Struts & Frets (14 page)

“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.