If You Want to Get to Heaven

About the Book

It’s 1973 and Rick Harrington has just earned a degree in music. His teachers tell him he’s got golden ears. Play a jazz chord and he’d whistle the inside voicings with ease—if he could only whistle. Hard to do when you’ve got cerebral palsy. Hard to get anything going when the world won’t cut you a break. But his break finally comes when his brother Kid, a rock-and-roller, needs a soundman and Rick is swept into a rip-roaring rock-and-roll circus of sex, drugs, and ambition.

“Not because of your condition or anything,” a mysterious beauty says to him in the midst of a post-concert bash, “but this doesn’t seem like your scene.” “What other scene do I have?” he asks her. Kid Chrysler and the Cruisers are his shot at life in the real world—though unreal might better define the lifestyle of a rock band.

Confronted the next day by a bathroom door too narrow for a wheelchair, Kid tells Rick “The old family tradition, bro. Time to hop aboard the Chrysler Express.” He’s carried on his brother’s back again. When will it stop? When will Rick’s talent, not his brother’s interventions, be enough to open a door of opportunity?

And what of love? Kid can have as many women as he wants, and does. Rick wants only one woman, to cherish forever. Why can´t women look past the handsome, charismatic Kid and see the genuinely loving brother who is carried not on a charging white steed but on a gleaming chrome wheelchair.

IF YOU WANT TO GET TO HEAVEN is about brothers in harmony and discord, about the triumphs and tragedies of a rock-and-roll band on the road, and about one very special man you won´t forget.

Here are what other authors are saying about If You Want to Get to Heaven:

“This is a beauty of a book. McKinney has earned the right to this story by living close to the marrow and serving an artist’s apprenticeship in the old-fashioned way. He knows about musical marriage—the six-way kind a band must forge and that other kind that threatens to break it all apart.”

—Kathryn Trueblood, THE SPERM DONOR’S DAUGHTER

“Confined by cerebral palsy to a wheelchair, Rick Harrington is determined to use the gift God gave him—his ear for music—and his skills as a soundman to build a life. For this he needs his older brother, the larger-than-life Kid Chrysler, a man of many appetites, and leader of the rock band, Kid Chrysler and the Cruisers. But Rick finds himself confined as well to Kid’s enormous shadow. The flawed but complex Kid towers over Gary McKinney’s energetic first novel. But at its heart is Rick’s struggle for autonomy. Its soul is the soul of rock-and-roll. And its quest is for love, freedom, family and music. IF YOU WANT TO GET TO HEAVEN: read this book.”

—Laura Kalpakian, “THE DELINQUENT VIRGIN”

“Sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll—and a wild-ass ride in a wheelchair! McKinney’s lively story takes you backstage with a band on the road, from the fresh perspective of the disabled sound engineer. This is the real stuff, straight from the heart.”

—Sara Stamey, WILD CARD RUN

“Irresistible. McKinney gets it right.”

—Cary Brown, THE DARK

About the Author

Gary McKinney lives the Pacific Northwest with his wife and two children. He has written several mystery novels and uses his MA in Creative Writing in his work as a technical writer. He continues his music career as a weekend professional and will until they pry the guitar from his cold, dead fingers.