Tempo Change Page 5

  It went like this:

  He has short blond hair and a penetrating gaze.

  He’s got petal red cheeks and a cigarette haze.

  He’s got plans for the future, he’s gonna program

  your world.

  He’s got eyes for everything except a girl.

  He wants to fall in love, yeah, he’s got that

  predilection

  But he’s just a walking contradiction.

  “What’s a predilection?” Viv asked. “I don’t know what that is. I can’t sing it if I don’t know what it is.”

  “It’s a tendency.”

  “I don’t get it. First you say he doesn’t see the girl and then you say he wants to fall in love.”

  “Yeah, Viv, it’s a contradiction.”

  “Who’s this about?” Gigi asked.

  “Jeff,” Ella said. “The assistant manager out there.”

  I felt overwhelmed with embarrassment.

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Sure it is.”

  “It’s not about him. That’s not how songwriting works. Now, it’s in the key of G and let’s figure out a tempo.”

  “G, really?” Gigi frowned. “It’s such a happy key.”

  “It’s the people’s key. Tempo.”

  Ella gave us one and Gigi said it was too fast and Ella said it wasn’t, she was too slow, and the Bos and Seans and Tylers hung around the door and giggled at us until I shooed them away.

  And then we all started throwing ideas out until everybody was on the same page and we did one version of the song where we got all the way through and it didn’t suck. By then it was midnight.

  Jeff was waiting for me outside when we left. Gigi and Viv took the bus and Ella rode her bike in the opposite direction. Gigi and Viv had been talking in a very animated way, and I noticed that Gigi was a lot more relaxed than I had ever seen her. Viv had a glow to her, too. The band was good for everyone but me. I felt exhausted.

  “Three hours, one song. Pretty good,” Jeff said.

  “Don’t start.” I collapsed on the curb beside him.

  “No, I mean, it sounded pretty good.”

  “I don’t know how we’re going to get there. We’ll be all right for the talent show but if we’re going to get into the Whisky show, we have to have a bunch of originals.”

  “Then I guess I’ll have to keep inspiring you.”

  “That song is not about you,” I said.

  He smiled.

  “You do it the way anything gets done,” he said. “One foot in front of the other.”

  “Is that gearhead wisdom?”

  “I don’t know why you think I’m a gearhead.”

  “Because you say things like ‘one foot in front of the other.’”

  “Oh,” he said, dashing his cigarette on the asphalt. “I thought I was being poetic.”

  “Everybody thinks that about themselves.”

  “You guys need help schlepping stuff? If you make it to the Whisky show, Toby will probably let me use one of the vans. I can be your driver.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  He grinned. “I’m dependable.”

  “Thanks, Jeff,” I said. “I hadn’t thought about it. That would be good.”

  “Just keep making the music, Street. That’s your new job.”

  He walked off, and I sat staring up at the moon, which had jumped out of nowhere.

  Sometimes I pretended the moon cared about me.

  Just like I pretended my father did.

  Ed the Guitar Guy

  THE NEXT NIGHT I WAS SITTING IN MY ROOM DASHING through my homework so I could get back to working on my songs when my mother tapped on my door. I looked at my watch and was surprised she was still home because this was certainly the having-pots-of-tea-with-Louise-at-the-Fig-Tree hour. My stomach knotted up because I knew she wanted to have one of those talks.

  I hadn’t really told her about the band. How could she know? I wasn’t ready to talk yet. “Mom, I’ve got an AP history test next week.”

  “This won’t take long.”

  The door opened and she walked in with a tall, skinny guy her age who had dark blond hair to his shoulders, wide blue eyes, suntan wrinkles, six earrings and a nose stud. He wore Levi’s and a long-sleeved shirt untucked and stood with his hands on his hips smiling at me.

  “This is Ed,” she said. “Ed, this is Blanche.”

  “Hi, Blanche. Nice name.”

  I was too stunned to say anything.

  My mother didn’t generally bring men home. I knew she dated them occasionally, but she was very particular about who she let into the house. In all the time my father had been gone I’d met two guys. One was Lance the corporate attorney who wore squeaky loafers and short-sleeved button-down shirts and said “sweet” a lot.

  Lance lasted exactly one month.

  Next came Timothy and he lasted almost six months because he was broody and depressed and had a novel that no one would publish. She’d never admit it but I think my mom gave him some money. For some reason, he got a grant to continue his novel-in-progress and he went off to a writers’ colony in New York and that was that. I wasn’t sure who dumped whom but the whole scenario was a little too much like the one with my father.

  Ed didn’t look like either one of those extremes. He was something in the middle.

  Anyway, back to my name.

  My mother couldn’t resist filling him in on the history:

  “She’s not named after Blanche DuBois, which is what everyone thinks. She’s named after Blanchefleur …”

  “Oh,” he said, “from Tristan and Isolde.”

  I wish you could have seen the look on my mother’s face. It made me very nervous.

  “Yes,” she half whispered.

  “It’s a pretty well-known legend,” I said to calm her down.

  “Tristan’s mother, Blanchefleur. Which of course means ‘white flower’ in French,” my mother said.

  “Sure, sure,” Ed said. He was looking around my room like an idiot savant, like one of those people who’d be able to re-create an exact replica later. Still letting his eyes surf across my walls, he said to my mother, “Diane, you’re a true romantic.”

  “Well, I wasn’t the only one. Her father loved that story, too. We saw the play together at some artsy playhouse in Hollywood. That’s how it started.”

  “You guys probably want to have a longer discussion about this somewhere. Nice to meet you, Ed.”

  “Oh, honey, Ed is here for a reason. He opened up a guitar store down the street from Biscuit.” Biscuit, if you’ll recall, was the curiously named clothing store that Mom and Louise ran together. They named it that because it was Louise’s cat’s name. You could not come up with a worse marketing strategy if you tried, but somehow it was working.

  Biscuit was for women who were tired of wearing clothes. Long flowy skirts and silk pants with elastic waists and scarves and hats to disguise the fact that you were really wearing pajamas. Neither my mother nor Louise dressed like that. Mom still had some rock-and-roll girlfriend in her and Louise wore anything tight to show off the body that she constantly starved and the boobs that had suddenly appeared last Christmas.

  People in the program were not hard on themselves about anything other than substance abuse. They felt that was the only test they needed to pass, so that’s why Louise gave herself permission to be anorexic and my mother didn’t wear makeup and dressed too young and ate a lot of sugar.

  “Really,” I said. “What kind of guitar shop?”

  “Small,” he said.

  “What kind of guitars do you have?” I asked.

  “Little bit of everything.”

  “Do you play?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “He went to Berklee,” my mother explained. “It’s a music college.”

  “I was in some bands when I was young but the weird thing is, I always liked the tools more than the trade, you know, so eventually I just started selling gu
itars and now I have my own shop.”

  He said all this as if he were answering some question he was always asked, like from the press, so he was prepared.

  “What’s it called?” I asked.

  “Ed’s Guitars,” Ed said.

  “Well, that’s very precise.”

  I could see my mother getting nervous about my tone so she started talking fast: “I asked Ed if he’d take a look at your guitar. You know, it has that crack in the top.”

  “You mean Dad’s guitar?”

  “Yes,” she said. “You know what I mean.”

  “I like the crack,” I said.

  “Well, let me just take a look,” Ed said.

  I pulled the guitar out from under my bed and he studied it. He twirled it around in his big hands, looked inside the sound hole, looked at the back of the neck, and held it up to eye level, never losing his grin. What was he grinning at? What was just randomly and consistently pleasing to him?

  “My dad was kind of famous,” I said.

  “I know who he is. The crack’s not too bad.”

  “Ed and I have talked about that,” my mother said, narrowing her eyes at me.

  “I’d leave it alone unless it bugs you,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The crack. I wouldn’t bother trying to do anything with it. Replacing the top would change the guitar. I don’t think you want to do that.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “I could give it a setup,” he said. “Get rid of the buzz on the low E. I’d do it for free, no problem.”

  “Maybe,” I said. I didn’t want to admit the low E string had a buzz but it did.

  They stood there for a long uncomfortable minute and then it was Ed who said to my mother, “Let’s go to the Urth Café and get a coffee or something. Blanche looks busy.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  “You in the program, Ed?”

  “What?”

  “AA. That how you guys met?”

  “No, we met at my store. Your mom came by to check it out.”

  “Awesome.”

  Mom touched his arm and said, “Ed, go on and I’ll meet you at Urth.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes,” she said, looking at me.

  “Nice to meet you,” he said and went out.

  “What’s that accent of his? He sounds like the movie Fargo.”

  “He’s from the Midwest. Blanche, really, did I raise you to be rude or is this something you picked up on your own?”

  “I thought brutal honesty was the policy of the program.”

  “You’re not in the program. You’re a teenager who’s expected to be courteous to people in our house.”

  “He’s a guitar salesman. Ed the Guitar Guy.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “It’s a little far to fall, Mom. Rock star to guitar salesman.”

  She stared hard at me and I wasn’t at all sure what she was going to do because I couldn’t remember ever having talked to her that way. I wasn’t sure why I was doing it now.

  “Your father,” she said, “is not here. You may have noticed.”

  “So that’s Ed’s big selling point? He’s here?”

  She ran her fingers through her hair and took a breath and stared at the wall. I could imagine she was following some AA rhyming rule like “When in doubt, leave it out.”

  She said, “Ed and I are going to Urth. I want you to apologize the next time you see him.”

  “Fine,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about it anymore because something on my computer screen had caught my eye.

  His name had jumped up in my in-box.

  She went out and I waited until I heard the front door close and then I clicked on my dad’s screen name: Ineffablel. The title box said “Keep Me Informed.”

  I read the e-mail over and over:

  Hello Lovely One. Interesting news about the band. If I were a responsible father I’d say, don’t do it. But you’re going to follow your own path. If music is calling you, resistance is futile. Just know that it will lead you places you never counted on going. But you will go wherever you are going to go. Just don’t make music your partner. It is unreliable and will betray you at every turn. Still, you can’t help loving it if you do.

  My advice about playing at the Whisky or anywhere is to be nice to the sound guy. Also, when playing live, think about something to make your sound dynamic. I recommend a tempo change. Right in the middle. When the timing of the music suddenly changes, and everybody goes with it, it looks like faith. But it’s really practice.

  I read the e-mail over and over until I memorized it.

  Then I got out his cracked guitar and started putting some chords together for a song I would later call “Looks Like Faith.”

  The next day I told the band about Ed the Guitar Guy. I told them about “Keep Me Informed.” I found I was telling them everything. I had to because everything that happened to me now had a place to land. Every funny story, strange character or strong emotion worked its way toward a song that I had a reason to write.

  It was a little uncomfortable, letting people into my life that way. I hadn’t told anyone that I still talked to my father because I was afraid he’d stop contacting me. I kept my promise about not telling anyone where he was, but for a long time, I never breathed a word about even knowing he was alive.

  The great thing about Gigi and Viv and Ella was that other than a rudimentary understanding of their instruments, they didn’t know the first thing about music so they didn’t care about my father. Other than he was my father.

  Viv said it was strange, she couldn’t imagine her father the physicist doing anything cool. He was one step away from taping his glasses together. Her mother had to lay his clothes out for him because his head was always so preoccupied he couldn’t bother to tell what matched.

  Ella said her father owned a trucking company and all he did was work and when he came home from work he drank beer. Her mother kept herself busy scrapbooking and driving her five brothers around. Ella was the youngest and a mistake. Her mother was so worn out by then that she didn’t have the energy to figure out how to raise a daughter differently so Ella was raised as a son and that was why she was the way she was.

  “I’m not gay, though,” she said. “Not that there’s anything wrong with being gay but everyone thinks I am and I’m not.”

  “Grow your hair,” Gigi suggested.

  “I wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

  “I’ll show you. I’m good at it. We’ll do a makeover.”

  “You’d have to come over every day. It’s easier like this.”

  I told her not to change it; the look was good for the band and besides, she’d find someone who liked her because she was different. I had some success with that.

  “You mean like Jeff?” she asked.

  “Jeff’s a friend.”

  “You don’t like him?”

  “He’s a geek and he works in a pizza shop.”

  “You’re holding out for the rock star?” Viv asked.

  “Who isn’t?”

  They both said they weren’t but I thought they were lying.

  I complained some more about Ed the Guitar Guy and how my mother was settling for him. And that’s how we started talking about guitar stores. Viv remembered that Guitar Center was just right down the street from school and suggested we go there.

  “I can’t stand it there,” Gigi said. “My father likes to go in there and look around. It’s loud and there are all these pimply adolescent boys playing bad guitar and the salespeople are jerks and they all look like rejects from some Depeche Mode tribute band.”

  “Sounds great,” Ella said. “Let’s go during lunch.”

  So we did.

  I didn’t think it was my imagination that we all moved a little differently walking down the street to Guitar Center. I could have sworn we were swaggering. Before we were just Laurel Hall kids and we were aware of people looking at us
as if something were fundamentally wrong with us because we went to such a joke of a school. (People were probably never thinking that; we were thinking that.) But now we moved like a rock band.

  We went into Guitar Center and it was exactly the way Gigi described. We walked around all the guitars and touched them and played them. We went through the keyboards and banged on them, and Viv sang into one of the mikes and then we went to the drums and Ella played a little, which caused all the guys to look at us, even the salesmen who’d been ignoring us because, since we were girls, they thought we weren’t going to buy anything. But once Ella played, people paid attention and she felt it and blushed.

  I left that scene because it was a good opportunity to slip away and try out a pink Telecaster I had my eye on. I had never imagined myself playing an electric guitar but because this one was pink I felt I was allowed to touch it. It was already plugged in so I picked it up and strummed it and it sounded great, like a chime with some muscle to it, and everything I did on it sounded like a legitimate noise, not like an accident the way the acoustic guitar sometimes sounded. A guy with long hair and a nose ring came over and asked if he could answer any questions and I couldn’t think of any except “How much is it?” And he said it was whatever it was and I didn’t really listen because I knew it wasn’t forty-seven dollars which was how much money I had in my checking account after I’d paid for books and uniforms. I thanked him and he walked away but said over his shoulder, “It looks good on you.”

  I thought about being offended because he should have said something about my playing, which was more than most girls knew. Then I thought it wasn’t such a bad thing to say a guitar looked good on a person and I was still thinking about that when the others returned and said we should get back to school.

  If we had left a second earlier. If Ella hadn’t played the drums, if I hadn’t picked up the Telecaster, if we hadn’t gone there at all but used the time instead to study as we usually did. That’s the kind of bargaining you do when you look back at a twist of fate, lying in the path like something that accidentally flew out the window. We were walking down Sunset Boulevard three blocks from where we’d turn to go safely back to LaHa when I think it was Gigi who said, “Hey, we’ve never been in here, either. Let’s go in.”