Struts & Frets (4 page)

“I'm even worse now,” she said, then turned and attacked her canvas again.

I just watched her paint for a little bit, then I said, “I think my mom doesn't want me to be a professional musician.”

“Imagine that,” she said, not looking away from her canvas.

“What do you mean?”

“When I told my mom I wanted to be an artist, do you know what she said? ‘Oh, I'll love you even if you work at 7-Eleven your whole life.'”

“No she didn't.”

“You better believe it.”

“What does that even mean?” I asked. “That she thinks you'll never make it as an artist?”

“What she's really saying is that, in her book, being a successful artist is right up there with being a success at selling cigarettes to old ladies.”

“Honestly, Fiver. Does she even get how bad that sounds?”

“Are you kidding? That's just her trying to be
funny
. If she actually thought I was serious, instead of just going through some teenage phase, she'd probably take away all my art supplies and ship me off to boarding school.” She continued
to dance around the easel, raking raw colors across the canvas. “As far as she's concerned, I'm on my way to a brilliant career as a doctor or lawyer.”

“Yeah, that's totally ridiculous,” I said. “But for your parents, in a weird parent kind of way, it makes sense. I mean, your mom
is
a lawyer. So of course that's what she wants you to be. But my grandfather was a professional musician. It was good enough for him, right? Why can't I be one too? I mean, most people our age don't even know what they want to do with themselves and they don't really care. But
I
care. I really want to be a musician.”

Jen5 didn't say anything, but her brush started hitting the canvas hard enough for me to hear it.

“What?” I said.

She stopped painting and looked at me. “Do you think they really care about what we want, Sammy? Do you
really
?”

“Hey Sammy, I figured out how to play ‘Peter Gunn'!” said Alexander.

Rick, TJ, and I had been friends a long time before the band got started. The other guy in our group was Alexander. He was brainiac smart and really good at soccer, but he didn't hang out with either the nerds or the jocks. Maybe it was because he was one of the few black kids in our school.
Maybe it was because he was also a skater and had worn oversized clothes for so many years that he didn't even know what his normal size was, and he had the biggest and most perfectly shaped fro that I'd ever seen. None of that fit in too well in central Ohio. But it was more than that. He was like a walking, talking They Might Be Giants song. He was always cheerful, always goofy, and just so
weird
that most of the time nobody understood what he was talking about. He was kind of like the weirdness mascot for our freaky little crew.

“What's ‘Peter Gunn'?” asked Rick. We were all sitting around our lunch table. Rick looked even more out of it than usual. He had dark circles under his eyes, he looked like he hadn't showered, and he was slumped so far over the table that it made you feel like he needed it to keep from falling off the bench.

“You know,” I said. “‘Peter Gunn' was that Spy Hunter theme from the old-school Nintendo.”

“Oh.” Rick nodded. “I didn't realize it had another name.”

“I think it was the theme song for a TV show in the fifties,” said TJ.

“Huh,” said Rick. “Was the Mario Brothers theme from something else too?”

“I don't think so,” said TJ.

“Surprising,” said Rick. “It was a catchy tune.”

“What do you mean you figured out how to play it?” I asked Alexander.

“With my hands!” said Alexander.

All three of us groaned.

Alexander had really sweaty palms. Now, this was gross enough all by itself, but Alexander, in typical Alexander fashion, made it even worse when he figured out that by squeezing his sweaty palms together, he could get them to make a farting noise. Most meathead jocks would have laughed and maybe done it in Ms. Jansen's English class once or twice, then left it at that. But not Alexander. He didn't really even think it was funny. He thought it was
interesting
. So he kept experimenting with it until he realized that by applying different kinds of pressure, he could produce different tones. Since then, he had been attempting to play a song with hand farts.

“Wanna hear?” he asked now, his hands poised and his face eager.

“Not really,” I said. But I knew it wouldn't do any good.

“Here goes!” he said, and began. His face screwed up in concentration as he worked his hands together, and sure enough, slowly we started to hear wet, squeaky notes:
phfipphop phfip-phop phfip-phop phfffip-phfip!

“Wow,” said TJ. But he couldn't help grinning a little bit.

Alexander was getting warmed up now and the song was building momentum. It really did sound like “Peter Gunn.” All three of us were nodding our heads in time, and Rick and I couldn't resist coming in with the second part over top:

“
Baaaaa bah! Baaaaaaaaaa beeebah! Buh-buh-buh bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah boo-buh-du!
” We busted up laughing as Alexander continued to happily squeak away with his hand farts.

Then a velvety female voice cut through and said, “Hey, Sammy.”

Silence. The speaker was standing directly behind me. I could see TJ and Alexander across from me with faces like deer in headlights. But I didn't need their expression to clue me in to who it was. Oh, God. I couldn't believe that
she'd
just witnessed our stupid freaky spectacle. I wanted to curl up like a pill bug and hide until graduation.

“Hi, Laurie,” I said, trying to sound tough but only managing to sound hoarse. Then I turned around to look up at her.

Laurie was the hottest girl in school. She had straight, glossy black hair that hung to her shoulders; pale white skin; deep, mysterious green eyes; and full, pouty lips that were always covered in a dark burgundy lipstick. Today she was wearing a halter top, jean skirt, black fishnets (with a few
artful rips), and knee-high black patent leather boots. In short, she was a goth goddess. And I was totally, helplessly in love with her.

My throat dried up as I tried to think of some way of explaining what we had just been doing that didn't make it sound even worse than it looked. All I could come up with was “How are you?”

“Okay.” She smiled ever so faintly, but it was enough to send shivers down my spine. “Have you seen Joe today?”

My heart flopped down around my knees. Rick, who had listened to my miserable sighs and heartache for over a year now, choked on his soda.

“No,” I said in a way that I hoped didn't sound as sad and desperate as I felt. “I think he skipped again today.”

She sighed and bit her lip. “You guys have rehearsal tonight?”

“Uh, no,” I said.

“Oh,” she said. “Okay.” She shifted her weight uncomfortably, then said, “Well, if you see him, tell him to call me.”

“Sure,” I said and valiantly attempted a smile. “Sure I will, Laurie.”

“Thanks, Sammy.” She gave another faint smile and then hurried off to sit with her girlfriends.

Our table seemed to breathe a collective sigh of relief.

“Dude,” said Rick, giving me his most serious look. “Why didn't you invite her to sit with us?”

“Why would I do that?” I said.

He shrugged. “Hey, she's totally not my type, but I have to admit she's smoking hot. And anyway, you've been mooning over her our entire high school lives.”

“Really?” asked TJ. “You have a thing for Laurie?”

“Never mind,” I said. “It's just lame and depressing to talk about. And anyway, she's clearly not into me, so just let it go.”

But
I
was the one who couldn't let it go.

“Why Joe?” I demanded. “What's he got that I don't?”

“He's older,” said TJ.

“He's tougher,” said Rick.

“He's the frontman,” said Alexander. “Don't they always get the hot chicks?”

“Thanks, guys,” I said. “Consider my ego boosted.”

Then Jen5 flopped down next to me, spilling books and notebooks from her army bag in a cascade across the table. “What did Vampirella want?” she asked.

“She was asking where Joe was,” said Rick.

“Ha,” she said around a bite of salami sandwich. “Aren't they a match made in heaven.”

“That's not what Sammy thinks,” said Alexander.

“That's 'cause Sammy's a retard,” said Jen5 without looking at me.

“I don't know why you don't like Laurie,” I said. “I don't think you've really given her a chance.”

“Oh, I gave her a chance all right. Back in junior high, before she'd discovered goth and was just another snobby prep girl. We were supposed to sell Girl Scout cookies together and—”

“You were in the Girl Scouts?” asked Alexander.

“For one year,” I said.

“My parents were concerned about my antisocial behavior,” Jen5 said with a shrug. “They thought it would bring me out of my shell. But as the case with Miss Vampirella illustrates, a year of merit badges, cookie sales, car washes, and memorized slogans may have made me more social, but it didn't do much good for the ‘anti' part.”

“So what happened?” said Rick. “Did you slap her or something? Pull her hair out?”

“Grow up,” she said.

“Never!”

“Anyway, we were supposed to sell cookies together, and I was trying to talk to her like she was a normal human being and not some brainless Kewpie doll until finally she turned to me and said: ‘Uh, hey, Jen. My friend's mom just pulled
into the parking lot, so if you could just, like, not talk to me until she's inside the store and can't see us anymore, I'd really appreciate it.'”

“You are lying,” I told Jen5.

“You wish,” she said.

“You know what I heard about love?” TJ asked suddenly.

We all stared at him.

“Uh, no,” I said, wondering where this came from. “What did you hear?”

“That everyone has an image in their mind of the perfect girl or guy. And whenever someone fits eighty percent of that image, we block out the rest. We just don't even see it. And we continue to block it out until we get to know them so well that we're comfortable with them. Then we finally see the other twenty percent and it could be the worst thing in the world and we just never noticed before.”

“Well, by all means, then,” said Jen5. “Let us hasten this connection between Laurie and Sammy so that he might see the idiocy of his desire more quickly! Hopefully he won't get crabs in the process!”

“Jesus, why do you have to be like that?” I said. “TJ's trying to talk about something serious and you can't even . . .”

She was just sitting there smirking at me. Maybe she was one of my best friends, but she also pissed me off a lot.

“You know what?” I said. “Just forget it.” And I got up, grabbed my bag, and left the table.

As I walked away, I heard her call to me, “Come on now! Sammy! Don't be such a spaz! I was only kidding!”

But I knew she wasn't. Jen5 only smiled when she was dead serious.

After school, I pulled the Boat up in front of my grandfather's apartment building. He lived on the first floor of a place just outside German Village, so it didn't have to keep that old-building look. I cut the ignition and waited while the Boat's engine settled, listening to the groaning tick of the radiator slow down to silence. I was stalling. I didn't really want to see him. I mean, I did. I loved my grandfather, maybe more than anyone else, but . . . well . . . he was getting a little crazy in his old age. I was tempted to skip it completely and tell Mom he was asleep or something. But I knew I wouldn't do that. It'd make me miserable all night thinking about it. So after another five minutes of staring at my dashboard, I decided to face the music.

Literally.

When I stepped through the front door, noise hit me like a brick in the face. The lights were dim, and as I waited for my eyes to adjust, I tried to figure out what was in the noise. The
Oscar Peterson Trio. Billie Holiday. And something else more modern, probably Wynton Marsalis. Three totally different jazz artists being blasted from three different stereos at the same time. And there was something else that I couldn't figure out. It wasn't until my eyes finally adjusted to the gloom that I saw it was my grandfather playing the piano. That gave me a little hope, because these days he usually only played when he was in a good mood.

I walked through the living room and over to the piano, then stopped and watched him play for a minute.

He was mostly bald, and the little bit of white hair he had around the sides and back was frizzy, almost like cotton candy. He had a short beard, which I always thought was a good idea for an old guy. It covered up that turkey neck that most of them got. He looked skinnier every time I saw him. He had a nurse or aide or whatever they were called who came in and made him breakfast, but I don't think he could afford any more help than that, so the only other time he ate was when Mom or I came to visit and made something for him. Eating just didn't interest him very much anymore.

He didn't seem to notice me, or else he didn't feel like talking. He just kept playing. After a little while, I went into the kitchen. His freezer was filled with the same frozen dinners that filled ours. Mom just bought a ton of them at
some warehouse club. I pulled out two and popped them in the microwave.

While I stared at the revolving plastic trays through the microwave door, I heard the Wynton Marsalis album finish. Right after the microwave timer dinged, the Oscar Peterson Trio stopped. While I was setting the tiny kitchen table for us, Billie Holiday stopped too. All that was left was my grandfather's piano. It was a little out of tune and it sounded like he couldn't quite make up his mind whether he was playing lounge or swing style. But I liked listening to him. It reminded me of when I was a kid and my mom used to take me to see him play. It hadn't happened a lot, because he usually played at nightclubs and other places my mom didn't think a kid should be. But every once in a while he'd have a gig at a regular concert hall, usually backing up some famous musician on tour. I'd also get to hear him when my mom was going to school at night to get her graduate degree. She'd drop me off at Gramps's place and we'd sit in front of the piano most of the night. He'd play lots of old big band tunes and teach me the words and I would sing along. He still lived in the same apartment, but it seemed brighter and warmer in my memory.