THAT NIGHT, JOSH GOT A TEXT. “Guerrilla rehearsal,” he said. “The boys want to play.” Sounded just right. I was more than ready for some music.
In the practice room, Josh pulled a pint of Jack Daniel’s out of his guitar case. Danny cut the lights. The red of the exit sign and the red blinks on the amps glowed.
They passed the bottle around. When it got to me, I figured we’d be screwed if we were caught, but the weird way the game went down, and Hopper’s ghost hovering somewhere in this goddamned perfect building—it all added up enough to push me just far enough. Or too far. I took one long swallow of the whiskey. It burned its way down my throat. Then it hit the back of my head.
I handed the bottle back to Josh, who took a long gulp and gave it back to me. I didn’t want any more. But right then, I didn’t care. I wanted to be part of the team. I took another hit. Then I handed it to Danny.
Josh picked up his guitar and played his four-note birdsong, softly, then stopped. “Naw,” he said. “Not tonight. Let’s rock.” He buzz-sawed a single, screaming chord. Simon answered with two hard slams on his tom-tom.
Then my hands kind of leapt to the keyboard. I slammed a bunch of heavy, predictable rock chords with my left hand. Meantime, through the whiskey, without my brain even trying, my right hand needled out a decent, rambling solo. Somewhere in there was an echo of the Schubert from a few days ago. Mostly, I was playing too hard: pissed-off piano. But it wasn’t all that bad.
I finished the solo and looked over at Danny. He nodded once and launched into a hard-rock riff. Then he repeated it. Then I repeated it, kind of. Then Josh repeated it. Kind of. And for the next five minutes, we pounded out some crazy, hard, pure-rock progression, sloppy as hell. Early Nine Inch Nails meets Nirvana.
Simon knew how to finish it off: with a final, heavy, slam-drum thing.
We just stood there, each echoing it in a different way in our heads.
“That’s kind of cool,” Josh said.
“Kind of, I don’t know, like . . .” Danny said.
“A mess,” I heard the whiskey say. Speaking for me.
Josh looked away. Simon laughed.
But Danny didn’t. “I thought it ruled, man,” he said. “It could be the middle movement of our little rock symphony if we cleaned it. What’d you call it? The Rapids?”
“It was all over the place,” I said. This time it was me and the booze talking. “And I’ll bet you fifty bucks we can’t do it again. And if all we’re going to do is get wasted, then it’s not music.”
I could tell that all of them wanted to answer, but none of them did. Maybe, just maybe, I’d struck a chord. So I kept going. “I don’t know about you guys, but I think we have sort of a real good vibe here,” I said. “You’re all better than anyone I’ve ever played with. Which is why I want to take it somewhere beyond slack-rock bullshit.”
Suddenly, the lights went on in the hallway.
“Shit!” said Simon, sticking the bottle inside his bass drum.
“Cool out,” Josh said. He opened the door a crack and came back. “No prob. Just Mario.”
“Geek,” said Danny.
“Serious about his music,” I said.
They all started packing up. Maybe I’d gone too far. I walked out by myself. Then Josh caught up, carrying his guitar.
“Kinda harsh,” he said.
“Maybe,” I said.
“Not that, like, it doesn’t make sense,” he said.
“We could do some serious stuff here,” I said. “But we have to take it seriously.”
Josh stopped, and I stopped, and he looked at me in a new way: not as my stoner roommate, but as a kid with a brain, facing off with me.
“Dude, check it out,” he said. “Everything about this place is too goddamned serious. I do the band to cool out.”
I didn’t answer for a second. Took a breath. It was put-up or shut-up time. “That’s why we have to take it seriously,” I said. “If we’re just some carnival act, nothing will ever change around this place. But if we convince old Oak that the classical scene isn’t the only way to play the game, maybe we can be a little more visible.”
He laughed. “Since when does music matter to the Master Race?”
“Because,” I said, “we don’t make music; music makes us.”
He smiled. “Where’d you get that?”
I had no idea. The whiskey? It had just appeared in my brain. A Jack Lefferts original thought! Even if it was a little hokey.
“Okay,” Josh said. “No more of the amber liquids at practice.”
“Or weed.”
“Ouch,” he said.
• • •
When I woke up the next morning, I was sore in every corner of my body. Including my brain.
“Rough night?” Sam said as we took our usual route up the shrub-lined path after a sermon about something or other. I hadn’t heard a word. But the final hymn was cool.
“Rough day, then rough night,” I said. “Chelton’s line weighed six thousand pounds. I was under it. Then I had a few drinks with the band. Which is not going to happen again.”
“Which is why Koreans don’t play football,” Sam said. “We stick to the noncontact sports. We’ll be the last ones standing. We will . . . survive,” he sang.
“Don’t tell me,” I said. “Metallica?”
He rolled his eyes. “Grateful Dead. ‘Touch of Grey.’ Jesus, Jack. Didn’t you ever take history?”
• • •
In the weight room, my shoulder throbbed as I did my first reps on the Universal. The clanks were too loud. I closed my eyes, started pumping again, and stopped. Something in the back of my neck clicked every time I looked to my right. My left wrist hurt. Even playing the piano was going to hurt.
“Feeling the pain?” It was Zowitzki, standing over me, lifting a ten-pound barbell with each arm, first left, then right, like a piston engine, huffing in rhythm. “The offer still stands.”
“I don’t need to get big, Zowitzki,” I said. “I need to get open. I don’t need your miracle drugs.”
“Nothing miraculous about ’em,” Zowitzki said. “Just science. Anabolics make the recovery time quicker too. Trust me. It’s quick and painless.”
“Okay, so I’ve been wondering,” I said. “Where exactly does the needle go?”
“In your butt.”
I had to laugh. The macho men? Shooting up in each others’ butts? Somehow I kept myself from saying something stupid enough to have him punch me out.
“It’s only going to get worse for you,” Zowitzki said, sitting down on the next bench. “The hurt just piles up during the season.”
“So basically you’re telling me to take a drug so I can recover from injuries I’m getting from my own team.”
“Don’t be paranoid, Lefferts,” said the linebacker, walking away.
I went back to the weights. This time I ignored the hurt. Each time I pumped a weight, it was a slap back at Zowitzki.
• • •
“Why don’t you call it a day?” Mr. Jarvis said, dropping down onto the next bench, in workout clothes, with a towel around his neck. “Let’s get out of here.”
He was a welcome sight. I liked Jarvis. He wore the tweed, but something about his smile made it seem like he knew it was just a costume. If someone’s eyes could be, well, kind, his were. Whatever he wanted to talk about, it wasn’t going to be bad.
We broke into the cool October air and walked down to the hillside overlooking the field. When he sat down, I followed. “Coulda used you Saturday,” he said. The JVs had been stomped by Chelton.
“I wish you were up here,” I said. “Ward’s insane, Mr. Jarvis.”
He laughed. “No, just insecure and taking it out on kids. It’s the only world he knows. It’s his safe place, as they say. We all need one.”
I was looking over at the hill behind the field, the woods where Caroline ran cross-country. Neither of us said anything. I had this weird feeling that Jarvis had actually asked me to sit down on the hallowed hillside just to shoot the shit with someone. Josh had given me his bio: from the Bronx, went to Essex for a while on a soccer scholarship, dropped out of our biggest rival because he was working class and Essex had no class, just an endowment that could buy the Chrysler Building for a party favor at an alumni reunion.
“So how’d you end up teaching here, sir?”
“I needed a job,” he said. “Got a full ride at Colgate for soccer, blew out a knee, studied journalism, bounced around some bad newspapers, didn’t have the guts to go for the great American novel. They had an English spot down here: free food, free housing. Eighteen years later, I’m still on the treadmill.”
“But you’re really smart, and you’re a really good teacher. Why aren’t you teaching college or something?”
He flopped onto his back and put his hands behind his head.
“Maybe I think I’m needed here, or maybe I’m kidding myself, and I just don’t have the chops for Dartmouth. But I know the ropes. I know what it’s like to be at one of these places. I mean, what kid wants his parents to drop him off in a castle in the woods at a time in his life when the kid needs his folks more than ever?” He plucked a piece of grass and started to chew on it. “I guess I stick around,” he said, “because trying to help kids figure it all out is what I’m good at.”
It was like he was talking to himself.
“Mr. Jarvis, why do people send their kids to prep schools?”
“Well,” he said, “there’s a couple of centuries of history that say that sending your kid away into the world is how to make him a man.”
“But this isn’t the world,” I said.
“Yeah, but trust me . . . the world’s not much of a picnic, either.” Then, in about a half second, he was back in focus and looking over at me. “So, Jack—you have some sort of gift with those hands, okay? I was watching a practice the other day, and”—he lapsed into a mock-comic McGregor voice—“as your adviser speaking, son,”—then he went back to his own voice—“you have the athlete gene. I had it too. Sometimes it can be a curse. I wish I had a buck for every old Essex or Colgate guy who lives off memories of scoring some meaningless goal.
“But you have something else going on in your head. I don’t think you’ll ever lock onto old Oakhurst Hall as the glory days of your life. So forget Ward. He’s a puppet. Carlton didn’t hire Bruno just for his resume. You heard about Bruno’s background, right? You probably don’t know that he also paid the whole college rides of the three brothers and sisters in the family of that kid he slugged back in the day. He made a mistake. He flipped one time. Everyone does. Now the guy’s at peace. And he thinks fairly highly of you.”
I thought of telling Jarvis about the juicers. I wondered if Bruno knew. But something stopped me. The team was fucked up, but it was my team. It had to stay in the family. “But why does he let Ward ride me? Why’s half the defense all over me? What’s their problem?”
“You like the game?”
“I love it,” I said.
“Then stop worrying about everyone else trying to turn you into something you’re not, Jack. Play your game.”