“At least you have a dad. Mine left before I was born. I’ve never even met him.”
Cal grabbed the drumsticks from his back pocket and started playing a beat on the edge of the picnic table. Then he nodded toward my guitar and said, “Wanna jam?”
I wasn’t sure how to do that, but I picked up the guitar and played the chord progression from an old Doug Blackman tune. Cal continued to play drums on the table, humming a melody over what I was doing, and pretty soon we had the makings of a song. Not a good song, but a song nevertheless.
That’s when something started happening inside of me. It was as though the world was changing right in front of my eyes. I was changing. I know most of the time people describe monumental moments of their life as taking shape, but it’s the exact opposite for me. I’d spent the last two years in a sharp and silent world, playing guitar by myself, and as Cal and I played together, I felt all the jagged edges inside of me start to soften and blur into something warm and ecstatic. My life suddenly seemed more bearable than it had in a long time, and I was glad Bob had bailed on me.
Cal and I stayed in the woods and made up songs all afternoon. When it started to get cold, I put my shoes back on, and we packed up and headed toward my house.
On our hike home, Cal asked me what I was up to for the rest of the weekend; I wrote that my mom was gone until Sunday night. She thought I was going to be with my dad, so she and Chuck had gone to Tahoe, and I hadn’t bothered to tell her otherwise.
Cal suggested that he and I go back to my house, listen to Chuck’s CDs, and learn more songs.
Cool, I wrote.
As we were crossing Panoramic Highway, Cal looked over at me and said, “Yo, what do you want to be when you grow up?”
I’d never given it much thought because Bob had already decided for me. I stopped and wrote, My dad says I’m going to take over his company. U?
“Duh,” Cal said. “I’m going to be a musician.”
Until Cal said that, it had never occurred to me that I could choose to play guitar as a profession, but it suddenly seemed like what I was born to do.
Me too, I wrote.
Cal spun around and walked backward, glaring at me with his little owl eyes as if he were a strigiform truth detector trying to measure how serious I was.
“For real?” he asked. “You swear?”
I wrote I SWEAR on my palm and held it up to him, nodding frantically at the same time.
He spun back around, once again took his place beside me, and we continued down my street.
So many new thoughts and dreams were rippling inside of me.
“Harp,” Cal said. “I have another serious question.”
I tried to curtail my smile because it didn’t seem cool to smile as much as I could feel myself smiling, but no one had ever given me a nickname, at least not a nickname that wasn’t an insult, and I felt as if Cal had just uncovered the real me. I stopped walking and tried to look serious, even though I suspected I was still smiling like a cartoon character.
“Do you want to be in my band?” Cal said.
It was as if all the stuff inside of me was about to gush out.
“I mean it’s just me right now, but I need a guitar player, and not only are you the best guitar player I’ve ever met, but you’re pretty decent looking too—girls like cute guitarists—and we’re going to be in the same class, and that means we can practice all the time and grow up to be the Campbell and Petty of our generation. What do you say?”
I whipped out my notebook and was about to write YES! as big as I could fit it on the page, but that didn’t seem emphatic enough. I wanted Cal to know I was more serious about this than I’d ever been about anything.
Cal was waiting for my answer. And I don’t think he ever truly understood the significance of what happened next.
I looked him in the eye, took a deep breath, and said, “I definitely want to be in your band.”
It was the first time I’d spoken in over two years.
“Cool,” Cal said with a casual shrug.
He took my notebook from me and wrote up a contract stating that he and I were now best friends and bandmates for life. We both signed it, and then Cal folded up the paper, put it in his pocket, and followed me up my driveway.
SEVEN.
Cal and I were inseparable all through high school. His mom, Terry, used to call us the Reese’s Twins on account of an old commercial for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups that went two great tastes that taste great together or some such thing. She said that, much like chocolate and peanut butter, we were pretty awesome on our own, but that as a duo we were unstoppable. She actually used that word: “unstoppable.” I’m sure she only said it because she was trying to be nice, because nothing about my personality screamed unstoppable, but she and Cal were both good at making me feel like I was worth something, and that meant a lot.
Every day after school, Cal and I would go back to my house and do our homework. Despite our obsession with music, we were both excellent students. I worked hard because Bob threatened to take away my guitar if I didn’t maintain my GPA. Cal worked hard because he said slacker musicians were a cliché, and he refused to be
