Chapter 1

They were ten years old best friends when the New York Dolls in their long hair and makeup and attitude and hard, simple but clever and perverse rock songs incongruously played the Young America pavilion at the Minnesota State Fair. One friend got changed by it. Not the other, who preferred seeing Muddy Waters there. The shorter boy was impressed by several things. The songs. How hard they rocked. The attitude. But the lead guitarist impressed him most. Johnny Thunders. Rock and Roll incarnate. Even the name the little Italian man with the ridiculously big hair chose.

That boy started changing his name afterwards. He hated his name, Mayer. Who wouldn’t? Trying different names on like a new outfit. Sort of as a joke until the two friends snuck into a midnight showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show a few years later, in through the out door, Mayer’s semi-delinquent brother aiding and abetting. Forever after that he became Eddie Frank. From Eddie the rocker creation from Rocky Horror as well as Eddie Munster from the Munsters tv show. For his last name Eddie used the shortened version of its creator, Doctor Frankenstein/Frank N. Furter.

Unlike his best friend, Joe Solomon liked his name. Especially when he began writing. He thought it biblical and universal. There’s Joes of all sorts all over the world. Even a sound alike in China. He figured writers should be that. Biblical as in mystical explanations, archetypes and cultural history. Universal in expressing universal truth. He also loved the solo man implied in his last name. What we all are. The vast mass or mess of us. Alone in the crowd.

When adolescence struck the two friends, it struck them practically dumb as far as addressing objects of their new obsession verbally. The fair sex, with its burgeoning appearances on their classmates. Budding breasts. Hips defining the female shape. Pretty becoming beautiful. The aesthetics of sexual attraction.

As it happened, they had similar taste. Slender bodies. Slender faces. Tight, athletic asses (Joe’s thing). Firm tits (Eddie’s thing). And petite. Which made more sense for Eddie, because he was much shorter than his friend, him being the short side of medium height, and Joe being quite a bit taller. The tallest in his class. Nearly a foot difference. Neither of them wanted to step on each other’s toes going after the same girl. As it happened, they didn’t have to.

Fred and Sam. Frederica and Samantha. Instead of rhyming names or alliteration, their parents decided both would have basically male names when shortened. Identical twins.

“How do we get them to notice us?” Eddie said to Joe, or probably more to himself.

They sat in the basement of Eddie’s house. His parents actually didn’t mind them smoking pot there. His older brother had turned the basement into a kind of psychedelic sanctuary, with a groovy mural of multicolored waves and stars. With lots of big pillows and a comfortable if tattering pea green couch, on which they sat and passed a joint of low, headache inducing quality. Eddie looked at the joint and smiled.

“What?” Joe asked, taking the joint from Eddie’s hand.

“You should buy a bass,” Eddie suggested. “We should start a band. You’ve been writing poetry, right?”

“Yeah?”

“You could write lyrics.”

After sucking in the semi-intoxicating smoke and holding it long enough before exhaling, Joe too looked at the joint, now close to a roach, and smiled. “You saw the drum kit at Randy’s,” he said, remembering when they bought the pot. Randy, like them, a high school senior. Almost a pretty boy with unkempt blonde hair just touching his shoulders. He had the typical strong young body of a farmer, which, like many in their small rural town southwest of the Twin Cities metropolitan area, was his family’s business. The twins as well.

Both Eddie and Joe had professional fathers. Perhaps uncomfortably in Eddie’s case, they both took up what could be considered typically Jewish professions. Eddie’s a money lender. Actually his grandfather owned the bank that did the lending in the county seat where they lived, and the prodigal son, bringing home his hippy wife, took it over and actually sold it for a great deal of money to a large bank conglomerate but still ran things. Joe’s became the country doctor. Maybe not a shrink, which would have been more typically Jewish, but a solid profession to make a mother proud. His wife, his nurse. But instead of homespun visits to the infirm or pregnant women giving birth, they ran a clinic, the only one in the county seat in which they lived. Though a hospital wasn’t far, just inside the nearest suburb.

But unlike Eddie, and unlike a lot of the doctors at that hospital, Joe’s family wasn’t wealthy. The clinic didn’t get chickens for trade, but it wasn’t a rich clientele who needed its services. He may have been a conservative asshole socially, but Joe’s father had the seeds of a bartering mentality, an anarcho-socialist mentality, accepting only what could be afforded.

Because of his at least social conservatism, and because he expected his son to learn how to make his own way, the whole bootstrap thing, he gave Joe little money for allowances, and only Joe’s mother insisting (and mostly subsidizing it) did he give Joe anything at all. So Joe worked, waking ungodly early for years, using his bicycle until cold and snow had his mom getting up driving him, tossing newspapers at houses. And he worked at his mother’s cousin’s book warehouse in Minneapolis for a summer tearing covers off books to get returns for them. With Eddie. Neither job paid much. Joe didn’t spend much. A bass, however, and an amp might be more than he could afford.

“Don’t worry,” said Eddie. “I’ll lend you the difference.” Joe smiled and nodded and knew, unlike his father, Eddie would never expect a return on his loan.

“So is Randy any good?” Joe asked.

“I asked. He shrugged.”

“He’s bound to be better than me.”

They laughed.

“He’ll be a magnet,” said Eddie.

“What do you mean?”

“The girls like him. And he knows what to do about that.”

“Does he know?” Joe asked. “Or is he just naturally easygoing and confident?”

Eddie shrugged. More Joe’s issue than Eddie’s. Joe hated the leg up some of their classmates had. Jocks most of all. They could be stupid and still get interest from the girls. Just by playing some stupid game. Like a lot of things Joe thought at that time in his life, it seemed completely unfair. He figured Eddie and he were more intelligent, and therefore much more interesting than those morons. Of course starting a rock and roll band to score chicks might have just as an insipid base as banging helmets against pads—it’s not like being expert musicians would be the intent because that would probably be counterproductive—but it would be planned and purposeful, and the girls were just as moronic as the boys.

Thus began the first iteration of Eddie and the Monsters.

It meant even more time with Eddie in his basement. Joe did practice at home, unplugged. To Chris Squire of Yes mostly. Fast and complicated. When Joe plugged in at Eddie’s, Eddie had Joe listen to altogether different music. Muddy Waters and Howlin Wolf. Learning from Willie Dixon. English blues based rockers like the Rolling Stones and early Fleetwood Mac. John Entwistle of the Who probably was the most advanced. Joe complained.

“Fucking Yes?” Eddie muttered.

Joe decided not to protest. Because he got it. KISS. Keep It Simple, Stupid.

It turned out Joe sucked at lyrics. Too complicated. Too deep. Not nearly clichéd enough.

At the beginning Eddie wasn’t much better. Just bad in a different way. Embarrassingly insipid. Except when he was silly. He did silly well. Almost clever. He’d get much cleverer and a lot less silly. And he got there surprisingly quickly.

Mostly they worked on covers. Early Kinks. Some sixties garage rock from a collection put out by Patty Smith’s guitarist. The Stooges. Punk. Just the two of them. Both Eddie and Joe felt Joe needed to play better before adding Randy to the band.

Just before they felt ready, another person witnessed this private thing. The two did have other friends. Only two others really in a clique one might call the intellectuals. Or the oddballs. Simon could definitely fit into the latter. Even quieter than Eddie or Joe, he had a nervous energy which made his fingers always busy. Counting. They took his focus. He would mutter something, and if you listened, it turned out to be something quite interesting. Cosmic even. The way a physicist looks at the cosmos. It seemed impossible for him not to be a great scientist someday.

And then there was Harriet. Tomboy. Just one of the boys. She and Eddie and Joe had been a mischievous threesome in their childhood. Adolescence had hit her even harder. She became the first girl in the class with tits. They only got bigger. She hated them. Eddie and Joe noticed them, but a lot less intensely than the other boys and the girls, jealous of her.

She wished a girl looked at her without jealousy, but with attraction. At summer camp she’d been the first of the four friends to enjoy sex, making her gender preference assured. She also had been the first to have her heart broken. She found it difficult to accept the inevitable brevity of her little affair. It toughened her even more than she already had been. Of the four, she definitely embraced the darkest view of the world. Although Joe embraced it more than the other two, and Eddie also had his dark side.

“You avoiding me?” she asked during lunch amidst the time of the secret rehearsals.

“We’ve been busy,” Eddie shrugged.

“Doing what? Fucking each other?”

The three young men at the table chuckled. Even Simon. It may have been ironic, what with her being lesbian. It may have been provocative, but she knew they wouldn’t care about such accusations. Unlike the majority of boys who surrounded them. Woe to anyone in their community who dared come out. Being a faggot was far worse than being a dyke. A man had to be manly. Simon could have been the one accused of such a crime if he wasn’t so weird and essentially asexual. The clique knew he wasn’t, though the rest of the school wouldn’t for another few months, when a girl as nerdy as him became his constant companion.

Joe actually knew a gay couple. They had been in his little one act he wrote for a yearly festival of one acts from Minnesota high schools in the spring. It had been successful, encouraging Joe’s lifelong profession as writer. One of the young men was quite masculine while the other fought to hide his fruitiness. Being in the company of fellow thespians helped, and allowed his true nature out when amongst them. Any jock stumbling into that world got the blackmail treatment. Any word and it would be he being accused. It worked. The boy survived high school.

“I’m learning to play the bass,” Joe told Harriet.

“Why?” she asked.

“We’re starting a band,” Eddie explained.

“About fucking time,” Harriet responded. “You’ve always been too talented to share your talent just with us,” she told Eddie.

It’s true as a boy he had a sweet, expressive voice and could play the guitar and piano as well as anyone quadruple his age. Classical. Folk. It didn’t matter. And his voice, lowering with age, even with the funny shifts it made adjusting to the new timber, just made it that much more expressive if not quite so sweet. He had participated in a couple talent shows as a pre-teen, winning one and getting robbed by placing second in another, but he always vomited beforehand, and practically trembled when taking his chair. And then ... greatness. Brilliance. But it took its toll. The vomiting. The shaking. He wanted to avoid it.

“Are you going to be okay?” she asked, remembering those earlier times.

Eddie grinned. “I’m just not going to take it so seriously.”

“It won’t be about the music!” Harriet cleverly figured out. “You want to get laid!”

Joe shushed her while Simon chortled with laughter. Both Joe and Eddie noticed the twins noticing them. Was that interest? Joe looked away, blushing, and saw Eddie continue gazing in their direction. Joe looked back, catching Fred glancing back at him, blushing. Her sister Sam continued her gaze at Joe’s best friend. The staring ended. Eddie grinned. “Yeah, Harry,” he said. “I want to get laid.”

“Can I come over?” she practically begged.

“Sure,” Joe said.

“Bring your violin,” said Eddie.

“That fucking thing? I could bring my keyboard.”

“I have a piano,” he reminded her. “Violin?”

“Fuck it,” she agreed. “At least I won’t be fucking bored.”

She sat in Eddie’s basement and listened to the incipient Monsters play old Kinks, Stooges and a Modern Lover tune. She insisted on an original and got one of Eddie’s sillier songs. She liked it. So did Joe.

“So,” she finally asked. “Violin?”

Eddie took off his guitar and knelt at the old cheap turntable he managed to patch into some decent speakers so Joe could hear the bass. He put on an album. “Ever heard the Velvet Underground?” he asked her.

“Heard of them,” she answered. Unlike her two best friends, she preferred spending time with them outdoors. Even in frigid winter, she preferred moving rather than vegetating. Skating or swimming at the YMCA or just walking. Not one to worship at the turntable, listening to things that supposedly altered one’s life like Eddie and Joe were wont to do.

Eddie played her various instances of John Cale tearing ferociously at his viola.

“Pretty wild,” she critiqued. “Viola?”

“Yeah,” said Eddie.

“A violin would be too shrill. The sound needs body.”

“I’ll buy you one.”

“Or a cello.”

“If you want.”

“Too much of a pain to carry around. Speaking of bodies, mine’s horny.” She suddenly tackled him onto the floor and kissed him, her jeans clad groin pressing into his.

“What?” Joe could only react.

“Eddie’s voice always makes me horny,” she explained. “Got any rubbers?” she asked Eddie.

“My brother,” he answered. “In case I got lucky.”

“Go get some luck and hurry.” She pulled off her clothing, becoming entirely naked as Eddie darted off up the stairs. “Let me show you how to suck cunt,” she said, sitting on the edge of the couch and spreading her legs wide. Joe gazed at her, frozen. She was thickly built and slightly dark skinned from being half Lakota. Her heavy breasts stood out proud. She had a nice ass to match. Not in the least slender, her thickness spoke of strength. Muscle.

“Joe?” she muttered impatiently. Her fingers twisted taut dark nipples and strummed her pussy.

She proceeded to instruct. From her reaction, Joe did well. She even let him continue while Eddie watched. She watched him stroke himself. “Let me taste it,” she moaned. He stood by her and let her lick him. His hand reached to her breast. “Gentle,” she moaned. Soon she begged, “Roll it on and fuck me.”

He took Joe’s place between her thighs. She helped him aim. “Fuck,” she moaned.

“God,” Eddie agreed.

“Keep fucking,” she moaned. Taking Joe’s hand, she sucked his fingers and placed it at her clit. The other hand she did the same and brought it to a nipple. “God you’re big for a little guy,” she groaned.

Joe couldn’t help noticing as well. Thicker than his but shorter by over an inch.

“Harriet,” Eddie exclaimed, pistoning inside her and then going still. “Sorry.”

“First time,” she smiled. “Me too. Joe?”

“At your service, Ma’am.”

“Condom?”

“On the couch,” said Eddie.

Joe grabbed it, pondered it and figured it out. “Lie on the couch, Eddie,” Harriet meanwhile said. When he did she stretched over him and kissed him. Her big fine ass lifted, so Joe fucked her doggy-style, his fingers reaching around to strum her clit. Though he was close, Joe wanted her to have her pleasure. Feeling weirded out about touching Eddie’s penis helped. When it started getting hard, he could feel it against the back of his hand while he strummed Harriet’s clit. Finally he moved it to her nipples. “Harder,” she insisted.

“Fucking? Nipples?” Joe asked breathlessly.

“Both,” she gasped.

Joe pummeled. Joe twisted. Joe came, fucking through it just long enough for her to cum.

“Thanks,” she said to Eddie. Joe laughed. The other two joined in.

“You’re definitely going to get laid,” she said to Eddie. “Probably even get blowjobs,” she added sourly.

“What about me?” Joe asked.

“You’ll get the one who doesn’t get him. Or is too horny to wait her turn.”

“Like you?” Joe smirked.

“You got sloppy seconds,” she reminded Joe.

“Except it wasn’t sloppy,” he said.

“It better not be,” she warned. “Condoms. Always. Even if she says she’s on the pill. Groupies tend to be skanks.”

“Like you?” Joe daringly asked.

“I’m exclusive.”

“Right,” he chuckled, reminding her she wasn’t by pulling his limp dick out of her cunt.

“You got me, Joe.”

“Uhm. Lesbian?”

“My girlfriend and I discovered I liked getting fucked. Her little vibrator didn’t do justice like you did, Eddie. Fuck! But she did manage to get rid of my hymen. I still prefer the smell and the taste and the look of a sexy bitch. Except you, Eddie, when you sing. I’ll want it when I see you guys play, but I’ll probably be in line.”

“I could help,” Joe offered.

“And I might just accept if you’re not otherwise occupied. You got a nice tongue. I saw you scoping out the Lyons twins.”

He shrugged. Guilty as charged.

On Harriet’s recommendation, Eddie invited Randy soon after. He brought his kit and records. He kept the beat pretty well and wasn’t busy, which made Eddie happy. He didn’t want a Mitch Mitchell or Keith Moon. KISS.

After working through a couple songs, they stopped and heard Randy’s records. They had an obvious purpose. Other choices for bass playing. Larry Graham’s slap. The smoothness of Motown. But what got both Eddie and Joe were his last samples. Hawkwind. Motorhead. Lenny Killmeister.

“Fuck that’s heavy shit,” said Eddie.

“It’s loud, chord strumming,” Joe decided. “I think.”

“Yeah,” said Randy, smiling. He did that a lot. Smile. Short answers. Nice guy.

“Can we play that loud?” Eddie asked.

“I can try. You?” said Randy.

Eddie nodded. His expertise gave a certain grace to even the simplest songs, which were most of what they played. “We’ll need bigger speakers.”

The Monsters weren’t metal. But neither was Motorhead. Not enough showing off. Really loud punk. The Monsters too. Thrash punk. Hardcore. But somehow, with Eddie at least, the grace remained.

Punk had an ethos. It didn’t matter how good you played. Anyone could play. Just get in people’s faces. It created quite a crop of noisy teen bands around the Twin Cities. Almost all of them sucked. Purposefully it seemed. But it made for shitty listening.

The Monsters never were. Only because of Eddie. He played like a motherfucker, sang like roughed up angel. Joe got better. So did Randy. And Harriet, too, when she joined, playing the viola Eddie bought her. But only Eddie made it great.

The rest of the band got better because they rehearsed a lot. Eddie insisted. He got better too, but mostly the songwriting. He’d bring in a song a week. Sometimes more. Some stayed silly. Others became clever. Funny in his juxtaposition of words. Turning clichés on their heads. Getting inspired from unexpected sources helped. Country. Smoky Robinson. Even Bing, Frank and Fred.

The Monsters didn’t play anywhere for months. Eddie wanted to be ready. Even for a backyard party. But they had audiences. People heard about them. Came to check them out. Mostly through the ever friendly Randy. The twins for instance. Friends of one of Randy’s girlfriends.

Randy could be considered a player, if such a term were known in the small white bread town, with a smattering of Native Americans, where few if anyone would know anything of the rap culture. Rappers Delight maybe, but probably Blondie’s Rapture would have been the closest they got. But even player didn’t seem appropriate. He wasn’t after hos. They just accumulated. They liked his goofy smile. His lightness. His humor. Nothing all that witty, but nevertheless effective. Effortless charm. But he never took things all that seriously, like for instance getting serious with a girl. It made him uncomfortable for them to be serious towards him. So relationships never lasted. Another term, to be coined later, would be friends-with-benefits for those girls who liked him and liked to fuck him without strings. This girl, this friend of the twins, though not starting that way, and getting offended when he didn’t stick to her, got over it and became one of those more intimate sort of friends.

Rachel, the FWB, another blonde, of which there were many in that little town, had developed her shape a little later and not quite as substantially as Harriet had, but ended up with a body that filled a bikini best, c cup breasts with matching ass and lean in between. And with a deceptively angelic face, she caught the attention of males, boys and men. The relentless attention and its sexual specificity ended up rubbing her wrong. The ogling of those not in her league. The singlemindedness of the BMOC who thought he was. The latter brought her back to Randy, who would never display her as a captured trophy or talk about his conquest of her in the locker room to impress or one-up his fellow jocks. They were genuine friends who liked each other and never worried that she might give some older guy a quick fuck or that he would be fucking some other girl. In a way he had given her permission to be as free-spirited as him.

That may have been the band’s best rehearsal yet, and not because of what happened after. The best friends wanted to impress the twins, but with Eddie rubbing off on Joe in his ever growing confidence, it didn’t make them nervous. Also Eddie brought in a new song that would become one of his signatures, and they polished another one, after working on it a couple times before, that would match or outmatch the legendary status of the new one. Even though his songwriting got better, those two songs would be the first real classics in Eddie Frank’s repertoire. The new one was fast. The older one unusually slow. They became the a and b sides, respectively, of Eddie and the Monster’s first single.

Wowing the audience of three girls, they showed their appreciation just as Eddie and Joe hoped. Combining rock and roll with a girl’s libido seems to cause the usual cautious mating dance of teens to speed up quite a bit. At least it did for Eddie and Sam. Not quite as much for Freddy and Joe.

Within minutes of the band finishing, Eddie and Sam were French kissing. Randy and Rachel weren’t far behind. The twins talked briefly after the kiss, then Eddie led Sam up the stairs to his room.

“Uhm,” Freddy started shyly to Joe, “Do you mind walking with me?”

Any consideration Joe might have would have been the weather. It being halfway between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the air dipped below freezing. An early snowstorm continued covering lawns and fields, though being Minnesota, places to walk and drive had been expertly cleared and salted. It would be nippy, but they had plastic coats and wool hats and leather gloves for that.

“Ok,” Joe smiled. She smiled shyly back.

About the same time those two started up the stairs, Rachel beckoned Harriet to join them. Joe managed to look back and see Harriet’s blushing face and surprised eyes.

The fact that the gloved hands of Joe and Freddy met as soon as they entered the brisk outdoors Joe took as extremely encouraging.

“Which way?” he asked Freddy.

“Uhm, how far away do you live?”

Joe got hard. Or harder.

“Just a block or so.”

“Could we maybe walk around a little before we go there?”

“Sure.”