It had just turned 8:08pm when the cream-coloured, wood-panelled station wagon pulled into the parking lot of the La Buena High School.
Three of the four doors popped open - a cat, a rabbit and two coyotes, teenagers all, hopped out of the car.
“You and your friends have fun tonight, honey!” cooed the rabbit lady from the driver’s seat.
“Thanks, Mom…” her son grunted in response, shoving his hands into his pocket and trying to hide his embarrassment at his mother’s behaviour.
“Don’t be late coming home, now, young man!” his mother said reproachfully.
The young rabbit merely made a ‘tch’ noise, shoved his hands into his pockets and walked away, leaving his friends to speak to his mother:
“Thanks, Mrs Stevens.” Said the black cat.
“At least someone has some manners,” Mrs Stevens sighed from behind the steering wheel. “Thank you, Maxxie.”
With a wave, the rabbit mother pulled away from the sidewalk, leaving the group of teens to make their way to the school entrance… where they ran into the bouncer, Jackson Hill.
The doberman doorman - 12th grade quarterback for the school’s football team, the La Buena Legends - was built like a well-stocked refrigerator, crammed uncomfortably into a suit and tie and with a forced side parting in his hair that was undeniably put there by his mother.
As soon as Jackson caught sight of the four 10th graders headed towards him, he grasped his big hands in front of him as though he were a Blues Brother.
"Not tonight, guys." He said, impassively.
“Awwww, Jackson!” Maxxie Black whined petulantly. “C’mon, man, let us in!”
The doberman’s eyebrow raised, completely unmoved.
"Does your mom know you're stealing her hairspray?" he sneered, causing the black cat to run a hand through his hair defensively.
“Bought it myself…” he pouted, but Jackson had already turned his attention towards Tyler Stevens.
Tyler, for his part, had actually managed to secure a full tuxedo - even though it was clearly a size too big for him - but the rabbit had refused to part with his beloved backwards baseball cap, and it was plastering his blonde hair down over his eyes as usual.
“Stevens, how many more times you gotta be asked to remove that grody-ass hat?”
“At least one more, hombre.” Tyler scoffed, unfazed.
Finally, Jackson’s critical eyes fell on Tony and Brad, the Ramirez brothers.
The doberman’s lip curled as he observed the state of them - clearly, the brothers hadn’t been able to find two separate tuxedos, so they had had to make do with splitting one suit between the two of them.
Tony had gotten the suit pants, which he had teamed with a fairly ratty AC/DC t-shirt, which, contrasting though it was, wasn’t quite the fashion faux-pas that Brad was currently sporting…
"Stonewashed? Really?” Jackson guffawed. “And you couldn't even get any jeans without holes in 'em?'
“Gawd, step off, Jackson,” Brad groaned, folding his arms.
“Step off? My job’s to stop little posers like you from laming it up in there, and that’s all I’ve been doing for a damn hour!”
As the doberman ranted, Brad pinched the bridge of his nose, while Maxxie turned to Tyler and nodded meaningfully.
“Hey Jackson, you hungry?” the rabbit asked, innocently.
Jackson stopped mid-sentence, and his expression instantly changed from indignant to hopeful. “What’d you say?”
From behind his back, Tyler drew out a small brown paper bag - judging from the grease collecting in one of the corners, there was clearly some kind of fast food in there.
When Tyler held the bag out, Jackson snatched it greedily out of the rabbit's hand.
Plunging a big hand into the bag, the big dog licked his chops upon withdrawing a sloppy cheeseburger.
"Fuckin' A!" He growled, before proceeding to ram the greasy fast food into his maw.
As he did this, the thick doberman moved out of their way, and the four boys took the opportunity to enter La Buena High School, moaning under their breaths as they did so:
“Damn, there goes my midnight snack…”
“Can’t believe we hadda use a bribe to get into our own high school.”
“Jackson’ll make a fine cop, one day…”
Multitudes of coloured balloons and streamers were plastered to the ceiling and every wall, and the colourfulness was compounded by the shimmering disco ball that hung down in the middle of it all, projecting those slanted rectangles of light onto everything and everyone present.
I'm so excited, and I just can't hide it I'm about to lose control and I think I like it I'm so excited, and I just can't hide it And I know, I know, I know, I know, I know I want you
The air was filled with the sounds of The Pointer Sisters coming through the PA system, and students from every grade were dancing to it on the shiny hardwood dancefloor.
The revelry wasn’t without supervision, however: dotted here and there around the fringes of the crowd of youngsters were teachers and other staff, conspicuous by their shared non-fun-having expressions, scanning the crowd for troublemakers like Terminators.
“Hey, look at the DJ!” Tyler said, diverting the attention of the others. “It’s Skids!”
Over in the far corner of the gymnasium was the DJ booth, the source of all the pop music filling the air, and there at the decks was indeed the infamous Shaun ‘Skids’ Kidd.
He had been kept back a year for not being particularly good at exams and academic learning.
Despite not having a driver’s license, he drove to the high school every day in a beat-up old Ford Econoline van into which he disappeared every lunch time to do God knows what.
He owned every Van Halen album that had so far been released.
He knew every secret, every combo and every Fatality for Mortal Kombat II in the arcade.
He owned every issue of Robocop vs The Terminator.
In short: he was the guy that the kids looked up to, and the guy that the parents and teachers looked down on.
But, despite this notorious reputation, the mountain lion looked…bored.
“Hey, kids…” Skids sighed, resting his cheek upon his fist as the four boys approached him.
“Sup, man?” Maxxie offered.
“How come you’re DJ-ing?” Tony asked. “This don’t seem like your scene.”
In response, Skids blew out a raspberry. “Sure ain’t, but Mr Welch said I’d get an A grade for Music class if I did a good job, so…”
The sable-coloured cat sighed again, and the four boys all looked at each other.
“But, like, ain’t you got better tunes than this? This stuff is lame!” Said Tyler.
Skids didn’t answer, instead gathering up a handful of CDs and handing them to the rabbit.
The other three young men gathered around him to look, and they voiced their opinions immediately:
“Dude, these are bogus as hell!”
“Elvis Costello, Boney M, Duran Duran?”
“Hey, I like Duran Duran!”
“Ew!”
“Yup,” Skids said, taking the discs back from Tyler. “That’s what the faculty gave me t’work with… but don’t you kids worry: I got something t’really shake everyone’s shit up!”
As the boys jumped about excitedly at this news, Skids reached inside the pocket of his hoodie and retrieved another CD - none of the four teens could see what it was, but, judging by the wink the mountain lion gave them, they all knew they were about to have the time of their lives.
As the current disco track came to an end, Maxxie, Tony, Brad and Tyler were eager to hear what was about to go down.
For his part, Skids gave it about 30 seconds of silence, just to let all the students breathe and, more importantly, not to alert the teachers.
Swiftly, he ejected the CD from his DJ deck, replaced it with the illicitly-smuggled one from his pocket, pressed play and waited.
At first, it seemed nothing had happened, but then:
FEED MYYYYYYYYYY… FRANKENSTEEEIIINNN!!!
The voice of Alice Cooper sounded out loudly over the PA system in the hall, and nobody had any time to react or take cover from the sheer wall of noise that hit them.
Guitar, keyboard and drums utterly exploded from every speaker of the PA system, temporarily deafening everyone in the gym and knocking the food and plastic cutlery from the trestle table buffet.
The teachers recovered first - they surged through the crowd of kids and pushed past Maxxie and his friends en route to Skids, just as Alice Cooper got into the first verse;
Well I aint evil, I’m just good-lookin’ Start the fire, and baby start cookin’...
They couldn’t hear what the teachers were yelling as they wrestled Skids away from the controls of the DJ booth; at least not until one of the faculty members abruptly cut out the music, leaving the gym hall to be filled with shocked silence as the students all observed the scuffle.
Skids had to be frog-marched out by the four tutors who had all but tackled the mountain lion, but before they took him away, the crazy feline had one last thing to say:
“Wooooooo! Heavy metal forever!”
--------------------------------
The rest of the night, it had to be said, was boring.
A teacher had taken Skids’ place at the DJ decks, and was continuing to pump out the same inoffensive pop music that had been playing before, and it was disappointingly free of heavy metal for the four boys.
They could barely bring themselves to flirt with any of the girls from the school, make rude faces at any teachers who were looking away or even see how many hotdogs they could fit into their mouths at once, such was the effect of Skids’ awesome spectacle.
When the evening came to a close, neither Skids nor his van were to be found in the parking lot. After this discovery, they headed away from the school towards their homes in the suburbs, promising themselves that they’d start saving up money to buy their own metal CDs.
But before they all split up, they gathered in a circle:
“When we get them CDs, we’ll show each other, yeah?” “Yeah!” “Cool!”
The teenagers solemnly high-fived each other, and went off on their separate ways; Maxxie in one direction, Tyler in another, and the Ramirez brothers up towards their home in the hills.
But before they were out of earshot, the black cat turned around and shouted one last thing to his friends:
"Heavy metal forever!!!"
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A transformative musical moment for an early-teens Maximilian Adam Maxxie Black, courtesy of Alice Cooper.
