A Ticket to Ride

“Oh no,” Carol said, her face grimacing. “The line is long.”

From the tiny back seat of her school-bus yellow VW, I craned my head to get a glimpse of what stood between us and the coveted Judas Priest tickets I had expertly skipped school to obtain.

Spilling out from a nondescript doorway in the industrial strip mall like a gothic Chinese dragon was a line of 50 or so people channeling early 80s hair metal fashion – all tight jeans, sleeveless t-shirts, and long wavy hair.

We quickly parked and made our way to the end of the line, our initial jubilance metered by our unfortunate lack of proximity to the promise land. I acted cool, but a bug of anxiety had crept into my stomach. After all my intricate planning to get here, my hopes might be felled by a long line. I wasn’t built for this type of pressure.

A few weeks prior, the four of us—Carol, her sister Christine, our friend Melissa, and me—had been riding around on a Saturday night in the School Bug—that’s what we called Carol’s car—drinking and heckling boys. Carol and Christine were sisters, part of a family I desperately wanted entrée to, cool kids whose parents didn’t hen peck their every waking moment and siblings to the senior boy I had a crush on.

Melissa was a recent addition to the group. I didn’t know much about her. She was 17, a junior. She dated a guy named Darwin.

Christine and I were 16, but Carol was 21. She was our alcohol connection. Her interest in hanging out with us didn’t seem weird at the time, though certainly it was. I just thought we were the luckiest girls in the world.

Christine and I were hunkered in the back seat chugging blackberry wine when the radio announcer broke the news that Judas Priest was coming to town. Tickets would be available in one month at exactly 10 a.m.

“Goddamn goddamn goddamn shit hell!” squealed Christine using our favorite curse word combination. She was jumping up and down beside me, beating on the back of Carol’s seat. “We have to get tickets! Carol! You have to take us to get tickets! We’ll skip school to get tickets. Hell yes!”

I jumped up and down with her and squealed when she squealed, but I wasn’t so sure about skipping school. I wasn’t even allowed to go outside the city limits and the nearest ticket office was an hour away. My parents would cut my hands off if they found out. And what if I missed something important at school? No, I would just give them money to buy a ticket for me. That’s how most people did it anyway. Everyone knew someone who would stand in line to buy six or eight tickets, or, in rare cases, someone whose mom would do it.

“Will you buy one for me?”

I knew skipping school wasn’t a good idea, but honestly I was a little bummed about missing out on what would obviously be a colossal day. Plus it seemed like the cool thing to do. Much cooler than, say, taking a French test.

“No, you have to come with,” begged Christine. “You have to skip school! C’mon! It’ll be great!” Her eyes were shining as she tugged on my arms emphatically as if the right combination of words would pop out of my mouth if she pulled on my arms enough times.

“Yeah, it’s not hard. You just need a fake doctor’s note,” added Melissa helpfully. “We’ll sign it for you. Carol can pick you up after the first bell.”

“Yes! I’ll take you! We’ll all go!” shouted Carol from the driver’s seat, catching my eyes in the rear-view mirror.

Their enthusiasm emboldened me, and I was touched that they wanted so much for me to be part of this expedition. Sure. I could pull this off. I could be this interesting. I could be the person who skips school for concert tickets and speaks nonchalantly to hot senior boys.

“Do you think Russ will come?” I asked.

“Yeah. Will Russ be there?” echoed Melissa, which I thought was weird.

Russ was Carol and Christine’s brother, and I had a huge crush on him. He wasn’t a football player or a school leader or in the band. He was different, at least by my school’s standards. He just had this charisma and confidence that was very sexy. And he loved hard rock music.

I knew he was a fan of Judas Priest. There had been a day the previous year where he had announced to our group at school that he was listening to nothing but Judas Priest for a whole week.

“Ugh, no,” said Christine, crinkling her nose as if I’d asked her to wipe down tables in the school cafeteria. “He can get his own tickets.”

She said as much to him when we ran into him and his buddies at the Sonic.

“Damn right I’ll get my own tickets,” he said. Then he smiled at me.

That meant he would be at the concert. That was almost like a date.

I sat in the back seat and purred, a little from the cheap wine and a little from the decadent future that lay before me. I pictured us all going to the concert together or at least meeting together someplace cool like Bennigan’s before it started. Russ would see me as this cool heavy metal chick and hold my hand during the show and share his beer. He and I could hang out with the other couples and it would be perfect. I was on a high only high school girls are capable of. I wanted it all so bad.

As I stood in that interminable line, my fantasy seemed in jeopardy. I was now acutely aware that the show could very well sell out before we got our turn. I slumped a little in the heat. It was October, still warm in Houston, and an aura of moisture hung around each of us like a sweaty halo. I wanted to throw up a little.

Christine kept grabbing my hand and giving it a confident squeeze, but we all felt powerless, left to a fate determined by the processing speed of a ticket release machine.

At five minutes after 10 a.m., the door to the ticket office swung open and we began to collectively do the crab walk inside.

“They’re giving our tickets away,” whined Christine as the first lucky buyers emerged from Oz. “Here’s Christine’s. Here’s Carol’s. Here’s Shanda’s. Here’s Melissa’s,” she said, mimicking throwing our tickets into the wind. “Oh, hurry up line!”

For increased efficiency, we pooled our money with Carol. She would buy all seven tickets at once, one each for the three of them and one each for their boyfriends. Plus me.

When we finally reached the front of the line, we could hardly contain ourselves. We were going to make the show after all. We would be the haves, the people with plans and a story to tell, the owners of concert t-shirts worn braggadociously to school the day after the show. The question now was how good our seats would be.

“Best available seats are on Level One to the right of the stage,” said the ticket guy. “The next option is straight across from the stage on Level Two.”

We contemplated the seating chart, crowding around it as if it was a lost sea scroll or a basket of babies.

“Is it better to be closer to the stage but caddy-corner to it?” wondered Carol.

“It seems like we’ll be craning our heads the whole night,” I said.

“But the other tickets are so far away,” countered Christine. “I guess you can see the whole stage, if seeing ants perform is your thing.”

“They’ll have the jumbotron,” I offered. “And we can bring binoculars.”

Ultimately we decided to go with Level Two for a more ergonomic concert experience. And as the ticket guy presented us with the 3-foot long streamer of tickets, we rejoiced, squealing and hugging each other, hugging the ticket guy, annoying everyone around us. We had set out on a mission and we had succeeded. We were unstoppable.

We strode confidently back out into the sunlight like Charlie’s Angel’s after nabbing the bad guy, past the anxious queue and back into the School Bug. It was time to celebrate.

We put down the convertible top on the VW, put the Screaming for Vengeance cassette tape into the player and fast-forwarded to “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin.” Then we blared it as loud as it would go as Carol peeled out of the parking lot, waving our arms to the music and feeling the hot sun stamp our faces. I couldn’t stop smiling.

We shared salad and bread sticks at Olive Garden, where we stole salt shakers and a menu, and walked up the down escalator in Macy’s. This disobedience made me feel impervious to calamity. The cool kids never suffer or get grounded. I had entered new territory.

On the way home, we talked about boys and sex. Carol was obviously on birth control, being the old lady of the group.

“She’s taking me to the doctor next week,” confided Christine.

Christine was getting serious with her boyfriend Phil and was ready to go all the way. I thought she was lucky to have a big sister to turn to. There was no way I could have a conversation like that with my mom. It was ridiculous to even contemplate.

“My mom put me on the pill when I was 15,” announced Melissa. “For cramps.”

I was stunned and also a little bit angry. These girls didn’t have a curfew. They had easy access to beer and birth control. They made decent though not stellar grades. I felt like I was living my life all wrong with my rules and studiousness. And Melissa. For some reason, her announcement made me especially uncomfortable. I guess I thought it made her more desirable, more sophisticated, and I was secretly glad she had a boyfriend. I didn’t want any extra competition.

I spent every waking moment of the next few weeks listening to Judas Priest cassettes on my Walkman, culling band trivia from the 101 KLOL radio DJs, and stalking heavy metal magazines to learn obscure facts about the band, like the origin of the band name, which supposedly came from a Bob Dylan song, “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest;” their hometown, which was Birmingham, England, the same as Black Sabbath; and their drummer lineup, which was eight so far.

Very often at school, Russ would join our group for lunch. I would try to impress him with my geek band knowledge, an early attempt at attracting men with my brain instead of sex appeal, which was awkward at best. The next weekend while we were partying in an abandoned subdivision, he kissed me. His mouth tasted like Budweiser.

The next week was a blur of holding hands in school and making out in the back seat of Carol’s car while she drove us to the Sonic after. He would fold up his tall lanky body to sit in the tiny back seat with me, and I would stare into his black eyes with my hazel ones between kisses. He let me wear his KISS concert shirt, the metal equivalent of a letter jacket, and we made plans to ride to the Judas Priest show together. I was in love and for once it wasn’t with a fantasy in my head.

The weekend before the concert, Russ was home alone. Carol and Christine and the rest of his family had gone out of town, which provided the perfect teenage boy opportunity—an epic, unchaparoned party at his house. Everyone from school was there drinking beer and listening to music. I felt like I’d done it—become one of the cool kids. I had great friends, a new awesome boyfriend, and got to attend legendary parties instead of just hearing about them the next week at school. I was easy prey.

“Let’s go to my bedroom,” he whispered with lips soft like petals. His black eyes, spiky inkblot hair, and welcoming arms proved too much for me. I gave in like a sinkhole.

The fallout was severe. The next week he stopped coming by at lunch and there were no after-school makeout sessions.

On Friday, we all met up to drink before the football game.

“You wanna go to the game together?” I asked him.

“Sorry,” he said, not making eye contact. “I’m taking Melissa.”

I was crushed. It was one of those moments when the words just hang in the air and you want to tear them down and stomp on them and make them not be true. But Christine confirmed.

“Melissa and Darwin broke up,” she said. “She’s dating Russ now. So sorry. He’s such a dick.”

I skipped the game and listened to Judas Priest’s “Love Bites” for several hours alone in my room. Heavy metal consolation.

Then Christine called me with even worse news. Her parents made Carol get a job and she wouldn’t be able to go to the show. That meant we didn’t have a ride. I was distraught. I had been callously dumped and was now perilously close to missing one of the epic shows of my lifetime.

I went into emergency management mode, calling everyone I knew. Melissa got a ride with Russ, of course, but they didn’t have room for Christine and me, as if I wanted to ride with those shitheads anyway.

As of Saturday afternoon, I had a ticket to the show, approval to attend it, but still no way to get there. Finally, Christine called me and said her boyfriend Phil and his friends would make room for us in their car.

Phil drove a colossally large Buick called the Budmobile, so-called because he only drank Budweiser. They picked me up at 5, and we headed to the liquor store outside town where he proceeded to fill the trunk and back seat with beer and various liquors. He bought enough alcohol for a week-long rave.

I had my own bottle of blackberry wine at the ready, but before we could leave town, we had to stop at my mother’s office so I could get some additional money.

I was so close! Weeks of preparation—ticket in hand, transportation finally confirmed. I just needed some extra cash and I was on my way, the big payoff to an epic week of humiliation. But I hadn’t counted on my mom coming out to the car to give us her “drive carefully” speech. I hadn’t counted on her seeing the aluminum forest of beer cans in the back seat. Had ATMs been around, the tragedy might have been averted.

I had already gotten in the front seat when she noticed them. I was in the car. I can’t stress enough how close I was! But she saw the beer – both the beer in the backseat and the beer between Phil’s legs for him to sip on as he drove. She saw all of this and her maternal instinct just kicked in. Like BLAM! She turned into a super hero and I turned into the biggest most unfortunate jackass loser ever. She pulled open the door with some kind of crazy Herculean strength, and pulled me out of the car kicking and screaming, like a momma cat grabbing her kitten by the scruff of the neck and throwing it out of harms way. She pulled me out of the car one handed, the finger on her other hand wagging, and me screaming and crying like a little girl for her to stop.

My friends looked on with sympathy, revulsion and relief – relief that they weren’t saddled with being me.

She got me out of there but there was nothing she could do to stop the other kids, so they took my ticket and sped away into the night, leaving me a sodden dejected mess with a royally pissed off momma cat still screaming in my face.

There would be no Bennigan’s, no holding hands and sharing beer with my new boyfriend, no amazing Judas Priest concert with my friends. The whole fantasy came crashing down in one ginormously-failed attempt at coolness. I was sent back several levels in the high school caste system, no longer just an uncool nerd, but now a slutty social pariah.

The next morning, Christine came over.

“How are you doing?”

“OK. My mom called your parents. Sorry about that. Did you get in trouble?”

“No. Not really.”

I was overtaken again by the injustice. I was grounded for a month.

“Here’s the money for your ticket,” she said, handing over a wad of bills. “We scalped it to a guy before the show.”

“Thanks,” I said, inconsolable.

“I also got you this.”

From out of her bag, she pulled out the only thing that might make me feel better—a white t-shirt with black sleeves and a Judas Priest logo emblazoned on the front. After a month of ups and downs and explosive declines in my reputation, at least I had a t-shirt.

« Read more from Issue 5: The Music Issue

About Shanda Boyett

Shanda Boyett (aka Music Crush Girl) is a music blogger and photographer in New York. She attempted to see Judas Priest while in college but was unsuccessful again. Her reviews and photographs have appeared in Brooklynvegan and CD Reviewer. You can follow her music insights at www.musiccrushgirl.com or @musiccrushgirl on twitter.