Struts & Frets Read online

  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.

  “So,” I said finally, “I think my band is breaking up.”

  He looked at me with a strange expression, like he wasn’t exactly sure what I was talking
about.

  “I got into a fight with the singer of my band.”

  “Did you win or lose?”

  “I guess I won. He had to go to the hospital and I didn’t.”

  “Sounds like a win to me. And so now this joker is sore at you?”

  “I guess.”

  “So get a new band.”

  “But I can’t lead a band.”

  “Can’t or won’t?”

  “When I have to sing in front of a big crowd, I get so freaked out, I totally freeze up.”

  “You just have to get over that.”

  “Gramps, you don’t understand how hard it—”

  He leaned in really close and poked me in the chest with one bony finger. “You serious about being a musician?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “You want easy, get off this bus right now and go do something practical with your life.”

  “Gramps, I’m not going to do that. I don’t even think I could.”

  “Then you better realize damn quick that it’s never going to be easy. And understand that you made that choice. You. Nobody else.”

  “But why, Gramps? Why does it have to be hard like that?”

  “Because that’s an artist’s job, Sam. To take this steaming shit pile called life and transform it into something beautiful.”

  He jerked his head to one side in a weird way, like he was listening to something. He frowned and shook his head.

  “You have to risk everything,” he said. “Do all the things that scare you, learn from them, and then translate them into something for the world.” Then he leaned back in his chair. “They won’t appreciate it, of course. Not truly. They’ll kiss your ass in that moment because they somehow sense that you’re doing something they can’t even comprehend, then they’ll trade you in for the next hot sound that comes along. Bastards. They’re all bastards. But that doesn’t matter. You do it because you can’t help yourself. Because if you can’t make music . . .”

  Then suddenly Gramps’s head jerked up as if he’d heard a loud noise.

  “What now?” he said in a growl, glancing at the pile of records on the floor in the living room.

  “What is it, Gramps?” I asked.

  His eyes shifted to me, then back to the records, then back to me again.

  “Nothing,” he said tersely. “Just . . .” He stared at me for a moment, then stood up so suddenly he knocked his chair over. “Just . . .” He looked worried and his hand was in his bathrobe pocket, fiddling with something. “Just, I think you should go.”

  “Oh . . . ,” I said.

  “Sorry, kid. You know how it is,” he patted me on the shoulder in a “buddy” kind of way. Something he’d never done before. “Got a lot to do. That’s all.”

  “Okay, sure,” I said, getting up. It was suddenly like he couldn’t wait for me to leave. He practically shoved me to the door.

  “Well!” he said with a cheerful voice. “Great seeing you! Tell her hello for me, will you?”

  “Her who?” I asked. Did he mean Jen5? My mother?

  “Oh!” he said, and gave a forced laugh. “I think you know who I mean!” But he said it in a way that made me question whether he knew what he meant.

  “Yeah, you bet,” I said, and let him push me out the door. “Good—”

  The door slammed closed.

  “I’m getting worried about Gramps,” I said to Jen5 that night on the phone.

  “Yeah?” she asked. “Well, he’s pretty old, Sammy. And it’s not like he ever really took care of himself, you know?”

  “I know,” I said. “It’s just . . . sometimes he’s so cool, and then the next minute, he acts like somebody I don’t even know. Mom said something about looking at nursing homes the other day. You think he’s losing it?”

  “My grandma is in a home,” she said. “She loves being there. All her little bingo friends and stuff. She says it was the best thing for her. Maybe it would be like that for him. Maybe he’d be happier in a home.”

  “Maybe,” I said, although it really didn’t sound like Gramps’s style.

  “Samuel Bojar!” my mother called from downstairs. “Are you talking on the phone when you should be doing your homework?”

  Damn that little green light.

  “Of course not!” I called down to her. Then on the phone: “Gotta go.”

  “Oh, real quick,” said Jen5.

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “Don’t forget to . . . uh . . . go to the drugstore before you come over for our modeling session tomorrow.”

  “Oh,” I said. Then I realized what she was talking about. “Oh! Yeah, of—of course . . .”

  “Sweet dreams.” Then she hung up.

  Condoms. I had just officially been asked to purchase condoms.

  It took forever to fall asleep that night.

  condoms.

  The school day had taken forever to get through, although I couldn’t really remember anything that happened. It had all been a blur of anticipation even more intense than waiting for a concert. But finally the last bell rang.

  And now I stood in the back aisle of the drugstore and stared at the wall of condoms like they were in a foreign language. Ribbed, lubricated, ultrathin, sensitive, lambskin, flavored, glow-in-the-dark . . . I didn’t even know what half of those meant. And there were sizes, too. Jesus, I didn’t know what size I needed. I stood paralyzed for a full ten minutes as I stared at the many colored boxes that hung in front of me.

  Why was buying condoms so embarrassing? It wasn’t like there was something to be ashamed of, right? If anything, I should be able to walk up to the register and proudly place them on the counter and say, Yes, I’m going to get laid tonight! And since I am a responsible person, I plan to use a condom! So why could I already feel a slow blush creeping into my face? Why was I tempted to actually steal them just so I didn’t have to take them to the counter? Honestly, the only thing that stopped me from swiping them was the possibility of an even worse embarrassment: being caught shoplifting condoms. I could picture being held back in the manager’s office until my mom showed up and I had to tell her. I couldn’t imagine anything worse than that.

  But I couldn’t just stand there and stare at them forever, either. So I took a deep breath, grabbed the one that seemed the most standard, and headed to the counter.

  There was some old lady at the register. Of course. It had to be an old lady. I tried to place them on the counter confidently. Like it was no big deal. But I think my hand might have been shaking a little. And my face was so hot, I’m sure it was beet red.

  The lady was used to this kind of thing, though. She didn’t even blink. Just scanned them and told me how much they were and I paid.

  “Thanks,” I said. My voice was shaking a little too.

  As I drove over to Jen5’s house, I suddenly remembered the “real” reason I was coming over. I was supposed to be her model. The idea of being a model seemed a little strange, but I knew she preferred to paint portraits and still lifes from living things, and I guess if you wanted to paint a real person, it would be weird to ask someone you didn’t know and almost as weird to ask someone you did know. I guess asking your boyfriend was probably the least weird. And while I’d never tried to sit completely still for an hour or two, how hard could it be?

  When I pulled up at Jen5’s house, she was already waiting for me, just sitting on the front stoop. She was wearing her painting gear, which was overalls and a tube top. On anyone else it might have looked trashy, but somehow on her it transformed into some kind of funky, dirty artist look. At her feet, she had a boom box.

  “You ready to be immortalized?” she asked as I climbed out of the Boat.

  “As I’ll ever be,” I said. “What’s with the stereo?”

  “Entertainment for you,” she said. “This could take a while.”

  “Could?” I asked.

  “Yeah, well, I never know. I don’t plan anything ahead of time. Like, I purposely don’t. So this could be a s
imple little sketch or it could be a five-hour painting marathon.”

  “Five hours?” I said.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll let you take breaks. Now, come on. Let’s get started.”

  We walked back behind her house to her studio, which was an old wooden shed. Her dad wasn’t really into yard work or home improvement, so it had just sat empty until Jen5 asked her parents if she could convert it into a studio. It was a small rectangular space, with bare wood floor and walls. All of her art supplies were on shelves on one side, and a big white canvas backdrop was on the other. It was a little stuffy and there weren’t any windows, so she had to a run an air filter all the time to clear out the paint fumes. But it was her own space where she could work in complete privacy with her CD player blaring and everything just the way she wanted it.

  As soon as we got inside, she said, “Take your shirt off.”

  Then she went over and started mixing paints.

  I felt vulnerable as I took my shirt off, especially the way she just commanded it to happen. I was kind of a skinny guy and always felt even skinnier when I was shirtless. Of course, it wasn’t like Jen5 had never seen me with my shirt off before. We’d gone swimming tons of times over the years. But things were a lot different now. Obviously. And Jen5 was totally in painter mode. She was so focused on setting up the equipment and everything that it almost didn’t even feel like her.

  “Sit on that stool,” she said while she set up her palette and a canvas.

  I sat down, but that didn’t help my nerves. If anything, I felt even more like some kind of specimen to be examined.

  She came over and adjusted the folds in the backdrop behind me.

  “You’re nervous,” she said.

  “I guess,” I admitted. “I just don’t know what to do.”

  “You don’t have to do anything,” she said.

  “Yeah, that’s the problem. I like having something to do.”

  “Here,” she said. Then she switched on the boom box and a mellow, spacey jam started playing.

  “Mercury Rev?” I asked.

  “Huh?” she said. She was back to fixing the backdrop and adjusting the clip lights that hung from the ceiling.