Struts & Frets

by Jon Skovron

  I thought it would be weird having Jen5 and Laurie there, but they made it even better. Laurie was really smiling now, laughing and cheering us on. And Jen5? Well, as much as I wanted to be a rock star, I’d never really felt like one. But that night, when I saw how she looked at me, I felt like a musical genius myself. I felt like I could do just about anything. And while my experience in dating was kind of slim, I was pretty sure that having someone who made you feel like that was worth a lot.

  The only bad part of the night was afterward, when we’d said good night and thanked Alexander’s parents for having us over and saying that we’d have to do this again really soon (and meaning it). Jen5 and I walked to the Boat and left behind the warm, cozy feeling of that basement paradise.

  “What’s up?” she said.

  “Nothing.”

  “Lies.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s just . . . this was really nice.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “It was.”

  “I don’t think something like that could ever happen with Tragedy of Wisdom. Not even if we practiced every night for hours.”

  “No,” she said. “Probably not.”

  “I wish this was the band I was in.”

  “Why can’t it be?”

  “What about Rick?”

  “I think he’d get over it.”

  “What about Joe?”

  “Screw Joe,” said Jen5.

  “We’d need a singer.”

  “You did great tonight. You were awesome.”

  “I can’t be a frontman.”

  “Jesus, Sammy, how many times do I have to tell you, yes you can.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t.”

  She stopped and grabbed my arm. “Seriously. Why is this such a hang-up for you?”

  “You wouldn’t understand,” I said.

  “Oh, it’s too deep for me or something?”

  “No,” I said. “That’s not it at all.”

  “I’m not Mr. Tortured Artist, so I wouldn’t get it?”

  “No, it’s . . .”

  “What? Just tell me!”

  “It scares the shit out of me, all right? I can play guitar in front of people because I just concentrate on my guitar and pretend there’s no one there. But singing, you have to look at the audience.”

  “But if you just tried—”

  “I did try. Rick talked me into this open mic a while back. I walked on that stage, started to play, but I was so nervous, my throat just closed up. I couldn’t sing a single note. I vamped for a minute like a complete jackass with everyone staring up at me, wondering what the hell I was doing. Then I just gave up and walked offstage. And the worst part? The quiet pity applause.” I looked at her. “There. Now you know. Happy?”

  She just stared at me with this confused look on her face, her paisley eyes wide, her mouth open a little.

  “See, I knew you wouldn’t understand,” I said. “You just go into everything fearlessly, like a friggin’ Mack truck. Well, not everybody can be like you, okay?”

  We drove home in total silence. I think it was the first time I ever got the last word on Jen5 like that. A few weeks ago, that would have given me some kind of weird satisfaction. But something was different now. I didn’t like the defeated silence. After a little while, I wanted to break it.

  But I just didn’t know how.

  still really tense between me and Jen5. For most of the day, we did our best to avoid each other. But at lunch, I refused to leave the table and I guess so did she. The two of us ate in silence, purposely not looking at each other, as Rick and Alexander grilled TJ mercilessly on what it was like to date Laurie.

  “So, does she have, like, weird body hair somewhere?” asked Alexander.

  “I bet she’s like a Barbie, without nipples or anything,” said Rick.

  “No, there was this one day she was wearing a white T-shirt and it started to rain and I definitely saw nipples,” said Alexander.

  “Do you, like, worship at the Temple of Laurie every night?” asked Rick.

  “Does she require animal sacrifices?” asked Alexander.

  “I bet she likes to talk dirty,” said Rick.

  “I bet she recites presidential speeches!” said Alexander.

  “What?” Rick turned to him.

  “I don’t know . . . ,” Alexander said, and shrugged.

  TJ just took it the way he usually did, with complete calm. He did have a slight smirk, though. He knew this was like their way of congratulating him. Of course, usually at some point during these riffs, Jen5 would rein Rick and Alex in before they got too offensive. But today she just sat there and ate her sandwich, her arms pulled in to her sides and her head a little bowed, like she was cold. Like she didn’t want to be bothered.

  I felt guilty, but I couldn’t figure out why. It wasn’t like I had said anything insulting. If anything, it had been a compliment. She usually was fearless. But it felt like I had really let her down somehow. And now I didn’t know what to do.

  “I mean,” I said to Rick on the drive to rehearsal that afternoon, “am I supposed to apologize for being a pussy or something? Or, now that she knows I’ll never be some hunky lead-singer type, she’s rethinking wanting to date me?”

  “I can’t figure out why she’s so upset,” said Rick. “I’ve always known you were a pussy.”

  “Jesus, can’t you be serious just this once?”

  “Seriously, I don’t know, dude.”

  “About Jen5?”

  “About whether I can be serious.”

  “See, this is when a real gayfriend would come in and explain things from her point of view.”

  “Sorry I’m not conforming to your stereotype,” said Rick, putting his feet up on the dashboard. “It must be awfully disappointing.”

  “Dude, get your jankey sneakers off my dash.”

  “What is up your butt today?” said Rick.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I think I’m going to get dumped by my girlfriend after only dating a few days, and I’m driving to another shitty band rehearsal for a competition where we plan to make total asses of ourselves in front of the entire local music scene. It’s nothing at all.”

  “Wow,” said Rick. “Tonight’s going to be interesting.”

  We were really sucking at rehearsal. Rick was playing the wrong song once again and Joe still didn’t know the lyrics or much of the melody to any of the songs I’d written. We flubbed around for a little, trying to keep the song going, but a little more than halfway through, it just kind of fell apart. There was a long silence. Then Joe said, “What the fuck were you doing, TJ?”

  TJ looked surprised. “What do you mean?”

  “Shit.” Joe threw his hands up in frustration, like any idiot could see it. “How can the rest of us play if you can’t keep the stupid beat?”

  TJ frowned and seemed to actually be wondering if his tempo had been off. But I realized what was going on here. And I was in exactly the right mood to butt in.

  “Leave him alone, Joe. You know he’s playing better than any of us.”

  “What do you know about it?” said Joe.

  “Well, I wrote the song,” I said. “So I guess I kind of know what it’s supposed to sound like.”

  “Oh, right.” Joe rolled his eyes. “These brilliant songs you wrote. Such quality stuff. It’s like we have our own little Thom Yorke here.”

  Normally this was where I could just roll my eyes at his stupid joke like I had so many times before, and that would be the end of it. But not this time.

  I said, “We all know why you’re really on TJ.”

  Joe’s face went hard immediately and he took a few steps toward me, his fists clenching and unclenching. “What do you know?” His voice was just a harsh growl.

  “Uh, Sammy . . . ,” I heard Rick say. He sounded worried. Almost afraid. But I didn’t care. This band sucked and nobody in it was trying, so fuck it. One word would blow it up.

  “Laurie,” I said.


  It happened so fast that I didn’t even think about it. I saw Joe’s face curl up and his shoulder slant, saw his arm draw back while his fist clenched. Then he came at me with a big roundhouse punch. I dodged to the side. His knuckles cracked into the cement wall behind me. It sounded like someone stepping on a dry tree branch. Broken bones.

  He fell to the floor holding his fist and screaming, “Oh, shit! Oh, shit!” But what I was still hearing was that breaking sound. I watched him writhe on the ground. There was blood. And maybe that was bone sticking out of his knuckle.

  But I didn’t feel anything.

  “Jesus, Sammy,” said TJ. “What should we do?”

  “I guess I’ll take him to the hospital,” I said. My voice sounded strange in my ears. “Rehearsal’s over.”

  I drove Joe to the emergency room. The whole way there he swore at me and insulted me and Jen5, although you could tell he didn’t know her well enough to come up with anything really offensive. But he knew me pretty well.

  “You think you’re so deep?” he snarled. “You’re a total poser. A nothing. Your songs are crap and you’re such a little shit, you’ll never get anywhere or do anything.”

  But what he said didn’t bother me. I felt completely in control. And by the time we got to the hospital, he had settled down into a sulky silence. I parked the Boat in one of the hourly spots in the garage. He had been staring at his purple-and-red, swollen, bloody hand, but when we came to a stop, he looked around, confused.

  “This isn’t the drop-off,” he said with the authority of someone who had been dropped off at the ER many times.

  “Right,” I said. “I’m going in with you.”

  “Forget it,” he said quietly. “I know what to do from here.”

  “I’m going in with you,” I said again, still calm, still cool.

  He looked at me for a second, like he was going to tell me to piss off or something. He might have been in too much pain to argue, or maybe it was something else, but finally he just shrugged and said, “Whatever.” Then, cradling his broken hand to his chest, he got out of the Boat and started walking to the ER entrance. He didn’t look back to see if I was following.

  It took me a minute to adjust, walking from the gathering darkness outside into the bright fluorescent world inside. I blinked and looked around at the brown-and-yellow room. It was quiet and grim and felt a little seedy. A TV showed an infomercial for prayer cloths that would get you anything you wanted. People sat slumped and sad, like they had always been there, waiting to be fixed by the doctors. Like they always would be there. I watched Joe walk up to the counter and saw that he was sad and slumped also. Like he was one of them. I took a seat while Joe talked with the woman at the desk. After he’d struggled to fill out the paperwork with his good hand, he walked back and sat down next to me.

  “They never take you right away, unless your life is in danger,” he said.

  I nodded but didn’t say anything. I thought maybe I was supposed to apologize or something. But I wasn’t sorry. I wasn’t anything. So I just sat there.

  After a while, Joe said, “I really liked her.”

  I nodded.

  “I guess too much, maybe,” he said.

  He wasn’t looking at me. Just staring off into the distance, still as sad and slumped as the rest of them. “You know, it was a weird feeling and I didn’t know what to do with it. So I got angry.”

  I wondered if he was talking about trying to punch me, or picking on TJ, or if he had gotten violent with Laurie.

  “It would’ve been better if TJ had told me,” he said.

  “He was scared.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of you.”

  Joe frowned at that, like it didn’t make sense to him. “It was that he thought he could sit there in rehearsal every day and I wouldn’t know. That he didn’t respect me enough to tell me right away.”

  “Fear is different from respect,” I said.

  A little later, a nurse called his name and he trudged off to get his hand fixed. I just sat and waited, watching the infomercials and the other sad people who came in and waited. Normally I would have been going nuts with boredom by now, but I wasn’t. And it was such a relief to be able to sit there not thinking of anything in particular and just wait.

  Eventually Joe came back with his hand bandaged up. I got up and stretched. Several joints popped and I wondered how long I had been sitting there.

  “Well,” said Joe. “Thanks for the ride.”

  “I’ll drive you home,” I said.

  “You don’t have to. I can take the bus.”

  “It’s too late for the bus,” I said. “And I want to drive you.” I wasn’t sure why I did, though.

  He looked at me like it was the saddest thing I’d ever said, then he just nodded.

  It only occurred to me while I was following his directions to the Southside that I’d never seen his house. That none of us had. None of us had met his parents. We hadn’t even known that he lived in the Southside. It was the worst part of town. Lots of burnt-out, abandoned buildings. If you wanted to buy cheap weed, that’s where you went. Otherwise, you stayed away.

  Joe lived in the projects. We drove past the identical little apartment buildings that felt more like fortresses than homes. I didn’t know how he knew his from any other, but suddenly he said to stop.

  He stared straight ahead, his face unreadable as he said, “Thanks for the ride.”

  Then he got out and walked with slow, measured steps into the building, his chains making a faint ching ching sound in the night air.

  As I pulled away, somewhere off in the distance, I thought I heard a firecracker. Or a car backfire. Or maybe it was a gunshot.

  It was late by the time I got home. Mom had been waiting up for me. Jen5 was with her. They were both sitting at the kitchen table when I walked in.

  “Uh . . . hi, guys,” I said.

  “Sammy!” they both said, practically in unison. Then they both jumped up and rushed me. Jen5 was ranting about what an asshole Joe was and Mom was going on about how she was getting me a cell phone the very next day.

  “Everything’s fine,” I said.

  “Sammy,” said my mom, “you really need to think about whether you want this guy as your friend.”

  “We worked it out,” I said. “It’s not going to happen again.”

  “So what actually happened?” demanded Jen5. “Rick was vague as usual on the phone.”

  I told them everything that had happened. As I was describing it all, I noticed them both looking at me strangely. When I had finished, they looked at each other, then just stared at me some more.

  “What?” I said at last.

  “What’s wrong with you?” asked Jen5.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The way you’re talking,” she said. “It’s like you weren’t there. Like you’re describing a movie.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s not like you,” she said. “You’re being so cool. So . . . cold.”

  “Whatever,” I said.

  “No, not whatever,” she said. “What’s going on with you? It’s like you’ve turned into Robot Sammy.”

  “I had a long night,” I said. “I’m just tired.”

  “Ha,” she said. “Nice try, but I know you better than that. It’s creepy to see you talk like Computer Boy.”

  “Maybe I’m just tired of feeling so much,” I said. “Maybe that’s really why I’m tired.”

  “Oh, so you’ve just decided you’re going to stop giving a shit?”

  “Works for everybody else. Why not?”

  She didn’t reply. Instead, she just looked at her watch. “I gotta go. Let me know when my Sammy can come out and play.”

  Then she walked past me and out of the house.

  It dawned on me that my mom had been standing there the whole time, listening to our conversation.

  “Well?” I said.

  She just shrugged and said, “So if you’
re tired, go to bed.”

  “Fine,” I said.

  I wasn’t that tired, and since usually I had to be totally exhausted before I could fall asleep, I decided to work on “Plastic Baby.” I had two verses down, so one more and maybe a bridge, and it would be done. I sat on the floor and stared for a long time at what I had written, trying to get myself back into that headspace, that zone. I strummed the rhythm part a little, but nothing came. Everything was all clogged up somewhere inside me. And at the same time, I felt completely empty.

  Writer’s block.

  I tossed my songbook aside and leaned back against my bed. It just wasn’t fair. Apparently, I couldn’t be a calm, cool, collected guy and still be a songwriter. It was one or the other.

  What I needed was a megadose of the Pixies.

  The best way to listen to the Pixies is with headphones turned up so that the crash of David Lovering’s cymbals, the growl of Kim Deal’s bass, and the loudest of Black Francis’s screams jab into your ears and hurt just a little. I think they intended just a little pain to go along with it.

  I lay on the floor in my room, listening to the Pixies in the prescribed way, letting them rip through “Wave of Mutilation” in my eardrums. If I had to pick my favorite band—and that was kind of unfair because it really depended on my mood—but if I had to, it would probably be the Pixies. Usually they filled me with a raging passion that made me want to go out there and really dive into things, no matter how obviously hopeless. Like throwing myself at a tidal wave.

  But tonight it was different. I started thinking that here I was, freaking out because my band might be breaking up, when I knew that the band clearly sucked. I didn’t want to break it up, despite the verbal abuse and humiliation, because I just had to be in a band—apparently, any band. I would never be in anything that sounded as good as the Pixies. Listening to their compositions, there were so many parts and rhythm changes that were really surprising, and yet it always sounded exactly right. How did they do that? How did they think of it? Admitting I had no idea made me wonder if I would ever know. If I was even capable of knowing. That was especially true of Joey Santiago’s guitar work. A lot of people thought he was the weak link in the band. I’d even heard rumors that his dad or uncle or somebody was some rich Cuban druglord who fronted the money to get the band started and that was the only reason he had even been in the band. But those people were totally wrong. I mean, I don’t know about the druglord stuff, but it wasn’t the only reason he was in the band. Those people just didn’t understand what he was doing. They thought his guitar work was simple. And it was. But they remembered it, right? Most of the time, people knew his guitar solos note for note. See, Joey Santiago wasn’t just playing the notes. He was playing the silence. Musically speaking, he knew when to shut up. He knew exactly the right thing to say and didn’t play a single note more. Now that was skill. That was also the depressing part for me. Because I wasn’t sure if I could ever be that good. Either musically, or in life.