Alvar silently watched the whole thing. Anita tried to speak up, but they told her this was between men. The result was that Erling’s three-man band became a duo. Ingmar on the piano and Erling on the clarinet.
“Go tell him you’re sorry and maybe he’ll come back,” Anita said.
“I know you like tall men, but what should I be sorry about? Beg forgiveness because he melted my record?”
Alvar found himself stretching to his full height. Was it true that Anita liked tall men, or was Erling just teasing her?
Anita turned to stare at him. “How about Alvar?”
“What about Alvar?”
Alvar became nervous hearing his name spoken aloud twice. His body shrank back down and he turned red without even knowing why.
“Well, he plays guitar, and they’re tuned similarly as far as I know … at least he can pluck strings and he certainly has finger strength.”
Erling lifted an eyebrow. “You know we’re a serious jazz orchestra.”
“Just give him a chance.”
Erling looked at Ingmar, who shrugged. Then he looked over at Alvar. Three pairs of eyes focused on him and he felt his legs begin to tremble until he stiffly clutched his knees.
“If you can find a bass, you can play with us. I’ll give you a trial, say for two … no, one month.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Anita protested. “Where’s he supposed to find a string bass? And what sort of a chance is that—just one month’s time?”
Alvar suddenly heard his own voice. Yes, he was speaking and he felt himself opening his mouth and the words just coming out. “I’ll do it.”
* * *
The quest for a string bass would color Alvar’s entire first summer in Stockholm. Without Anita’s help, he wouldn’t have found one. She knew someone who knew someone who needed help with his garden more than he needed his string bass over the summer. Why Anita had helped him was a question Alvar pondered often at night in his kitchen bed. The consequences of the deal she’d magically managed to bring about kept Alvar hurtling from one end of Stockholm to the other all those summer days and even a few nights. He pedaled the cargo bicycle he was working to pay off from Åkesson. First and foremost, he had to make deliveries for Åkesson’s grocery. Then he had to bike around on errands for Erling’s trio. Then, finally, he had to transport soil and flowers to the gentleman on Djurgården, whose string bass he was allowed to use and guard with his young life. Aunt Hilda asked him once what he was doing all day long but was content to hear how he was working off his payments on the bicycle so that he could help Aunt Hilda with the rent as soon as possible. She didn’t really seem all that unhappy that he was gone so much. Alvar was worn out when evening came, but he was content with his work—where some people had no job, he had three. He was becoming a self-made man.
The first time he tried to play the upright bass, he was surprised. He had not realized that, in contrast to a guitar, the instrument had no frets, making it more difficult to find the notes on the fingerboard. In addition, there was no way to comfortably sit when he tried to reach the fingerboard with one hand and the strings with the other. Erling would laugh at him, not in a mean-spirited way, but it didn’t make things better.
Anita glared at Erling. “Will you help him or make it worse?”
Alvar counted another finger against his palm. Seven times she’d stood up for him since he’d started keeping track, and that meant something, didn’t it? By now he knew that she was twenty-two years old. He was seventeen. Seventeen, twenty-two. Twenty-two, seventeen. If he kept saying the words, they soon lost any meaning.
* * *
He finally found help at Nalen. He still could not work up the courage to talk to any of the girls. When Anita was all dressed up, it was even hard to talk to her. But men were just men. The worst they could do was brush him off. All that Wednesday evening he studied the bass player in one of the jazz bands performing that night, and when they finished their set, he walked over and took a slight bow.
“I’m Alvar Svensson.”
The bass player grinned. “Well, hello, then.”
“I would like to compliment you on your fine playing this evening.”
He thought he’d managed a precise Stockholm accent, but the man laughed.
“If you’ve come all the way from Värmland just to compliment my playing, I feel honored!”
“I’m trying to learn the bass, too.”
“You are?”
“Yes, and I’m just wondering if you could give me some tips … things I really should learn. First of all, how I should stand.”
The bass player seemed flattered by this request to teach a boy from Värmland how to play. Privately, Alvar decided to stop trying to emulate the Söder slang, which often gave him problems.
The bass player showed him how to press the bass against his body and let it rest against his hip to relieve any stress on his shoulders and back and allow a free range of motion and as much strength as possible in his arms and fingers, especially for pizzicato.
“There you go!” he exclaimed as Alvar had almost gotten it. “Soon I can hire you to play for me and I’ll be able to retire!”
Alvar laughed. Then he heard Erling’s laughter echoing behind him.
“Thanks so much for sharing some techniques to our Big Boy. We’re trying to teach him a thing or two ourselves. Erling Karlsson’s the name and I run the Erling Trio.”
The bass player didn’t seem impressed. That was often how it went with the men who met Erling. They were not taken in by his charm the way women often were. Alvar wondered if this was due to jealousy. He had to admit that he could get jealous of Erling.
“Erling is a good clarinetist,” Alvar said. “He’s played at Edermann’s and everything.”
“I’m not surprised,” the bass player said, wooden-faced.
Erling frowned at Alvar, as if Alvar had said something wrong. Alvar had no idea what that could be.
“Alvar here will be a hot item,” the bassist said over the sound of the next jazz band starting up in a fox-trot. “I’m looking forward to hearing your trio.”
The bassist disappeared into the crowd.
Erling snorted. “He thinks he’s so great.”
* * *
Alvar laughs as he repeats this last remark. His laugh soon turns into a yawn.
“But if you only played string bass in those days, what did you say for my kind of bass?”
“That problem was not yet in existence.”
“There weren’t any electric bass guitars at all?”
“No, not a one. The electric bass guitar was invented in the fifties.”
“Oh.”
Steffi runs through all the records from the forties she carries about inside her head. Nope. Not a single electric bass in all those songs she’s tried to play. And she hadn’t even considered that they’d all been uprights.
“But you had electricity,” she protests.
“Of course.”
“Because otherwise you couldn’t turn on the lights.”
“You haven’t missed a trick.”
Steffi laughs, although she is feeling a little stupid. “Why weren’t you supposed to say Erling played at … what’s the place again?”
“Edermann’s. It was a hole-in-the-wall where untested bands could come and play. Anyone could play. He’d impressed me, but not Hasse Kahn’s bassist.”
He smiles to himself. His small smile becomes a third huge yawn. It was time to let Alvar Big Boy Svensson go back to his nap.
— CHAPTER 14 —
HEPCAT’S LOG, March 10
I never listen to their shit. My future will be completely different, and once I leave, all that shit will drop and you’ll be able to see that it was just hanging in the air and none of it stuck to me. I know. We’ve all felt small. Some people stay small the rest of their lives.
* * *
“He’s got to be a bad boy,” Sanja suggests. “It must be the principal … and the
police … who are on his case. They don’t get it.”
Karro shakes her head. “It must be all the adults. They want him to be a doctor or lawyer or something, but he’s not letting them tell him what to do. He’s going his own way.”
Karro has visited Hepcat’s page five times at least. He hasn’t visited her page at all since that first time and she can’t understand why. She’s changed her photo and everything; she took her picture from slightly above while pressing her breasts together and after having put on mascara like fashion blogger Luna in her video.
She would never start a conversation with a guy. That would be like writing desperate on her forehead. But—she’s thinking a forbidden thought—if she decided to write to him, what would she say? Nothing too common. Hepcat is deep; she could tell.
Her thoughts are disturbed by Ugly Steffi brushing past in her nauseating manner to get a sheet of graph paper from the teacher. The paper isn’t gross until Steffi’s hands touch it. It’s sick how some people can walk around being so disgusting that it rubs off on everything they touch.
“I have to throw up!” she whispers to Sanja, loud enough so Steffi can hear. “I can smell her from here!”
Sanja smiles and agrees with her. Karro can always trust Sanja’s loyalty. Nothing will ever come between them. But sometimes Sanja disgusts Karro, too. She’d tell these secret thoughts to Hepcat, if he ever decided to write to her.
Steffi isn’t listening and she’s trying not to hear what they’re saying. She knows she doesn’t smell. She takes a shower every morning and uses the perfume-free deodorant from the drugstore. I can’t hear you, she thinks. I can’t hear you, so why would I fear you?
The words don’t fit into a ragtime or bebop, but they fit a slow jazz song, like Monica Zetterlund used to sing. She’ll write them down.
* * *
In the afternoon, something completely unexpected happens. It’s almost invisible. Steffi is at her locker and Karro is walking toward hers. She’s turning in from the other hallway and heading to the bathroom, and they happen to find themselves in the same small space at the same time. Karro opens her mouth and her smeared lip gloss moves in slow motion as she starts to say “Disgu…” before Hannes appears and says something totally different. “Have you worked more on your song?”
“My song?”
Steffi hadn’t told them it was hers.
“Yeah, the one you called ‘Believe.’”
“Well, yeah, it was mine.”
Karro is staring at them. The shifts in her expression could be photographed one by one.
“It was cool. I knew you had to be writing it yourself, because you hadn’t figured out a refrain yet.”
“Right … that’s right. But I have one now. I tried to emphasize the motif in the transition and made it the basis of the entire refrain, and I changed the key, too.”
Hannes nods. He doesn’t ask her if she wants to be the bass player in Lard Heroes, but he does say: “Cool.”
Then he heads into the bathroom, as if he hadn’t done anything special at all, and Karro and Steffi are left standing there in an unclear universe.
“How the hell do you know Hannes?”
Steffi doesn’t answer.
Karro puts her face back into place. “I never thought he’d sleep with whores.”
* * *
Steffi thinks about this the whole way to Alvar’s place. It doesn’t matter what Karro said. She’d panicked when Steffi talked to Hannes. Because Hannes is cute and Steffi is Steffi. She goes through the conversation again and again, listening to the tones of the voices, plays back Karro’s expressions and how they changed from one to the next. The warmth she’d felt when Hannes said: Cool.
Does this mean she’s in love? Is there anyone who could answer that question?
“All that between boys and girls,” Alvar says after she’d asked him. “I can’t say I ever understood it.”
She shakes her head. “Me neither.”
“Really?”
“‘Letter from Frej’ doesn’t speak to me anymore,” she says, and she catches a smile from Alvar. He doesn’t say anything, so she sits up in her chair. “There’s a kind … of pecking order,” she says. “It’s determined by the girls the boys want to have and the boys the girls want to have. You never think about it. I mean, you have to think about it, but you never ask yourself why it is the way it is.”
Alvar thought he was going to tell her about Anita and his burning desire for her, but there’s something in the girl’s voice, something in her reality. What is she really trying to tell him? “So what does this pecking order look like?”
She presses her lips together as she thinks.
“Some are at the top and some are on the bottom. Some have everything.”
“And others have nothing.”
“Others have no significance whatsoever.”
Her voice is crisp and to the point, but it squeaks like a violin when a player demands too much from it. This dark-haired girl sitting in his chair takes a deep breath.
“People can’t handle it if you don’t stay in your place. It’s that important.”
Alvar is not sure what Steffi needs, but he knows he can help her with a little white lie. “I wasn’t a popular kid before I left Björke.”
“You weren’t?”
“At least the girls didn’t think so. In that pecking order you’re talking about, I would have been on the bottom rung.”
Now he is telling the truth. The only girls who had crushes on him in Björke were little kids, and he wasn’t afraid of them.
“And when I got to Stockholm, I didn’t understand a thing about girls.”
That much was absolutely true.
* * *
Alvar didn’t understand a thing about girls. He didn’t understand how some guys could make them giggle, what the girls liked and didn’t like, and why Ingmar always had a girl on his arm and Erling always had three at a time while Alvar was just dreaming rose-colored dreams about Anita. To win her, he’d have to figure out the secret. Which he found in Bonde Street, high up in an apartment not much bigger than a pantry with a kitchen nook.
This was the second time he had come. The building was packed with families. Their large-eyed children would follow him up the stairs. When he talked to them, they just stared back. It was a bit unnerving, actually. An excited face met him at the door.
“I snagged some new records!”
Erling gestured to him to close the door. The staring children disappeared. When the door was shut, he could hear them laugh and yell like normal kids, and he breathed a sigh of relief. Erling headed to the other side of the apartment.
“Artie Shaw,” he said as he dropped the needle of his gramophone.
It was always magical to listen to new music. Any record could bring a new emotion, a new way to feel a note or a new melody he’d want to imitate as soon as he could. The best records came by boat—they brought not just new rhythms and melodies, but also America. For Alvar, feelings welled up in his body and his hands wanted to move.
“That was hep,” he said. “That spot where he went up the scale. Did you hear the bass?”
“It cost me two bits and a half,” Erling said. “But it was worth it. One day I’m going to be playing the clarinet for three crowns a record, count on it.”
They sat in silence, their heads bobbing to the music. Alvar was beating the rhythm with his fingers as Erling swung his elbows with a pleased smile on his lips.
When the needle began to scratch at the end of the record, Erling got up and took off the record, placing it gently into its sleeve. Grinned. “So you want to know how to pick up chicks? Get the girl? Have a fling with some swing?”
Was Erling making up these phrases on the spot? Alvar tried to memorize them, just to be on the safe side.
“Yeah, that’s right.”
Erling gestured for Alvar to follow him across the floor.
“The first thing you need can be found in this cupboar
d.”
Alvar opened the door to his cupboard with the same devotion as if it held the Eucharist. At the bottom of the cupboard, he spied a jumbled heap of what must be handkerchiefs. The cupboard had just one shelf. A red tube with a screw-on cap lay beside a brown comb. Erling was waiting for a reaction, so Alvar reached out for the tube. Erling grabbed his hand. “Careful, buddy. This, Big Boy, is the stuff of dreams…” Erling paused for dramatic effect. “This is Brylcreem.”
Brylcreem was a snuff-colored jelly that you pressed out onto your palm. Once Erling was reassured that Alvar respected his Brylcreem, Alvar was allowed to rub some into his hair according to Erling’s strict instructions. The inside of the cupboard had a mirror speckled with black spots.
Alvar watched himself transform into someone else. A young man, an elegant gentleman, his reddish blond hair shiny and just slightly wavy in the tight grip of the jelly. He looked at Erling in surprise.
“Well, well, well, what a hepcat we have here! I see I have some competition!” Erling winked and Alvar blushed.
Erling insisted that Brylcreem alone would not make the girls run after him. Girls liked three things in a man, and they all had to be in one and the same man.
“Brylcreem, adventure, and nonchalance. It’s a golden triangle. If you have adventure and Brylcreem, but no nonchalance, they don’t think the adventure is exciting enough. If you just have Brylcreem and nonchalance, they think you’re just dull, and they figure that out pretty fast.”
“But if I have adventure and nonchalance?”
“Not going to work without the Brylcreem. Got it?”
Alvar didn’t exactly get it, but he had to give in. How do you look adventurous? How do you look nonchalant, especially if nonchalance was not part of your nature?
Erling was a generous man, however.
“I’m going to give you three, no four, pickup lines. But you have to say them the right way.”
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