Notes From the Midnight Driver Read online

  Notes From the Midnight Driver

  Jordan Sonnenblick

  SCHOLASTIC INC.

  New York Toronto London Auckland Sydney

  Mexico City New Delhi Hong Kong Buenos Aires

  To my grandfather,

  Solomon Feldman,

  who inspired this book,

  and to the memory of my father,

  Dr. Harvey Sonnenblick,

  who loved it

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  May

  Last September Gnome Run

  The Wake-Up

  Day Of The Dork-Wit

  My Day In Court

  Solomon

  Plan B

  Laurie Meets Sol

  Sol Gets Interested

  Half An Answer

  Happy Holidays

  The Ball Falls

  Happy New Year!

  Enter The Cha-Kings

  Home Again

  Am I A Great Musician, Or What?

  A Night For Surprises

  Darkness

  The Valentine’s Day Massacre

  Good Morning, World!

  The Mission

  The Saints Go Marchin’ In

  The Work Of Breathing

  Peace In My Tribe

  Finale

  Coda

  The Saints Go Marchin’ In Again

  Thank you Notes

  About the Author

  Interview

  Sneak Peek

  Copyright

  May

  Boop. Boop. Boop.

  I’m sitting next to the old man’s bed, watching the bright green line spike and jiggle across the screen of his heart monitor. Just a couple of days ago, those little mountains on the monitor were floating from left to right in perfect order, but now they’re jangling and jerking like maddened hand puppets.

  I know that sometime soon, the boops will become one long beep, the mountains will crumble into a flat line, and I will be finished with my work here.

  I will be free.

  LAST SEPTEMBER

  GNOME RUN

  It seemed like a good idea at the time. Yes, I know everybody says that—but I’m serious. As insane as it looks in retrospect, I was fully convinced on that particular Friday evening last September that stealing my mom’s car and storming my dad’s house was a brilliant plan. And not brilliant, as in,“That was a brilliant answer you gave in Spanish today.” I mean brilliant, as in, “Wow, Einstein, when you came up with that relativity thing, and it revolutionized our entire concept of space and time while also leading all of humankind into the nuclear age, that was brilliant!”

  The plan had a certain elegant simplicity, too. I would drink one more pint of Dad’s old vodka, grab Mom’s spare car keys, jump into the Dodge, and fire that sucker up. Then I would speed through the deserted, moonlit streets, straight and true as a homing missile, or at least straight and true as a sober person who actually knew how to drive. When I skidded triumphantly into Dad’s driveway, I would leap nimbly from the car, race to the front door, ring the bell with a fury rarely encountered by any bell, anywhere—and catch my father with the no-good home-wrecking wench who was once, in a forgotten life we used to have, my third-grade teacher.

  Okay, perhaps these plans would theoretically work better if the planner were not already completely intoxicated. But I’d never gotten drunk before—so how was I supposed to know I’d get so smashed so quickly? And hey, if my mom had really wanted to keep me from driving drunk without a license at age sixteen, would she have gone out on a date and left me home with a car, a liquor cabinet, and some keys?

  I rest my case.

  So I downed some more booze straight from the bottle and lunged for the key ring, grabbing it by the wooden number 1 I had made for my “Number One Mom” in Cub Scouts. I threw on my Yankees jacket, slammed my way out of the house, got into the car, and started it. Then I believe there was some drama with the gear stick and the parking brake, and probably a bit of fun with the gas pedal.

  The next thing I knew, I was hanging out the passenger door, puking up vodka and Ring Dings. When I got my eyes sort of focused, I could see that the car was up on a lawn. When I got them even more focused, I could see that my last salvo of vomit had completely splattered two shiny black objects—the well-polished shoes of one angry police officer. He yanked me out of the car, largely by the hair, and stood me up. I remember him saying, “Look at that! Look what you did.” I also remember trying to follow his pointing finger. And when I finally zoomed in on what was lying in front of the car, I couldn’t believe it. There was a detached head about ten feet in front of the bumper!

  The cop sort of puppet-marched me up to the horrific scene and forced my head down close to the carnage. This head was seriously injured, to be sure. It was upside down, smushed up against a tree stump. There was no body in sight. I whirled around so fast that the cop almost lost hold of me, and crouched to look under Mom’s car. Sure enough, an arm and a leg were sticking out from underneath the left front wheel.

  “Officer, sir, did I—is he—is—ummm…”

  I could feel the tears welling up. My eyes burned, and the next wave of acid was coming up my throat in a hurry.

  “Yes, son. You ruined my brand-new shoes, smashed up your car, and decapitated Mrs. Wilson’s French lawn gnome. You’re in some serious…”

  “Lawn gnome? LAWN GNOME?”

  Now that I looked a bit more closely, I noticed that the head wasn’t bleeding, and that the ear had cracked off with inhuman neatness. I began to laugh like an idiot, but my relief came too late to halt my barf, which came out mostly through my nose—and landed on the officer’s left side, all over his walkietalkie.

  This was even more of a crack-up. I started mumbling, “Walkie-talkie-barfie, walkie-talkie-barfie,” which amused me almost all the way to the police station. You would think I’d have been pretty scared by this point, but because I had drunk so much vodka so fast, I was still getting drunker by the second. Even with my hands cuffed behind my back—and the cuffs were REALLY tight, because the officer hadn’t been enjoying me much so far—I was like a little one-man house party in the back seat of the cruiser. The last thing I remember was getting bored of the dispatch radio, and shouting, “Change the station! Get me some ROCK!” Then the car turned a sharp corner, and the window was tilting and rushing toward my face.

  You know what must really be a highlight of being a desk cop? Processing the arrests of drunk people. After several of my new pals in blue dragged me semiconscious (I mean, I was semiconscious; they were pretty alert) into the station, they left me cuffed to a scuffed-up old wooden seat across from some old guy with a badge. I decided his name was Sarge. He had that fingerprinting pad thing and a bunch of questions for me, and didn’t waste any time easing into things.

  “Right thumb.”

  I stared at the weaving, bobbing blurs that had replaced my hands, trying to figure out which was which. “I can’t find the right one; they’re too bloody.”

  Sure enough, they were, because I had a cut over my left eye, which must have been hidden from view beneath my adorable mop of hair. Sarge apparently saw the blood, but not the source, because he sighed one of those big annoyed sighs that public servants make when they are forced to do actual work, reached into his desk, and pulled out a pack of wet wipes. “Geez, you must’a really banged your nose. Get your hands cleaned up, kid. I’ll be back in a minute. By the way, genius, your right hand is the one that ain’t chained to the desk.”

  He walked away to get a cup of coffee or whatever. I got my hands clean, then reached my free hand up to wipe the hair out of my eyes. Which got it all g
ory again. I repeated this at least three times, creating an impressive pile of crumbled, deep-pink-stained wipes. Then I got the marvy idea that maybe I could just wipe the blood off my head first. I pushed my hair all the way up off my forehead, the alcoholsoaked wipe touched my wound, and I sobered up REAL fast, just as Sarge was putting his cup of steaming liquid on the desk blotter.

  “Ooooowwwww!” I screamed. Up I jumped. Up jumped my arm. Up jumped the handcuff. Up jumped the desk. Up flew the coffee.

  “Ooooowwwww!” screamed Sarge. Sarge was wet!

  Eventually the sodden mass of paper, blood, wipes, and coffee was disposed of by a guy in rubber gloves. Sarge found a new pair of pants, and came back. He took a really long look at my forehead, the mixture of blood, snot, and tears that was flowing freely across my facial features, and the moist abstract painting that had been his desk blotter, and decided to use a trick which always works for my dad: He would make me Somebody Else’s Problem.

  Sarge shouted across the room, “Call me an ambulance!”

  I couldn’t stop myself. “Okay, you’re an ambulance!”

  And so it went, until the paramedics accidentally banged my head against the doorway of the emergency room, and I passed out for good.

  THE WAKE-UP

  The next morning, I had two new experiences, and they both hurt. I had never woken up with a hangover or a concussion before, but—WHOA!—I guess there’s a first time for everything.

  Before I opened my gummy, grainy eyes, a shadow crossed over me. I begged it for help. “Sarge, Sarge, can I please have some water? Water, please? Oh, God, WATER!”

  It replied so sweetly that I knew who it was without looking. “Good morning, Alex. Congratulations. You got arrested and ruined everybody’s night. The car is in bad shape, too. And who the hell is Sarge?”

  “Hi, Mom,” I croaked.

  As I finally pried my eyelids open, the glare of the sun through the hospital room window almost made me faint. But before I could even lose consciousness in peace, Mom grabbed me in a rib-pulverizing body hug. “Oh, Alex. Oh, my baby!”

  “Mom, I’m okay. Really,” I gasped like a dying salmon.

  She looked me dead in the eyes then, and wiped tears from the corners of hers. “You’re not okay,” she snapped. “You’re an idiot!” Then she whacked me on the arm really hard, just as my father stampeded in.

  While I was gingerly checking my bicep area for spurting arteries, Dad burst into high-volume mode. “Oh, good, Janet, why don’t you just beat the boy to death while we’re here? It will be convenient, with the morgue right downstairs and all.”

  “Don’t ‘Good, Janet’ me, Simon. It’s your fault the boy is lying here all…all…all…”

  “Smacked?” I chimed in.

  “Shut up!” they exclaimed in unison. See, divorced people CAN cooperate where the children are concerned.

  “And how is this my fault? You leave him at your house, drunk, with the car keys, while you’re gallivanting around town with some…”

  “I leave him drunk?”

  “Yes, you leave him drunk.”

  “Whose liquor is still at the house?”

  “What do you mean, still at the house? It was your lawyer who said I couldn’t remove any common property from the—”

  I couldn’t tolerate this Battle of the Italics any longer. I looked away and started picking at an itch on my left arm. My fingers encountered something alarming there—I was hooked up to an IV! What was THAT about? I needed to know, pronto, so I reached out for the button on the side of my bed, and desperately buzzed for help. A nurse came in, threaded her way between my still-raging parents, and stopped by my bedside with an expectant look and a question. “Hi, I’m Miss Anderson. I’ll be your nurse today. What can I do for you?”

  “Um, hi. My name is Alex and, uh, do you know why I have a needle in my arm? Am I, um, critically injured or anything? I mean, because I’d want to know that.”

  She sighed. “No, you’re not critically injured, Alex. But from what your mother told me before you woke up, you’re very lucky not to be.”

  I glanced over at my parents—they were both still going bonkers on each other, to the point where a casual bystander might have started looking for something to hide under in case they reached the “throwing-objects” stage. This wasn’t my idea of a very lucky scenario, but whatever. “Yes, ma’am. I just want to know what’s wrong with me.”

  My mom paused in her vicious attack on my father’s parenting and general life skills to throw a jab my way: “Yes, Nurse. We’d love to know what’s wrong with him, too.”

  Miss Anderson looked like an innocent Roman who had somehow walked onto the floor of the Coliseum right into the middle of a “Throwing-Christians-to-the-Lions” marathon. She was saved from answering, though, by the entrance of Dr. Friedman, or at least some guy wearing Dr. Friedman’s badge. “Ah, Mr. Alexander Gregory, the famous midnight driver. I overheard your request, and I will be glad to tell you what’s going on. I’d imagine you’re feeling pretty rocky right now—is that correct?”

  I nodded and tried to look pathetic, which came naturally at that moment.

  “Well, there are several valid reasons for that. One, you came to us with a fairly significant case of alcohol poisoning. That’s why your mouth and eyes are probably very dry: Alcohol poisoning causes dehydration. That’s also why you have an intravenous line in your arm. Two, you sustained at least one strong blow to the head last night, possibly when your head hit the steering wheel of your mother’s car. This caused your soft brain to bounce off of the hard inside of your cranium. So you have a concussion, which means that even if the drinking hadn’t given you a pounding headache, dizziness, and nausea, you’d certainly have them now anyway. Three, you split your forehead open. It wasn’t a deep gash, but it was fairly jagged, so we had to suture it up. A plastic surgeon will be by later today to check on the stitching job, and you can ask him how bad he thinks the scar might be.”

  Scar? Holy moley. That was cause for panic. But I didn’t have time to think about it for long, because the doctor was still talking: “By the way, does your right shoulder ache?”

  I hadn’t singled out that one particular strand of discomfort in the thick rope of agony that was twisting around my brain, but, “Yes, it does. Why?”

  “Tetanus shot. Do you have any specific questions I haven’t covered?”

  “Uh, can I get some kind of medicine for my head? It really hurts. Please?”

  “We’ll see what your next blood toxicology report shows, but right now I don’t want to give your liver any additional work to do. You gave it quite a workout last night.”

  Great. Head trauma without painkillers. Now there’s a recipe for wholesome fun.

  After the doctor left, my mom announced that she needed some air, and stomped out with one last glare at my dad. Dad ambled over to the side of the bed and sort of punched my shoulder in a fatherly way—which would have been just peachy if he hadn’t hit the exact spot my mother had already pulverized. Then, completely ignoring my gasp and wince, he gave me a whole big speech about responsibility while I closed my eyes and tried very hard not to picture him cheating on my mom with my third-grade teacher.

  Eventually, I turned my head to the wall and pretended to be asleep—which he noticed after maybe seven or eight minutes. I swear, I almost let out a fake snore just to speed up the process, but was afraid it might make him shake me back to consciousness. It felt as though getting shaken might very well have made my head fall off, so I wasn’t willing to take the risk.

  I don’t remember Dad leaving, so I must have fallen asleep for real at some point. Next thing I knew, Mom was sitting on the edge of the bed, holding my hand, and crying again. I gave an encore performance of my “slumbering boy” routine, only this time I was doing it for a different reason—I didn’t want my mother to see that my eyes were welling up, too.

  DAY OF THE DORK-WIT

  I spent that whole day in the hospital, an
d went home on Sunday—right after a nice lady from Social Services came by to “release me into the custody of my parents.” Before we left, my mom had to sign a whole bunch of police papers. She also had to promise to get me a lawyer and deliver me to court in thirty days for a hearing on my drunk-driving case. You didn’t have to be a genius to realize this was going to be a long month.

  Mom wasn’t particularly speaking to me for most of the morning at home, but I was too sore to go out and do anything, so I spent hours in the basement noodling around on my electric guitar. It’s the best thing I own, a real American Fender Telecaster with a beautiful sunburst finish that my dad bought me in a moment of guilt right after he moved out sophomore year. At the time I spent about twelve millionths of a second contemplating whether I should refuse to accept such a transparent bribe gift, but gimme a break—it was a Tele, and my old acoustic guitar from middle school was a cheap-o imported job. So I just told myself that living well is the best revenge, plugged the Tele in, and played for about a month nonstop.

  Anyway, I took lessons until a couple of months after my parents separated, so I picked up a lot of the basics from my teacher. Then I quit the lessons because I figured somebody had to attempt to conserve my college fund in the face of my parents’ rising legal bills. After that, I worked hard on figuring out the exercises from books and magazines, and kept playing in the high school jazz band. I wasn’t a great jazz guitar player, because jazz is the hardest guitar music on the planet, but I could ROCK. So there I was, raging along with a pile of CDs with my little amp cranked, until I got really woozy. Then I turned the amp way down, turned the CD player off, and did some finger exercises and scales until the nausea and boredom became too overwhelming. I knew I couldn’t stay down in the basement until my mom forgot all about my little automotive adventure, so I trudged up for lunch.