Free Struts & Frets by Jon Skovron

mic stand to bring it back upright.
    TJ counted us in and we started over. Rick played the rightbass line. And you could always count on TJ. He was the best musician in the band, without a doubt. So after a little bit, the three of us finally found our groove together and it started to sound like a real song.
    But then Joe began to sing. I glanced over and saw him holding the sheaf of lyric papers that I had typed up for him. He wasn’t really reading from it too much though, just kind of mumbling something that sounded close to the words. He was too busy winking and thrusting his hips suggestively at Laurie, who giggled shyly with her hand over her mouth. Joe was paying so little attention to his singing that he actually started up on the third verse when we were supposed to go to the bridge. The three of us kept going, and it took him a few measures to catch on. When he did, his face immediately contorted from sly flirtation to absolute fury.
    â€œWHAT ARE YOU DOING?!!!” he roared.
    We stopped playing.
    â€œWhat just happened there?” he demanded. This wasn’t just Mean Joe. This was Mean Joe Impressing His Girlfriend.
    Gramps once told me that fools rush in where wise men fear to tread. That was me all over.
    â€œYou went to the third verse,” I said.
    â€œYeah?” he snarled, his eyes wide like some kind of psycho killer. “And?”
    â€œIt was time to go to the bridge,” I said.
    â€œOh, well,” he growled. “Excuse me!” He turned toward Laurie, waving the lyrics in the air above his head. “Maybe if these weren’t the most asinine lyrics ever written, it’d be easier to remember them. I mean, come on.” He held out the pages in front of him and began to read them like a lawyer or something. “‘Make believe myself in a thirty-second drop, but I don’t believe in fortune or my luck to stop’? Or how about, ‘Fantasized fictional tragedy to feel. When all is said and done it seems like no big deal’? You asked what ‘Tragedy of Wisdom’ meant? Well, what the hell does
this
mean?”
    I said, “It means—”
    â€œSHUT UP!!! SHUT THE FUCK UP!” Joe’s face was bright red now, and a thick vein stood out on his forehead. I don’t think I’d ever seen him this angry. Or scary. “IT’S DUMB!” he yelled. “IT MAKES NO SENSE! All it does is rhyme because that’s all you can do. But I guess we’re stuck with you, now aren’t we? So let’s just start over again and see if we can somehow get this shit off the ground.”
    Total silence. It was one thing to crack on someone’s clothes or hair or whatever. It was something completely different to knock the thing that someone sees as the most important thing in his life. My head was burning and I really wanted to just jump on him and pound him. I imagined myfists as sledgehammers beating him senseless. But part of me knew it wouldn’t go like that. He was so much bigger and meaner than I was. He’d destroy me.
    â€œOkay,” I said quietly. “TJ, count us in again.”
    TJ clicked his drumsticks together and we started over. Rick fumbled for a second, but then got it together and the song started to pick up again. Joe glared at us, letting a full verse of music go by before he joined in. Then he went back to his mic and his pieces of paper and his winking at Laurie and the song limped on.
    I didn’t really feel like doing anything that night, but Rick didn’t seem to care.
    â€œLet’s just go get some coffee at Idiot Child,” he said as we walked through the Parks and Rec parking lot to the Boat.
    â€œI won’t be any fun,” I told him.
    â€œYou never are,” he said. “Anyway, I can’t just let you go home, listen to Radiohead, and mope all night. Come on. Just you and me. It’ll be a nice, quiet night.”
    I knew he was lying, of course. There was