American Love Songs (6 page)

 

“Sorry,” he said sheepishly. “Ive always wanted one, but Im chicken. Its really cool.”

 

“It was a mistake,” Parker snapped, and then his cheeks turned pink. “Can I get dressed now?” he added more gently.

 

Taken aback, Jake stepped out of the way. “Yeah, sure. Sorry.” Parker gave him a tight smile, and that was that.

 

7. Parker was celibate
¹⁸
.
¹⁸
Or else really oblivious.

He had to be. There was no other explanation for the way he ignored the advances of every single person who hit on him in the bar every time they performed.

8. He was fastidiously tidy.

Parker kept his things to himself with a tenacity that bordered on paranoia. If Parker hadnt been using it within the last five minutes, it was tucked away in his bedroom, with the exception of Kylies guitar, which stood on its stand on the opposite side of the television from Jakes. To be fair, sometimes he forgot things, but they were small: pens, notepads, an occasional spoon from his coffee. In general they were things that he used when he didnt have his glasses on, so Jake surmised that once he put them down he just forgot about them, and since he couldnt see them anymore once he was more than five feet away, that was where they stayed.

9. In direct relation with number eight, Parker lost his glasses all the time.

Hed leave them on the back of the toilet while he had a shower and search the kitchen relentlessly for them once hed finished his coffee. Hed put them on top of the fridge while he was getting out a carton of ice cream in the middle of June so they wouldnt fog up, but then inspiration struck and he wandered off to pick at his guitar strings and ended up squinting for the rest of the day. He lost them when they were sitting on the top of his head and when they were clipped to the front of his shirt. He put them on the windowsill and closed the blinds. He took them off to wipe his eyes while he was lying on the floor at Chriss after a Monty Python marathon, and they accidentally got knocked under the table. The sheer number of ways Parker managed to lose his glasses was mystifying to Jake, and in self-defense—it was always when they had to leave to go somewhere that Parker noticed his glasses were missing—he started keeping track of where hed last seen them.

“On top of the CD rack,” he said one Thursday before Parker could ask him.

 

When he turned around, Parker was watching him strangely, having located his spectacles. “What?”

 

Parker shook his head. “Nothing. Lets go, I want to grab a bite to eat on the way.”

He thought about buying Parker one of those strings that went around your neck to keep you from losing them, the kind seniors wore, as a joke, but somehow he never got around to it. And anyway, it was kind of nice to think that Parker needed him.

10. Parker didnt talk about his family.

Jake didnt have to be a genius to figure that one out. Parker was, for all intents and purposes, a runaway. He must have had someone at some point—his manners were too precise for someone brought up in the foster care system, and the way he reacted to Jakes mama, now that they knew each other better, was too warm, almost longing. Like he missed someone in particular, not like hed missed out on having a mother at all. Every time Mama Brenner paid him a compliment, or gave him a hug, or saved him the last cookie, Parker blushed, or held on too tight, or looked at the cookie like it held all the answers in the world.

Maybe Parker wasnt talking about it much, but that didnt mean Jake wasnt listening.
Second Movement: With the Band

J
AKE liked to think that the Wayward Sons were a what-you-see-iswhat-you-get kind of group. What he meant by that was that they didnt spend a lot of time thinking about their
image
. Of course hed helped Parker with his wardrobe some, but that was more of an act of mercy; there was contrived, over-thought clothes and behavior, and then there was going out in public looking like youd dressed in the dark.

Take Chris, for example. Chris was a douchebag, and the way he presented himself did nothing to hide that fact. He had the typical rockstar hair, dyed dark, and he had spent the entire drive up to todays concert styling it in the van and getting hair gel all over Jakes comb. He was vain, and he liked to wear his T-shirts too tight to show off his biceps. Not that Jake wasnt a little vain too—he did want to be a rock star, after all. Chris just spent an awful lot of time on his hair for a straight guy, that was all.

The point was, you could tell a lot about Chris by the way he dressed. He didnt bother trying to hide it. Jake liked to hum that Carly Simon song under his breath sometimes to remind him.

Then there was Jimmy, with his artless dreads hiding piercing blue eyes. He was earnest and suffered from a total lack of selfabsorption that sometimes made him prone to forgetting to shower, though Chris always reminded him when the smell became noticeable. Jimmy was no more capable of subterfuge than he was of spelling it.

Either way, both Chris and Jimmy had some kind of innate rockstar appeal. When they had first started out, Jake had tried to achieve the look, but his own hair did that curling-up-at-the-ends, butterwouldnt-melt, look-at-me-Im-about-twelve thing, even though he was far from innocent. The one time he had tried to color it, though, it had turned out ginger, so it was a mistake he hadnt repeated. He was destined to be the boy-next-door type, and really, that wasnt so bad.

Parker, though. Parker was shy—he hid behind his glasses. To Jakes knowledge, he had never spent more than ten minutes in the shower. He shone on stage not because he enjoyed having the audiences eyes on him but simply because he loved to play, and off of it he avoided attention like the plague. He was so painfully shy that Jake had to wonder why the hell hed ever want to be in a band in the first place. Intervention was going to be necessary on Parkers behalf, and it looked like Jake was the man for the job. “Are you okay, dude? You look like youre going to be sick.”

It was their first concert in front of an audience bigger than the bar crowd at Rock Lobster, and it was about a million fucking degrees outside. They were playing an outdoor venue, some local music festival—Chris did the arranging and Jake published the details on their blog, but right now he was so excited he couldnt even remember what it was called.

Parker went the same color has his washed-out green T-shirt, which Jake had learned spelled bad news for his digestive system. “Im okay,” he said, wheezing a little. “Im okay.”

Jake didnt believe him, but he was struggling for something he could do. It wasnt like there was a cure for stage fright, and if you were going to be in a band, you shouldnt need one.

Then he had an idea. “Gimme your glasses.”
“What?”
“Your glasses. Give them to me.”
“But I wont be able to see!”

“How bad is it?” Jake pressed. “Are you going to miss any notes? Fall off the stage?”

 

“No. Ill be able to see about five feet—”

 

“So give me your glasses,” Jake coaxed again. “Come on. Theyre sliding off your face right now anyway, dude.”

Parker finally relented, pulling the thick plastic frames down the bridge of his nose and handing them over. Jake folded the arms in and hooked them on his jeans pocket. “Okay. Now you cant see them.”

At first, Parker looked weird with his glasses off, somehow more vulnerable. Jake guessed that made a strange kind of sense, since he was essentially blind. His eyes were a funky greenish brown, like a kiwi or something. Jake had never noticed them before. Actually—Jake blinked, shaking himself. Actually, Parker was completely fucking hot, in that rock-star-cum-twink kind of way.
Who knew?

“Youre going to have to make sure I dont trip over anything,” Parker muttered, scratching the back of his head.

“I got your back,” Jake assured him, wrenching his neck to peer out at the assembled crowd. The band on now was just finishing up their set, the reverbs from the last chord echoing from the speakers. “We have, like, thirty seconds. You going to puke?”

“Maybe.”

Fuck
. Jake thought fast, spying the unlabeled bottle of Wild Turkey Chris had been drinking out of for the last hour and making a grab for it. “You like whiskey?”

“What?” Parker made a face. Jake took that for a “no.” “No, it burns.”

Jake felt kind of bad for what he was about to do, but hopefully Parker would thank him later. Or at least forgive him eventually. “Great. Drink this.”

“Is it whiskey?”
“No.”

Technically nothing so unrefined could make a claim at that name.

Jake winced even before Parker got the bottle to his lips and stood back when he started sputtering, bending over at the waist to hurl the contents of his stomach onto the ground at Jakes feet. Jake grimaced and took another step back.

“You said it wasnt whiskey!”
“I lied.” Jake shrugged, still feeling like an asshole. “Better?”

Parker looked up at him, eyes watering at the corners. He didnt look mad, although there was vomit on his chin. “Yeah,” he said at length, wiping a hand across his mouth. “Thanks, I guess.”

Chris took that moment to cozy up to them, swaying just a little. When he saw Parker, though, he straightened up, any hint of inebriation disappearing. “Were on in two minutes, guys. What the fucks going on?”

“Nerves,” Parker explained, gesturing unnecessarily to his mess. “Jake was just giving me some liquid courage.”

 

“Theres puke on your shirt,” Chris said succinctly. “Lose it and grab your stuff; come on, lets go.”

 

“He wants me to take my shirt off?” Parker asked forlornly as Chris jogged off to talk to Jimmy.

“This goes the way we hope it will, he wont be the last one,” Jake told him, trying to cheer him up. Parker just looked green again. “Come on, seriously. That shirt is gross.”

“If I take it off, Ill burn.”

“Yeah, well, you could use some color, you fainting southern belle, you.” Parker didnt bother reminding him that he was from South Dakota, and Jake turned away to triple-check the tuning on his bass. When he turned back again Parker was standing there in the sunlight, so pale it almost blinded him. “Dude. Do not look directly at your own skin.”

“Shut up.” Parker rubbed at his arms in an obvious display of self-consciousness. In the sunlight, the measures of Rotas “Theme for Romeo and Juliet” that covered his left shoulder and part of his back stood out in stark relief. Jake had seen it before, of course—hard to avoid when you were roommates—but the audience hadnt. “Hand me my guitar, would you?”

Jake did, though the contrast with the black body didnt do much for Parkers complexion either. “You ready to rock this thing?” “No,” Parker confessed frankly. “Does it matter?”

 

Jake shrugged. “Not really. We need you.”

 

Parker exhaled shakily, checking his tuning with a quick strum. “No pressure.”

There was a reason they hadnt told Parker there was a scout from a major label in the audience tonight, a contact of one of Chriss multitude of cousins, and that was it. Jake would have felt better if he could have talked about it with Parker, if Parker were right there being as nervous as he was, except for if Jake told him, he would probably explode. So he kept his mouth shut and smiled wanly, reaching out to touch the tattooed shoulder. “Hey. Its just like any other gig, okay? Look, you can even wear my lucky sunglasses.” He pulled them off his head, where theyd been resting, and slid them onto Parkers nose.

“I feel ridiculous,” Parker confessed. He could probably see even less now, since the lenses were smudged as hell.

 

“Yeah, but you
look
hot,” Jake told him sincerely, straightening up. He met Chriss eyes across the staging area. “Lets do this.”

He had to guide Parker with one hand on his shoulder until he was in place, and then—worse—he had to leave him there and take his own place on stage, all the way across on the other side, and hope he didnt trip over his own two feet or a patch cord and fall and make an ass out of them or break his guitar or something. A hundred very bad scenarios ran through Jakes mind—none of them had to do with his own performance anymore, or even Parkers; he knew they were both more than capable of this. It was just the possible unforeseen disasters that were nagging at him. He didnt have time to concentrate on any of them, though, because all of a sudden the master of ceremonies was introducing them and Chris stepped up to the mike.

The audience didnt know them, and that was more than a little unnerving. Jake had become accustomed to people standing still and paying attention when he was in the spotlight, even if it was just the usual Friday night crowd at Rock Lobster, and the fact that these people didnt seem to care about them one way or another was unsettling and made him feel small and insignificant. Jake tried to remind himself that this wouldnt be their last chance at a record deal and major label representation, but his mental peptalk got interrupted by Chris motioning Jimmy to count them in, and he just had to hold on tight and enjoy the ride.

He had a bad moment when Parker didnt come in when he was supposed to, and his heart nearly stopped as he looked over to see Parker staring blankly at his right hand, dark lenses in place, but Jimmy kept his cool and tapped out another measure, and this time Parker didnt miss his cue, guitar screaming into the afternoon, and Jake breathed a sigh of relief and looked away. Then it was his turn to knock out a complicated riff, and even though these people didnt know their work and so wouldnt know it if he screwed it up, the guys were counting on him. Centering himself, Jake let Parkers wailing guitar and Chriss steady vocals wash over him, concentrated on getting in the groove, and tried not to worry about stage presence. Whatever else people might say about the asshole, Chris had that part of the performance covered.

The song they were performing was one Parker had written—the first he had had the guts to show to Chris, and Jake was still kind of amazed that Chris didnt try to pick it to pieces, not that there was anything to criticize as far as Jake could see. It was catchy enough to be pop but driven and loud enough for the alt-rockers, and so what if the original lyrics were crap? That part was easy to fix. He lent his voice to the backing vocals and tried not to keep looking over to make sure Parker was okay, sure that it would come out against them somehow if it looked like Parker needed a babysitter or something.