Tempo Change (6 page)

“Sure. I mean, LaHa, it’s a fringe school. We’ll be competing with the established schools. It’s a celebration of the underdog.”

Ella stopped chewing her nail and said, “I kinda like that.”

“What are we going to play?” Gigi asked.

“I’m writing something. You’ll like it.”

“You write music?” Gigi asked. She was staring as if she were seeing me for the first time.

“Where are we going to rehearse?” Ella asked. “I play loud.”

“Peace Pizza. I asked Toby and he says we can use the banquet room after nine o’clock if nobody’s in there.”

“Nobody’s ever in there,” Ella said. “Nobody has pizza banquets.”

The bell rang. Viv and Ella walked away talking about how they’d get to Main Street, what bus they’d take, or if one of Viv’s sisters could drive them.

Gigi was still standing there.

She said, “It’s a dirty trick, Blanche. You know that, don’t you?”

“It’s not a trick. It’s a plan.”

“It’s a dirty plan.”

“You’re going to thank me,” I said. “Just wait.”

She shook her head but she walked away smiling.

When I went home that night, after work, I found the living room of our house full of Twelve Steppers. They were drinking tea and one of them was crying and the rest were all hanging on her every word. The crier wasn’t Louise. In
fact, Louise wasn’t there, which was unusual. Maybe she had a date with the married man.

My mother looked up at me and asked if everything was all right. I said it was. She went back to listening.

I checked my e-mail and there was nothing from my father. But I didn’t expect it. They were few and far between. I had already gotten a couple this month so I wasn’t due for a while. Sometimes I could get him to respond by telling him something new or asking him a question. So I sat down and e-mailed him:

I stared at what I’d written and then I hit Send and I felt that message traveling through the system, the whirring mass of X’s and O’s that Jeff talked about, the perfect system mimicking some bigger system that I didn’t believe in, but like everyone else, I believed in this one. This tiny thread that kept me connected to him. I swear, I could feel it when my words landed.

W
HEN YOU DECIDE TO START A BAND, NO ONE TELLS YOU (AND
you certainly don’t think about it) that you are going to end up being a kind of substitute teacher. No one wants to listen to you because they don’t recognize you as an authority figure. You’re one of them. You can’t possibly know what you’re doing.

A lot of things happened that I hadn’t counted on. First, Gigi decided to play bass instead of keyboards. The idea came to her when her father, Rodney Stone, said he was a bass player in college and wouldn’t it be fun for her to learn his instrument? He didn’t have his instrument anymore so he’d gone out and bought a brand-new one for her. He’d also bought her a bass amp. Then he bought us a guitar amp and a PA system. I suddenly saw the benefits of having rich friends. On the other hand, it meant that the pressure was
on. Adults were invested. Rodney wanted to hang around for rehearsal, but Gigi convinced him that most rock stars didn’t have their parents hanging around rehearsals. Her mother, Erica with a “C,” made us T-shirts with our names on them and some business cards. This was all before we’d learned one song, so I definitely felt we couldn’t back out now.

Gigi was a little surprised at her parents’ sudden acceptance of this new venture, and I had to admit that I was, too. I thought rebellion was supposed to be part of it somehow but everyone approved. Almost everyone. More on that later.

Our first rehearsal took place in the banquet room of Peace. Nine o’clock, after the rush.

Off the bat, there was the problem that even though she had a brand-new amp and a bass guitar, Gigi didn’t actually know how to play bass. I didn’t know how to teach her, either. Ella could get her to follow along with the beat she was creating on the drums, but when Ella tried to deviate with some frills or anything fancy, Gigi would lose her way. I struggled to show her what to do but it really wasn’t my instrument. I was talking about eighth versus quarter notes when Viv spoke up. She said, “It’s kinda like a voice, you know. Like a backing vocal, you know? Like in a song when someone is going ‘bop bop bop’ in the background. You’re the bop bop.”

This is what worked.

Then everybody had thoughts on my song. I certainly hadn’t counted on that.

The song was called “Walking Contradiction.” Okay, I
had written it about Jeff but I hoped he’d never figure that out. Guys mostly didn’t listen to lyrics.

It went like this:

“What’s a predilection?” Viv asked. “I don’t know what that is. I can’t sing it if I don’t know what it is.”

“It’s a tendency.”

“I don’t get it. First you say he doesn’t see the girl and then you say he wants to fall in love.”

“Yeah, Viv, it’s a contradiction.”

“Who’s this about?” Gigi asked.

“Jeff,” Ella said. “The assistant manager out there.”

I felt overwhelmed with embarrassment.

“No, it’s not.”

“Sure it is.”

“It’s not about him. That’s not how songwriting works. Now, it’s in the key of G and let’s figure out a tempo.”

“G, really?” Gigi frowned. “It’s such a happy key.”

“It’s the people’s key. Tempo.”

Ella gave us one and Gigi said it was too fast and Ella
said it wasn’t, she was too slow, and the Bos and Seans and Tylers hung around the door and giggled at us until I shooed them away.

And then we all started throwing ideas out until everybody was on the same page and we did one version of the song where we got all the way through and it didn’t suck. By then it was midnight.

Jeff was waiting for me outside when we left. Gigi and Viv took the bus and Ella rode her bike in the opposite direction. Gigi and Viv had been talking in a very animated way, and I noticed that Gigi was a lot more relaxed than I had ever seen her. Viv had a glow to her, too. The band was good for everyone but me. I felt exhausted.

“Three hours, one song. Pretty good,” Jeff said.

“Don’t start.” I collapsed on the curb beside him.

“No, I mean, it sounded pretty good.”

“I don’t know how we’re going to get there. We’ll be all right for the talent show but if we’re going to get into the Whisky show, we have to have a bunch of originals.”

“Then I guess I’ll have to keep inspiring you.”

“That song is not about you,” I said.

He smiled.

“You do it the way anything gets done,” he said. “One foot in front of the other.”

“Is that gearhead wisdom?”

“I don’t know why you think I’m a gearhead.”

“Because you say things like ‘one foot in front of the other.’”

“Oh,” he said, dashing his cigarette on the asphalt. “I thought I was being poetic.”

“Everybody thinks that about themselves.”

“You guys need help schlepping stuff? If you make it to the Whisky show, Toby will probably let me use one of the vans. I can be your driver.”

“Why would he do that?”

He grinned. “I’m dependable.”

“Thanks, Jeff,” I said. “I hadn’t thought about it. That would be good.”

“Just keep making the music, Street. That’s your new job.”

He walked off, and I sat staring up at the moon, which had jumped out of nowhere.

Sometimes I pretended the moon cared about me.

Just like I pretended my father did.

T
HE NEXT NIGHT
I
WAS SITTING IN MY ROOM DASHING
through my homework so I could get back to working on my songs when my mother tapped on my door. I looked at my watch and was surprised she was still home because this was certainly the having-pots-of-tea-with-Louise-at-the-Fig-Tree hour. My stomach knotted up because I knew she wanted to have one of those talks.

I hadn’t really told her about the band. How could she know? I wasn’t ready to talk yet. “Mom, I’ve got an AP history test next week.”

“This won’t take long.”

The door opened and she walked in with a tall, skinny guy her age who had dark blond hair to his shoulders, wide blue eyes, suntan wrinkles, six earrings and a nose stud. He
wore Levi’s and a long-sleeved shirt untucked and stood with his hands on his hips smiling at me.

“This is Ed,” she said. “Ed, this is Blanche.”

“Hi, Blanche. Nice name.”

I was too stunned to say anything.

My mother didn’t generally bring men home. I knew she dated them occasionally, but she was very particular about who she let into the house. In all the time my father had been gone I’d met two guys. One was Lance the corporate attorney who wore squeaky loafers and short-sleeved button-down shirts and said “sweet” a lot.

Lance lasted exactly one month.

Next came Timothy and he lasted almost six months because he was broody and depressed and had a novel that no one would publish. She’d never admit it but I think my mom gave him some money. For some reason, he got a grant to continue his novel-in-progress and he went off to a writers’ colony in New York and that was that. I wasn’t sure who dumped whom but the whole scenario was a little too much like the one with my father.

Ed didn’t look like either one of those extremes. He was something in the middle.

Anyway, back to my name.

My mother couldn’t resist filling him in on the history:

“She’s not named after Blanche DuBois, which is what everyone thinks. She’s named after Blanchefleur …”

“Oh,” he said, “from Tristan and Isolde.”

I wish you could have seen the look on my mother’s face. It made me very nervous.

“Yes,” she half whispered.

“It’s a pretty well-known legend,” I said to calm her down.

“Tristan’s mother, Blanchefleur. Which of course means ‘white flower’ in French,” my mother said.

“Sure, sure,” Ed said. He was looking around my room like an idiot savant, like one of those people who’d be able to re-create an exact replica later. Still letting his eyes surf across my walls, he said to my mother, “Diane, you’re a true romantic.”

“Well, I wasn’t the only one. Her father loved that story, too. We saw the play together at some artsy playhouse in Hollywood. That’s how it started.”

“You guys probably want to have a longer discussion about this somewhere. Nice to meet you, Ed.”

“Oh, honey, Ed is here for a reason. He opened up a guitar store down the street from Biscuit.” Biscuit, if you’ll recall, was the curiously named clothing store that Mom and Louise ran together. They named it that because it was Louise’s cat’s name. You could not come up with a worse marketing strategy if you tried, but somehow it was working.

Biscuit was for women who were tired of wearing clothes. Long flowy skirts and silk pants with elastic waists and scarves and hats to disguise the fact that you were really wearing pajamas. Neither my mother nor Louise dressed like that. Mom still had some rock-and-roll girlfriend in her and Louise wore anything tight to show off the body that she constantly starved and the boobs that had suddenly appeared last Christmas.

People in the program were not hard on themselves about anything other than substance abuse. They felt that
was the only test they needed to pass, so that’s why Louise gave herself permission to be anorexic and my mother didn’t wear makeup and dressed too young and ate a lot of sugar.

“Really,” I said. “What kind of guitar shop?”

“Small,” he said.

“What kind of guitars do you have?” I asked.

“Little bit of everything.”

“Do you play?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“He went to Berklee,” my mother explained. “It’s a music college.”

“I was in some bands when I was young but the weird thing is, I always liked the tools more than the trade, you know, so eventually I just started selling guitars and now I have my own shop.”

He said all this as if he were answering some question he was always asked, like from the press, so he was prepared.

“What’s it called?” I asked.

“Ed’s Guitars,” Ed said.

“Well, that’s very precise.”

I could see my mother getting nervous about my tone so she started talking fast: “I asked Ed if he’d take a look at your guitar. You know, it has that crack in the top.”

“You mean Dad’s guitar?”

“Yes,” she said. “You know what I mean.”

“I like the crack,” I said.