by Josh Farrar
“Umm, okay. Keep going …”
“It was with some guys who just turned out to be serious jerks.” He played a power chord and held it. “I’m into playing alone now.”
“What do you mean? Jerks how?”
“I don’t know, just jerks.”
“Okay.” I rubbed my chin. “Well, what if it was with cooler people, wouldn’t you want to be in a band again?”
“Probably not. I don’t know.” He was pretty good at creating an awkward vibe.
“So what’s your name?”
“Jonny.” Another power chord, even louder. “Really, I don’t get why it always has to be about bands. Bands are like the big thing now. Everybody all of a sudden has to be in a band. But music doesn’t always have to be about rocking out.”
“What do you mean? Of course music is about rocking out!”
“I dunno.”
“Nobody can rock alone, you must know that. Where would Paul McCartney be without John Lennon? Thom Yorke without Jonny Greenwood? Chuck D without Flava Flav?”
That got a laugh, so I decided to keep going.
“You want to be a solo artist? You want to be the next Justin Timberlake? Bright Eyes? Miley Cyrus, maybe?”
“Ha, Miley. What’s your name, then, Miss Bandleader?”
“Annabelle Cabrera,” I said, holding my hand out to him.
“Well, Annabelle Cabrera, today has been a weird one.” We shook hands. “First few days of school, and I just kind of wish I was still sitting in my bedroom, playing guitar. You know what I mean?”
I nodded. “My favorite part of the day is spent with my bass and my iPod, learning songs.”
“Exactly. And I’d like to keep it that way.” He got up from his chair. “But there are a bunch of musicians in this school.”
“Yeah? I haven’t had much luck.”
“You just need to know where to look. I can help you, if you want.”
“For real?”
“Sure. Meet me here on Monday, same time. I’ll give you a little tour around.”
Yes! A Federal Hill rock ’n’ roll tour guide. I was on my way.
Rock stars hang out with other rock stars.
FRIED CHEESE AND SALAMI
I checked e-mail at home and saw one from Ronaldo. The subject line read “Ronaldo’s Rules to Rock By.” This is what it said:
1. Find the right bandmates. Form a band with your friends. It’s better to have a pretty good drummer who’s the coolest guy in the world than a great drummer who’s a jerk.
2. Practice. Every great band practices tons. Whether your music’s crazy-complicated or stupid-simple, you have to rehearse. Radiohead does it. So did The Ramones. And so will you.
3. Write. I know you keep your notebook. That’s awesome. Keep going with it. Don’t worry about saying anything brilliant or earth-shattering. Write about things that mean something to you, and people will listen.
4. Record. Recording is really the last step of writing. You have no idea how much you’ll learn about writing songs by recording them. You’ll tear your hair out trying to capture THE perfect version of a song, and you’ll probably rewrite the whole thing three or four times along the way. But you’ll improve as a songwriter, and your band will get better and better, too.
5. Gig. It doesn’t matter if you’re playing at Madison Square Garden or the pizza place around the corner. Every gig will make you stronger as a band. Especially at the beginning, don’t turn down gigs because they seem uncool. If your history teacher asks you to play for her dad and his checkers partner at the old folks’ home, say yes.
Before I’d even finished reading, Ronaldo popped up on IM.
EggMtnRckr: so, did U get em?
Bassinyrface: sure did. thanks.
EggMtnRckr: and? what did you think?
Bassinyrface: well, I think I pretty much knew that stuff already. I mean, practice, write, record, gig? Duh.
EggMtnRckr: Maybe. But you’d be surprised how easy it is to forget the basics sometimes.
Bassinyrface: Ok. I DO have a question, though … like, you say to form a band with my friends, but I dont really HAVE any friends here, remember?
EggMtnRckr: Maybe just make sure you pick bandmates that seem like they COULD be your friends.
Bassinyrface: yeah, that makes sense.
EggMtnRckr: just dont pick anybody who seems totally evil!
Bassinyrface: word. So i might have found a guitar player. MIGHT have. plays great but says he wants to stay solo.
EggMtnRckr: hmm … work on him.
Bassinyrface: What do you mean? How?
EggMtnRckr: He’s prolly just shy. Nobody REALLY wants to do this alone. Just get to know him a little, and maybe he’ll change his mind.
Bassinyrface: how did you find the egg
guys?
EggMtnRckr: they came to me.
Bassinyrface: shaddup YOU were the one who came to ME.
EggMtnRckr: Yeah but U were a special case, Annabelle. The other guys found me. The most important thing is, you gotta find people you like as people, cuz you’ll be spending a lotta time together. U know?
Bassinyrface: Are you saying I need to be more likable?
EggMtnRckr: No I’m saying … be YRSELF.
Bassinyrface: Meh.
EggMtnRckr: Hey, I like you so at least you’ve got THAT, annabelle.
Bassinyrface: Ha, thanks, R. U are awesome.
As it turned out, I had a chance to work on my writing later that very night. I lay on my bed, stomach-down, a couple sheets of paper in front of me and a pen in my hand.
“Write about a time when you were very homesick,” read the assignment.
Ugh. I was homesick right now. Did Mr. V make up this homework just for me, or what? Missing my old city was about the last thing in the world I wanted to put into words at that moment, so I tried to think of the assignment as Coming Up with Ideas for Future Songs, not as having anything to do with school.
Rock stars don’t do homework, I thought.
But they do write songs—or at least they try to.
Everything was better in Brooklyn, I wrote.
I looked at the sentence, and kind of liked it. Could it be a lyric? Maybe. I decided to just write a bunch of sentences as fast as they came to me.
I miss fried cheese and salami.
I miss soccer games in Red Hook Park.
I miss my abuela.
Everything had been better in Brooklyn. For one thing, Abuela, my grandmother on my dad’s side, the Dominican side, had always been around. It was actually Abuela’s apartment that we had lived in right up until the move to Providence. We had never had a place all to ourselves before. My dad had never really left home, except for an apartment in Prospect Heights, where he lasted for about five minutes without Abuela’s home-cooked meals. When my parents got married, my mom had moved in, and then they had me and X.
There was never any guessing whose house it was, though. Abuela was the queen of the castle. That is, if a queen worked really hard all day long in a housecoat and slippers. And if the castle were a dingy three-bedroom apartment in Sunset Park. Even with my mom and dad supposedly in charge of X and me, it was pretty clear who called the shots at Abuela’s house.
Abuela had earned the right to tell us what to do. While my parents raced from gig to gig or slept off a late-night recording session, Abuela was at home doing what needed to be done. She was the one, not my parents, who walked X and me to the bus every morning. She was the one who came to soccer games with tasty treats for all my teammates and slowly, methodically opened our report cards as soon as they arrived in the mail. She would force us to stand right in front of her as she did it, too. When the grades were good, Abuela would go nuts baking cakes or cookies or a pie, feeding us until we were about to explode. When they were not so good, she’d get all serious and say, “I know you do better next time.”
Abuela used to get up every day at sunrise and make café con leche for herself with her hai
r curlers still on. She tore off bits of bread and dunked them in the coffee, always taking a moment to savor the taste. Only once had I actually been awake early enough to see her make breakfast. Usually the smell of hot food was already in the air by the time I even opened my eyes, the pots and pans having long been cleaned and put away.
But one time, when I was about eight, I was sick with a fever. I woke up when it was still dark out, and I was scared. I wandered, sleepy and spaced out, into the kitchen, my blanket trailing behind me. Standing in the kitchen door, I watched Abuela doing her thing. She was making my favorite, fried cheese and salami with a side of casabe, a cracker made from yucca. It was 90 percent grease, and it tasted amazing.
Abuela had made this dish at least twice a week for my whole life, but she always took it really seriously, like she was making it for the first time. She was obsessed with getting the fried cheese just right: it had to be golden and crispy on the bottom, and if she didn’t feel it was perfect, she’d throw the whole thing out and start over. She would squint at the pan and lift it from the fire, then have a staring contest with the browned edges of the cheese. That day, it was ready. It was just right. She plated two portions for X and me, not realizing I was standing right behind her. When I coughed into my blanket, she spotted me and jumped back, surprised.
“Oh, baby, you scare me,” she said, pulling out a chair. “Sit down. Eat.”
Now I sat in a huge, humid apartment in a new city, and I hadn’t had cheese and salami for over two months. And what was for dinner tonight in the Cabrera household? Shaky Jake’s chocolate chip pancakes again—I could almost bet on it. X would be on a three-hour sugar high, as usual. While Jake ruled in many ways, he was no Abuela. He couldn’t hold our family together while my parents lived in their fantasy world.
Was I homesick? I felt like I didn’t have a home anymore. Home was something we had left in Sunset Park. Now I was living in a recording studio, which is the exact opposite of a home.
I looked at what I had written, pulled out a rhyming dictionary, and started to screw around:
Everything’s better in Brooklyn
Fried salami, goopy cheese
Egg Mountain shows and the East River
breeze
Take me back to Brooklyn, please
Man, I miss my old hometown
Milk shakes at Uncle Louie G’s
What’s for dinner tonight, pizza or
Chinese?
Take me back to Brooklyn, please
What are you going to make of my masterpiece, Mr. V?
“What’s up, Cabrera?” Jonny said on the following Monday. He was waiting for me at the empty classroom at lunchtime, right where he said he’d be.
“Not much, Jonny …” I waited for him to fill in the blank. But he didn’t.
“Just Jonny.”
“Okay, Jonny No Last Name. Jonny Mysterious.”
“Ha, it’s Jonny Mack.”
“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Mack.”
“Likewise.”
We were both brown-bagging it, so we skipped the caff and walked through the halls. I hadn’t been this near him standing upright before, so it was like I was looking at him for the first time. Dyed black hair with bangs long enough to cover a slightly patchy forehead. A small white scar above his lip. Black T-shirt, black jeans, black Chuck high-tops. Next to him, I looked like Little Miss Sunshine. He was way more goth than I remembered, like the doofus big brother to that David Copperfield–obsessed pixie I’d seen in Loner Land.
“I can’t believe your parents are Benny and Joon,” he said. “Entranced is a great record.”
“You Googled me?”
“Yup.” He pushed up his glasses.
“All righty, then.”
“So are they crazy? Why would you guys leave Brooklyn? Brooklyn is like the international center of indie rock.”
“Tell me about it. Shows every night of the week.”
“All my favorite bands are from Brooklyn. Animal Collective, Liars, Interpol, they’re all there.”
“I know.”
“You must be bummed. There’s maybe ten bands in all of Providence, and half of them are metal tribute bands.”
“Yeah.”
“So … why’d you move here, then?”
“My parents wanted a place where they could live and record, and they couldn’t afford it in Brooklyn.”
“Really? But they’re totally successful.”
“Well, if by ‘successful’ you mean that a lot of people like them, sure. But they don’t exactly rake cash in, doing what they do. They’re not competing with Beyoncé for a spot on the top ten.”
“Well, yeah, they’re indie. But they could play to at least five hundred people in almost every major city in the country. Not Providence, maybe, but every major city.”
“Yeah, I guess. But you’d be surprised how little they make, after you count up the hotel bills, the gas, the blah, blah, blah. They don’t make much on records, either.”
“Oh man, that sucks. I guess I should listen to my dad and become a lawyer, then?”
“Ha. Totally, you traitor.”
We walked by my poster, and Jonny stopped.
“This is you, right?”
I nodded.
“ ‘For those about to rock’?” he read.
“Umm, yeah. You think that was cheesy?”
“Nah, don’t worry about it. Everybody needs a little cheese in their diet. So what do you think, are you gonna form the biggest band in the world, or what?”
“Well, you’ve gotta start somewhere, right?”
“What’s more important? Is it about being incredibly popular, or just sounding really amazing?”
I had to think about it. “When I imagine this band,” I said, “we’re playing in front of thousands of people. But for thousands of people to like us, we’d have to sound really great, right?”
“Yeah, but there are some really, really popular bands whose music is terrible, don’t you think? Look at Hilary Duff.”
“Well, sure, I hate ninety-nine percent of what’s on the radio. So I guess I want to be the biggest and the best.”
“So, Annabelle Cabrera has to have it all.”
Heh. I was starting to like this guy. We kept walking.
As we made our way toward the yard, I realized we were getting an awful lot of sidelong glances. I couldn’t figure out why. A pudgy goth nerd taking a stroll with a four-foot-ten rock girl. Keep moving, people, I thought. Nothing to see here.
Suddenly, I saw a familiar face: the attention-deficit girl from the week before. She walked right next to me, talking to one of her friends in a voice obviously meant to be overheard by anybody within a mile radius.
“There she is, the talent scout,” she said nastily. “The choir director who thinks she’s too good for this school.”
I winced. “Don’t ask,” I whispered to Jonny. “ADHDiva.”
She went left, thankfully, and we went right.
Jonny pushed open the door to the yard with his shoulder.
“Ah, fresh air,” he said. “Too stuffy in that hallway.”
We rested our backs against the wall, squinted into the sun, and pulled out our lunches. I was having another one of Jake’s specialties, PB&J. Jonny chomped on a tangerine, a Ho Ho, and a piece of mayo-slathered salami that he had pulled out of a soggy-looking sandwich.
“Nice feast,” I said.
“Ho Hos rock.”
Three big guys walked by. My eyes were at jeans level, and I spotted a folded Fender guitar strap hanging out of one of the dudes’ back pockets. Keeping in mind Jonny’s anti-band attitude and Ronaldo’s very first rule to rock by, I got up and started following them.
“Annabelle, wait up,” Jonny said. “Bad idea!”
But I was already off and running.
I followed the jeans until I could get a better view of the kid wearing them. He was massive, adult-tall, with slicked-back hair and the beginnings of a scraggly goatee. He
had on the mirrored sunglasses of a cop and a swimmer’s broad shoulders. Had to be an eighth grader. I walked alongside him until he couldn’t ignore me anymore.
Finally, he stopped and faced me.
“What?” he said. His buddies turned around, and I immediately recognized one of them as Curly Burly. Disaster. But it was too late. I was on the spot now.
“You … play guitar?”
“You … know who you’re talking to?” the guy said in a voice unbelievably deep for a middle schooler. He turned to Jonny, who had just caught up to us and was so out of breath he had to put his hands on his knees to keep from hyperventilating. “Fatty McGoth, you want to introduce me to this … Muppet?”
“Annabelle … this is Jackson Royer,” Jonny said. “Jackson, this is Annabelle. She’s, um, a bass player, and she’s starting a band.” Jonny stuttered a bit and kept his eyes on the floor.
“Thanks for the translation,” Jackson said, smirking. He peered out from the top of his sunglasses and looked me up and down so slowly that I could feel my flesh crawl. Somehow, I still had time to wonder how much hair product it took to keep a slickie like his going all day long. Once we got super friendly, I’d have to ask him.
“What are you going to do, Beatles Girl—sing ‘She Loves You’ and ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ until McGoth lets you be his girlfriend?”
“Ha-ha, Jackson. Hilarious,” Jonny said.
“I thought it was amusing, myself,” Jackson said. “Jonny, remind your new lady friend: no eye contact.”
I could feel my face go red. The heat started in my neck and spread across my entire face in about a half second. I tried to say something, but the words died on their journey up my throat. Jackson turned toward Jonny, took off the shades, and looked at the scar above his lip like a doctor examining a patient.
“It’s healing quite nicely,” Jackson said, walking away. “Good luck with your little project, Beatles Girl!”
“Annabelle, maybe you should slow things down a little,” Jonny said. “I was about to tell you, number one, that Jackson’s already in a band, and that, number two—”
“Why did he say your scar’s healing nicely?”
“Nothing. Forget it.”