Character, Driven Read online

  Right after I got settled, but before I could release more than two or three deep, meaningful sighs, or relive the moment when Patricia decapitated me with the sharp blade of harsh truths, I heard Jimby walking over. There was no sign of his usual grin, and he didn’t sit down across from me like he normally would. He looked like someone whose dog had just been shot. Good thing he didn’t have one.

  “What’s up?” I asked. “Are you okay?”

  “People call me stupid all the time,” he said.

  “Hey, sticks and stones,” I said, which was sort of hypocritical, given that I was currently brooding about hurtful words.

  Jimby frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “You know.” I told him the whole saying.

  He nodded in recognition. “I’ve heard that. But it’s not really true.”

  “You’re right. It’s not true. But it’s supposed to make people feel better, or help us cope, or something like that.” I glanced toward his house. I hadn’t heard any of the lively voices or loud music that would indicate his mom had made a new friend who liked to party. The guys she attracted didn’t always treat Jimby very nicely. On top of that, I’m pretty sure he was a lot smarter than most of them. “You don’t usually care what people say. Did something bad happen?”

  “We have to write a story for English,” he said. “I like stories. I figured I could write a really good one. And get a good grade. If you get a good grade, people can’t call you stupid. Right?”

  “That’s for sure,” I said.

  “But I tried. I tried hard.” He kicked the bench. “I don’t know how to write a story!”

  “Chill, man. It’s not that hard.”

  Jimby shot me a fierce look.

  Damn it. I’d just done something I totally hate when I see other people do it. I see it in school, and I see it online all the time. As soon as you say something is hard, or ask for help, whether you’re trying to prove a trigonometric theorem or beat the final boss in a video game, some anonymous bully basically says, “That was easy. I did it on my first try. You must be stupid.”

  It’s not that hard.

  “Hey, I’m sorry, Jimby. I wasn’t thinking. I forgot how hard it was the first time I wrote a story. You’re right—it’s not easy. I had to write a whole bunch of stuff before I got used to making up stories and it started to feel easy.” I pointed to the bench. “Grab a seat. All you need is one good idea. We’ll brainstorm.”

  “Is that cheating?” he asked. “We’re supposed to do our own work. I don’t cheat.”

  “No. It’s okay to talk about ideas. As long as you write the story on your own, it’s fine. You’re not cheating. Even Shakespeare got his ideas from all over the place. Hang on. I’ll be right back.”

  I ran inside for a notepad and a pen. I figured it would be a good idea for Jimby to write down any ideas we came up with. That way, he’d put them in his own words.

  When I got back to the table, I asked him, “What kind of story do you want to write?”

  “A good one,” he said.

  “Maybe you can think of something amazing,” I said. “Amazing stories are always good.”

  He chewed at that thought for a minute, then shook his head. “I don’t even know how to start. I told you I can’t do this.”

  “Sure you can. Stop thinking about stories. Think about adventures. What would be something amazing for you to do?”

  That brought an instant answer, and the return of his grin. “Fly,” he said.

  “Good. Real good. Write that down. What else?”

  “Fight zombies.” That got a bigger grin.

  “For sure. Maybe you can even put a couple ideas together. What if you could fly and fight zombies?” I asked.

  “Yeah! I could fly real fast with a pair of samurai swords.” He jumped up on the table, leaned over at the waist, and stuck his hands wide out to the sides. “I’d just hold the swords like this and slice their heads off.”

  “That would be double awesome. Write that down. But let’s keep going. I want to see if you can come up with five or ten good ideas.”

  It turned out that brainstorming with Jimby was a lot of fun. He didn’t always think in straight lines, but his thoughts definitely weren’t random. Even the most puzzling topical leaps he hurled at me made sense when I gave them some thought. The universe inside his head operated by a set of consistent rules. They just weren’t the standard set accepted by society, which made the journey pretty interesting and enjoyable. It was sort of like being on a roller coaster that didn’t need tracks and sometimes refused to believe in gravity.

  A half hour later, Jimby had a page full of ideas written down on the pad, ranging from our initial flying zombie fighter to vampire mobsters and a private, steerable one-man air balloon. He had more than enough for a story. And I had the satisfied feeling that comes with doing something creative. The story wasn’t due for three weeks, so he’d have plenty of time to work on it.

  As he got up to head back home, I said, “Hey, good job. You’re pretty creative.”

  “Thanks, Cliff. So are you.”

  His grin stayed with me after he left, softening my sadness as my thoughts returned to the concert I was missing.

  * * *

  SUNDAY, I WAS eager to give Mom her present, but I’d have to wait a bit. She was scheduled to work until midafternoon. Since I knew she’d be away, I picked up a morning shift at Moo Fish. There were plenty of kids who wanted to have the whole day off.

  “I got Mom something,” I told Dad as I was grabbing some cereal before heading out.

  Dad shot me a glare. “Will you ever learn to stop wasting money?”

  “It’s Mother’s Day,” I said. “I had to get her something.”

  “You could have made something. She loves your art crap.”

  I opened my mouth to defend my purchase, but the words didn’t come. Shit. For once, he was right. I could have made her something. But he wasn’t totally right. Store-bought presents are nice.

  Even with my shift at work, I got home before Mom. The instant she came in, I met her at the door and handed her the present.

  “Happy Mother’s Day.” I watched as she unwrapped the box and lifted out the glittery copper bauble.

  “It’s lovely,” she said, slipping it over her hand. “Just perfect. It matches my favorite blouse. You have great taste.”

  “Thanks.” I figured it was okay not to confess that what I really had was great taste in friends, not jewelry.

  I made dinner for the three of us that night. Luckily, the weather was nice, so I was able to grill hot dogs. That’s about the only thing I know how to make, not counting cereal, or mac and cheese from a box.

  After dinner, when Dad was taking out the garbage, Mom asked me, “So, how was the concert?”

  My brain tested a variety of answers that wouldn’t be outright lies, and quickly settled for, “It was an amazing night.”

  My gift for Mom has no further significance. On the other hand, Mom’s gift to me, which I regifted, set unpredictable and significant events into motion.

  Impermanent Records

  WEDNESDAY, MS. RYDER plopped a cardboard box on her desk, opened the flaps, and lifted out a turntable, followed by a small amplifier and speakers.

  “You all know what this is?” she said.

  “First generation iPod,” Peter said.

  The rest of us nodded.

  “I was at a concert this weekend,” Ms. Ryder said. “And it got me thinking. A decade is defined as much by its music as anything else. And part of the musical experience is in the delivery.”

  She moved down the aisle to where Zach was sitting, reached under the hair that draped over his ears, and plucked out his earbuds.

  “We walk around plugged in. In their youth, your parents might have listened to a Walkman or a Discman. Their parents had phonographs. Their grandparents had the radio. Go back a bit further, and the only option was live music. Your own children might listen to music
that’s streamed directly into their brains. Their children—who knows? How many of you have phonograph records in the attic?”

  I raised my hand. I knew there were three or four of those plastic milk crates filled with record albums in our basement. A few of the records belonged to my parents. The rest had belonged to my grandfather. I’d glanced through them once or twice, but anything I wanted to listen to was available a lot more easily in digital form.

  “Bring in an album that interests you,” Ms. Ryder said. “Or that helps define something significant about its decade. We can start listening to them tomorrow, and continue on Friday.”

  “Will we be graded on this?” Abbie asked.

  “I hadn’t planned on it,” Ms. Ryder said. “But I don’t mind using it as extra credit for anyone who needs a boost. Especially if your choice reveals something about the reactions of the people to the actions of their government.”

  Creature of habit that I am, I glanced at Jillian as I imagined myself bringing in the most amazing album of anyone in the class. Of course, I had no idea what sort of music she would find amazing.

  Mr. Piccaro caught up with me on the way out of school. I’d dawdled with the short stories, nibbling them as if they were exotic chocolates given to me as a onetime gift. A more crass person might say I’d stretched out my Dick, but I wasn’t the sort to make such a crude joke. When I tore off the wrapper, I found a Post-it stuck over the title, with the words I didn’t give you this written on it. That piqued my interest, because he’d put similar disclaimers on several other books—most memorably, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I lifted the note and read the title: Geek Love. I liked it already. And I knew, despite the note, that while Mr. Piccaro might give me books that were shocking, disturbing, or, to use a word he taught us last year, iconoclastic, he’d never give me something truly inappropriate. Though, at my age, I don’t think there’s much I can’t, or shouldn’t, handle. If something were deeply disturbing and wrong for me, I’d stop reading on my own.

  When I got home, I headed straight for the basement, where the records, and a record player, awaited me. Most of the albums were rock and roll, with a mix of groups I knew and groups who were total mysteries. There were too many to listen to all the way through, but I figured I’d pull out the ones I wasn’t familiar with and check out a track or two on each of them.

  Most of the rock was pretty much what I expected. I liked Santana and the Doors. I wasn’t crazy about Blood, Sweat & Tears. There were a couple folksingers from the 1960s mixed in. I guess that music would have told a lot about the decade. They sang songs protesting pretty much everything. One guy, David Bromberg, played good guitar, including a lot of blues. But that’s not what got my attention. As I was scanning the back of the album cover, which had a stupid picture on front of him on the Empire State Building swatting at airplanes like King Kong, my eyes met a title that nearly killed my enthusiasm for the musical hunt. “Wallflower.” That was the song Paul and Shelly had danced to.

  I felt my mind tipping in the direction of self-pity. “Screw it,” I said, tossing that album aside. I wasn’t in the mood to wallow. I continued the hunt.

  When I reached Southbound, with its bland green cover, I almost skipped over it. The guy on front had his eyes half closed. That struck me as kind of pretentious. I felt bad later, when I learned he was blind and really didn’t have much choice about how he looked. He was leaning his chin on his hand, which rested on the head of his guitar. The album cover looked pretty worn. Maybe someone in the family really liked this one.

  I put the record on the turntable, then flipped the cover over to see what song was first. “Walk On Boy.” I’d never heard of it, but those three words sounded like good advice. Maybe I should do that. Walk away from the assignment. Walk away from my obsession with Jillian. If Robert was already aware of it, other people would figure it out, sooner or later. The last thing I wanted was to have the whole school laughing at me.

  But I’d already invested a lot of time in listening to the records. I wasn’t going to quit just yet. Besides, I’d enjoyed much of what I heard. I even got a kick out of sampling the music I didn’t like, just for what it revealed about past decades. I guess Ms. Ryder really knew what she was doing.

  I lowered the tonearm onto the first track. The guy, Doc Watson, had a good voice. But the song didn’t do much for me. I was about to go to the next album, when I noticed the third cut. “Sweet Georgia Brown” was the song the Harlem Globetrotters played when they did their trick basketball stuff. And it had been the opening number of our jazz band concert sophomore year. I’d always thought of it as a band piece. I couldn’t imagine it being played by one guy on a guitar, backed up with nothing but an acoustic bass.

  I moved the needle past the intervening song and lowered it in place at the start of track three. After a bit of crackly emptiness, the guitar kicked in.

  And the guitar kicked ass.

  Wow.

  When the song ended, I played it again.

  Yeah, wow.

  This guy had some serious guitar-picking skills. He’d played a couple nice licks in “Walk On Boy,” but that was a slow song and he hadn’t cut loose. Here, he’d floored the pedal and punched the turbo. I halfway remember asking if I could take guitar lessons, way back in third or fourth grade, after Mom took me to a kiddie folk-rock concert, but I think Dad had shot that idea down. I’d fooled around on the guitar a little in middle school, and played with Tim’s guitar a couple of times when I was hanging out at one of Jersey Bayou’s practices. I stunk at it. But I could recognize brilliance when I heard it. Most guitarists I knew, except for Robert’s dad, played electric. This was acoustic. Un-amped, unfuzzed, un-anythinged. Pure steel strings, ringing out.

  Plucking amazing.

  I went upstairs, made a peanut butter sandwich, brought it back down, and listened to the whole album. That was not a Herculean task. Records, back then, weren’t very long. But they could be very good. Southbound has seven songs on each side. The longest was just over three and a half minutes; the shortest, just under two.

  Some of the songs were sappy. Some of the lyrics would make a college English major puke. But the guitar playing on nearly every cut blew me away. I had a feeling all the musicians in class would react that way, too. Especially any of them who’d ever picked up a guitar. They’d probably never even heard of Doc Watson—I sure hadn’t—so it was like I’d be showing them music they knew nothing about. Several of the kids in class were into country music. But this wasn’t country. It was something much more traditional, without the twang. I was pretty sure Zach and Tim would like it. And Paul. I hated to admit it, but I guess I still wanted to impress him.

  As I slid Southbound back in its sleeve, I pictured Tim coming up to me after class and begging to borrow the album. I imagined Zach saying, Dude, where’d you find that? It’s awesome.

  I looked at the stack of records on the floor. I’d sampled about twenty albums. There was no need to listen to the rest right now. I had what I needed. Though I might do that someday, just to see what else I could discover.

  When I put the records back, I noticed an old manila envelope in one of the crates. There were some faded photos inside. As I looked at the first one, I think I came within a hundredth of a second of sending myself into a lifetime of psychotherapy or guilt-driven alcoholic binge drinking. It was a picture of three men and two women, standing in some kind of park, near a huge willow tree at the edge of a stream. The guys, two with guitars, one with an acoustic bass, had long hair and drooping mustaches. They all wore work shirts, untucked, over jeans. One woman, who held a flute and wore a skirt and loose white blouse, was pretty. The other, in a flowing dress, was—and here is where I had my close call—much more than just pretty. I think my brain was about a nanosecond away from offering up the observation, She’s hot, when a deeper, reptilian beast near my spine made a desperate adrenaline-fueled sprint and blind-side tackled that thought out of bounds at the two-yard line by scr
eaming IT’S YOUR MOTHER!

  So, yeah, I was within a fraction of a second of drooling over a photo of my mom and having my mind run wild with the usual guy fantasies that burst loose whenever I saw a picture of an attractive female.

  A shudder of relief, twined with instinctual tabooistic revulsion, shook my mind and body like a hard-plucked bass string.

  That was close.

  As I mulled over my narrow escape, I took a closer, much-more-clinical look at the photo. Obviously, they were some sort of musical group. My mom was holding a violin. Or, I guess, in a group like that, it would be thought of as a fiddle.

  There were several more photos of the group, along with a newspaper clipping. Zephyrs and Dreams, all sophomores at the time, had played a concert at the Rutgers student center as part of the entertainment during freshman orientation.

  Cool. I never knew my mom had been in a folk group. She and Dad had met during her senior year, when he was taking graduate classes. He’d gotten his undergrad degree in some sort of finance at Bucknell. It’s funny she’d never mentioned the band, or that she’d played the fiddle. I guess she didn’t keep it. I’d never seen one around.

  * * *

  “SO, WHO BROUGHT an album?” Ms. Ryder asked.

  More than a dozen hands went up. I spotted the obvious choices arranged on desks around me: the Beatles, Grateful Dead, Nirvana. Abbie had a half dozen albums spread out in front of her, along with a stack of file cards. It looked like she was prepared to give a period-long lecture on the significance of her selections. I’d done some research, just in case I had to justify my choice as reflecting something about an era, and found that Doc Watson had risen from obscurity as part of the huge folk revival of the 1960s. And the folk revival was a reflection of the restlessness of the youth of that era, generated in large part as a reaction to government military and social policies.