Notes From the Midnight Driver

by Jordan Sonnenblick

  While Dad and I scrambled around like we were on an Easter-egg hunt, Mom sat hunched over on the bed and pressed a wad of tissues to the gushing slit in her foot. “This is going to need stitches. Oh, Simon. I’m sorry. I broke our portrait and ruined your big dinner plans.”

  He rushed back into the room and gently—oh, so gently—wrapped her foot in gauze. “It’s okay, Janet. Broken things can be fixed. And I’m glad I’m here for you.”

  Oh, how freaking romantic. Gory, yet freaking romantic.

  Three minutes later, Apron Man and Gimp Lady were on the way to the hospital. I realized I was hungry, and walked into the kitchen. That’s when I noticed the bitter smell. And when I lifted the lid of Dad’s creation, I got a face full of acrid brown smoke. The sauce was now a thin wafer of charred carbon.

  Here was a lesson I could tell the judge I’d learned: Some people get the romance, and some people get coal for dinner.

  THE SAINTS GO MARCHIN’ IN

  “No, no, Alex! Jazz has to have a swing to it. All the time, a swing.”

  “But this is a sad song.”

  “All the more reason it should swing, then. Listen: Do you know how jazz started out? As funeral music. In New Orleans, when somebody would die, they would all walk down to the cemetery with a band playing sad songs. But on the way BACK from the cemetery, they danced. The band played fast, they played happy. And the people danced. Even in sorrow, jazz should sound like there’s dancing in it. Have you ever heard ‘When the Saints Go Marching In?’”

  “Uh, I’m not sure.”

  Sol held out his hands for my guitar, and I handed it over. I was ready for a break anyway. It was our first day of official practice, and he had shown me some new scale patterns first. After I had played those for maybe twenty minutes, he’d shown me some finger exercises, some new chords, and now a brand-new song. My fingers felt like they were going to shrivel up and die, and apparently, I hadn’t done anything right yet.

  He took the guitar and played a simple little melody. First he played just the melody, with no bounce to it at all, like this:

  Ding-ding-ding-ding.

  It was the corniest thing I had ever heard. Like, if Mister Rogers had played guitar, this would have been his big solo feature. Then Sol played just the melody again, with a swing:

  Ding-a-ding-a-ding-ding.

  This was starting to sound a little hipper. Next, he played the chords on the low strings, and the melody on the high strings, all at the same time. Suddenly, it was so bouncy I couldn’t sit still. When he played it again, and added a call-and-response part, I found myself tapping along on my legs and smiling:

  Dinga-dinga-ding-ding. (Dinga-dinga-ding-ding.)

  Finally, he played the chords, but sang the words to the tune AND answered them with the response part on the high strings:

  “Oh, when the saints (dinga-dinga-ding-ding.)

  Go marching in (dinga-dinga-ding-ding.)

  Oh, when the saints go marching in,

  (deet-deet-deet-dooby-doo-wah)

  Oh how I want to be in that number,

  when the saints go marchin’ in.”

  When he stopped, he was wildly out of breath. Claudelle was standing in the doorway clapping, but he was too wrapped up in catching up on oxygen to notice. She said to me, under her breath, “He sounds good. But that’s goin’ to get harder and harder for him now. You watch. You’d better be careful not to push him too hard, or he’s goin’ to be in that number soon enough.”

  On the way to my third or fourth lesson, I realized something that should have probably hit me much sooner: We had one guitar, and two guitarists. How were we both going to play at this concert? I came up with a plan, and told Sol about it right away. “Hey, Sol, listen. We have a little problem, but I think I have it all figured out.”

  “YOU have it all figured out? THIS I’ve got to hear.”

  “Ha-ha. Look, we’ve got two of us, but only one guitar. I have a feeling that will add a bit too much challenge to the duet portion of the concert program.”

  “So I won’t play. That’s fine, boychik. I’ve been pretty tired lately anyway.” Which he had.

  “No, you’ll play. Here’s the thing: My hundred hours of mandated public service are almost up. After that, I’ll get to keep the five bucks an hour I earn for being here. I was planning to use that money to save up for a car, but we all know that, thanks to my brilliance, I have a few years to do that anyway. So I have a schedule I just made, and if I can get Annette and Steven to practice here sometimes, I think I can make about three hundred bucks in the next few weeks. Then I’ll buy a cheap jazz guitar used somewhere. I can play that, and you can have my Telecaster. And, um, you don’t have to pay me back or anything. Consider it payment for these amazing lessons. I’ve never improved this fast in my life.”

  “Wait a minute, Mr. Um. You’re telling me you’d play a used, old, dusty guitar and let me use your beautiful Telecaster? Are you really sure?”

  “Sol, I’m sure. Why?”

  “Wait, wait. Are you SURE you’re sure? You’ll play the old thing, I’ll play the Tele, and you’re even willing to pay the bill?”

  “YES, that’s what I’m saying.”

  “Hmmm. Do you still have the key I gave you?”

  “Yeah, it’s on my key chain.” I took it out. “See?”

  “Okay, Alex, it’s time for my breathing treatment. Why don’t you take a walk down to the storage lockers at the end of the hall? That key fits my locker, number three-forty-four. Just like the room number. Anyway, bring me what you find.”

  “Is there only one thing in there, or will I know what I’m looking for?”

  As the respiratory therapy guy strapped the little mask on his head, Sol said, “You’ll know, boychik. Believe me, you’ll know.”

  I took my walk then. Down the hall, around the corner, chat with the nurses, buy a candy bar, hang out with Mrs. Goldfarb. Killing time, because I was kinda nervous to see what was in the locker. But when I saw the respiratory therapist leave Sol’s room, I figured that was my cue. I walked down the long hall to the locker, not knowing what would be in there. A jug of water, rigged to dump on my head? A spring-loaded pie-throwing device? I definitely felt a “GOTCHA” coming on, but Sol hadn’t had quite the usual gloating smirk on his face. I shoved the key in the lock, took a deep breath, and turned it. The mechanism was creaky; I could tell nobody had been in the locker for a long time. Okay, that meant the pie-thrower was probably not a realistic threat, anyway. When I opened the door, there wasn’t much to see, just a few big boxes, labeled RECORD COLLECTION, FAMILY PHOTOS, MUSIC PHOTOS, and JUDY. But when I pushed the top box aside a bit, I saw a black shape sticking up from behind the pile, a shape I knew. It was a very, very dusty guitar case. Choking on the dust, I pulled it up and over the boxes, then straightened the pile back up. As I closed the locker and headed back to Sol’s room, I was dying to see what was inside. I was also dying of a sudden allergy fit, so I stopped by the nurses’ desk and rubbed down the outside of the case with a cleaning wipe Juanita gave me. I figured the big surprise wouldn’t be quite right if Sol keeled over and died from the dust.

  Sol was sitting up in bed in the usual position, but his posture was different somehow. He looked taller, straighter, more alert. And I realized that the guitar in this case was something he really wanted to see again. I set it on the bed, with the latches facing him. He spun it around toward me. “You open it, boychik. I already know what’s in there.”

  Click. One latch. Click, the second. Click, number three. I tried to swing the lid up. Doh! This was one of the old-fashioned kind of cases that has the extra latch by the bottom. Click. Deep breath for me. Shallow breath for Sol. Slowly, I started to lift that lid again. I sort of squinched my eyes up so I wouldn’t see too much too soon, but I knew I was looking at a special instrument. The body was a gleaming blond wood, with cream-colored binding around the edges and F-holes. The hardware was gold, with one of those fancy harp tailpieces you
see on guitars in old, old movies. The neck was, literally, a work of art, with gorgeous slanted, parallel blocks of pearl inlay at the first, third, fifth, and seventh frets. The headstock of the guitar had the word “D’Angelico” in beautiful, flowing script, over an elaborate art-deco design. And inlaid into the twelfth fret in gleaming mother-of-pearl was a single word: GOTCHA!

  My voice was shaky. “Sol, is this what I think it is?”

  “What am I, a mind reader? If you’re thinking it’s a toaster, you’re wrong. However, if you’re thinking it’s a very valuable 1954 D’Angelico New Yorker archtop with a custom inlay, you’re smarter than you look.”

  “And I’m supposed to PLAY this?”

  “Alex, it’s yours. You could strap it to your feet and use it for skiing if you want to, but I personally think that would be wasteful.”

  “Why me?”

  “You gave me your Telecaster, and you can’t go up onstage next month and play the washboard. So now you have a real jazz guitar.”

  “But I’m not a real jazz guitar player.”

  “So you’ll grow into it. Or you’ll wait until I die, sell it, and pay for two years of college. Whatever. Now, tune that thing up and let’s play.”

  Holy cow, holy cow, holy…freaking…COW! My hands were starting to tremble, but I picked up the D’Angelico, sat in the big chair, and tuned it (the guitar, not the chair). Even with decades-old strings, the thing sounded like a heavenly choir of angels. Well, all right, a heavenly choir of tone-deaf angels—at least until I finished tuning. When everything sounded good, I played a few chords. Then I played a few more chords. Then a single-note run. Then some of the call-and-response chord-melody stuff Sol had been showing me. I looked up, and Sol was grinning from ear to ear, but his eyes were watery, too. He growled, “Nice-sounding hunk of wood, eh? Think you can work with it?”

  “It’ll have to do, I suppose.”

  “Good. Now let’s see how you’re doing with the chord-substitution exercises from last time. And remember to keep your right wrist loose. If you lose the swing, it doesn’t matter if you’re playing a solidgold guitar with diamond inlays—nobody’s going to be happy. All right, then. One-two-three-four!”

  THE WORK OF BREATHING

  The next time I went to visit Sol, I was bearing gifts, but he wasn’t in the room. Leonora was walking by, and came over to me.“Hello, Alex. I haven’t seen you in a while, but I hear you and Mr. Lewis have been exchanging instruments. If someone had told me three months ago that I’d see the day when Sol started sharing his things with others, I wouldn’t have believed it. You and he have quite a special relationship, young man. My hat’s off to you.”

  “Thank you. Uh, where is he?”

  “Just at the doctor’s for some tests. You know, it’s becoming more difficult to manage his CHF, so the medical folks here have been consulting a lot with the cardiologists over at the hospital.”

  “CHF?”

  “Congestive heart failure. He is doing remarkably well for a man with so little remaining lung capacity, but after all, his emphysema is terminal.”

  I had a lump in my throat all of a sudden, like someone had snuck down in there with a chicken bone, some crazy glue, and a bad grudge. “Yes, I know he’s in bad shape. Will…when…when will he be coming back?”

  “You have about an hour or so, at the least. Why don’t you go on into his room and play your guitar for a while? That way, you will be ready to impress him when he arrives. Oh, he so enjoys your time together.”

  “Sure. Thank you, Leonora.” She strode off to depress somebody else, and I walked down to Sol’s locker to get the guitar—I still couldn’t even begin to think of it as MY guitar. I reached in for the handle of the case and missed. The boxes tipped, tumbled, and crashed, although I made a spectacular diving save and grabbed the guitar case before it had a chance to hit the ground. Then I spent a few minutes panting and choking on the cloud of grimy dust I’d raised. After about a thousand rapid-fire blinks, my eyes cleared to the point where I could see again, and I found myself standing amid a heap of jumbled photos. Well, I figured out really fast that I wasn’t going to get any guitar practice in, because getting the pictures back into the upside-down box labeled JUDY was going to be a slow process even if I didn’t have an asthma attack from the allergen-laden air. I sat down, creating a little secondary mushroom cloud around myself, and started sorting through Solomon Lewis’s great disappointment.

  An hour later, I was in Sol’s room, randomly picking out a sad little blues progression on my Tele—it would have been almost sacrilege to play the down and dirty blues on Sol’s D’Angelico, like sketching over the Mona Lisa with watercolors—and trying to process what I’d seen in the “Judy box.” It was hard for me to even imagine all the pain Sol had gone through in his life. And the pain was going to get worse before it was through. When they wheeled him in, Sol’s skin was the shade of ashes in oatmeal, and his chest looked all puffed up. He grinned at me, but distantly, and you could just tell that it cost him some effort somehow. His voice was breathy and scratchy at the same time.

  “So, boychik, what’s with the blues? Is that mean old no-good Mrs. Um doin’ you wrong again?”

  “No, just thinking. How are you feeling? You look tired.”

  “Well, you know, I have my good days and my…not-so-good days. This one isn’t necessarily in my top ten.”

  “Hey, I brought you something.” I took out the two huge black-and-white bakery cookies I had stowed under my chair, but he barely even glanced at them.

  “Leave them. Maybe I’ll…be…hungry later.”

  “No problem, Sol. What do you want to work on with me today?”

  He was lying all the way back in bed, and while he pondered my question I could hear the air rattling and whistling through his lungs. The guy was suffocating while his genius protégé was offering him cookies. “Like you said, I’m tired right now. Just…play something nice. Okay?”

  So I played and played: whole songs, half songs, chord progressions, whatever wound up under my fingers. Sol’s breathing noises would get louder for maybe a minute at a time, and then so quiet that I almost wanted to stop playing and take his pulse to make sure my playing hadn’t carried him off to the Great Beyond. Then at some point, Claudelle came in and stood next to me. She put a hand on my shoulder, and gestured with the other to the doorway. “Come on out, baby,” she whispered. “Your friend needs his rest now.”

  In the hallway, all I could say was, “Why is his chest so loud now? And why does he look all puffed up like that?”

  Claudelle sighed before she answered. “Work of breathing, Alex. The doctors call it ‘the work of breathing.’ You and me, our lungs do all the work the way they should, so it doesn’t look hard. But a man like Sol, his lungs are all scarred up and swollen on the inside. So he has to work for his oxygen.”

  “Always? Every breath? Why now?”

  “Oh, baby. Your friend in there is a tough old fighter. But you see how hard it is. And nobody fights forever. Nobody.”

  I had to get out of there, and I did. I needed Laurie, so I went to her house. Her dad answered the door, and warned me: “Her Highness has retired to her royal bedchamber. She’s in a serious mood, Alex. She got ultrasound pictures from her mother today, and ripped them into tiny black-and-white confetti. You can go up if you want, but I think I’m just going to stay out of Laurie’s way for a while, like, until she turns thirty. I’ve been hearing sounds, like boards breaking.”

  “Well, I think breaking her karate boards is a healthy way to get out some aggression, Mr. Flynn.”

  “So do I, Alex. I just wish she had some karate boards at home.”

  “Oh. Uh, well, I guess I’ll be going up the stairs now.”

  “All right, son. Just in case things don’t go…well up there, let me just take this time to tell you what a great kid I think you were—I mean, are.”

  Is the guy just a total riot, or what?

  I listened outsid
e of Laurie’s door for a few minutes, and couldn’t hear any blatantly dangerous noises, so I knocked. She grunted something, which I took as an invitation, and I entered the Chamber of Raging Sorrow. The room was definitely trashed, but I ignored the wreckage, or at least the nonhuman wreckage. Laurie was curled up on her bed with a wad of tissues in one hand and a folded paper in the other. She wasn’t actively crying, but she was still in that sniffly post-weep stage. I swept a damp cluster of tissues off the bed onto the floor, and sat by her knees. I gave her one of those weird little pats that old-fashioned country doctors give in the movies when they’re delivering horrendous news, and her red-rimmed eyes focused on mine.

  “She’s really going to have the baby, Alex. She’s really going to spawn. Look at this!” She unfolded the paper, and waved it in my face. It was the ultrasound photo her dad had mentioned.

  “Hey, your father told me you ripped that up.”

  “He’s such an exaggerator. He probably told you I was breaking things up here too, right?”

  I took in the dumped drawers, the beauty supplies scattered everywhere, and the massive diagonal crack in her headboard. I raised an eyebrow.

  “Well, he exaggerated about the stupid paper, anyway. I only ripped up the envelope and the cute, annoying card she sent.”

  I grabbed the ultrasound picture, which basically looked like a radar image of a space alien. The odd being had a gigantic head, a teeny body, little floppy arms and curled-up legs. And, looking more closely, I couldn’t help but notice that it appeared to have a tail.