keeps hassling me about retiring from my retirement job now that the kids are gone, but I already do nothing all day behind this counter, so I don’t see why doing nothing at home is any better.”
I smiled. Andrew was the kind of person you really couldn’t be in a bad mood around. Mostly because if you were, he’d start telling all kinds of corny jokes that were a hell of a lot worse than whatever was bothering you.
“To be fair to Becky, your definition of retirement is a little questionable.”
He just scoffed and leaned over the counter, his paunch squishing over the wood. “So, what brings you by today? Since you're a big famous rock star now, I know you didn’t come just to hang out with a silly old man.”
“You’re not old, and I’m not famous. The band is famous,” I reminded him. He just rolled his eyes. The truth was, I didn’t really know why I’d come. Just to get out of the apartment, I guess, but I felt stupid admitting that. “Anyway, I’ve got some time off, so I figured I’d try something new.”
“A new instrument?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.
I shrugged. “I’ve got a couple guitars in storage, but I’m in the mood for something different. Acoustic, maybe.”
“Now that I can help you with,” he said, coming around from behind the counter. I followed him over to the various guitars displayed on hooks on the far wall from top to bottom. “I’ve got everything. Fender, Ibanez, Yamaha...pick your poison.”
I studied the instruments for a few moments, finally gravitating toward a plain-looking acoustic made of light-colored wood.
“The Martin D-28,” Andrew said with a low whistle. “She might not be flashy, but that’s the Rolls-Royce of acoustics. That there’s the same model I used to woo Becky.”
I laughed, taking the guitar from him when he lifted it down from the wall. “Good enough for me. How much?”
Andrew gave me a scolding look. “Your money’s no good here. You know that.”
I sighed. We went through this every time. A few years back, the shop had run into some hard times like most of the other shops on the strip, and I’d bailed him out. Tune In had always been a safe haven for me, one of the few constants in my life after bouncing from one foster home to the next, and I wanted it to be that haven for other kids for a long time to come. There were few good places and people left, so it felt like it was worth preserving the ones that existed.
“That was just payment for all the shit you put up with,” I told him. I could tell he was about to argue, so I added, “If you don’t want the cash, put it toward someone else’s tab the next time another squirrely little stoner kid shows up.”
He gave a weary sigh, but I knew I’d won.
I paid up and bought a gig bag to carry my new acquisition home. With her strapped to my back, I felt kind of like a troubadour or something. By the time I got back, I felt lighter than when I’d left, which was the point of the outing, I guess.
I sat on the couch and put some trash TV on in the background while I got to know my new toy. After a few minutes of tuning, I decided it was a boy. He needed a badass name to make up for the fact that he looked like the mid-level accountant of guitars, no matter what Andrew said.
Johnny… Rocket… Ace.
There we go.
Once I’d settled on a name, I decided to fuck around with some of the melodies I’d been doodling on napkins and whatever odd scraps of paper I found around, because I couldn’t justify wasting a piece of paper on that shit. It took a while to get used to playing a regular guitar let alone an acoustic, but it came back faster than I’d expected.
The first bar I tried out actually wasn’t that bad, so I kept going and wound up freestyling until I had the rough outline of a song. A shitty song, but a song nonetheless.
What the hell. I put my phone on and decided to record it as I worked out some of the kinks, so at least I could go back and listen to see where I went wrong. That had helped me progress faster with the bass.
Once I got into it, time just kind of slipped away,