Struts & Frets (16 page)

I stood there and watched her force herself not to cry. I could only take it for about thirty seconds.

“Okay,” I said. “I'll sing at the open mic.”

“Oh, God, Sammy, thank you!” she said, then jumped up and kissed me hard and gave me a hug. “I know it's a big
deal for you,” she whispered in my ear. “You really are the best boyfriend ever.”

I just stood there in a daze, relieved and horrified all at the same time by what I'd just agreed to.

“It looks like a person, but it's not a person,” said Mr. Sully. “So what's the difference? Paint it.”

Art class again, a circle of easels around a table. But this time, instead of fruit, it was a statue of some naked Italian guy. No, it was actually a naked Jewish guy (David, I think) but made by some Italian guy.

“This is the worst,” groaned Jen5. “Painting a famous statue? Why don't we just make sculptures of the friggin'
Mona Lisa
while we're at it?”

“No fruit, no sculptures,” I said. “What
would
you want to paint?”

“Seriously?” she said. “You.”

“Ha-ha,” I said.

“No, I mean it. Will you model for me?”

“Why would you want to paint me?”

“I've never painted a model,” she said. “And I think this falls under the heading of boyfriend duties.”

“Does it?”

“Sure.” Then she grinned. “I think it would be kind of hot.”

“Painting me would be hot?”

She shrugged and gave me a strange look. A look I had never seen before but understood immediately. Or at least, I hoped I did.

“Like . . . how hot?” I ventured.

She shrugged again. There was a mischievous little smirk on her lips.

“My mom has some deposition thing coming up, so she'll be working late all this week,” she said. “And my dad has some faculty dinner thing tomorrow night, so . . .”

“Empty house,” I said.

“Yep,” she said.

“Tomorrow night.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well,” I said with what I thought was incredible coolness, all things considered, “I just happen to be free for modeling tomorrow night.”

“Oh, good,” she said. Then she started to paint the statue, but she still had that little smirk while she worked.

I barely paid attention to afternoon classes. There was just too much stuff bouncing around in my head.

Tragedy of Wisdom looked like it might be totally finished. Nobody seemed really desperate to keep it together, except me.
They just didn't see what I saw. What it could be if we just worked a little harder. We'd already put so much into the band. So many nights and weekends of rehearsal, and that wasn't even counting the time I'd spent writing the songs. How could they just shrug all that off? There had to be some way that I could show them what I saw, but I didn't have any ideas.

Then there was the little matter of promising Jen5 that I would sing at an open mic. What was I thinking? Well, you don't tell your crying girlfriend no, is what I was thinking. But the idea made me so queasy, I couldn't really dwell on it too much. But that was okay because there was a third thing that started creeping in and taking over all my other thoughts until it was this huge knot of tension at the back of my head: losing my virginity.

When Jen5 had sort of suggested it in art class, it had been just pure, hot adrenaline rush. But then, as the reality of it started to sink in the rest of the day, I realized that I was terrified. It was just such a mind-boggling thing. Sex. Me. Jen5. In less than forty-eight hours. Holy shit.

I mean, I knew what was supposed to happen. I'd seen my share of porn. But that was just it. The idea of Jen5 actually saying,
Oh, baby! I want your big hard cock!
was just ludicrous. So it clearly wouldn't be like it was in porn. So what, then? I'd seen other movies where it was a lot less in-your-face, but I wasn't sure if that was right either.

And then there were the sex talks I'd had with my mother. She seemed to have this compulsive need to talk to me about the facts of sex. I guess she was just overcompensating because I didn't have a father to talk to me about them. But the stuff she said didn't exactly make me feel any more ready, especially conversations that went something like this:

So, enough of those kinds of talks and you start to feel this weird pressure. Like you have to do it right or else the girl won't enjoy it and then you feel like an asshole. And who knew if the stuff she was telling me was even right. I mean, I think the last date she went on was when I was ten years old.

So I stumbled from class to class, staring at teachers like I was paying attention. But all that was in my head was that my band was breaking up, I was probably going to make an utter idiot of myself in front of Jen5 in a way that I would never be able to live down, and then I would follow that up by making an utter idiot of myself in front of a ton of people at an open mic. Again.

I felt like I was going to explode if I didn't talk to someone about it. But pretty much everyone I could talk
to was somehow involved in it. I needed to talk to someone outside the situation.

I parked the Boat in front of Gramps's house after school. The two chairs were still out, and so was the boom box. It was amazing that no one had stolen it. It wasn't a terrible neighborhood or anything, but come on. A little CD player just sitting there? Of course, it had rained the night before, so the thing was probably toast anyway. But it felt weird leaving it there, so I snagged it on my way to the front door.

I knocked. There was no response, but that was normal, so I just opened the door. Immediately, I was hit by the squealing, squawking sounds of a free jazz saxophone solo. Sun Ra? No, it sounded more like Coltrane. I couldn't always tell, because there was never any melody or harmony in free jazz. Just lots of honking, pounding noise.

I peeked in before entering because Gramps didn't listen to free jazz unless he was in a weird mood. The living room was a lot messier than it usually was. Lots of stuff just lying around. Maybe the cleaning person was sick or something. Gramps sat on the hardwood floor in his bathrobe, surrounded by stacks of vinyl records so high, they looked like they could topple over at any second. He was flipping through them quickly, like he was looking for something. Every once in a while, he pulled
one out and set it aside, his head nodding and his lips moving a little, like he was talking to himself.

“Hey, Gramps,” I said over the screeching saxophone solo.

His head lifted up, and for a just a moment he looked at me in this empty sort of way. Almost how an animal looks at you. Then he gave a flicker of a smile, nodded, and went back to sorting through his albums.

“Whatcha doing?” I asked as I got a little closer.

“Oh, nothing, nothing at all,” he said, giving me a sideways glance. Then he was back to his records again. He put the stack down and gathered up all the ones he'd set aside and flipped through them rapidly, like he was shuffling giant cards.

“Um . . . ,” I said. “You hungry?”

“Ha!” he said, but didn't look up.

“Well, I am,” I said in a way that I hoped was convincing. I actually wasn't very hungry either. “So I'll make us something.”

He nodded but continued to shuffle through his albums. I went into the kitchen, grabbed two frozen dinners from the freezer, and popped them into the microwave. The song, which I had finally pegged as Coltrane's “Interstellar Space,” squeaked and honked on the stereo while I watched the plastic plates spin around and around. Every once in a while, I could see Gramps's lips move, and one time he actually stopped shuffling, chuckled, and muttered, “Oh really, Johnny?” then went back to flipping
through the albums over and over again. This was even weirder than his usual free jazz mood.

I understood the concept of free jazz. Jazz had gone through a lot of changes during the '50s and '60s, and some people felt like it had gotten too formulaic and restricting. Plus, I think that was when the “easy listening” kind of jazz first started to happen, and people were saying that jazz had sold out. So I guess some people like Sun Ra and Coltrane went out to prove that jazz could be just as wild and crazy as it used to be. I appreciated the idea of that, but honestly, listening to it was usually just irritating.

But that night I wondered if it was really as random as it sounded. Was it totally meaningless noise or was there something behind it? Was it even possible that a person like Coltrane, no matter how much junk he'd put in his veins, could ever make pure random noise? Maybe what he was saying was that
everything
was music, even noise, if you knew how to listen to it.

“What's
your
problem?” Gramps's voice was right behind me. I still stood in front of the microwave, even though it had finished cooking. I turned around and saw Gramps scowling at me.

“What do you mean?” I asked. I took our two dinners to the tiny kitchen table and sat down.

He didn't come join me at the table. Instead he just stood by the microwave, his arms folded across his chest, kind of hunched forward. “You're walking around like the weight of the world is on your shoulders. Even more than usual.”

“Nothing,” I said. He really was in a strange mood, and I wasn't sure now that I wanted to bring up everything that was going on when he was like this.

“Don't bullshit a bullshitter, son. Tell me.”

“It's okay,” I said. “Really.”

“I am old,” he said. “I could die at any moment.”

“Gramps, please—”

“You want our last interaction to be this? You acting mopey and being generally irritating?”

“Irritating?”

“Damn right,” he said. “People who mope are irritating. So spill it.”

“Okay,” I said. “Fine. My band is breaking up and I have a date tomorrow night that scares the hell out of me.”

“Ah.” He grinned. “Those sound like my areas of expertise.” He took his untouched dish of food from the table and casually tossed it into the sink.

“Aren't you going to eat?” I asked.

“Don't change the subject,” he said, then sat down with me. “Okay. First things first. Tell me about the girl.”

“Okay,” I said. “But you can't tell Mom any of this.”

“I probably won't remember tomorrow anyway,” he said. “But if there's one thing I know how to do, it's be discreet. Now talk.”

“So I'm just nervous is all,” I said. “About this date.”

“Is this some new girl?”

“No, it's Jennifer. We've been friends forever. We just started dating, though.”

“So? If you've known her that long, what do you have to be nervous about?”

“Well, okay . . . See . . . the thing is . . . I think . . . I mean, I don't
know
or anything and I'm not assuming anything, but I think that . . . because her parents won't be at home and stuff . . . I think we're going to have . . . uh . . . sex.”

“Ah,” he said. Then waited.

“It's . . . uh . . . my first time,” I said.

“Oh!” he said. “I get it now. You're worried about that?”

“Yeah.”

“Worried how it will go.”

“Right.”

“Because you don't know what's going to happen.”

“Exactly.”

He sat there, staring at me and scratching his beard. Then he said, “Sam, sex is like music.”

“What?”

“You play by yourself and it sounds okay. But when you play with someone else, that's when the magic happens.”

“Okay. . . .” I still wasn't really seeing where this was going.

“It's improvisation,” he said. “When you play with someone, you do your thing, but you also listen to their thing. And you try to match it. Try to harmonize. You have to trust what you're doing, but you also have to be open to what they're doing. You just have to listen, Sam. Trust yourself and pay attention. And remember that the first time you play with someone, it's always a little rough. A little awkward. But as long as you play from the heart, you just get better with practice.”

I sat there and stared at my untouched plate of food. I didn't know if Gramps was being sane or crazy right then, but he had never talked to me like that before. We sat for a while, not looking at each other, but I felt like there was this whole new channel open between us.