Seventeen months earlier: May
Fifty minutes carrying a Les Paul in a hardshell case. The walking is not a challenge. He can walk for fifty minutes, although he is not in particularly good physical shape. But he knows that carrying the guitar for that long will tire his hands. It is only fifteen minutes from Lemon Street to school, and there have been days when he’s lugged the Les Paul that distance in the morning and his hands were stiff and shaking when he started to play. That stiffness and muscle fatigue will work itself out in a few minutes, but he wants to get off to a strong start. When he begins playing, he wants the Jazz Kids to think: all right. This guy can play. He does not want to have to play through a bunch of shakiness first.
So he sets out with the case in his right hand. As much as possible, he is going to carry it in his strumming hand. He thinks that is the better hand to be weak.
When he finally arrives at 56 Wren Crescent, there is a new-looking Hyundai on the pad of tarmac outside the garage door. The front yard has some flower beds with evergreen shrubs. A waist-high fence runs down one side of the driveway.
He has been hearing music since halfway down the block. The occasional thump of a bass drum. The low thrum of an amplified upright bass.
He stands a moment at the side door of the garage. He looks over his shoulder at the house to make sure no one from inside is watching him. He straightens himself up, stands to his full height, inhales a deep breath through his nose. He sets the guitar case down at his feet and lets both arms dangle at his sides. He gives them a couple of loosening shakes and holds up both hands, examining them for trembling.
He is standing with one hand on the door knob, the swing-beat pulse of the music detectable through his palm, when a gleaming black Mercedes turns into the driveway.
Holy fuck, a Mercedes, he cannot help thinking.
In the front seat is No, the saxophone player. His mom is driving. She looks right at Robot and smiles. She waves at Robot, says a quick something to her son. No reaches over the seat, pulls a saxophone case out of the back.
“Hey!” Robot says.
The car pulls out of the drive and No comes over to where Robot stands. They’ve seen each other plenty, but they’ve never been introduced. Robot puts out his hand, the way someone taught him once. No takes it and they shake.
“I’m—”
“You are fucking Robot,” says No. “Everyone in that garage is thrilled you’re jamming with us.”
Robot hardens his face. Can this guy be shitting him right now? Is this the start of some sort of rich kid prank meant to hurt him?
“No way,” Robot says. “Why would anyone want to jam with me?”
No smiles. “You’re joking, right?”
“Uh. No.”
“Is your real name Robot?”
“It’s Robert.”
“Oh. I get it!”
“Is your real name No?” There. He’s said it. He’s asked it. He was given the perfect opportunity and he took it. It might never have come up again.
No shrugged. “Sort of. It’s my last name. Like. Family name? It’s Korean. When you spell it in English, you’re supposed to put an ‘h’ on the end.”
“Is it, like, racist for people to make a thing out of your name like they do?”
Noh shrugs again. “I’m not sure,” he says plainly. “You know what the Jazz Kids are like.”
“Ha! You’re one of the Jazz Kids!”
Noh’s face droops with a frown of mild surprise. “I don’t think so,” he says. He raises his chin in the direction of the door. “Let’s go in.”
Robot is used to a dramatic whoosh when opening the door on people jamming. And there is a sudden rush of volume from the music. But the volume in the garage is not overpowering. The space is well-lit by rows of fluorescent tubes that hang from bare roof trusses. The ceiling and walls are bare, unfinished wood and plastic-covered pink fibreglass insulation. In a far corner, there is a red chest-high tool case on black rubber wheels. Beside it is a stack of winter tires, piled four high on the smooth concrete floor. There are two aluminum ladders hanging parallel, one above the other, on hooks against one long wall. Some paint cans on shelves.
Everything else in the spacious garage is a musical instrument or a piece of sound gear. The big-shouldered girl who plays drums is sitting at a kit. The setup is modest, but the drums appear to be miked. Cables snake out from mic mounts around her. She wears a black men’s dress hat that looks like it is meant for winter. Her mid-length brown hair sticks out from under it, clumped with sweat. She is leaning over the snare and hi-hat at the moment, working her brushes, a dazed expression of musical absorption on her face.
To the left of the drummer, a tall ginger kid is playing a dark-wood upright bass. His gaze is locked on the drummer. He stares, not at her face, but at the triangle defined by her face at the top, the snare and hi-hat across the bottom. His bass is plugged into a Fender bass head with a homemade four-by-twelve cabinet under it.
The keyboard player is a girl named Jackie. She is the only one here who Robot sort of knows. He is a year older than the other Jazz Kids. He’s pretty sure they’re in grade ten. He and Jackie are in grade eleven. Their grade nine gym teacher thought his jokes were fucking hilarious and had a stupid name he called everyone in the class. He called Jackie Jackie McClacky, and that is the only version of her last name that Robot can remember now. Actually, the same teacher was the first one who called him Robot. It is hard to believe that was only two years ago. It seems like he’s never had any other name.
Jackie has two keyboards on the go. There’s a cheap-looking Casio side-by-side with a pro-level Roland. Jackie is plugged into a Roland keys amp that is raised up and tilted back in some sort of stand.
There are two mics on stands. Noh is putting his mouthpiece onto his sax in front of one. He’s got a reed coming out of his mouth like a narrow, square-tipped tongue. At the other mic, Trumpet Boy has his eyes closed, his lips against the cup of his mouthpiece. He is not playing, but listening to the other players, waiting for his moment to come in. His Shut Up shirt, freed from the language restrictions of school, says Shut the Fuck Up.
The bass player smiles at Robot and points at a Roland CUBE-60 down beside him on his left. Robot digs his tuner pedal out of the guitar case. He plugs in, estimates a decent volume level, and dials it in on the amp. He straps the guitar over his shoulder and takes a minute to tune. Noh is on his left, and has just put a Real Book on a stand in front of him.
“Do you have a Real Book?” Noh asks.
Robot shakes his head.
Noh moves his music stand so they both can look at it. He leans over, takes a look at Trumpet Boy’s copy, then pages quickly with an index finger to a tune whose name Robot does not have time to look at.
He is focused on the chords. His eyes scan the chord names on the page while his ears listen hard to the tune the players are in the middle of. He’s trying to locate where they are in the changes. When he finishes scanning the page, he fills his lungs and empties them with great relief. He can do this. Jackie is on the other side of the room, and he cannot see her fingers well at all. But she is using some reedy organ voice that is cutting clearly through the mix. Robot can make out some of the important notes in the key. There’s the one. There’s the five. He looks at the names of the chords in the Real Book. It sounds like Jackie is playing them straight up, as they are named. Robot’s arms are light now that the fifty minutes of guitar carrying are over. He stretches out both arms from the shoulders, yoga pose style. He lets his arms fall loose and relaxed at his sides. He wiggles all ten fingers, pulls a pick out of the guitar’s headstock. He watches the chord progression on the page. When the hell will it circle back to the start? As though she’s heard his thought, Jackie raises her head. She circles her eyes wide to let him know. Here it comes. She counts with nods of her head: one, two, three, and…
Boom. He digs in from bar one. Trumpet Boy points up for him to increase his volume.
Trumpet Boy and Noh are looking at each other now, playing a harmonized line, giving each other little twitching movements of their horns to help stay locked on the beat.
Robot listens to the rich, mellow sound his Les Paul makes through the CUBE-60. He adjusts the highs down and pulls the mids up a bit, thickening his tone further. He listens hard for the drums as he works his strumming pattern into the mix. He feels around for the bass. In a moment, he finds a little pocket he can drop into and suddenly he can stop trying so hard.
He has never played with horns before. Jesus! Listen to how clever those two parts are! The way they lean toward and away from each other.
He closes his eyes and sinks away into the harmonies. Before he knows it, he feels a tension building. They are getting ready for a stop. He opens his eyes and he can see that everyone has perked up, looking for who is going to direct. “Three beat stop!” Trumpet Boy shouts. “After the one,” the bell of his trumpet goes up, and comes down, everyone stops playing. The drummer clicks her sticks together for the three beats. “To the bridge!” Trumpet Boy shouts, and…whoosh! There they go. Back into the tune from the start of the changes at the bridge.
It is late when he gets home. Noh’s mom drives him right to Lemon Street, even though it is out of her way.
In the dark, the houses at this end of the street look even dingier. The street lights are dim and have a weird tinge to them. All the cheery new green of coming summer has darkened into black.
“That was a great jam,” Noh says from the front seat.
“Oh, man,” Robot says. “You guys are all such awesome players.”
Noh turns around and smiles.
“That was my first time playing with horns,” Robot says.
Noh turns around again and with a disbelieving frown says, “No way.”
“First time playing with a group off the written page. I’ve practiced off paper before.”
“What do you normally play off? Like…tabs or something?” He says tabs like he has no idea what it means. He’s heard guitar players use the word, so he’s taking a wild guess with it.
Robot laughs. “I normally play metal. Or at least some kind of rock. Nobody reads that off paper.”
“You play it by ear?”
Robot shrugs. “That’s what they call it when you’re not reading. But it’s from memory, mostly. Anyway. That was pretty awesome.”
Robot gets out of the Mercedes and stands on the sidewalk as the vehicle corners right onto Elm Way at the end of the block.
His phone is still on his bed where he left it. He is feeling too good about things to check it. He knows it is only going to be full of awfulness. The asshole Prank Fights fans who want to see him and a kid he barely knows beating on each other. He picks it up and sets it on the floor.
He puts the guitar case against the wall, snaps off the light, and sits on the edge of the bed. Every cell in his body is popping. He feels electrified. Ecstatic. His mind goes back to the garage. The changes they played from the Real Book swirl past in his imagination. He hears the rattling, hissing interplay of the snare and hi-hat. He looks down at the dark form of his left hand in the shadows of his lightless bedroom. He tries to picture his hand in the shape of all the chords it played tonight. It seems impossible.
He lies back on his bed and pulls up the covers. How will he ever sleep? He goes through it all again in his mind. All the tunes, one after another from Noh’s Real Book. He thinks of funny little moments when everyone got lost. There was an incredible four bars where the drums and bass and keys all dropped out and it was just him and the horns. And he’d cut the chords down to their essential triads on the high strings. And he was playing one beat per bar and he did not even know what beat he was hitting. It was like the and before the one, but the horn players were following him and they’d pared their parts down to an answering stab that echoed his chords. And that alone. That minute. That forty-five seconds of improvised fun was the high point of his musical life. Everything he’d ever practiced had brought him there, right to that moment in a garage on Wren Crescent. With players he’d never played with before.
He has an alarm set on his phone. When it rings, he awakes first to the dingy reality of his room. He is not in the clean, neatly ordered garage that was stocked with thousands of dollars’ worth of musical instruments and sound gear. He is not going to be driven anywhere in a Mercedes. He does not have a sober, healthy mom who is going to look out for him, dote on him. His own mom is barely going to notice he is alive today. And she’ll be lucky to live through the day herself. After the enormous high of last night, it seems a terrible injustice that he is back to his same old shitty world today. While they played music, he was full of so much joy. There was power and energy in what they did. Everything felt so right and full. Now he feels empty. Why? Why does his life have to be devoid of everything that feels right?
The room is dark except for the square of his phone on the floor by his bed, lighting up with the annoying beep of his alarm. As he nudges the phone to shut off the alarm, his notifications scroll across the screen. A hundred text messages. All of them angry, violent, hateful. He picks up the phone, pushes it back into sleep mode, and lies face up on his bed, the phone clutched to his chest. Now that his eyes are adjusting to the dark, he can see the square of light in the high window across from him.
What would have felt right and natural would have been to have a shower, grab something to eat, and go right back out to Wren Crescent. Spend the day in that garage. Play music. Have fun. Be positive. Use skills he’s spent a long time practicing and developing. In a just world, a world that made sense and was set up correctly, that’s what he’d get to do.
Instead, he is going to have to turn on the lights in this dirty apartment. He is going to have to check to see if his mother is alive. He is going to have to go to school, submit himself to the mob of idiots that the chief idiots, two guys with more YouTube subscribers than they have ideas in their heads, can just sic on him any time they want.
He pads across the floor and flips on the light. His own room is dingy, but it is not a chaotic horror, like the rest of the apartment. He has a bed with a box spring and mattress. He keeps the bed made. He keeps the bedding clean. He has a plastic milk crate for a night stand. There is a book on the crate. A simple lamp.
His guitar is in its case. The Peavey tube amp he started saving for right after he got the guitar. This much of his world makes sense. This much is in his power to order and control.
He opens his mother’s bedroom door just a crack. He almost gags at the smell. The reek of alcohol and what it is doing to her body. But he hears her laboured breathing, the frightened dream sounds she makes in her drunken sleep. Slow-motion moans, half-muffled by sleep paralysis.
There is one frozen waffle left in a cardboard package in the fridge. But there is no syrup and no butter in the kitchen. Three of the four burner coils in the two-slot toaster do not work. So he puts the waffle in the one slot of the toaster that half works, and when he sees the waffle’s side turning brown, he pops it out, turns it 180 degrees, and plunges it down for a second try.
The whole way from Lemon Street to school, he scans the roads and walkways with trepidation. The assholes with their video camera are going to be after him at some point in the day. And he would not have been shocked to find them right outside his door on Lemon Street as he left his house. The day is light. The sky partly clouded. There is free toast at school until five minutes before first period, and he walks quickly, on relatively quiet streets, his bookbag over one shoulder, his guitar in his opposite hand, thinking about what he would do if he got surrounded again, like he had that other day. Suitjon’s camera in his face, Lucas Shortt narrating his response into a ridiculous microphone.
Will the Jazz Kids ask him to play again? Will it be today? Will he ever be one of the kids who does not even have to get invited to jam in the band room at school? One of the kids who can just assume they’ve been granted a place? One of the kids who comes into the room where everyone else is already playing, and just joins in?
He does not like going into the school through the front door. Too many people congregate there on the steps. Assholes can get tucked away behind one of the pillars and before you can prepare yourself or turn the other way, they’re in your face. He prefers going through one of the entrances on the south side of the building, but sometimes they are not open first thing in the morning.
He steps across the teachers’ parking lot.
There is a little gap in the hedge where he and his guitar case can just squeeze through. The principal’s office is visible from this walkway. You can see right through the window. And there is the principal, in a charcoal suit, like an American president, his chin in his hand, staring at a computer screen on his desk.
The side door pulls open. Ahead of him there are people in the foyer, but he ducks left down the hallway in the direction of the cafeteria. As he gets closer to the band room, he can hear music coming through the open door. He can tell it is the same kids he jammed with last night. He recognizes all of their individual voices. It is a jam they played on, too. Jackie sounds like maybe she’s playing the Yamaha upright acoustic piano, probably with a mic stuck in the back of it. It is a loopy little chord progression: ii, v, I with one tricky bar of 5/4 thrown into the middle of it. Last night, before they cottoned onto it, nobody could figure out how to get that five-beat bar right. They all fumbled their way through it, faking the counts and hoping it would work. Then they would all start laughing when it fell apart. They got so used to laughing on that bar that they laughed the first time Robot played through it correctly. They’d heard it wrong so many times that the right way sounded messed.
He walks down the hall toward the open door of the band room as though in a dream. What is going to happen? There is no way he is going to have enough nerve to just walk in there like he belongs. There is too much opportunity for high-visibility rejection there. He is going to walk past the door. Casually. But he is going to walk slowly, so that someone inside will have the chance to see him.
One, two, three, four, five: there goes the tricky bar again, but everyone plays through it correctly now. They’ve done it so many times, it no longer poses a challenge. And there is the open doorway. And there are the Jazz Kids. Jackie is standing up at the Yamaha upright, her back to Robot and to the open door. The drummer is playing the school’s second-best kit, a beat-up wood-grained Pearl set. She has her face set sideways, staring at the bass player. Robot is past the door before he hears his name shouted. It is Trumpet Boy’s voice. Shouting through the mic he’s been playing into.
“Hello!” Robot shouts through the open door as he steps happily back to it. He pokes his head around the door post. Everyone keeps playing, but they all turn toward the doorway and smile at him. Trumpet Boy points at an old Peavey solid state stage amp. “Plug in, bro,” he calls.
Robot holds up five fingers. “I’ll be back in five minutes,” he shouts over the music. He pauses a moment to consider whether or not to drop his bookbag and instrument case in the room before heading quickly to the cafeteria for some free toast. No. They invited him to play. But the room does not feel like his space. He does not leave his stuff there. He rushes down the hallway toward the cafeteria. As he climbs the stairs to the second floor, the aroma of buttered toast hits him square on the nose and his mouth begins to water. He is waiting for the bread to fall down the back of the conveyor when he catches sight of the first idiot.
Suitjon is outside the cafeteria. In the hallway with his camera rig. Robot gets a glimpse of him passing by, crossing the width of the double doors.
“Okay. Okay,” Robot says aloud. He hears his two pieces of white bread toast hit the pan at the bottom of the toaster.“You knew this was coming,” he says to himself. “Just. Handle it. Handle it.” By the time he has the bread smeared with peanut butter and jam, there is a crowd gathering in the hallway outside the cafeteria. If they are staying there to ambush him on the way out, that will be better. At least he will be able to eat his toast in peace.
But, fuck! It just occurs to him. They are going to follow him. They will follow him down the hall, down the stairs. They’ll follow him to the band room. That will be the worst. That will be humiliating. That will be it, the end of whatever fragile relationship he’s just begun with the Jazz Kids. The Jazz Kids want to play music. The Jazz Kids want a guitar player, not some loser with an entourage from a YouTube fist fight channel. Fuck! He begins wolfing down the toast, folds one piece up and shoves it into his mouth, stuffing it in. Even as he stands there, the hallway outside the cafeteria is darkening with bodies. Their voices are growing in volume. In the kitchen at the far end, across from the toaster, two or three cafeteria workers are bustling about, already doing prep work for lunch. One of them, a stout lady in a white smock and white cotton kitchen cap, stops what she is doing to look suspiciously over at the increasingly noisy crowd in the hallway.
The idiots have spooked the room. The few people who were in the cafeteria with him, eating free toast, doing a bit of last minute homework, scrolling blankly through their social media, disperse now. They dump their paper plates and napkins into the trash bins. They fold their binders and books. They either go out the fire door in the back corner, or they squeeze out the cafeteria door and join the fight-hungry crowd in the hallway or they make their way through it to escape to some other part of the building.
Halfway to the office, in the school’s central hallway, the Jazz Kids are jamming away happily. They’ll stop after ten minutes, page their way through the Real Book until they find another number that interests them, and keep going until the first bell. Later, as they are packing up for class, they’ll wonder where he went. But Robot cannot go to the band room now. There will be too much commotion. Too much humiliation. He’s only just opened the door between himself and the Jazz Kids. He cannot risk closing it back up forever by trailing his fucked up life right to their literal front door.
Robot doesn’t even have any of the Jazz Kids’ numbers. He cannot text them with an excuse, an explanation, or even an apology for not coming back when he said he would. This might be the end, anyway, he realizes as he sits down in the cafeteria. If the Jazz Kids take his not showing up as a snub—and why wouldn’t they?—he might never get a chance to play with them again. Not another hallway invite from Trumpet Boy. Not another call through the open band room door. If the assholes in the hallway outside are going to wait for him, he’ll wait them out in here. He is not going to give them the pleasure of seeing him do what they want. He’ll wait here for the bell, and when the hallway empties out, he’ll make his way to science class. Late, if need be.
This time of day, the vice principals are outside, dressed in safety vests, monitoring the kids getting off buses. There are hall monitors, older ladies with icy, hardened stares they use to keep kids following school rules. And if the monitors happen by, they’ll disperse the crowd that’s hovering in the hallway waiting for him. But it’s a big school, and there are really only a few minutes until first period begins.
Robot places his second piece of toast on the tabletop before him. Moisture and crumbs spread out from it into the napkin it rests on. He takes out his phone and places it on the table beside the toast. Out of curiosity and just to confirm what he knows will be true, he touches the on button and his notifications explode across the screen.
Come on out and play, Robert.
Come out in the hallway, you chicken piece of shit.
Do you think you can hide in there? We see you.
So many texts, though there cannot be more than a few dozen people in the hallway waiting for him.
First bell rings. He is not going to move.
“Get us both in the shot,” he hears Lucas Shortt say. Then: “There he is. Across the cafeteria. He’s refusing to come out into the hallway. As far as we know now, Gink is not even in the building yet today. But the crowd here is clearly expecting something to happen. Shoot the crowd. Get a shot of the crowd. Turn around. That’s it. Now get up high and pan slowly past the faces. Stay tuned to the Prank Fights channel. More excitement soon.”