if you really want to understand this chapter you should listen to the song on the side first, jussaying
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f o u r
My grandmother was a dancer.
Yeah, she’s dead, like most grandmothers are. She died when I was ten. I don’t remember much about her. She never used to stop telling the story of how she met my grandfather, who died before I saw him. I used to love that story, but I’ve forgotten it now. She used to make me flaky pizza from the kiln with too much cheese on it and sit me down in the verandah that faced the beach and tell it to me and after a point I could finish her sentences and she would laugh when I did. When we were done I used to go in and watch her as she danced. She would go up to her dance room on the terrace and throw open the French doors so we could see the sea, put on her dance clothes which were bright cotton, pink, blue, green, red, she would put her white hair back in a bun, and then she would dance, smiling at the sea, and I would sit in the corner and watch her with pizza crumbs falling off my lips.
It’s funny how I don’t remember her face exactly, or how their house was, or her voice when she told me the story, or the story itself, but I remember the way I felt when I used to watch her dance. She used to tell other stories with her dance. She told them so beautifully that they took me away, like any good story should. I forgot about the sea-salted air and the pizza crumbs, and I would just stare at the way she was moving, almost as if she wasn’t a human that was moving, as if she was just art, art in a human form – does that make sense? Her limbs wouldn’t look like limbs anymore and her face wasn’t a face anymore and she wasn’t my grandmother anymore, she was someone else, she was somewhere else, it was like she was there but not there at the same time, and I felt like that too, like I was there but not there, like I was on another level, another world.
I don’t know. There isn’t a word for it.
The room is filled with pot smoke. Everyone’s trying to go to the same place, the place I’ve been when I was ten years old, a place with sea-salted air and pizza crumbs. Pot’s a lazy way of doing it. But that’s what we all are, we’re lazy. We don’t see. We just sit and smoke and watch people play music and smoke some more and the more attractive ones out of all of us get to fuck someone at the end of it.
The tequila should be working. The stuff that Jake said would be there is in the form of little blue pills being passed around in a white bottle. I tried to take them but I can’t. Pills remind me too much of meds, even if I know that they’re just casual recreational drugs. Micky doesn’t take them either, because tomorrow she has to drive to Caravel to see her parents and she obviously can’t show up baked. I think about Aunt Evelyn’s pending invitation to catch-up some time in the summer and remind myself to answer the e-mail.
Mikaela gets me another Blue Sunrise and has another Screaming Orgasm for herself.
Atlanta’s Heel is doing okay so far. Their first cover is drawing to a close; I’ve already forgotten the song. But from what I heard at least they’re not lacking in skill – that’s a put off, when the band’s own damn guitarist can’t pull off a complicated chord switch. The guy on lead guitar (Dexter? Calvin?) is this bearded dude who has his eyes closed all the time and I think it’s pretty cool because guitar is clearly his zone or whatever.
When the song finishes people clap and cheer and I tap my fingers on the glass-topped table just to contribute to the noise. Jake, clearly in the flow of things, doesn’t introduce the next song; the band simply stops for a few moments. Then the music continues.
I’m forced to give it my attention because the guitarist (Calvin? Mason? No, Mason is the drummer) starts plucking a tune on his Gibson which sounds very bluesy and also very familiar.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry or just watch when I realize they’re playing Led Zeppelin. A murmur goes around the room when everyone else realizes the same thing I have; even professional bands don’t cover Zeppelin for fuck’s sake, let alone cover a trippy number like this. As the song starts I see that they’ve tweaked it in bits to make it simpler and I’m not surprised – the blonde guy in the Ramones shirt (Mason? Dexter? I’m confused now) clearly can’t match up to Bonzo’s standards. And Jake is no Plant. He’s alright. A bit pitchy, but alright. He’s not holding any of the high notes though. Not even trying, nope. What a wimp.
The guitar solo starts after a few minutes of all-round decent performance. I feel as if literally everyone in the room is looking at the bearded man with the black Gibson cradled in his arms. I feel like even I’m looking at him and no one else.
He starts playing. His eyes are still closed. He’s swaying on the spot, his head bowed, almost in reverence (to the guitar? To himself? To Jimmy’s solo?), and his fingers are moving so fast, so skillfully (that’s what she said, my mind sniggers, but I shush it quickly) and I realize that I’m hearing something special, something not ordinary, and it makes me feel something, I don’t know what, and he’s just there on the stage under the cheap blue spotlight and it’s like – it’s like the same feeling all over again, pizza crumbs and sea-salted air. It hits me suddenly, like the taste of tequila in my mouth. I have never seen anyone play guitar like this before.
It reminds me of the sea. It reminds me of the time I was half-drowned in it. It reminds of the savage seduction of the man-ocean, the way the waves lifted me up and ripped me apart, every note, every chord, held the same breathlessness, not quite suffocation, the same lungfuls of saline water, and I don’t know how he’s doing it, I don’t know how he’s doing this with a fucking guitar, but I wish I was closer to the stage because I want to see his face, a guitarist’s face while he’s playing a solo is one of the most beautiful things ever, and with the kind of music this bearded man (Calvin? Dexter?) is producing, I know his face will be beautiful; I know that right now he is not anywhere, he is not on the stage at the Green Door in Benna Lui, he is just somewhere else, like I am somewhere else, he is somewhere with his guitar and the music that’s in him, and I envy him, I want to go to a place like that too, without weed and without tequila and without little blue pills, I want to go dancing, or playing guitar, or writing, or singing.
After the solo stops all I can hear is the guitar, through the bass and the drums and the vocals. And I know I’m staring at Calvin/Dexter/Mason like the psycho that I am but I can’t stop and I don’t know why.
It’s funny really; he’s not one of those guys who people, or girls, would like to look at. I can’t see his face properly anyway because he bows his head when he plays, his hands skimming over the guitar, making love to it, and his shadows fall across the stage in a way that doesn’t make him seem human. His shape isn’t pleasing to the eye – he’s disproportionately normal – he has too long legs and too long fingers, a skinny torso and broad shoulders skimmed by the ends of the hair on his head. He’s wearing normal clothes too, not stylish black like Jake or a funky overpriced band shirt like the drummer. But the thing is, I don’t want to look at his clothes or his beard. I just want to look at him. Does that make sense? Have I had too much tequila?
I look at Mikaela and she’s completely disinterested in the guitarist (I’ve given up on his name). I look around and so is everyone else. They’ve moved on but he’s still playing, only this time he’s not alone so everyone is looking at Jake because he’s good looking and has a mike in his hand and is winking at the girls in the audience.
Micky tells me that we get to go hang out with the band once the gig is done and for once I don’t mumble that I have to go home because for once I actually want to see someone – the guitarist – Calvin/Dexter/Mason (or is it Jason?). I want to see what his face is like. I don’t know what I’d say to him when I do. Maybe I’d just walk away.
So I tell her okay. I ask her how she met Jake. She shrugs and tells me they met only that night, at the pub she’d gone to before. He was borrowing amps from his friend Skylar because the ones they normally used crashed. Then she bumped into him and they got talking. And then he invited her to the gig.
I ask her if they expect us to sleep with them. She giggles.
“Well I wouldn’t mind, would you?”
I just look back at the stage.
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a.n : so it turns out that putting a guitar solo into words is one of the hardest things i've ever done but it turned out ok. not great, but ok. i'll probably edit this chapter later.
