out, Sarah McGonigle is no longer his girlfriend and is going with Tyler Ashton instead. Tyler. The “voted most likely to succeed,” of the third-generation logging magnate family Ashtons. Of the no way in hell he was going to succeed Ashtons.

“Bernadette Simmons. Loves the band. Maybe she’d go?”

Bernadette Simmons patiently sat at her brown and black, marble-stylized, formica-laminated kitchen table. Her wavy black hair was wet and matted down to her head, dripping onto the black metal folding chair with the glued-together left back leg that, when pressure was applied to it, dug a divot into the yellow and white, checkerboard-tile on plywood kitchen floor. Bernadette’s hair was wet because there were newly white-blond dyed strands currently foil-wrapped and seemingly glued to her left temple.

Dezze Lucas, Bernadette’s best friend, was standing in front of her, with a just-heated sewing needle pointed at her right nostril. Dezze was the thinly-muscled, 5'11" outside hitter for Palisades High School’s currently 3–11 women’s volleyball squad. Dezze was short for Desdemona. Her father was Erik Lucas, a literary agent noted for having sold over $50 million in translations of Shakespeare from Old English into Spanish for high school students. Her mother was Eileen Merriweather, who you may remember as the third waitress in that one scene of that TV show you saw that one time on CBS. She wasn’t exactly a great actress of the 1970, 1980s, or 1990s, but she parlayed being Yvonne Ellman’s second understudy for Jesus Christ Superstar into something of a career until, well, let Dezze tell it, “my mom got up on the table to shoot me out of her pussy and she fucking kicked the shit out of the bucket.”

Eileen met Erik in Tijuana in 1986 while Erik was head deep in a pile of cocaine while simultaneously eating tilapia tacos at Loreto’s Restaurant on Avenida Revolucion. Eileen was in-between acting gigs and stumbling, 10 tequila and Pepsis later, out of Dandy del Sur and in for a dinner-as-hangover cure. “HOLY SHIT” she exclaimed upon seeing Erik, bald, reddish pink-tanned, and wide-eyed wearing a threadbare pastel blue t-shirt that read “VAMOS ARHENTINA 86” in crinkling puffy letters, along with Ray-Ban aviator shades inside at 3 AM. “Baile baile” he excitedly exclaimed, pointing at the white, granulated mound sitting on the table and massive soup spoon sitting next to it. Eileen cackled, throwing back her Farrah Fawcett crown of brunette hair framing her angular, pointed-jaw face that showcased the London by way of Cairo roots of her family’s lineage.

“Fuck, dude. No way in hell. But are those TACOS? I really want a fucking taco right now.” With that, Eileen Merriweather reached down, and swiped both a taco off a chipped blue-edged, and poorly-aging white china plate, but also Erik’s heart forever.

Dezze was born in Plainfield, Vermont. Erik’s career as a book translator had reached just enough success to the point where he could, in awareness of his own addictive behavior, check himself into the Spruce Mountain Inn rehabilitation facility in 1987. Eileen was newly-married to Erik, pregnant with Dezze, and before Erik left for Vermont, he gave Eileen a $75,000 advance check to take care of her life and expenses while he was away.

Dezze, and yes, that’s what the birth certificate says, got her name from Erik, whose mother and father died in a car accident when he was two. He was raised as a ward of Santa Cruz, County, Arizona. Sister Desdemona was his favorite aid worker from the Catholic aid mission just over the border in Sonora that was responsible for teaching him flawless and un-accented Spanish. Dezze was named as soon as Eileen discovered the sex of the baby, in a phone call that took exactly 45 seconds because Erik was running late to a group therapy session. Eileen hung up the phone, and suddenly felt very…very…alone.

“Dezze homie, you got a weird shaped head, but them bangs you’re rocking totally hide it.” Bernadette was pretty much the only person in the world allowed to make fun of the fact that Dezze was pulled out by forceps by a team of doctors trying to figure out how pushing out her child caused Eileen Merriweather to go into sudden cardiac arrest.

“Bitch, I got a hot ass needle at your nose and NOW you make jokes? Cute. But whatever. I pierced Aleks’ nose last week and he said you had a mean ass booty. Lady, I don’t even know what he could mean by saying that, but he IS single AND we’re going to prom to hear them tonight.”

Dezze met Bernadette at junior varsity volleyball tryouts in freshman year of high school. Bernadette played volleyball because it was the only summer youth sports program they offered in Fairlee that summer for girls. Bob Simmons blowing out his knee in the eighth grade is the only thing that kept him from the National Hockey League. He was 6'3" back then, 240 pounds, and one of those freakishly athletic kids who, in 1962, was outscoring Bobby Orr in a youth hockey tournament until his knee buckled. By 1988, Bob was 40, and the top-selling used car salesman in all of Vermont.

Trenelle Walker was 17 in 1988, and after failing to place at the Miss Florida Teen tournament, was wearing her brand new retainer after having her braces removed at the National Independent Automobile Dealers Association Convention. The event was right down the street from the split-level apartment building in which they lived in Orlando, so her mother, Tanisha, told her to go up to the event and ask to model. Tanisha was 15 years older than Trenelle, and both wore heavy nude-colored pancake makeup to hide the blotchy skin and acne that was the result of their high-fat, full-starvation diets.

Both Tanisha and Trenelle literally ironed their hair bone-straight to the point that it swayed in the wind and laid like a flat bedsheet against their frail, yet beguiling physiques. Trenelle was well on the way, or so her stage mother/pageant coach/welfare and insurance payment from 70-year old dead husband mom Tanisha Walker thought. Maybe this convention would be a career jump-starter, a thing to do now that Trenelle was zero for four at pageants, with no placing higher than fifth.

Bob Simmons had just had a full left knee replacement. That’s what he had just told the jury. He was on trial for the attempted murder of Trenelle Walker, in a hotel room just outside of Orlando, on the day before the final day of the NAIDA Convention. He claimed that the vaginal tearing and chest bruises that appeared to come from a 275-pound man laying on top of a 98-pound woman and raping her were impossible because his teenage hockey injury had come back to haunt him. “Yeah, we consensually had sex,” Bob said on the witness stand. “I picked her up at the convention, yeah. Then I drove her back to my hotel. We split a bottle of tequila. She’s hot, and young, and wanted some money because she was broke. Did I take advantage of that? Sure. I came onto her. Was she wanting what I was wanting? Sure. So rape? Hell no. Attempted murder? Well, she called me a shitty lay, slapped me, and said she was joking. I hit her.”

Bob Simmons was convicted of the rape and attempted murder of Trenelle Walker. Six months later, Bernadette Simmons was born. Now, 18 years later, Bernadette, long-since estranged after running away from her home and her mother, is renting a ten-year old, pre-fabricated one-bedroom house with an all-formica and plywood kitchen, with her best friend Dezze Lucas. Dezze has dyed a strip of Bernadette’s hair platinum blonde, and is about to pierce her nose and place into it a place-holder sterling silver ring. Then, they’re going to get dressed in matching white hand-me down gowns that Erik Lucas, Dezze’s rich dad who’s currently in Mexico, bought for his daughter and best friend who live in a ramshackle house in Fairlee, Vermont. They’re both headed to prom with Aleksandr Pedersen, the bassist of Over The Edge, a band, that, after this gig, may no longer exist.