This Song Is (Not) for You (4 page)

Wednesday after school, I don’t go over to Sam’s house like I do most days. When I get home, I drop my bag by the door and head straight to the piano in the front room and sit down. It’s an old upright, but it belonged to my mom and we’ve taken good care of it.

John, my piano instructor, has me running all the scales over again at faster and faster tempos each time. I’m on C scales right now.

It. Is. Boring. As. Fucking. Hell.

c.d.e.f.g.a.b.

c.d.e.f.g.a.b.

c.d.e.f.g.a.b.

But if I can’t run the C scale with the metronome set to 150 when John comes over tomorrow afternoon, then he might mention it in front of my dad, and Dad already said something yesterday about all the extra band practice cutting into my piano time.

Dad takes my piano lessons as seriously as he takes school grades. He pays for my lessons out of Mom’s life insurance money, and he’s really supportive about me wanting to go to Artibus. Lots of parents would want their kid to pursue a more practical career, but Dad wants me to be a pianist like Mom.

Dad’s not a musician at all, but he’s still pretty cool. For a dad, I mean. Especially an old dad. He likes it when I argue with him about politics. He always says that not enough teachers encourage teenagers to think for themselves. He even stood up for me during the whole tie drama—and don’t forget, the principal at St Joe’s is my dad’s boss.

I guess we are closer than a lot of other kids and their parents. I mean, it’s just us two at home.

So I’m gonna go to Artibus with Sam, and I’ll study piano there. John says I’m good enough to have a career, if I follow his instructions and practice hard.

c.d.e.f.g.a.b.

c.d.e.f.g.a.b.

It’s been weird having Tom around all the time. Ramona always wants to know what Tom thinks about this song or argues with him about that band, and I like to sit and listen to people talk—especially Ramona—but in the past week, I’ve been missing when it was just her and me.

But today in Tom’s car, Ramona was delivering her “Yes Is Philosophically and Scientifically the Greatest Band in Recorded History” speech. She’d just finished her in-depth comparison of Bill Bruford and Alan White when Tom interrupted her.

“‘Owner of a Lonely Heart.’”

“What?” It’s rare to be able to stop the thought train that is Ramona’s mind, but Tom had done it swiftly and without looking up from the road.

“‘Owner of a Lonely Heart’ is a glaring blister of a flaw on Yes’s permanent record. It’s musical blasphemy,” he replied.

“It’s awesomely bad.”

“Yes, it is awe inspiring how bad it is, but that’s not a point in their favor. They were trying to make a
good
song, and they failed. There is no other way to look at it.”

Ramona opened her mouth.

“He’s right,” I said. “They’re one of the best bands in history, but even good bands sucked in the eighties.”

“Well,” Ramona said and fell silent.

Silent.

Ramona fell silent.

And I had to admit that it was kind of satisfying, ’cause “Owner of a Lonely Heart” is a terrible song.

And then she laughed and said, “All right, I’ll concede that point.”

And I realized that maybe Tom was good for us.

It’s good for Ramona to have someone to pull the rug out from under her every once and awhile.

She turned and smiled at me.

And I realized that it’s probably good for me to have another person between me and Ramona.

All around me, I see wasted opportunities.

Blank concrete walls, light posts, corner trash cans—if someone comes along and makes these things better looking, makes them art, why is that illegal?

Sure, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but there is a clear difference between art and gang tags or hate crimes.

At least there sure as hell is a difference between gang tags and Glitter in Odd Places. In the past eighteen months I’ve coated thirty-three pens on chains (they’re soon to be extinct) with silver or gold glitter. I’ve painted four fast-food restaurants’ talk boxes blue, green, pink, and peach. I covered three city sidewalk squares in three vastly different neighborhoods with two inches of Call Me Crazy multicolored sparkles purchased from my favorite craft store, Grift Craft. (Yeah, I have a favorite craft store. Deal with it.)

And I glitter bombed one fire hydrant.

(I knew that this would be crossing a line, but I felt that it was time. It was a tactical decision. And I was feeling confident. Sara and I had been together for five months. She got GOP, and she got me—and it was so amazing to have someone who understood me.)

For public safety, I matched the glitter to the hydrant’s original red and yellow, and I was careful not to get glitter or glue in the hinges. (It’s very important to me that my art never causes harm.) After I was done, the fire hydrant looked and would function exactly the same as before, except that it was glittery.

And why not? Why can’t these things that we have to have—these fire hydrants and traffic lights and bus stops and overhead passes—why can’t they be beautiful and unique, or at least interesting to look at? We have people who want do it for us for free, people who don’t think art should only be locked up in galleries.

It’s at least something worth thinking about, right?

So anyway, I was proud of my fire hydrant.

The city of St. Louis didn’t exactly feel the same way.

The cop showed up during dinner, good timing on his part.

Mom and I were still at the table when Dad called my name. By his voice, I knew something was up.

The cop’s badge said “Smith.”

His face said “grave concern.”

Smith asked me, “Son, is this your car?” and he handed me a still shot from a security camera. It showed my car in the alley next to the fire hydrant.

“Yes, sir,” I said. I had imagined a moment like this, and I was determined to go out with dignity.

“Mr. Cogsworthy,” Officer Smith said. (I hate, hate, hate it when adults call me Mr., as if they were treating me with respect when actually they mean the opposite by it.) “Is it a coincidence that your car, which is covered in glitter, was seen on camera near a piece of city property that was vandalized by glitter?”

And I couldn’t help it.

I laughed.

I laughed in front of Officer Smith and my parents, because “vandalized by glitter” was the funniest phrase I had ever heard spoken aloud in such a serious voice.

I’m gonna make a long story short and say that in the end I was really lucky. I was technically arrested, though I never actually left my parents’ home, and I went before a judge and read the statement of apology that my mom wrote, instead of the artistic manifesto that I’d prepared. The judge was lenient because he said that he had a grandson who was “like me” (I’m not even gonna comment on that one), and I did sixteen hours of community service cleaning up gang tags in bad neighborhoods.

I was also grounded for two months, and Mom and Dad have definitely kept the leash tighter since then.

The worst part was that Sara didn’t want me to do GOP anymore. And that was when we started fighting.

“Here’s the thing about Neil Peart,” I explain to the guys. “He knows that acoustic drums will always be the soul of percussion, but he embraces the innovations allowed by electronic drums.”

It’s a normal afternoon in Sam’s garage. We’re taking a quick break before we try to record our new song. Today Tom brought his touch-pad chaos thing, usual collection of pedals, and a didgeridoo he made out of PVC pipe. We just messed around for a little while, and it didn’t take long for a song to emerge. The music we make with Tom is strange and exciting. It isn’t always technically difficult, but it’s always new.

The song we wrote today opens with the lone, low tones of the didgeridoo, then Sam comes in with this crazy riff on the authentic sitar his dad brought back from India. Just as I come in with the polyrhythmic beat, Tom switches from the real didgeridoo to a premade recording he runs effects through, and Sam begins lead melody on the electric guitar.

The setup for all of this is ridiculous. Instruments, pedals, and cables are all over the floor, and Sam had to get another extension cord. Because of the clutter, we’re all standing or sitting behind our instruments.

“Electronic drums were invented by the guy from Moody Blues,” Tom says. “They deserve a place in any true percussionist’s heart. And a band without a true percussionist brain cannot transcend this realm.”

“We don’t have that problem,” Sam says.

“Thanks,” I say, “but I don’t think I deserve the compliment. I’m a good drummer, yeah, but I’m not that innovative.”

“Remember just the other day when you were saying how much you liked the sound when you drummed on the garage floor?” Tom says. “Why haven’t you ever recorded it for a song?”

Something inside me clicks into place.

“You already treat the whole world like your drum set anyway,” Sam says. “We might as well start incorporating that in the band.”

My chest feels good, like suddenly my lungs have more

room. I think of the sound of drumming on my desk, Sam’s

steering wheel, my piano stool. I remember the tones of my

sticks hitting concrete and plastic, hollow wood and thick,

dark asphalt.

It never occurred to me that maybe I was making

real music

that other people would like too.

And to think I might have not spoken to Tom that first day.

My mother is an adult who has never figured herself out and probably never will.

When my parents met, my mother was switching from a theater major to social work. She dropped out of college when she married my father.

When I was small, my mother was always trying to find a different sport for me, a new activity. Pottery, capoeira, children’s theater. When I was eleven, I told her that I didn’t want to try anything new anymore. I just wanted to keep taking guitar lessons.

In the final six months of the last presidential election, she became opinionated and involved. She spoke at meetings and bought me clever campaign shirts. She walked neighborhoods registering people to vote. She talked about running for local government, about making a difference through democracy. Her candidate lost. She never talks about politics anymore.

Just before the divorce was finalized, Mom started mentioning that she had always been a deeply spiritual person. She started doing yoga and wore bracelets with magnets and bells on them. For a while she talked about past lives and energy fields, but that tapered off. Some weekends she still does yoga, but recently she’s been watching cooking shows and trying the recipes out. It’s way more fun now that she’s past the herbal-drinks phase.

But I still have my guitars and band practice.

I love my mother. I have more respect for her than I do my father.

But I also know that I don’t want to be like her.

I love music. I love playing my guitars.

But I don’t love it enough to want to put myself through what it takes to become a professional musician.

Music will always be a part of my life. A huge part.

But there are other things in life that I also want, and I don’t want to give them up to pursue just that one thing.

I want to make the world a better place, to help the environment.

And I really like chemistry. A lot.

Music will be always be a part of my life. A huge part.

But I’m not cut out for the musician’s life.

I know myself well enough to know that.

Just before we broke up, Sara and I had a fight about goldfish.

I had a brilliant plan, and she objected to it on ethical grounds.

It was late last spring, toward the end I guess. After school I drove to Juan’s Pet Supply and Fish Emporium to buy goldfish, the tiny kind that aren’t pets but actually pet food. (Why would anyone want a pet fish that eats other fish? Isn’t that both creepy and a lot of work?)

Fish like that cost about ten cents. I spent twenty bucks. Then I drove across the city to pick up Sara. She’d stayed late at Saint Joe’s for a student government meeting. Whenever I picked Sara up there, I never actually drove into the campus. I just parked by the gates. She didn’t seem to mind.

“Have I ever got a date planned for us, kiddo,” I told her as she climbed in my car.

“Really?” she said. She reached behind her head with both hands and tightened her ponytail. I’d drawn a picture of her in my journal with her hands behind her head like that.

“Oh yeah,” I said. “This is gonna blow your mind.” I jerked my head toward the backseat. Sara gasped when she saw the bags of goldfish.

“What—”

“Just wait,” I told her, and I drove us to downtown St. Louis. There’s a massive fountain downtown, all adorned with these wanton warrior mermaids. That fountain was our destination.

I parked a few blocks away, and before we got out of the car, I stuck one of my dad’s baseball caps on my head, the brim pulled down low over my face. I handed Sara one of the goldfish bags and we walked across the square together.

“This is the first in a series of sister projects to Glitter in Odd Places,” I told her, “I’m gonna call it something like ‘Surprise! Real Life!’”

When we reached the fountain, I tore open the first bag and poured the fish into the fountain.

The fish kinda freaked out for a moment, but then they slowed down and started swimming in circles like in the pet shop. It looked awesome.

I poured in the second and third.

Compared to these tiny, real fish, the mermaids looked crazed.

I turned to Sara and reached for the last bag. For a moment she wouldn’t let it go. I thought she was just nervous. Some people across the street were looking at us. I pulled the bag from her hands and released the last of the fish. Then I took out my phone, snapped a quick picture, and grabbed Sara’s arm as I turned away. We jogged together back to the car, and I started the engine as soon as I’d closed the door.

“It’s gonna look even more awesome tomorrow,” I said. “After they’re all dead, it’s gonna be so gruesome. Like the goldfish have been sacrificed to the false idol fishes.”

“But you’re the one who’s killed them,” Sara said. I glanced away from the road to look at her. She had her arms crossed over her chest defensively, and I couldn’t recognize the look on her face.

“They were gonna die anyway,” I said. “They’re fish food.”

“They’re living creatures,” she said. “Isn’t that the point of your art project?”

“You eat meat,” I said.

“That’s not the point,” she said. Her arms were crossed in front of her chest, and her lower lip stuck out.

“What is the point?”

She didn’t say anything, so I didn’t either. I drove her home without asking first. Before she got out of the car, she turned back to me.

“The point is, you shouldn’t be doing this stuff anymore, Tom. You got arrested! I know you’re really passionate about your art and your music and all that, but maybe I’d like to go on a real date sometime,” she said. “One where you actually treat me like a girlfriend.” And then, before I could say anything, she slammed the door.

The next day was Saturday. On Sunday I called her and acted like nothing had happened, and to my relief, so did she.

A week later I read an article in the
Post Dispatch
that said a “prank” had cost the city five thousand dollars to fix when the filter system of a downtown fountain became clogged with goldfish. This scared me to death because I was still on probation, and it did really upset me. Causing real harm goes against my ethics.

I was gonna tell Sara about it and admit that maybe I should have thought things through more, but before I got a chance, she broke up with me.

I don’t really want to go over that conversation.