Struts & Frets

by Jon Skovron

  “The song,” I said. “It’s Mercury Rev. I didn’t know you liked them.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. It’s some mix you made me a few years ago. When you were trying to get me out of my classical music groove.”

  “Oh, right,” I said. “I remember that.”

  I listened to the song as she continued to set things up. “Car Wash Hair,” one of my all-time favorites. It had the feeling of a lazy summer, both sad and happy at once.

  “Mixes are funny,” I said.

  “How’s that?” She was still messing with some kind of lighting thing.

  “Well, you pick songs, you know, and most of the time you aren’t really thinking about why. You’re just thinking about that person and then thinking, ‘Oh, this would sound great next.’ But maybe there’s some kind of subconscious thing at work. I mean, this song . . . then I think there’s that Cure song, ‘Just Like Heaven.’ Then that Pixies song, ‘La La Love You.’ And I think there’s even a Magic Numbers song in there . . . I mean, come on.”

  “I can’t believe you remember what you put on a mix you made me two years ago.”

  “But that’s exactly it,” I said. “All that thought I put into it. Didn’t I see that I was making you a crush mix?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. I thought it was pretty obvious.”

  “It’s like we do all these things and don’t know why we do them, and then we look back and it’s like, ‘Of course! That’s why I did it!’ I don’t know . . . I mean, I wonder if I’ll ever be able to see the reason for things while I’m actually doing them. You know?”

  “Yeah . . . ,” she said. Then she looked at me with a weird sort of half-smile.

  “Should I be posing now?” I said. “Are you, like, thinking about the painting or something?”

  “I am,” she said. “But don’t start posing.” She picked up her palette and brush, walked over to me. Then she reached out with her brush and drew a line on my shoulder.

  I moved away a little. “What are you doing? I thought you were going to paint me.”

  She still had that half-smile. “I am. Come here. Get closer.” Her eyes were different, somehow. Really open wide. “Trust me.”

  I leaned back in, not sure what the hell was going on at all.

  “Thanks,” she said. Then she took her brush and drew a long slow line of red from my shoulder to my wrist. It felt strange. Wet and cool and really, really soft. It made me shiver a little.

  “Is this . . . ,” I said. “Is this . . .”

  “Shhh,” she said, and tapped the paintbrush on my lips. Then she lightly drew a circle around my mouth. She was close now. So close I could smell her. Her own mixture of hair product and paint. I could feel heat coming off of her skin. I could see her pulse beating in her neck. I stared at her eyes, those paisley eyes that you could trip out on like the visualizations on MP3 players. And I could feel the brush trace from the corner of my mouth, along my jawline, down my neck, and onto my chest. My brain started to flip out on me. It was all too much to take in at once. There could have been sparks coming from my ears and I wouldn’t have been surprised. Her breath was on my skin and her smell was in my head, and I could feel heat—real heat—coming off of her body, and that Mercury Rev song was still playing and all the while that soft brush moved up and down my chest, my arms, my stomach. I was going nuts. I didn’t want it to end. But I couldn’t help myself. I grabbed her by her overalls and pulled her into a kiss. Paint from my face smeared on hers. I could feel her bare, sweating shoulders in my hands. Her fingers were in my hair and she sighed into my ear.

  Then I heard a ping ping as I popped the clasps off her overalls. And then I melted and she melted, or at least that’s how it seemed to me because the only thing in my brain was heat.

  It was our first duet.

  As I drove home that night, something was different. I felt like electricity tingled beneath my skin. Sure, some of it was the dried paint on my arms and chest. But the rest of it was something I couldn’t quite get a handle on. Like what Gramps was always talking about, some kind of magic or mystery. There are those guys that pretend that it’s not a big deal. But those guys are either lying assholes or soulless robots from another planet. Because that first time is so crazy and cool and kind of intensely embarrassing that it might be the biggest deal in your life so far. Nothing prepares you for it. Not movies or books or your friends talking about it. Definitely not your mother. I could see how if it wasn’t with someone you could trust, if you were really worried the girl might laugh at you if you did something wrong, I could see how that could make it the biggest mind-fuck of your life. But I did trust Jen5. There probably wasn’t another person alive that I trusted more. And Gramps was right. You didn’t really worry about what to do, any more than you worried about what note comes next in an improv. Your brain was on a deeper level.

  When I got home, Mom was in bed, but waiting up for me. When I kissed her good night, she said, “Is that paint on your face?”

  I’d thought I’d gotten most of it off my face, but I guess not enough.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Jen5 was doing some art thing.”

  “Painting people?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “I didn’t really understand it either. But if I don’t do that kind of weird stuff for her, who will?”

  She gave me a look that I couldn’t quite understand, and I thought there might be more interrogation. But then she just said, “All right. Good night, Sam. Take a shower before you go to bed. I don’t want you getting paint on your sheets.”

  Everyone lies to their parents about something. You learn pretty quick that no matter what they say, parents don’t really want to know everything. When you were a kid, they shielded you (or tried to anyway) from stuff like death and poverty and disease. So now you protected your parents. You shielded them from the knowledge of how close you came to getting sucked into drugs and sex and craziness in one way or another. Because really, they didn’t want to know. It would drive them so crazy, they would probably either lock you in a room and have you homeschooled by a nun or else they’d move the family to Montana or someplace where life hadn’t changed in fifty years. If there even were places like that anymore. And it wasn’t like they hadn’t done half of those things themselves. But what they couldn’t handle was you doing them.

  So I was used to lying to Mom a little and it usually only bothered me a little. But lying about my relationship with Jen5 really bugged me. It made me feel like I was doing something wrong. But I wasn’t this time. It was one of the few things in my life I was sure about, but I also knew that when I told Mom, she would totally flip out.

  But even that couldn’t get me down. I was feeling too good. I didn’t mind the buzzing slot machine of my mind while I lay in bed. Mainly it was just images of Jen5.

  I spent Saturday morning stressing about what song I was going to play for the open mic that night. I wished I could do “Plastic Baby,” but it still needed at least one more verse, and I wasn’t quite sure where I was going with it yet. So I went through a bunch of others, some that we’d been working on in Tragedy of Wisdom, some that had been sitting in my songbook because I knew they weren’t the kind of songs Joe would want to do. Eventually, I decided on a upbeat little song called “Postmarked Super Queen” about this girl that I dated for a few months freshman year who broke up with me in a letter. It was a goofy, fun song that I hoped would make the whole open mic experience less painful. Maybe if I just kept it light, I’d be able to get through it.

  I went over to Jen5’s place at four. The open mic didn’t start until eight, but she wanted to get there early to help Francine set up.

  She answered the door and gave me a quick kiss. “Hey, I’m running a little late. I still have to get dressed.”

  I looked at her. She was wearing a T-shirt and jeans. “You look fine,” I said.

  “Thanks, but I want to dress up a little for this,” she said.

  “Dress up? What, like a gown
or something?”

  “Like hell,” she said. “No, just stuff that’s a little nicer than what I normally wear. You know. Stuff I don’t want to mess up.”

  I had no idea what that stuff might be, but I was really interested to see it. “Okay,” I said.

  “So maybe you can just hang out for a little while.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  I didn’t realize that meant hanging out with her dad. But a little bit later, there I was, sitting in the big cold study in a high-backed, uncomfortable antique chair trying like hell to make conversation with Mr. Russell. I hadn’t talked to him since Jen5 and I had started dating, and the vibe was completely different. He wasn’t just my friend’s father anymore. Now he was my girlfriend’s father.

  “Samuel,” he said. He sat in a different uncomfortable antique chair with his hands carefully folded in his lap.

  “Good to see you, Mr. Russell,” I said. My palms were already sweating.

  “It is my understanding,” said Mr. Russell, “that the nature of your relationship with my daughter has changed.”

  “Um,” I said, “that’s right.”

  “Don’t say ‘um,’” said Mr. Russell. “It makes you sound doltish and ill-mannered.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “While humility is admirable,” said Mr. Russell, “apologizing for an accidental mistake is pointless and suggests a weakness of character. Had you known your error, then an apology would have been appropriate. In the case of being informed of an error of which you were ignorant, an apology is academic.”

  “Thank you,” I said, not knowing what else to say. I was already totally flunking the interview.

  “Samuel, you agree that your relationship with Jennifer has changed,” said Mr. Russell. “In what way would you say it has changed?”

  “That’s kinda complicated,” I said.

  “Inevitably,” he said. “Do your best to summarize.”

  “Well, in a lot of ways, things are the same. I mean, we’re still best friends and all. But everything’s more . . . intense, you know? I mean, you think that friendships are intense, right? But then this is like ten times that. Like sometimes it’s so much that it just blows your mind. Like something you never knew you were missing but now that you have it, you can’t imagine life without it.”

  I eyed him uneasily. I didn’t even think I’d followed that.

  “I see,” was all he said. We sat there in total silence for a long time. I could hear an old clock ticking off in the distance and I wondered how Jen5 could be taking so long to get ready.

  “So, Samuel,” Mr. Russell said at last. “You are a musician, correct?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “And guitar is your instrument?”

  “Mainly, sir.”

  “You play other instruments?”

  Normally I didn’t tell people this, because it sounded kind of conceited and nerdy. But I thought Mr. Russell might appreciate it. “Well,” I said, “I actually started on trumpet. My grandfather is a jazz musician, and he’s really into Miles Davis. So he got me my first horn when I was in third grade.”

  “Your grandfather is a musician?”

  “He’s retired now, but yeah.”

  “Locally?”

  “I guess he really got his break up in Detroit and Cleveland and moved down here with my mom after my grandmother died.”

  “Forgive me,” said Mr. Russell. Underneath his normal glare, he suddenly seemed kind of excited. “I must ask. Is your grandfather Jack Bojar?”

  “Yeah.” I was kind of surprised that he knew him. “Yeah, he is.”

  Mr. Russell leaned back in his seat and smiled. “I’d always wondered why your last name seemed familiar to me. I’m sure you know, your grandfather is one of the greatest pianists of the bop era to come out of this region.”

  “Well, thanks, Mr. Russell,” I said. “I know he’ll be really glad to hear that.”

  “Will you tell him?”

  “Of course,” I said. “He’s . . . Well, he could really use some compliments like that right now. Things aren’t really that . . . easy for him anymore.”

  Mr. Russell was acting really weird now. He kept nodding his head and rubbing his hands together. “I have a recording. You might know it. The Newport Jazz Festival in 1966. I was a student in Rhode Island at the time. I must confess that my interest in jazz was minimal. But a friend of mine convinced me to go with him. It was a pivotal moment in my life. It was where I developed a true love for modern jazz. I witnessed your grandfather play an extended solo improvisation of ‘Stormy Weather’ by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler, and in that moment, I understood, for the first time, the possibilities of the form. It was then that I realized that jazz was not simply popular dance music. It had been elevated to a noble artistic form.” Then he suddenly stood up. “If you haven’t heard it, I’d be pleased to play it for you.”

  “Yeah,” I said, kind of stunned. “That’d be great.” I’d never heard a recording with Gramps. He was mainly a live performance musician, someone who sat in with whoever was coming through town. That was back when you could do that and make a living without ever really putting out an album of your own. He’d told me he was on lots of other people’s albums, as a fill-in studio musician, but that most of those albums were impossible to find or else just total crap.

  Mr. Russell walked quickly over to a big wooden closet. I saw his hands shake a little as he reached for the handles, and the expression in his eyes was just like when Rick got a new Xbox game. Jen5’s dad was totally geeking out on jazz right in front of my eyes. He opened the closet and on the inside was a huge mahogany frame with speakers and a record player inset. He slid open a drawer at the bottom that was packed tightly with records. It looked like they were in alphabetical order, and he flipped through them quickly until he pulled one out. The album cover was a picture of either a sunrise or a sunset (I couldn’t tell which) and just had the words Newport Jazz Festival, Live, 1966. He carefully slid the record out of the sleeve and placed it on the turntable. I could tell he knew exactly what he was looking for, because he counted the lines and set the needle down about halfway through the record.

  Right away, a drum-and-upright-bass combo kicked in over the speakers, pretty much just a mellow, cool vamping groove. Something to give the soloist room to do whatever he wanted. Then a piano came crashing in and I knew immediately it was Gramps. His playing style was as familiar to me as his voice. But I never heard him play like this. So free and wild, but you knew that every note was on purpose. One moment it sounded like he was pounding those keys so hard he would break his fingers, then he would slide into some smooth, ultracool riff that just sent shivers down your back.

  I don’t know how long we listened, but Mr. Russell and I were still standing there with music washing over us when I heard Jen5 behind me. “Dad, are you forcing your record collection on my boyfriend?”

  I turned to her and I think I might have been getting a little teary all of a sudden as I said, “It’s my grandfather. He has my grandfather on record.”

  Jen5’s mouth opened wide and she stared back and forth between me and her dad.

  “Oh,” was all she could say. “Wow.”

  And then, with Gramps’s music still crashing in my ears, I looked at Jen5. Really looked. She had carefully twisted up her dreadlocks and tied them in chunks with bits of old lace and ribbon. She’d put on eye shadow or something that brightened the kaleidoscopic colors of her eyes. She had on some kind of tight lacy tank-top thing that looked more like lingerie than anything, and over that was a fitted red satin suit coat. And she wore a skirt, or maybe a black canvas kilt, all ragged and torn, with safety pins glittering everywhere. To finish it all off, she had on knee-high chunky black boots.

  “Wow,” I said, like an echo of her. “Fiver, you look . . . unbelievable.”

  She gave me a sly grin and winked.

  “I clean up pretty good, huh?” she said.

  “We
ll,” Mr. Russell said absently, still staring at the record, still zoned into Gramps’s piano. “You clean up well.”

  Jen5 and I showed up at Idiot Child around six. It was weird seeing the place during the day and before the cigarette smoke and the smell of dirty punks and hippies had time to fill it up. I had never noticed that there were big bay windows up front. The late-afternoon sunlight shone in through them and lit the place up all warm and happy, with little bits of dust floating around. It was almost like some enchanted fairyland. But, you know, with old couches and graffiti and stuff. It was so bright and fresh that when Jen5 and I first stepped through the door, I thought we’d somehow come into the wrong place. That is, until I heard a harsh female voice say, “Sammy Bojar, I don’t give a shit if you’re happy to see me or not, but that better be a guitar you’re holding.”

  “Hi, Francine,” I said.

  She was over in the far corner, where she had cleared away the furniture to make room for a tiny, four-foot-wide platform. She was setting up a sound system with a mic and stand. She was pretty big, like I said before, but a lot of that was muscle. She was wearing a black tank top and her tattooed arms flexed and strained as she shoved an amp and speaker stack back behind the little platform. She had a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth as she talked. Once she had admitted to me that it took a lot of practice to master that.

  “You are playing tonight, right?” she asked.

  “I don’t think I have a choice,” I said. “By the way, thanks for saying that I was the next best thing to being a lesbian.”

  “Hey,” said Francine. “If I were ever to go back to boys, you’d be top on my list. Anyway, the both of you are on the house tab tonight. Hey, Raef!”

  Raef’s head popped up from behind the counter. “Yo, Franny!” he said.

  “Any luck with that signal of yours?”

  He sighed and shook his head. “So close, Franny. So close.”

  “Well, Jen5 and Sammy get free coffee all night. The fancy stuff, if they want it.”