Struts & Frets Read online

  “Sam?” Her voice was softer and thicker after a couple glasses of wine.

  “Yeah, Mom?”

  “Take a break from history for a minute,” she said.

  Like a dutiful son, I closed the textbook from which I had been reading the same paragraph over and over again because I just couldn’t seem to pay attention to it.

  “Talk to me,” she said.

  I turned away from my desk and looked at her.

  For the most part, my mom was pretty cool. If she didn’t understand me, it wasn’t because she didn’t try. My major complaint about my mom was that all of my friends, at some point, had to confess to me that they thought she was hot. Why couldn’t they just keep it to themselves? Even Rick once said, “I mean, she’s not my type or anything, but you have to admit, your mom is a total MILF!” I told him I would admit no such thing.

  When we were first starting the band, Joe hadn’t hooked up the Parks and Rec room yet. Rick, TJ, and I were hanging out one night, trying to think of places we could rehearse. TJ suggested my place. When I asked why, he said something about my mom maybe bringing us lemonade every once in a while. Well, I told him that one thing I was damn sure of, Joe would never meet my mom. TJ agreed that this was probably for the best.

  “Hello?” my mom said. “Earth to Sam?”

  “Sorry, Mom,” I said.

  “How was school?” she asked.

  “Boring,” I said.

  “A few more details would be nice,” she said.

  “History is dumb. Spanish is hard. Math is pointless.”

  “What about English?”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “We just finished Beowulf, which is about some knight dude, but they call him a Thane instead, and he kills this monster called Grendel, and then Grendel’s mom gets upset and tries to kill him. So that’s kind of interesting, I guess.”

  “What about science?”

  “Science is just gross. We have to do these labs, right? Where we cut up plants and worms and stuff, and then we have to label all the parts on a worksheet.”

  “That sounds better than just reading things in books,” said Mom.

  “I guess,” I said. Of course I couldn’t tell her that at least I could fake reading things in textbooks. I didn’t mind English or history, because they were about people. I felt like even Shakespeare had something to teach me about being a better songwriter. But science? Where was the poetry in cutting up slimy dead things?

  “I know it’s hard to see this right now, but science and math are really important. Colleges offer big scholarships for kids who excel at those subjects, and the variety of careers you can choose from is virtually endless.”

  “Mom, I’d rather gouge my eyes out with rusty spoons than study math. It’s the lamest thing in existence. It’s like the opposite of all creativity.”

  “Sammy, that’s just not true. There’s all sorts of amazing and wonderful things going on in math and science. Don’t forget that it’s going to be mathematicians and scientists who solve the world’s ecology problems.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “And computers. Video games. These things are made by math and science people.”

  “I know, I know. But it’s still just numbers. And I’m not good at that stuff.”

  “You don’t know that. You’ve never really even tried.”

  “Trust me, Mom. I’m not.”

  There was a moment of silence, during which I could tell I’d said something over the line, though I really couldn’t see any flaw in my logic.

  “Well,” she said. “How was rehearsal?”

  “Okay, I guess,” I said.

  “Okay, you guess?” she said.

  “We’re going to call ourselves Tragedy of Wisdom.”

  “Oh,” she said. “That’s nice.”

  See? Even she knew it was lame.

  “Do you have rehearsal tomorrow after school?”

  “No,” I said. “TJ can’t make it and Joe thinks that there’s no point rehearsing without the drummer.”

  “Joe thinks,” she said, rolling her eyes.

  “What?” I said.

  “Never mind,” she said. “If you don’t have too much homework tomorrow, could you spend a little time with your grandfather after school? He’s been pretty down lately.”

  “Yeah, sure, I guess.”

  “You know it always cheers him up to see you.”

  “Sure doesn’t seem like it,” I said.

  It takes me a long time to fall asleep. I’m not sure why. I don’t really get tired like I guess a lot of people do. I mean, I wake up tired and stupid and slow, then as the day goes on, I get more and more awake until, by the time I’m supposed to go to bed, I’m totally wired. No, I don’t eat a lot of sugar and I don’t drink tons of soda or coffee. It’s just how I am.

  You know that buzzing sound you hear from old fluorescent lights? Not real obvious at first, but it kind of creeps up on you and gets really annoying after a while? Well, that’s what runs through my head every night. So I just lay in bed in the dark and stare up at the ceiling while I wait for the buzzing to fade out. It always does, but sometimes it takes hours. And I can’t close my eyes or I start to lose perspective on how big the room is and where I am in it, almost like I’m floating or sinking, and the buzzing gets so intense it feels like I’ll drown in it. I used to read or listen to music in bed, but that only made things worse because not only would I have all my old thoughts from the day to settle down, but I’d be getting new ones also. So now I just stare up at the ceiling and wait.

  The thing that kept floating through my head was Jen5’s question: What would you do with the rest of your life?

  But of course, I already knew the answer to that question. I’d just make more music. Despite its name, Tragedy of Wisdom was going to become famous. Not lame famous, like those sellout bands that play in football stadiums and can’t even relate to regular people anymore. No, we were going to be cool famous, like those bands that hardly get any radio play, except on college radio, and if they have a video, it’s only played late at night because it isn’t commercial enough for the soulless marketing people. We were going to have one of those small but intense fan bases that would swap bootlegs of our shows online but buy the CDs anyway and totally obsess over my lyrics and what they meant. Cool writers would make references to us in their novels. Hot artsy chicks with nose rings would stalk us at concerts. The works.

  That’s what I planned to do with the rest of my life. Not bad, huh?

  said Mr. Sully, our art teacher. “Fruit is soooo dullsville.” He was an older guy with a long beard and long hair pulled back into a ponytail. Or at least, the hair he had was long. He was mostly bald on top. He looked more like he should be guarding a pot farm with a couple of Rottweilers down in southern Ohio than teaching art in a high school. But he was nice enough and kind of funny—at least, when he didn’t mean to be.

  “But I want tell you,” continued Mr. Sully, nodding his head up and down rhythmically, “that painting a fruit still life can be awesome if you approach it the right way.”

  We were all standing in a big circle facing inward, each with an easel. In the center of the circle was an apple, a banana, and an orange on a table.

  “I want you to think back to last year,” said Mr. Sully, “and just muse on all the different styles of painting we talked about. I want you to meditate on them until you pick the one that speaks to you.” He lowered his head, as if to show the proper posture for meditating, then he jerked his head back up, blinked, and said, “Then I want you to paint in that style. Okay. Begin.”

  “Fruit,” said Jen5. “I hate painting fruit.” Today she was decked out in a gray tweed sports coat over a black lacy tank top and torn-up flared jeans. Her massive tangle of frizzy, nearly dreadlocked blond hair was pulled back in some kind of leather-thong-and-chopstick combo.

  Jen5 didn’t really have a specific look or style. You couldn’t pin her into a group like goth or geek or p
unk. Sometimes she looked like an art chick, sometimes like a skater chick, sometimes even a little like a college professor. But most of the time she looked like all three at once. The first thing that people noticed about her was the color of her eyes. Just like her style, you couldn’t really tell what they were. Sometimes they were blue, sometimes green, sometimes gray or hazel. On official forms where you had to fill in stuff like your height, weight, and hair color, in the eye-color line she usually wrote “paisley.”

  “Fruit, flowers, sunsets,” I said with a shrug. “What’s the difference? It’s all painting.”

  Jen5 scowled at me. “Sure, for you. Because you don’t like painting. If you did, you’d know that there was a huge difference.” Then she turned her scowl on the fruit. “Maybe if it was organic fruit or something . . . then it would have shades and variations. Stuff you could play with. But the stupid Frankenfruit they pump full of chemicals now, combined with all the wax they pour on it . . . we might as well be painting fake plastic fruit. There’s nothing real about that. Nothing alive.” Then she sighed, squirted some paint onto her palette, and went to town.

  Visual art was definitely Jen5’s thing. Drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, you name it. She kicked ass at all of it. It was amazing to watch how she attacked the canvas like she was pounding the colors into it. Paint flew everywhere—in her hair, on her clothes, smeared across her hands and face. It wasn’t so much that she didn’t care. It seemed more that she actually liked when it got messy. But as much as the paint was all over the place off the canvas, the paint on the canvas went exactly where she wanted.

  “Wow, Jenny! Fantastic!” said Mr. Sully as he gazed at her half-finished painting. “I am totally feeling what you are putting down! Impressionistic fruit! Right on!”

  Jen5 grunted without looking at him and continued painting, but I saw a little smile on her lips. She’d never admit it, but Mr. Sully was probably the only teacher whose opinion she valued.

  Then Mr. Sully looked at my sad little picture. The only difference between the apple and the orange was the color. And the banana looked more like a wilted, yellow green bean.

  “Ah.” He nodded and patted me on the shoulder sympathetically. “Well, you just keep at it, Sam. I know you have the fire. This just isn’t your medium, man.”

  “No kidding,” I said.

  “But that doesn’t matter, you know,” he said, his eyes getting dreamy. “All art, all creativity comes from the same place. Painting, music, dancing. It all comes from the same well. We drink and we are full. Are you feeling me?” he looked at me expectantly.

  “Sure,” I said. “Sure, Mr. Sully.”

  He nodded happily. “Just keep at it! Follow your bliss!” Then he floated off to babble at some other student.

  “Wow, Sammy,” said Jen5, looking over my shoulder at my painting. “That sucks.”

  “Eat me, Niffer,” I said.

  “Hey, I’m sure you’d say the same thing if you ever heard me try to sing.”

  “I’ve heard you sing,” I said.

  “What? When?”

  “Third grade. School play. I believe the piece was entitled ‘Peanut Butter and Jelly.’ I was spellbound.”

  “I’m even worse now,” she said, then turned and attacked her canvas again.

  I just watched her paint for a little bit, then I said, “I think my mom doesn’t want me to be a professional musician.”

  “Imagine that,” she said, not looking away from her canvas.

  “What do you mean?”

  “When I told my mom I wanted to be an artist, do you know what she said? ‘Oh, I’ll love you even if you work at 7-Eleven your whole life.’”

  “No she didn’t.”

  “You better believe it.”

  “What does that even mean?” I asked. “That she thinks you’ll never make it as an artist?”

  “What she’s really saying is that, in her book, being a successful artist is right up there with being a success at selling cigarettes to old ladies.”

  “Honestly, Fiver. Does she even get how bad that sounds?”

  “Are you kidding? That’s just her trying to be funny. If she actually thought I was serious, instead of just going through some teenage phase, she’d probably take away all my art supplies and ship me off to boarding school.” She continued to dance around the easel, raking raw colors across the canvas. “As far as she’s concerned, I’m on my way to a brilliant career as a doctor or lawyer.”

  “Yeah, that’s totally ridiculous,” I said. “But for your parents, in a weird parent kind of way, it makes sense. I mean, your mom is a lawyer. So of course that’s what she wants you to be. But my grandfather was a professional musician. It was good enough for him, right? Why can’t I be one too? I mean, most people our age don’t even know what they want to do with themselves and they don’t really care. But I care. I really want to be a musician.”

  Jen5 didn’t say anything, but her brush started hitting the canvas hard enough for me to hear it.

  “What?” I said.

  She stopped painting and looked at me. “Do you think they really care about what we want, Sammy? Do you really?”

  “Hey Sammy, I figured out how to play ‘Peter Gunn’!” said Alexander.

  Rick, TJ, and I had been friends a long time before the band got started. The other guy in our group was Alexander. He was brainiac smart and really good at soccer, but he didn’t hang out with either the nerds or the jocks. Maybe it was because he was one of the few black kids in our school. Maybe it was because he was also a skater and had worn oversized clothes for so many years that he didn’t even know what his normal size was, and he had the biggest and most perfectly shaped fro that I’d ever seen. None of that fit in too well in central Ohio. But it was more than that. He was like a walking, talking They Might Be Giants song. He was always cheerful, always goofy, and just so weird that most of the time nobody understood what he was talking about. He was kind of like the weirdness mascot for our freaky little crew.

  “What’s ‘Peter Gunn’?” asked Rick. We were all sitting around our lunch table. Rick looked even more out of it than usual. He had dark circles under his eyes, he looked like he hadn’t showered, and he was slumped so far over the table that it made you feel like he needed it to keep from falling off the bench.

  “You know,” I said. “‘Peter Gunn’ was that Spy Hunter theme from the old-school Nintendo.”

  “Oh.” Rick nodded. “I didn’t realize it had another name.”

  “I think it was the theme song for a TV show in the fifties,” said TJ.

  “Huh,” said Rick. “Was the Mario Brothers theme from something else too?”

  “I don’t think so,” said TJ.

  “Surprising,” said Rick. “It was a catchy tune.”

  “What do you mean you figured out how to play it?” I asked Alexander.

  “With my hands!” said Alexander.

  All three of us groaned.

  Alexander had really sweaty palms. Now, this was gross enough all by itself, but Alexander, in typical Alexander fashion, made it even worse when he figured out that by squeezing his sweaty palms together, he could get them to make a farting noise. Most meathead jocks would have laughed and maybe done it in Ms. Jansen’s English class once or twice, then left it at that. But not Alexander. He didn’t really even think it was funny. He thought it was interesting. So he kept experimenting with it until he realized that by applying different kinds of pressure, he could produce different tones. Since then, he had been attempting to play a song with hand farts.

  “Wanna hear?” he asked now, his hands poised and his face eager.

  “Not really,” I said. But I knew it wouldn’t do any good.

  “Here goes!” he said, and began. His face screwed up in concentration as he worked his hands together, and sure enough, slowly we started to hear wet, squeaky notes: phfipphop phfip-phop phfip-phop phfffip-phfip!

  “Wow,” said TJ. But he couldn’t help grinning
a little bit.

  Alexander was getting warmed up now and the song was building momentum. It really did sound like “Peter Gunn.” All three of us were nodding our heads in time, and Rick and I couldn’t resist coming in with the second part over top:

  “Baaaaa bah! Baaaaaaaaaa beeebah! Buh-buh-buh bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah boo-buh-du!” We busted up laughing as Alexander continued to happily squeak away with his hand farts.

  Then a velvety female voice cut through and said, “Hey, Sammy.”

  Silence. The speaker was standing directly behind me. I could see TJ and Alexander across from me with faces like deer in headlights. But I didn’t need their expression to clue me in to who it was. Oh, God. I couldn’t believe that she’d just witnessed our stupid freaky spectacle. I wanted to curl up like a pill bug and hide until graduation.

  “Hi, Laurie,” I said, trying to sound tough but only managing to sound hoarse. Then I turned around to look up at her.

  Laurie was the hottest girl in school. She had straight, glossy black hair that hung to her shoulders; pale white skin; deep, mysterious green eyes; and full, pouty lips that were always covered in a dark burgundy lipstick. Today she was wearing a halter top, jean skirt, black fishnets (with a few artful rips), and knee-high black patent leather boots. In short, she was a goth goddess. And I was totally, helplessly in love with her.

  My throat dried up as I tried to think of some way of explaining what we had just been doing that didn’t make it sound even worse than it looked. All I could come up with was “How are you?”

  “Okay.” She smiled ever so faintly, but it was enough to send shivers down my spine. “Have you seen Joe today?”

  My heart flopped down around my knees. Rick, who had listened to my miserable sighs and heartache for over a year now, choked on his soda.

  “No,” I said in a way that I hoped didn’t sound as sad and desperate as I felt. “I think he skipped again today.”

  She sighed and bit her lip. “You guys have rehearsal tonight?”

  “Uh, no,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said. “Okay.” She shifted her weight uncomfortably, then said, “Well, if you see him, tell him to call me.”