The Konohazuku Affair

    They sat in the sand ten meters from the ocean.  Logan remembered that last Sunday, he spilled soy sauce on Harry’s carpet.  Maybe that was what he was upset about.  A seagull edged carefully toward Logan’s feet, keeping one eye toward him at all times.  Logan wiggled his toes and the seagull jumped back a few feet, than started edging toward him again.  Logan raised his hand as if to scratch his head, and the seagull jumped back, raising its wings a little, then drawing them back in, as if it were just stretching.  Logan couldn’t help smiling and looked at Harry, but Harry still looked upset.

    Harry watched the waves, picked up handfuls of sand and let it fall through his fingers.  Choosing maturity over Rock?  Where did Lonnie get the idea that the two were opposed?  Hadn’t he ever heard of the Rolling fucking Stones?  And again Harry tried to put himself beyond it, to regard the very idea as ludicrous, but he couldn’t let go.  He kept repeating "Fucking Lonnie" in his head over and over.  How could he let go when his kid was sitting next to him on the beach, playing with a seagull, for fuck’s sake.

    Logan watched as the sand fell from his father’s hand.  Yeah, it must have been the soy sauce.

    The band broke up.  George received an email from Lonnie saying he was sorry, but he decided that he just didn’t want to be a rockstar anymore, said he wanted to grow up, whatever that meant.  Turns out George felt sort of the same way, but not Harry.  He never wanted to be a rockstar in the first place, he just wanted to jam with his buddies, and maybe entertain a room of bored, drunk people on Friday nights.  What was so immature about that?

    He arrived to pick Logan up shirtless and shoeless, with the band’s first demo tape blaring in his Honda. He sat outside and honked the horn along with the bassline.

    Logan had been aimlessly flipping channels all afternoon and had downed three-and-a-quarter bowls of mac and cheese.  The honking snapped him out of a daze and he found himself more than surprised to see his father shirtless and smoking a cigarette at the wheel of his car.  The numbness of the long afternoon began to recede as he  slipped into his sneakers.

    Harry barely glanced toward Logan as he entered the car.  The stereo’s bass shook Logan’s stomach, but he didn’t move to turn the stereo down.  Harry put the car into drive and Logan noticed how his father’s sagging stomach twitched as he turned the steering wheel.

    “What do you want to do today, Logan?”  Harry had to shout over the stereo, but still refused to turn his head and Logan tried to think of what he did to upset his father.

    “We’ll go to the beach then, if you don’t mind.”