by Josh Farrar
“You did freak out,” said Jonny. “And you told me to shut up. Not cool.”
“I’m really sorry. It had nothing to do with you. That was between me and my parents.”
“Remember when I said how bands bring out the worst in people?”
“Yeah, I do. It won’t happen again.”
“If you don’t want me to be the singer, I can just be the keyboard player,” said Christine.
“No, no. I want you to sing,” I said. “Really.”
“How about you both sing?” said Jonny. “Duh. Harmonies. Two girl vocalists. You’ll be huge.”
Crackers and I looked at each other.
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll both sing.”
“How about working on something for this?” Christine said, pointing to a poster across the hall. It was for an open-mic concert at next Friday’s lunch assembly. Anyone could play. All we had to do was sign up.
“We don’t even have a drummer. We’re not even a band yet,” I said.
“You don’t even have a guitarist yet,” Jonny said. “Remember, I said I’d practice, but no gigs.”
“You guys are wimps,” Crackers said.
“What?” I said.
“You say you want to be in a band, but you’re afraid. Both of you.”
“I am not afraid,” I said.
“I might be a little afraid,” Jonny said.
“Annabelle, what are you more interested in?” Christine asked. “Forming a band, or looking cool? Because we might not look that cool at this open mic, but if we do well, people will notice us. And what better way is there to find a drummer than to show the whole school that we’re serious about playing?”
“She has a point,” said Jonny.
“The drummers will come to us,” Christine said.
“So, Jonny, you’ll do it if I do it?”
I looked for a flicker of doubt on his face. He had to have seen the threatening note by now, so he knew there was some risk involved if he played in public with us.
“Okay, I’ll do it. I’m a hired gun, though. Just till you find somebody permanent.”
We both knew that he’d said he’d never perform with us before. And now he was a willing participant in a live show. So he wasn’t exactly saying yes to being in our band. But he wasn’t exactly saying no, either.
HEY, CRACKERS
On Friday, two periods before the lunch assembly and the open mic, Mr. V gave us back our Soundtrack of My Life song lists, complete with the descriptions of why we had picked the songs. He had already said that “this exercise is not a judgment on your musical taste,” but I was still a little worried about having my excellent indie song list critiqued by a middle-aged Bon Jovi fan. Plus, good song choices were all I had! I felt like I had only actually done a good job on four of the songs and just scribbled random stuff under the other ones, so I braced myself for a horrible grade. But when I Iooked down, I saw a big fat A at the top of the page. Plus, there were exclamation marks next to every paragraph that I had actually completed. He must have really loved it!
The Soundtrack of My Life, by Annabelle Cabrera
Opening Credits: “The Perfect Me,” Deerhoof
Everyone dreams of being perfect at something. It could be school, or sports, or Grand Theft Auto. I want to be as perfect as Satomi Matsuzaki at playing the bass, singing, jumping around, and generally being awesome. This is my favorite Deerhoof song of all time. The drums are crazy, there are weird bell sounds on top of everything, and a church organ from outer space.
Receiving a Gift: “Strawberry Fields Forever,” The Beatles
This is my “receiving a gift” song because that’s how I feel when I’m listening to it: like I am being given a gift by The Beatles. Directly by The Beatles, like they wrote it just for me. It’s a really gentle song, but then every once in a while Ringo’s drums really bang in on a fill, and it just sounds awesome. I also like how a lot of the words don’t really mean anything. But if you know the song, they somehow do start to make sense. They make sense the way a beautiful dream makes sense, but then you wake up and you can’t explain to anybody what made the dream so excellent.
Treasured Memory: “Kooks,” David Bowie
This song reminds me of how life was when I was really young, maybe four or six years old or something. The song’s about a couple of weirdos who are in love—and trust me, my parents are kind of weird—and who have a kid. Maybe by accident, it’s hard to tell. But they are happy about having the baby, and they sing a song to her, welcoming her to their nutty family. The parents in the song sort of apologize for being weird, and to make up for it they buy the kid a trumpet and a guide for how to not get picked on, which is totally something I could use right now.
And it’s cool to be different, but I wish my parents were more like they used to be, more like the parents in this Bowie song. When we lived in Brooklyn, with my abuela, she was the boss, and my parents and brother and I were kind of all her kids. It was a lot more fun that way.
Moment of Regret: “Waitin’ for a Superman,” The Flaming Lips
Sometimes you just want somebody to come down and save you. Maybe you’re having a bad day. Maybe you wish you were taller or played the bass better. But you can’t just become an amazing musician or grow a whole foot overnight, so you dream about it instead. I think I chose this for “moment of regret” because I always used to think my dad was Superman, and then one day I woke up and realized he was just my dad. He was just a guy.
Loneliness: “Nowhere Man,” The Beatles
What I love about Beatles songs is that the words can be really sad sometimes, but it doesn’t matter because you feel happy when you listen to the melodies and instruments. Everybody feels lonely sometimes, but I never feel lonely when I listen to The Beatles, because it’s like they’re kind of holding your hand and helping you through the hard times. You might be lonely when you turn on this song, but three minutes later you realize it’s all going to be okay.
Final Battle: “Declare Independence,” Björk
I chose “Declare Independence,” the Björk song, for my final battle song because when she sings this song, she sounds like she is at war. Maybe not the kind of war where you load up guns, fly flags, and climb mountaintops. But maybe the kind of war where sometimes it feels like everybody is standing between you and your dream, and you have to get a little bit mad in order to become who you want to be.
All my life people have used annoying words to describe me, like “sassy” or “spunky.” I hate the word “spunky.” It sounds like a word for feeling like you want to throw up. People describe Björk as spunky, too. (Or they just talk about how she wears weird clothes.) Sassy and spunky mean full of energy and attitude. But I don’t really feel like I have attitude. I feel like I will never get what I want in life. I will never be able to lead my own band. I will never be able to do what Ronaldo did, not on my own.
I will never be noticed again, by my parents or anyone else. I will be invisible.
Closing Credits: “Crimson and Clover,” Joan Jett
Tommy James wrote this song around the time my parents were born, but Joan Jett did it in the eighties and totally owned it. She’s somebody who would do another person’s song note for note but still somehow makes it all her own. I really don’t know how everything in the lyrics adds up to “Crimson and Clover,” but those words just sound so good together! Oh, Joan, how I love thee. The guitars on this record are HUGE, but her voice goes back and forth between hard and soft, tough and gentle. When she’s barely whispering on top of those crunchy, distorted guitar chords, I feel like I’m lying in a field of grass gazing up at a blue sky so wide open and unending, it almost hurts.
“This is great, even though you still owe me some of the assignment,” Mr. V wrote. “You are finally opening up a little bit here. We are seeing the real Annabelle now. This is what good writers do. But it’s still not complete. Keep going!”
The real Annabelle? I read my final battle para
graph again and felt a rush of warmth spread across my face. “I will be invisible,” I had written. It was just embarrassing.
“Okay, class,” Mr. V said. “Now comes the hard part: creating a work of art. Over the weekend, I want you to look again at what you have written. Many of you have written very well so far, but in a rather unstructured way. Your thoughts and expressions are full of life on these pages, but they are still raw. The next step is to use your soundtrack as inspiration to create a work of art, a finished piece that you are proud of, a piece that says something of who … you … are.”
I’m not sure if anyone knew what he was talking about. I waited until all the other kids had filed out to approach Mr. V’s desk.
“Ah, Ms. Cabrera,” he said. “Nice work on that assignment. Do you know what your work of art will be?”
“Huh?” I said.
“Your work of art. A song perhaps?”
“Yep, that’s what I want to do. But …”
“It’s scary, right?”
“No, I’m not scared exactly. I’ve been around songwriting my whole life. My parents do it, my friends do it. And when they do it, it looks really easy. Every time I do it, though, it feels impossible.”
“So you’ve written songs before, then?”
“Well, that’s the thing. I just write a few words here, a few words there. I put them to some chords. Sometimes it sounds good, but I can never finish anything. The ideas never go anywhere.”
“Ah, you’ve got a bit of a block happening, maybe. It takes a long while to truly become good at something, you know. You might not feel very young right now, but believe me, you are. And you have a lot of time to develop your talents. The only thing I can say is that, as your teacher, I see you have a lot to say. You just need to keep working at it, a little bit every day. It’s a long climb, but believe me, you will get there. Slow and steady wins the race.”
Slow and steady wins the race. As I set up my bass and looked out at the bleachers, I tried to take courage from Mr. V’s saying, but at that moment it just didn’t do the trick. These assemblies were a total drag. Teachers stood in the halls like watchdogs, making sure each and every kid filed into the gym, but for what? To hear an endless list of boring announcements from the principal, or maybe a motivational speech from the art teacher about how beautiful autumn could be if you only looked up and noticed the trees’ changing leaves. Mostly, they were an excuse for boys to yell out jokes and see if they could get the crowd laughing. I guess the hopeful part of me thought this open mic might change the mood of the assembly, but it hadn’t at all. If anything, the jokers were more amped up than usual—this time they had a chance to make fun of their own classmates.
This performance was going to be a huge, humiliating mistake. The stand-up comic and the juggler who had also signed up had dropped out earlier that morning, so we were the only act stupid enough to subject ourselves to the open-mic treatment. Half the crowd looked bored out of their minds, and the rest of the kids were hurling insults our way:
“Loser!”
“Beatles Geek!”
“Dork!”
“Crackers ’n’ Cheeeeeeeese!”
“Fatty McGoth!”
I don’t know how they even recognized Jonny, though. He wore sunglasses and a baseball cap so low on his head that I wasn’t sure he’d be able to see his guitar strings.
“Is that a disguise?” I asked him.
“Kind of.” Either he knew that doing the open mic was the biggest dork maneuver in history or he was hiding from Jackson. Or whoever else might have written him the threatening note.
Mrs. Harris, the principal, played the MC role.
“Okay, kids, we have something really special for today’s open mic,” she said. “It’s a new rock group of sixth graders.”
Jonny’s disguise must have been successful, because Harris didn’t realize that a full-blown seventh grader was our guitarist, even though he was too embarrassed to be seen with us.
“I don’t believe they have a name.” She turned to us. “What do you call yourselves?”
“IDIOTS!” somebody yelled from the stands.
“Hey!” Harris yelled. I didn’t know she had it in her. She was serious about this hope-and-love thing. “These kids have the floor!” Then she walked off and the floor was ours indeed.
Jonny plunked out the intro chords of “Hey Jude” so quietly that I couldn’t even hear the beat, and I was two feet away from him. Then he flubbed a D chord and stopped dead in his tracks.
“Oops,” he said. “Bungle.”
“They should be called The Bungles!” said the jerk from the stand. Half the audience cracked up. Were we going to be the first band in history to be named by a heckler? Maybe. But I was not going to let Rule Number Five get the best of me!
“Go ahead, Jonny,” I whispered. “Start it again.”
He played the intro again, more confidently, and Christine and I joined in. I sang the first verse, and I sounded okay, I thought. There were a couple more heckles, but by the time I was done with my part of the song, everybody had shut up. I remembered this from the Egg Mountain days, the way a good song played by a good band can silence a restless, obnoxious crowd in seconds. Music is a powerful thing, and even our quiet little Beatles cover was working its power.
But by the time Crackers finished her first verse, she absolutely owned the crowd.
“Go, Crackers!” yelled out a high-sounding girl’s voice. I was thinking, Crackers has a groupie?
I had pushed for “Hey Jude” instead of “A Place in the Sun” to avoid having Crackers look so much better than me, but it didn’t make a difference. She was amazing, no matter what song she sang. This much was clear: Crackers was going to be the star of this band. As I scanned the bleachers, I saw that half the kids had stood up. Most of the school had probably never even consciously laid their eyes on this gawky girl, a mere eleven-year-old who blended into the sea of faces in the halls. Before today, there had been nothing unique about her except for her constant snacking. Plus, she was all spindly arms and legs, and had that distant quality, that faraway look in her eyes of someone who barely even seemed to know where she was.
But when she sang, none of that mattered. I watched her as she went into the nah nah nah nahs of the outro, and I could tell she wasn’t even trying to hit it out of the park. It just came naturally to her. She followed where the music took her, and when I listened to her sing “Hey Jude,” it was like I was hearing the song’s true meaning for the first time, feeling all the emotion that Paul McCartney must have felt when he had written it. Crackers reached deep into the heart of the lyrics about cheering up a sad little boy, and made it sound like a love letter to the whole school. I was blown away. So was Jonny, and so was the audience. Christine, without even trying, had everybody eating out of the palm of her hand.
“Crackers! Crackers! Crackers!” the audience chanted. Suddenly the lamest nickname in the history of man had been transformed into total coolness.
When we finished, the placed erupted. We bowed three times, and Mrs. Harris wiped a tear from her eye. “That was amazing!” she said.
As I put away my bass, the crowd was still going bonkers, and I remembered that we needed a drummer.
I walked up to the mic and said, “Hey, everybody, we need a drummer. If anybody’s interested, find us in the halls!” But nobody could hear me above the chants. I looked at Jonny, and he shrugged as if to say, Good luck, there’s no way you’re getting heard in this crazy scene. So I gave up and followed Crackers and Jonny back to our seats in the stands. As we made our way through the crowd of fifth graders sitting on the floor in front of the first row of bleachers, I could see that kids were looking at all of us differently—not just at Christine, but at Jonny and me, too. They stared at us, respect in their eyes, and in Crackers’s case, actual awe. I had figured we’d be either ignored or ridiculed, but never worshiped in this Egg Mountainy way. We had barely rehearsed the song and had been making
mistakes up until the last minute of rehearsals. Before today, we hadn’t even been worthy of teasing. Now Crackers was a full-on Federal Hill rock star, and Jonny and I stood in her glow. It wasn’t quite how I’d imagined this particular scene, to say the least.
Following Crackers up the steps was like following Moses through the Dead Sea: the crowd of kids had instinctively opened up a lane for her to pass through. It was nuts, like a middle school version of the red-carpet treatment.
The three of us sat down in a row in the back, all eyes on us. Christine looked around, unsmiling and nervous.
“It’s just a Beatles song,” she said.
But Jonny basked in the new celebrity, beaming.
“This is awesome,” he whispered. “Count me in.”
“What?” I said.
“The band. I’m in. A hundred percent.”
I don’t know how to describe what I felt at that moment. It felt great to get noticed, and it was even better to have Jonny as a full-time member of the band. But my worst nightmare had become true: I was just the bassist. I was just a member of Crackers’s backup band.
Rock stars don’t play second fiddle. To anybody.
(No matter what the Rules to Rock By say!)
DARIUS THE HILARIOUS AND THE
REFUGEES OF RAISING CAIN
The Monday after the open mic, I could still see people looking at me differently, like I was actually cool or something. People watched me as I went down the hall in a way they never did at PS 443, where the hip-hop kids had never heard of Egg Mountain, despite our being well-known around the city. One Federal Hill kid stopped me and said, “Nice bass playing, Annabelle.” That felt good. But was I really just the bass player? Didn’t anyone realize that I had formed this band?
The feeling boiled over in Mr. V’s room, where Christine got an ovation from the entire class. “Excellent singing, Christine, really,” said Mr. V, who started off the round of applause himself. I didn’t pay much attention to what happened in class after that. I just sat there, doing nothing. This was lame, I admit. She’s not THAT GREAT!!! I wanted to yell, but instead I sank into the background.
