LNOYL

Her arm is draped across the olive green bench. Her hair is always an attractive contrast against the white collared uniform she wears. My buster brown dress shoes, white socks, grey pants, and round flaccid shirt collars meet the obligatory high school dress code with pure function. Like the clothes I wear, my personality would appear to be default – I haven’t struck out on any particular defining path as yet, and im quite unnoticeable as a result. I’ve got the guitar, but it’s still insular at this point – im wood-shedding in the basement. So I can’t understand why Sophia is actually talking to me.

A summer family trip has been planned and we will soon be piling into one of those old 1980 toyota mini vans that looks like star trek. A second family is going to pile in the van and travel with us as well. They are like an aunt and uncle to me, and I’ve been calling them that since I can remember. The engine in the toyota is situated underneath the driver seat (maybe that had something to do with what happened), and there is a huge sliding door in which the eventually somber passengers will exit. The morning before we all enter the space wagon and leave for disney land, Sophia calls and asks if i want to come over and give her a guitar lesson. We must have talked about it on the bus, where she looked so cool to me, and made me feel like somebody. There is this new acoustic ballad on the radio called “more than words”, and all the girls are really into it, and I guess want to learn acoustic guitar as a result (you would later hear a lot of misgivings after that album was purchased – the rest of it was comprised of funk fused with pregrunge 90’s metal).

The morning that im to go to Sophia’s house is the same day im supposed to leave on our road trip, so most of my stuff is already packed in the van. I decided to take a quick shower before I go to her place. There is only one bar of soap remaining – a perfumed pink bar that my mom sometimes gets when its on sale. It’s called ‘rosemilk’, and I smell like Monsanto’s version of a fresh croquet of flowers. I throw a pair of black jean shorts on (rolled up at the ends with the stringy cut bits hanging out) and an oversized t-shirt. My antiperspirant is packed away in the space van, so I lock the doors in my parents bathroom, and start looking around their cabinets for something i can use. It’s thirty degrees outside, and i’ve got to walk to her place after all. I find this new liquid antiperspirant in the medicine cabinet, and run out the door. It’s one of those funny types that looks like a ping pong ball at the buisiness end.

Im half way there, when the tingles begin. The ping pong ball roll on deodorant is reacting with the fragrance in the soap, and the combination of chemicals are brewing something awful. I begin to smell like an overcooked cheese and cabbage roll. By the time I arrive at her place, Im so embarrassed that I squeeze my arms together in an attempt to hide this chemical stench. You know the cliqued scene where some guy goes to give golf or instrument lessons to the centre of his attention, and leans over for that instructive embrace while he does it? I bet he didn’t smell like a cabbage roll – and all I could think of when I went up to her room is how much I did. There were no cliches happening that day…

The road trip ends up being a disaster, because the adults are having a ‘falling out’, while us kids have no where to escape misdirected wrath. As far as I know, we are supposed to stay over at the first house we visit in Florida. The people who live there are relatives of the family we are traveling with. I walk in the house, and my jaw drops to the ground. I see guitars, amps and pedals all over. What is this place? I meet the owner of all this equipment, and tell him that hey, I play too. We began to talk, and thats when I figure out that this guy used to test out effects for Roger Mayer. Roger Mayer was the engineer who made Jimi Hendrix’s fuzz and octave pedals in the 60′s. You know, all the little boxes he used to step on that made his guitar explode and squeal through a marshal or sunn amplifier stack. The sounds of purple haze. And purple haze, the first time I heard it, well, it just opened me up to a different way of thinking about music all together. And here he was, this living, breathing link to one of my sonic idols, handing me a guitar so we could jam. The chemistry was exothermic and we spent hours playing and talking about sounds. I began to feel like all that playing in the basement – that it could amount to something – I could take it somewhere. It was quiet in the other room – were the adults patching things up in there? I got a tap on the shoulder. I begged my dad to let me stay…but “Roger Mayers” and Hendrix was just that noise that came from the basement, and we going to stay in a road side motel instead.

The next day, we ate breakfast in a mall food court. The tension from the day before had my dad on edge, and he got really upset about something. As usual, “something” was so inconsequential that you cant even remember the initiating event that set things off. He walked out of the mall, got into the car, and drove away from us while we stood on the sidewalk. We were stranded in the middle of some mall in florida. I eventually found the toyota parked elsewhere in the mall parking lot – with my dad perched in it looking through the windshield. I pounded on the windshield, and yelled “this is bullshit”…his eyes widened, because I don’t think  id’ ever raised my voice or swore in his direction like that before. He was more offended that I raised my voice to him than anything else. In that way, the seeds of resentment were planted in the orange juice capital of the world. They were healthy, and would flourish over the next few years…

Back in London, I went back to pumping gas for the rest of the summer. I didn’t see her again until school started again, but I would meet up with Sophia many times as ten years would pass, as we grew up into our twenties. And every time, I would be out of sync with her. I was mostly behind, once in a short while ahead, but never could I make contact in the middle. The last day I saw her, Sophia wore this t-shirt with an image of hendrix on it. He had his bandanna affixed to his fro, head up to the sky during his rendition of the star spangled banner as he worked the Roger Mayer Univibe pedal beneath his feet. I told Sophia I was getting out of London, I was moving down the line, going to try out this place called “Guelph”. Maybe go to school there and start something new. She said “why would you do that”, “why wouldn’t you just do something else – just find work here like regular people do”? Instead of looking her back in the eyes and searching for truth beyond the face value of those words, and instead of accepting her as she was, like she did for me all those years back on the bus when I had nowhere to go, I turned on her with a look of disdain and a shake of the head. Is that when I started trying to ‘get ahead’, by leaving other people behind?