Captive Audience. Dave Reidy

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“Can I borrow that?”

      “Suit yourself,” the woman next to Lisa said.

      I picked up the binder and a stubby half-pencil and brought them to a table near the stage. I flipped to the Fs, found “Faithfully,” and jotted its alphanumeric code on a white slip of paper. Then I mounted the stage, handed the paper to the DJ, and waited my turn in the wings.

       THINGLESS

      Kyle woke up to a terrifying realization: he would start high school in two weeks and he had yet to find a thing. He hadn’t had a thing in junior high, and that had worked out okay, but El Dorado High had almost thirteen-hundred students. Kyle was sure that if he showed up on the first day of high school without a thing, he’d be swept up in the swarm and lost for good.

      He’d seen it happen. Two years ago, Kyle’s next-door neighbor, Starlee, had started high school knowing exactly what her thing would be. She’d been co-captain of the dance team in junior high and spent three years choreographing, rehearsing and performing routines. Watching her lithe, precise movements during the halftime shows of junior-high football games, Kyle had marveled that Starlee, who’d begun to get her body, was the same girl with whom he’d spent so many summer nights playing Ghosts in the Graveyard. Back then, Kyle had considered himself Starlee’s equal—her better where running and choosing hiding places were concerned—but by junior high, running and hiding weren’t the yardsticks anymore. The year Kyle was in sixth grade and Starlee was in eighth, they spent every day at the same small school, and evenings and weekends in homes just fifteen feet apart, but they rarely said a word to one another.

      Two weeks after enrolling at El Dorado High, Starlee was cut from the dance team. After that, she stopped doing her hair and putting on makeup. She was home from school by three-thirty most every day and emerged from the house only to smoke cigarettes on the crumbling slab of concrete at her back door. Kyle could not remember the last time he saw Starlee smile. If not having a thing could bring a creature like Starlee so low, Kyle shuddered to think what thinglessness would do to him.

      Kyle had supposed that his thing—the thing he was meant to have—would manifest itself somehow, perhaps as a hand-me-down from an older cousin or a gleam in the mud of a creek bank. Such a revelation was still possible, Kyle figured, but he could no longer afford to wait for it.

      For some time, Kyle had thought that the guitar would make a good thing. He liked the look of a guitar, the bowed symmetry of the body and the slight angle at which the head emerged from the neck. Guitars looked cool in a way that Kyle didn’t. But more importantly, guys who made the guitar their thing put themselves outside the usual pecking order. They didn’t sit around wishing they’d made the football team or been elected to student government. They hung out in each other’s backyards and carports, playing and singing. Kyle knew he wasn’t going to top the pecking order at El Dorado High, and he didn’t think he would want to if he could, so getting outside it seemed like good idea.

      With time running short, Kyle didn’t bother to consider other options. He dressed without showering and walked a mile and a half in the South Arkansas heat to the music store near the community college, carrying all of his graduation and lawn-mowing money—150 dollars—in the right hip pocket of his shorts.

      When Kyle pushed open the store’s front door, rusted bells rang above him and a sweet-and-sour combination of resin and cigarette smoke filled his nose. An older man sat on a stool behind the glass case that served as the store’s counter. He smoked a cigarette. On the pegboard walls to his left and right and behind him, dozens of guitars hung vertically from rubber-coated brackets.

      “I’d like to get a guitar,” Kyle said to the older man.

      “OK,” the man said. He did not get up from the stool.

      “What kind of guitar should I get?” Kyle asked.

      “That depends. How much money do you have to spend?”

      “A hundred and fifty.”

      The man extinguished his cigarette and slid gingerly from the stool. He sidestepped out from behind the glass case and walked toward the wall to his right. Kyle eyed the guitars in the man’s path. Would he pull down the black one with the mother-of-pearl inlays? Or the one with the Mexican drawings on the front? Near the front door, the man reached up for a standard spruce-top model and lifted it gently from its bracket. He held the guitar’s body to his chin, closed one eye, and looked down the neck as if checking a rifle sight. Then he handed the guitar to Kyle, who leaned away a little when he took the instrument, afraid that he might hit himself in the mouth with it somehow.

      “What kind is it?” Kyle asked.

      “A Dean.”

      On the Internet, Kyle had been reading about Gibsons and Martins and Taylors. “Are Deans good?”

      “They’re good for the money,” the man said. “This model’s worth two-fifty, but it’s on sale for one-thirty-five. That sale price means no returns, so you’ll have to be sure you want it.”

      Kyle looked the instrument over, turning it awkwardly and feeling its weight in his hands. “I want it.”

      “You sure?” the man said.

      Kyle nodded. He handed the guitar to the man, pulled a wad of bills from his shorts, and set it on the counter.

      After giving Kyle his change and a receipt, the man sat down on his stool and tuned the guitar one string at a time. Then he began making shapes on the fingerboard with his left hand and strumming them into sound with his right thumb. Kyle wanted to be able to make one of those shapes, but the man didn’t hold any one of them long enough for Kyle to memorize it.

      “You know any chords?” the man asked.

      Kyle wasn’t sure what a chord was. He shook his head.

      “You want to be a rocker?”

      “Sure.”

      “I’ll teach you a good rock chord. Once you know this one you can play a half-dozen others.” The man flattened his left index finger against all six strings at the first fret, then placed the callused tip of his middle finger on a string at the second fret and his ring and pinky fingertips on separate strings at the third. Then he ran his thumb down the strings over the sound hole.

      “Which chord is that?”

      “F,” the man said.

      Kyle liked the sound of F.

      “You try.” The man stood up and offered the guitar to Kyle. When Kyle had the guitar body secured between his elbow and his side, the man pulled Kyle’s left index finger straight and mashed it against the strings at the first fret. Then he placed three of Kyle’s fingertips on the strings, digging the phosphor bronze into the soft pink skin. Kyle began strumming while the man’s fingers were still on his.

      “Hold on a minute, now,” the man said. Then he took two steps back. “Now try.”

      Kyle pulled his thumb down over the strings. His F didn’t sound like the man’s. He felt the fourth string vibrating beneath the tip of his pinky and pressed it harder, but the center knuckle buckled and muted several strings, so he stopped.

      “There you go,”

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