by Barbara Hall
I wasn’t a stranger to cigarette smoke. Lots of my mom’s friends smoked because they were sober and somehow you were allowed to hold on to that vice. She didn’t let them smoke in the house but they were always in the backyard, puffing away. I thought it was so strange how some vices were off-limits while others were not so bad and it all depended on what crowd you ran with.
I added, “Hey, listen, don’t tell anyone that I talk to my dad. Not even my mother knows.”
I had only given him half the story. My father and I did e-mail but not regularly. I waited to hear from him the way I imagined normal girls would wait to hear from an aloof guy they liked.
“I don’t know my dad,” Jeff said, puffing.
“Where does he live?”
“I don’t know. He took off like yours did.”
“Wait, mine didn’t just take off for no reason. He’s finding himself. He’s an artist.”
“Okay,” he said.
“He had vision and purpose. The whole fame thing got to him. So he left.”
“About ten years ago.”
“Right.” I let a minute pass and then I said, “Jeff, how can you smoke? You’re a big track star.”
“I’m a walking contradiction,” he said.
He was quiet and I let him be. It made me nervous but my father also told me it was important to let silence accumulate. People thought they had to fill the gaps all the time. But it was important, in singing as well as relationships, to allow for space.
Not that Jeff and I had a relationship. Talking to him was okay. I used him for practice.
He looked at me. I looked at him.
Jeff had great hair. It was thick and it fell into his face and he shook it out. He must have known he looked cute when he did that.
“What about you? Are you musical?” he asked.
“I play the guitar a little.”
He nodded, looking at the cigarette more than smoking it. He jerked his head back toward the kitchen.
“Ella’s a drummer, you know.”
“What?”
“And she goes to your school. She’s good, too.”
“What?”
“Laurel Hall. That’s you, right?”
“I’ve never seen her there.”
“Maybe you never looked.”
I stared through the glass and saw her pulling a pepperoni pizza out of the oven as gingerly as if she were delivering a baby. Then she slammed it on the counter and hit the bell.
“If I did see her, I must have thought she was a guy.”
“Laurel Hall has guys?” Jeff asked.
“Not really. They just have some people who aren’t girls.”
Jeff laughed.
“You’re funny,” he said.
“Thanks.”
“Funny girls aren’t usually pretty.”
“Is that the case?”
“Well, pretty girls aren’t usually funny.”
“Is this your gearheaded way of giving me a compliment?”
“Whatever,” he said, and he was blushing. As much as I was a loner, I’d found it wasn’t hard to make guys do that. I knew that I was different and some guys liked that. Once it was clear that a guy was even remotely interested, all you had to do was call them on it to see what they’d look like with a pink complexion.
“Maybe it’s a sign,” Jeff said. His face was working its way back to pale.
“What?”
“The fact that Ella is a drummer and goes to your school and works here.”
“Sign of what?”
“I don’t know, Street. Help me out here.”
“I don’t believe in signs.”
“You don’t?”
“My dad told me to beware of things that a lot of people believe.”
“He’s probably right about that,” Jeff said.
“So if you believe in signs, you probably believe in God,” I said.
“No, not really.”
“Because you’re not going to get anywhere with me, talking about God. I get too much of it at home.”
“Your mother is religious?”
“AA,” I said. “There’s a lot of God talk but it’s vague. God of your understanding and all that.”
“It doesn’t rub off on you?”
“God is not understandable to me.”
“Well, isn’t that the point?”
“I don’t know what the point is, Jeff.”
“I think it’s pretty obvious there’s some kind of plan. A scheme, a system. Numbers have taught me that. All those X’s and O’s. You don’t have to know what the system is to understand it. I mean, the idea that we keep inventing systems, algorithmic and whatnot, means we’re modeling it after something that already exists.”
“You’re losing me.”
“We’ll pick this up tomorrow,” he said. “So little time, so many pizzas to make.”
Right before I punched out, I got up my nerve and approached Ella. I didn’t think she and I had said more than twelve words to each other in the whole year we’d both been working at Peace. Which was why I didn’t know she went to Laurel Hall. She was shoving a pizza into the oven and her back was to me but somehow she saw me anyway.
“What do you want?” the back of her head said to me.
“Oh, I just wondered … I was thinking … I’m Blanche.”
“You’re thinking you’re Blanche?”
“I know I am.”
“I know you’re Blanche, too.”
“Well, we’ve never actually talked.”
“Eight people work here. Two are girls. I figured it out.”
“Okay. So I just found out you go to LaHa?”
“Yep.”
Still with her back to me.
“I go there, too,” I said.
“You are telling me things I know. Do you want to explain prime numbers or gravity next? I’m working.”
“I write the music column.”
She turned. Her face was small and fierce. Her dark eyes were piercing and her hair was almost short enough to be considered a buzz cut. She reminded me of Sinead O’Connor, who was an Irish singer famous for a Prince song called “Nothing Compares 2 You.” She got even more famous by tearing up a picture of the pope on Saturday Night Live.
“I’ve read your column,” Ella said. “You know a lot about old music. You’ve got a lot of opinions, too.”
“Oh, thanks.”
She shrugged. “It seems like a waste of time.”
I said, “Why do you go to LaHa? I’m a scholarship kid.”
She stared at me for a while.
“I got kicked out of all the others.”
“What for?”
“Breaking the rules. Being weird. Who knows.”
“Jeff said you play the drums?”
She shrugged. “I fool around.”
“Well, I need a drummer.”
“What for?”
“I’ve been thinking about something. I thought I’d run it by you.”
She waited.
“Okay?” I asked.
“I’m waiting.”
“I want to start a band.”
The sentence came out, just like that. I was startled myself. I wanted to put it all the way back in my mouth and down my throat. It was the scariest thing I’d ever said out loud. But the idea was finally taking over me and I knew there was no going back. Research, I told myself. Experience, not art.
Her expression didn’t change.
“Covers?” she asked.
“Well, no. I would want to do original stuff.”
“You write the songs?”
I gulped.
“Yes. Well, I fool around with lyrics. I’m more interested in the music. Performing. I need some stuff on my résumé.”
She ignored this fumbling and I was grateful.
“Who sings?” she asked.
“I’m working on that.”
“Find a singer,” she said. “And get back to me.”
She pulled
a pizza out of the oven and started slicing it into pieces.
You would not want to be that pizza.
The Fringers
I CAN’T KEEP YOU IN SUSPENSE ABOUT THE BAND COMING TOGETHER. It did.
The way I got this to happen was pretty much the same way I got myself to keep up an above-four-point average. I put myself out on a limb. I made sure that it mattered more than anything. I took classes that were almost too hard and I had something enormous to lose if it didn’t come together. I’m aware there are people who motivate themselves normally but this has always been my approach. Head on the chopping block.
My father once told me that the difference between people who succeeded and those who didn’t was willingness. He wrote music because he was willing. My mother believed the opposite. She was powerless. She surrendered to the God of her understanding and He told her to work in a clothing store. Willingness had bigger plans for me. And what made a person willing? I didn’t know that.
Something told me I could not just be someone who talked about music.
I wrote my last column of “Perspective, People.” It was a bit of a diatribe about Fleetwood Mac, encouraging everyone to go back and discover them. In the last paragraph I announced that I was going to take a little time off to pursue my own musical aspirations with my band the Fringers, which consisted of myself, Vivien Wyler on vocals, Georgia Stone on keyboards, and Ella Tandy on drums.
The article came out and I sat and waited in the lunchroom to be assaulted by my fellow band members.
I had taken this approach because of something else my father once said to me. He said, “If you want to make a thing happen, say it is so, and then keep your word.”
Viv, Gigi, and Ella found me at roughly the same time in the lunchroom and they stood around me in a semicircle of glares. The article had the desired effect. They had seen it in print and now it had to be true.
“What are you talking about?” Gigi shrieked. She got very shrieky when anyone interrupted her carefully scheduled future plans. “We aren’t in a band.”
“We could be, though. It’ll be good for us,” I said.
“Good for us how?” she demanded.
“And what us?” Viv asked. “I barely know you guys.”
Ella just glared and chewed on a thumbnail. Because of her silence, I knew she was already adjusting to the idea. Glaring was her natural state, anyway.
I explained. I said we didn’t have to stay together forever, but I thought we should put a band together and enter the talent show.
“The talent show?” Viv exclaimed. “Nobody takes the talent show seriously.”
“But the winners of their school talent shows automatically qualify for High School Band Night at the Whisky.”
High School Band Night was a pretty well-known affair. Because we lived in L.A., teens who played in bands were taken very seriously. They were surrounded by the music industry—agents, managers, always scouring the city for the next big thing. Kids in L.A. attended High School Band Night at the Whisky the way kids in other cities attended the prom or football games.
“What’s the upside of it?” Viv asked. “I have to have an answer because my dad always wants to know what the upside of stuff is.”
“My parents will want to know how it’s going to look on my college résumé,” Gigi agreed.
I looked at Ella, who was still just glaring at me, chewing on the nail.
“What are your issues?” I asked.
“Who says I have issues? I just don’t like finding out I’m in a band by reading it in the school paper.”
“You told me to find a singer and get back to you. Well, I found the singer.”
I smiled at Viv and she looked away.
“I don’t know if I can just sing in front of people like that,” she said. “I’m used to singing in a large group.”
“Why am I playing keyboards?” Gigi asked.
“Because you’ve had piano lessons since you were a kid.”
“I play Beethoven. And what are you going to do, drag a piano onto the stage?”
“I don’t know. An electric keyboard. We’ll figure it out. The important thing is, we’re a band.”
They got quiet and thought about it. While they were thinking about it, the headmistress of LaHa, Dr. Bonny, came by. She was a smiley woman in colorful power suits with a strong addiction to Altoids. She chomped them nervously, and behind her eternal smile was this forced quality that I thought revealed a sense that LaHa was always on the verge of falling apart.
She said, “Girls, congratulations. Such a talented group of people here at Laurel Hall. I commend you. The Fringers. That’s a wonderful name. That’s …”
She walked off, still talking, which was another thing she always did.
The Fringers were still staring at me.
“For you, Gigi, a no-brainer. It makes you look well-rounded. Ivy Leagues love that,” I said.
“Keep talking,” Viv said.
“It’s good for your lungs, singing. Good for your body, too. It’ll help when it’s time to play soccer. What is that, a winter sport?”
“Yep.”
“The talent show will be over by then. The Whisky is right before winter break.”
They considered it. I saw them falling for it, so I just waited.
Finally Gigi said, “The Fringers? That’s what we’re called?”
“Sure. I mean, LaHa, it’s a fringe school. We’ll be competing with the established schools. It’s a celebration of the underdog.”
Ella stopped chewing her nail and said, “I kinda like that.”
“What are we going to play?” Gigi asked.
“I’m writing something. You’ll like it.”
“You write music?” Gigi asked. She was staring as if she were seeing me for the first time.
“Where are we going to rehearse?” Ella asked. “I play loud.”
“Peace Pizza. I asked Toby and he says we can use the banquet room after nine o’clock if nobody’s in there.”
“Nobody’s ever in there,” Ella said. “Nobody has pizza banquets.”
The bell rang. Viv and Ella walked away talking about how they’d get to Main Street, what bus they’d take, or if one of Viv’s sisters could drive them.
Gigi was still standing there.
She said, “It’s a dirty trick, Blanche. You know that, don’t you?”
“It’s not a trick. It’s a plan.”
“It’s a dirty plan.”
“You’re going to thank me,” I said. “Just wait.”
She shook her head but she walked away smiling.
When I went home that night, after work, I found the living room of our house full of Twelve Steppers. They were drinking tea and one of them was crying and the rest were all hanging on her every word. The crier wasn’t Louise. In fact, Louise wasn’t there, which was unusual. Maybe she had a date with the married man.
My mother looked up at me and asked if everything was all right. I said it was. She went back to listening.
I checked my e-mail and there was nothing from my father. But I didn’t expect it. They were few and far between. I had already gotten a couple this month so I wasn’t due for a while. Sometimes I could get him to respond by telling him something new or asking him a question. So I sat down and e-mailed him:
Hey, Dad,
Just checking in. School is school and L.A. is the way it always is, full of sunshine and promises. I’ve started a band called the Fringers and we’re working hard to get our act together in time for the talent show. The talent show at LaHa is lame but if we win, we get to play at the Whisky. I’d appreciate any tips you have.
I stared at what I’d written and then I hit Send and I felt that message traveling through the system, the whirring mass of X’s and O’s that Jeff talked about, the perfect system mimicking some bigger system that I didn’t believe in, but like everyone else, I believed in this one. This tiny thread that kept me connected to him. I swear, I could feel it
when my words landed.
Rehearsal
WHEN YOU DECIDE TO START A BAND, NO ONE TELLS YOU (AND you certainly don’t think about it) that you are going to end up being a kind of substitute teacher. No one wants to listen to you because they don’t recognize you as an authority figure. You’re one of them. You can’t possibly know what you’re doing.
A lot of things happened that I hadn’t counted on. First, Gigi decided to play bass instead of keyboards. The idea came to her when her father, Rodney Stone, said he was a bass player in college and wouldn’t it be fun for her to learn his instrument? He didn’t have his instrument anymore so he’d gone out and bought a brand-new one for her. He’d also bought her a bass amp. Then he bought us a guitar amp and a PA system. I suddenly saw the benefits of having rich friends. On the other hand, it meant that the pressure was on. Adults were invested. Rodney wanted to hang around for rehearsal, but Gigi convinced him that most rock stars didn’t have their parents hanging around rehearsals. Her mother, Erica with a “C,” made us T-shirts with our names on them and some business cards. This was all before we’d learned one song, so I definitely felt we couldn’t back out now.
Gigi was a little surprised at her parents’ sudden acceptance of this new venture, and I had to admit that I was, too. I thought rebellion was supposed to be part of it somehow but everyone approved. Almost everyone. More on that later.
Our first rehearsal took place in the banquet room of Peace. Nine o’clock, after the rush.
Off the bat, there was the problem that even though she had a brand-new amp and a bass guitar, Gigi didn’t actually know how to play bass. I didn’t know how to teach her, either. Ella could get her to follow along with the beat she was creating on the drums, but when Ella tried to deviate with some frills or anything fancy, Gigi would lose her way. I struggled to show her what to do but it really wasn’t my instrument. I was talking about eighth versus quarter notes when Viv spoke up. She said, “It’s kinda like a voice, you know. Like a backing vocal, you know? Like in a song when someone is going ‘bop bop bop’ in the background. You’re the bop bop.”
This is what worked.
Then everybody had thoughts on my song. I certainly hadn’t counted on that.
The song was called “Walking Contradiction.” Okay, I had written it about Jeff but I hoped he’d never figure that out. Guys mostly didn’t listen to lyrics.
