Struts & Frets Read online

  When all is said and done, they seem like no big deal.

  No pain?

  No pain.

  Here at the bridge was where I opened it up to some big, loud, fat chords and really sang out.

  Sometimes I get a little confused.

  And sometimes I feel a little abused.

  It’s okay to want a little pain.

  And it’s okay to want to be insane.

  But on a night like this, I could be in the stars.

  On a night like this, I could be in your arms.

  This is our chance for a little romance,

  This is our time to feel a little fine,

  Soon the pain is gonna come back, see?

  But until then, it’s just you and me.

  It went back to the original chords, but they were looser, messier now, with lots of little fills and riffs. Like it couldn’t all be contained anymore.

  Check my axle limping from a broken wheel.

  Stick my fingers in my brain to cop a feel.

  Radio heaven to nurse my darkest thoughts.

  I cannot see beyond what I haven’t got.

  No pain?

  No pain?

  No pain?

  No . . .

  The last chord rang out in the room. I realized that I’d just done it. I sung in front of about fifty of my most judgmental peers.

  Not only that, I’d also enjoyed it.

  Afterward, Jen5 and I just kind of sprawled out together on an old stuffed couch. We’d both been so tense and worried, and now it was all over and we could finally relax. Raef came over with a mug of coffee.

  “Killer song, bro,” he said. “Here’s my specialty. An Irish coffee.” Then he winked at me, handed me the mug, and went back to the counter.

  “Do you know what’s in that?” asked Jen5 as I took a sip.

  I coughed and nearly spit it back out into the cup.

  “Irish whiskey, I’m guessing?” I said.

  So we shared the mug of Irish coffee and basked in the compliments of friends and acquaintances.

  Kick-ass combat ninja, rock-star style.

  applied. Mom wasn’t putting on makeup or doing her hair, and she wasn’t leaving the house. The problem was, she had a strong craving for a caramel macchiato. So of course I had to get it for her.

  She handed me a twenty, said, “Get yourself something too,” and then settled in to watch the entire third season of Sex and the City on DVD.

  “Thanks,” I said. “You know, kids aren’t supposed to have caffeine. It stunts our growth.”

  “I’m trying to keep it from becoming taboo and therefore desirable,” she said, and hit Play on the remote. “Is it working?”

  “I think they have those organic juices,” I said.

  There was a decent little coffee shop down the street and it was a nice day, so I just put my headphones on and walked. Sometimes there’s nothing better to clear your head and get refocused. My mind wandered, but not in the crazy, hectic way it did at night. Instead it just floated along as the Clash’s “Overpowered by Funk” was blasting from my MP3 player, conjuring up that feeling like I was in the opening credits of a movie. It was a biopic about the rise of indie rock legend Sammy Bojar. Did he know, at the age of seventeen, that one day he would be adored by millions, acclaimed by critics, and give new life to a genre that was beginning to slip into overmarketed mediocrity? How could he have had such depth and vision at that young age? And I was thinking Johnny Depp was way too old to play me, so maybe that Cillian Murphy guy, and Scarlett Johansson would play Jen5, of course. Who would play Rick? Jack Black, maybe? That cracked me up and I actually laughed a little out loud as I walked. But then I realized that by the time this movie was made, those actors would be way too old to play high school kids, even by Hollywood standards. But that was better, really. It would be young, unknown actors, getting their big breaks. And the kid who played me would study my concert videos and interviews to get my mannerisms and stuff, and he would look a lot like me, but with better hair and a cooler wardrobe. They’d have to keep the Boat the same, though. It was just too perfect—

  Then my movie froze with one of those classic record-scratch sounds when I stepped through the front door of the coffee shop and saw Eric Strom, the lead singer of Monster Zero, standing behind the counter, serving coffee. I stopped in the doorway and just stared at him like a total idiot. In my head, the movie film had snapped and was flapping uselessly on the reel.

  It didn’t make any sense. This was the guy who was leading Columbus’s claim to be “The Next Seattle.” How could he possibly be making lattes in German Village? It would be like coming out of your house in the morning to go to school and finding out that Superman was your garbage collector.

  He had just finished ringing up a customer and I guess he must have noticed me standing in the doorway staring at him because he looked right at me and smiled.

  “Hey,” he said, then pulled out a dirty, coffee-stained rag and began wiping the countertop.

  “You . . . ,” I said. “You’re Eric Strom.”

  He looked at me kind of weird. “Do I know you?”

  “Uh,” I said. “Uh, no. I just . . . I’m a . . . I really like Monster Zero. I see all your shows.”

  “Awesome,” he said. “Glad you like it.” He smiled again and went back to wiping up the counter.

  I thought about turning around, walking back home, getting in my car, and going to a completely different coffee shop. That’s how freaked out I was. But that would have been just goofy. Even I knew that. So I walked to the counter and said, “I didn’t know you worked here. I live right down the street and I’m pretty much here every Sunday and I never see you.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I usually work nights. But I switched shifts with someone so I could play a gig last week.”

  “At Saul’s,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Great venue.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You were great.”

  “Thanks,” he said. He was totally getting weirded out by me now, but I couldn’t help myself.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “What?” he said.

  “Why are you working in a coffee shop?”

  “Uh . . . I don’t like office jobs. And I need a flexible schedule for gigs.”

  “But you were named best indie rock band in Columbus,” I said.

  “Um, yeah,” he said. “Like that actually means anything.”

  “But . . .”

  “Listen, man. That’s how it works. You’re hot one minute, they make all sorts of promises, and a week later they’ve totally forgotten about you. Especially when you aren’t interested in jumping through hoops for the big record labels.” He looked at me for a minute. “You play?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “What?”

  “Guitar, mostly,” I said.

  “Cool,” he said. “So you think we should be rock stars now that we were mentioned in a magazine?”

  “Uh . . . ,” I said.

  “I’m only telling you this because I wish someone had told me when I was your age. It would have saved me a lot of heartache,” he said. “See, you don’t do it to become rich and famous. If that’s what you want, go do something else, because for every one band that makes enough money off their music to live—and we’re not talking a lot of money, just enough to live—for every one of those bands, there’s ninety-nine that have to work crappy day jobs just so they can pay their rent. This is something you do because you love music and you gotta get it out there. And so you do whatever it takes.”

  He looked at me expectantly, with this hard expression on his face, a glint of that punk rock stage god coming through in his eyes.

  I just stared back at him. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t even know what to think.

  After a moment his expression softened. “Look, I’m sorry, kid. I didn’t mean to dump all that on you.” He smiled, a little forced. “Hey, maybe you should just think abo
ut doing something else. Like, I dunno, computers or something.”

  “There’s nothing else,” I said, quietly.

  “Is that so?” he asked, his forced smile fading away. “Well, then. I hope you’ve got what it takes to stick it out. Wannabe rock stars are a dime a dozen, but real musicians? Those are actually pretty rare. Now, did you want some coffee?”

  I ordered some coffee.

  When I got home, Mom was doing that weird thing she always did when watching her Sex and the City where she laughs and cries at the same time.

  “Here,” I said, holding out her caramel macchiato.

  “Thanks, sweetie,” she said, her eyes still glued to whatever Sarah Jessica Parker was doing. It was an okay show, I guess. At least they actually showed the sex, instead of cutting the scene right before it got good. Although it had been the cause of many sex conversations between me and my mom, which mostly consisted of her telling me how rare it was to find a show with that much sexual honesty.

  “Hey, Mom,” I said. “What if I worked in a coffee shop my whole life?”

  Mom grabbed the remote, switched off the TV, and turned to me with a look that probably froze both our coffee drinks.

  “You’re going to college,” she said. “End of story.”

  “Huh?” I said.

  “That’s where this is going, isn’t it?” she said.

  “What? No. I just . . . well, what if I couldn’t make enough money to completely support myself as a musician, and so I had to get another kind of job?”

  “Well, since you’re going to college, you won’t have to worry about that, will you? You’ll major in something useful and get a real job. A career job.”

  “But that’s not what I want to do with my life. You always said that I should—”

  “You could still play music. It would be your hobby.”

  “A hobby? That’s like the worst word in the world. When you say that someone plays music as a hobby, you’re saying they suck. Worse than that, you’re saying they don’t even care that they suck, ’cause it’s just a hobby.”

  “You sound like your grandfather when you say that,” she said, and clearly she didn’t mean it as a compliment.

  “Because I am like him. And that’s all I want. To have a life like his. No stupid math or science or any of that. Just music.”

  “Sam, I know it all sounds so exciting and wonderful, but a real musician’s life is difficult.”

  “I know that,” I said.

  “No, Sam. You don’t. I do. Because I grew up with them. The late hours they kept. Always moving around from city to city. Never sure where the money would come from or when. The parties and drugs and booze. I didn’t have any friends of my own because we never lived in one place long enough for me to make them. You think that was easy to grow up with? And do you think they were any happier because they were musicians? How do you think your grandmother Vivian died?”

  “Uh . . . ,” I said. “Heart attack, wasn’t it?”

  “Sure, that’s the official story. But the heart attack was caused by a drug overdose. And there are generally two ways that overdoses happen. One is on purpose, the other is by accident. So your grandmother was either a suicide or a junkie or both. Sound like a great way to go? Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, and your grandmother. Hi-diddle-dee-dee, a musician’s life for me, huh?”

  What was it with people dumping on me today? She stared at me like I was supposed to respond to something like that. Like I even knew how the conversation got to that point. Yeah, maybe I’d been picking a little bit of a fight with her from the beginning. But it was like asking to arm wrestle with someone and instead they drop a nuke on your head.

  “I’m going to go up to my room,” I said. “To hide from the world.”

  Mom had already turned her DVD back on.

  Later that day, I was on the phone with Jen5.

  “Remember when you were telling me that your mom said she’d love you even if you worked at 7-Eleven?” I asked. “Well, my mom told me that she wouldn’t.”

  “Oh, come on. Don’t try to pretend like your mom is meaner than my mom. Your mom is actually pretty cool.”

  “Well, she’s quickly becoming not cool.”

  “She’s probably just worried that you have all this talent but you won’t use it.”

  “No, what she’s worried about is that I’ll use the wrong kind of talent. She basically said she doesn’t want me to be a musician because she’s afraid I’d end up like my suicidal junkie grandmother.”

  “Your grandmother was a suicidal junkie?”

  “That’s what my mom claims. She said, and I quote, ‘Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, and your grandmother.’”

  “Wow,” said Jen5. “That’s actually kind of cool.”

  “You’re not helping.”

  “What do you want me to do? Talk to your mom for you? Explain why it is that you want to be a rock star?”

  “Well, that’s the other thing. I went to the coffee shop by my house today, and get this: Eric Strom from Monster Zero was working there.”

  “So?”

  “Besides the fact that the singer for one of the best bands in the Midwest has to have a day job? He basically said that most musicians need to have other jobs just to pay the rent.”

  “So do artists. So does pretty much everyone with a cool job in this lame-ass country.”

  “I guess I hadn’t really thought about it before. I mean . . . that everything I want could come true, I could be as good as Eric Strom, and I’d still have to work some shitty job. It just doesn’t seem right, you know?”

  “In the Czech Republic, the government actually gives money to artists so they can concentrate on art instead of how they’re going to pay the rent,” said Jen5. “That’s why everything we put out in America these days is such crap. Because it’s survival of the most commercial here.”

  “None of that helps me,” I said.

  “Well, you could move to Prague.”

  “Thanks.”

  “What? I’d move with you. I think I’d really like living in Europe.”

  “Maybe someday. But for right now, what do I do?”

  “I don’t know. Tell her you want to major in music composition so that you can write motion picture soundtracks or something. That sounds nice and boring with very little risk of suicide or hard drugs.”

  “Become a soulless marketing minion?”

  “Hey, now. My uncle works in PR and he is without a doubt the coolest person in my family.”

  “But still, it just seems so . . .”

  “Sam, you’re missing the point. You don’t actually have to write commercial jingles or action movie soundtracks. You just major in it and get the knowledge from studying music, and you tell her that’s what you’ll do with the knowledge. But in reality, you’ll do whatever you want, and by then you’ll have graduated from college and so it won’t matter.”

  “Oh,” I said. “You know, that might actually work.”

  “And then,” she said, “you can meet me in Prague.”

  The phone beeped.

  “Hang on,” I said. “There’s someone on the other line.” I clicked over and said, “Hello?”

  “Hey,” said a low, gravelly voice.

  “Joe?”

  “Yeah. I really need to talk to you. Can you meet me? I’m at the Dube.”

  “Um . . . ,” I said. “Sure.”

  “Great,” he said, not sounding especially enthusiastic. “See you soon.” Then he hung up.

  I clicked back over to Jen5.

  “That was weird,” I said. “It was Joe. He wants to meet up with me.”

  “Oh, God, Sammy, you didn’t say yes, did you?”

  “Of course I did,” I said. “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Well, I thought after what happened . . .”

  “Fiver, I’m not scared of him anymore. I think we might actually be able to be friends now.”

  “Why would you want to be?”

  “So
mebody should be,” I said.

  The Blue Danube, or as most people called it, the Dube, was a bar and restaurant just off the OSU campus. It was a pretty seedy place, and the food was lousy. It was just one big open room, with the bar on one side, and a bunch of booths and tables on the other. It was kind of like a diner with a good jukebox and mood lighting. In fact, there were hardly any regular lights in the Dube. Just one or two small lamps over by the bar. Most of the lighting for the place came from a big blue neon sign hung above the booths that said THE BLUE DUBE in swirling script. The sign cast everything in a dim blue light, making the place feel like it was a scene from some gritty crime movie.

  Joe was sitting over in the corner booth, directly beneath the Blue Dube sign. He was writing in a little blank book, an empty coffee cup in front of him and a cigarette burning in the ashtray. Even directly under the sign, I couldn’t imagine how he was able to see what he was writing without serious eyestrain. One hand was wrapped in a thick bandage.

  “Hey,” I said, sliding into the booth.

  He didn’t respond right away, but instead continued to scribble into his book. I knew that feeling. Just wanted to finish that one last thought before it was gone. So I sat and listened to the jukebox. It was playing “Just Like Honey,” an old Jesus and Mary Chain song—slow, fat, distorted guitar under whispered vocals. It really was a great jukebox.

  Joe put down his pen and snapped his little blank book closed.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “Sorry about what happened,” he said, his eyes trailing to his bandaged hand.

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I wasn’t the one who got hurt.”

  “I heard you played at an open mic at Idiot Child last night.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I just did one song. It was mainly for Jen5’s art show.”

  He nodded and started clicking his Zippo lighter open and closed with his good hand. The sharp ping sound it made was in counterpoint to the song in the background. There was a faint smell of lighter fluid that penetrated the greasy burger smell.

  “I need this band,” he said suddenly. He was looking directly at me, with the same expression as when I gave him a ride home. That sad, broken look. “I know I’ve said a lot of shit about it, and about you guys. But that was just me talking. I know I’m not a great musician like you and TJ. I know that.” Then his face went from that broken look to the triumphant, confident look that he had when we first saw that poster about the Battle of the Bands. “This band is special,” he said in a way that you couldn’t argue with. “It’s going to be something. I know it. We can still kick ass at this contest. And you know I’ll work my ass off, because it’s the only worthwhile thing I have now,” he said.