There’s nothing certain about Shriek, only some conjecture and a lot of fantasy. Like his name. Everyone accepts that “Shriek” was a later embellishment but the one he replaced is lost forever. And to have an ID, a Social Security number, or even a birth certificate would be asking too much of him. Shriek’s destiny would not be weighted down by records.
We can say with some confidence that he was born as you and I were born. For a good stretch of his life he was a normal guy without much of a future. He had a dad. And that dad, so the legend goes, burst into his room one day and asked “What do you want to do with your life?” To which Shriek replied, “I want to rock.”
And to his credit he did exactly that. Everything from that moment changed. The normal guy with no future had become someone who cared slightly less about that fact.
Shriek cut an impressive figure among the young people in town. Though for the most part he was barely seen, whipping down the middle of the streets on his sputtering blue Triumph as if it was a blade slicing the town into shards.
No one knows why he took the name he did. And no one worked up the courage to ask. Certainly motorcycles don’t shriek; and he himself almost never spoke. I wouldn’t say “Hey” was his catchphrase; it was an all-purpose word for him. It was his favorite salutation, his favorite pickup line, his favorite Bible verse, and his favorite Shakespeare quote. He didn’t need to speak, I guess. Some people say all that needs saying in gestures. Like when he’d take off his helmet and let loose a shock of platinum hair, so thick with pomade it looked like a dying, molten beast. No one I know ever saw him take off his goggles. If you ever wanted to see him just kind of around, all you needed to do was to look for any free sidewall where he was certain to be found leaning affectedly against it. He liked the Dairy Queen; he liked the library; he liked the lumber mill.
I don’t know that he ever worked. Betty took good care of him. Betty was his girl. She was nice; no one really took notice of her until she started wearing black every day under some kind of flannel or plaid thing, the “Betty look” they called it. Can someone have a look if no one wants to imitate it? That was about the time she became his girl. She went to school, she stacked books at the library and faked sick at gym constantly; he didn’t do anything. When he wasn’t riding around with her or leaning on walls by himself, he was spinning donuts in a cornfield and challenging anyone he could to a game of chicken. He would just idle in front of someone and rev his engine. Occasionally someone would accept, someone just ambitious enough to actually want to run him over, but fights with other kids kept breaking out and cops pulled curfews.
His only real trick was wiping out all the time, skidding and rolling in the dust a good 10 feet at least. Betty was at his side instantly with whiskey, a bandage, and some peroxide. He just kissed her and limped away to God knows where. But he never did cool jumps the way people similar to Shriek do on TV.
I don’t think Betty really loved him that much, at least not enough to finish writing his name in studs on the back of his jacket. When he flew by, the clearest thing you could see were those bright, shining dots of S-H-R and less than half of an “E.” She couldn’t even spell it right. Some say she had a crush on a science teacher; others say it was on the Postmaster General at the time. I guess all that really matters is that you fall in love with someone who will treat you right, and who at least has a credit history and is convincingly literate.
Things didn’t work out, if that’s the right way of putting it. Betty moved to Minot, where she got into some kind of bigamy-related hot water. I don’t know on whose end. She had a kid. A son. A neighbor of her mom says he is now a professional drifter working odd jobs at different highway motels, and where he dabbles in peeping.
People argued for a good couple of years if Shriek really did what they said he did to that other girl. The kids took sides and most of them fell one way. “That bitch thinks she can trash Shriek because she got into Radcliffe,” the sophomore girls would say. “Let’s egg her house; she lives five doors down from me.” Things like that. He skipped town and was tried in absentia. Even with bifocals the presiding judge struggled to read his bitter condemnation off of a piece of crumpled and yellowed typewritten paper.
Then the football team choked on a 35-yard field goal, then the mayor’s cat got run over by a steamroller, then the parishioners of the Lutheran church burned down the Presbyterian church during an overnight youth ministry jamboree, though they denied knowing that was happening. The outlet mall took on this weird, fetid stench that no one could find the source of. It didn’t stop people from going, but the wince of disgust on the shoppers’ faces stayed that way for some of them.
Before Shriek left, there wasn’t much fun to do in this town besides watching Shriek. After Shriek left town, everything was different, but it wasn’t what anyone would call better. It’s like the world was a stomach he purged himself from just as we were willfully getting swallowed into it.
No one knew he was 34 until a bit later. He wound up in Missouri where a cousin or someone lived. He worked in a machine shop or as a busboy. Then he got in trouble again.
Tabloids in a few nearby cities picked up the story. It caused a minor sensation when his mugshot was all over the front pages. In the end he was just some mahogany-haired schlub who hogtied a cocktail waitress and tried to attach handlebars to her ears. They sent him to a state hospital before it closed sometime in the ‘80s; like the Dairy Queen, the library, the lumber mill, and the outlet mall (though not the smell).
And that is why it is illegal to rock within municipal limits.