Tuning the Guitar Player

[1]

I had no idea how to play billiards. Same went for pool. And I especially had no idea what the difference between the two of them was. I rubbed my eyes and vaguely listened to Connor’s explanation. A good board game interested me more. Hell, I would’ve even accepted Monopoly.

Roommates Connor and Zach from upstairs were already around the table when I ventured over to the common room with my favorite guitar in my hands. Its name was Parsley, although I long ago stopped telling people that. Not worth the questions and annoyance. If people learn your guitar has a name, they want to know if you sleep with it or treat it like a girlfriend. And it just gets worse from there.

I let the two of them set up the game while I practiced a riff stuck in my head for a while. No matter what I did with it though, the sound still played wrong. Seeing Zach‘s Star Wars T-shirt made me think about the time my music teacher showed us the difference between major and minor key. The Imperial March transforms into a soft and fluttery melody. And if you drop Hey Jude, it sounds morose. That seeded ideas in my mind. I was going to do something wild like that. Find some mixture of tones that unleashed just the sort of emotion stuck inside me creatively.

I made sure Parsley was set flat and I didn’t do anything amateurish like resting my thumb too far in front. Then, I cracked my knuckles a few times, made sure I had a pick even though I was fine without, and… retreated to comfortable sounds, spending a long time just replaying familiar notes. Good thing my guitar wasn’t actually my girlfriend, otherwise I’d probably bore her to death with my hesitant fingering.

My last shower, which smelled like too long ago, wrapped my brain up in an inspiration haze. Everything from ditties to epic ballads played in my head like frantic dreams. All my body needed were my fingers. Unfortunately, the moment I was out of the shower with my hair drying, clothes on, and Parsley cradled in my hands, most of that was gone, like the drifting vapors of hot steam once I opened the door.

The only piece left was, “I’ve got a song for you, I wish I could write it down.” Apt. I took my not-girl for a walk. Surely some stray visual this afternoon would trigger the remnants of what briefly slotted into position between my neurons. Shirley. Don’t call me ‘Shirley’. I’ll call you, surely. Hurly burly whirly early pearly surly Shirley. Song long tong bong prong strong wrong thong. Down town crown brown frown gown.

I didn’t need to rhyme everything, but it felt like a better bridge. I borrowed Josh’s rhyming dictionary in freshman year with the implicit promise that I would eventually return it. I’d since lost that particular dictionary twice when moving dorms and acquired new copies all while fostering the pointless illusion that it was the same book, like a mom reincarnating her child’s immortal goldfish.

Before the game properly started, I looked up and happened to see Taylor Lee wandering around with his hands in his pockets, his head down, and his long black hair covering his eyes. Dude looked like he was having the worst day. I called out to him and he seemed surprised that anyone else was around or even noticed him. We shared a couple of pre-requisite classes but just talked as much as random group assignments ordained. He seemed like a cool guy, just very quiet. When I brought him around to the dorm, I had to glare at my friends of my roommates when they asked Taylor if he was into guns. A mixture of genuine curiosity and cliche probing.

Taylor was totally flummoxed about the topic. He seemed to understand from his appearance and mood what they were getting at, and the poor guy looked completely sickened. After that, I noticed he shifted to more light colors, tans, and yellows.

At first, it seemed like he was going to dash away like some frightened deer, but he recognized me and crept over quietly. Connor, practically bouncing off the walls, gave him a huge invitation and extolled the virtues of having four players on this table rather than three. Taylor recognized all of us and seemed to brighten ever so slightly. I fumbled through my chords, searching for the perfect pleasant background music to boost the party. A bard, I was not.

Taylor, after the initial excitement of joining the group, dipped into a melancholy groove. He kept looking over at Zach as though there were something he wanted to say but couldn’t quite figure out the words for. I could tell he was checking out the artistic Millennium Falcon on Zach‘s shirt. There used to be a day when something like that spoke the same language to all geeks. Now, it was all obfuscated by the dilution and confusion of Disney+. I could probably write a song about that, as if there weren’t already enough geek rants songs.

We chatted lightly towards and across one another. I couldn’t tell you what was said. Just stray neurons releasing their excess charges. Mostly there were belches foreshadowing the desire for supper at the student union. I was able to send a few balls down the far side but I also scratched. I think. One childhood Christmas, I actually received a convertible sports table with ping pong, air hockey, and pool. Didn’t help my understanding of the rules of any of them. Better Christmas was the Game Boy Advance year.

Not that I didn’t appreciate it. I appreciated every year that my parents opted not to separate and instead kept together so they could scream at me and each other even louder. I played pool on the sports table maybe twice in my life before it became a thing to hoard junk on.

This version was fun, mostly owing to the company. I could almost feel as though the ghost of a melody wanted to breach through my skull and flow across the strings. But it was one of those painful expulsions you get where you have to bear down because you’ve forgotten to drink water for the last day or two. Tightening my grip didn’t help at all.

When I looked up, I could almost see a weird shimmer around Taylor, as though I’d spent all night staring at a tiny cellphone and my eyes weren’t ready to see the world as it actually was. Blinking a few times didn’t remedy it. He was shrinking.

Taylor’s first reaction was to brush at something like it was a stray cobweb. His wild hair flattened into orderly locks that came to rest against his shoulders. The changes practically exploded after that. His face got rounded and his top shrunk but also spread down to his thighs. It kept the Marvel theme though. Along the way, he acquired black nails, matching lipstick, and a spiked choker. Gorgeous black eyeliner traced around his shocked, wide eyes. The lowest fringe of a black leather skirt encircled his thighs and extended suspender straps to hold up a pair of long socks.

And he was clearly no longer a guy anymore. I mean, I didn’t know 100% for certain, but it looked damn obvious. His arms were so tiny, half swallowed up by those sleeves. Everything about him was dainty, cute, and girly in a starkly goth fashion.

“Ohmygosh!” Those crammed-together words squeaked out of his throat in a way I’d never heard before. She… Yeah, she… looked around at us as though we had to have the answers. I had no clue what to say.

Connor managed a not-very helpful, “Dude…what?” Taylor didn’t stay long after that, rushing down the hallway as though she had pins and needles in her legs and had never used them before. I continued to have no idea what to say when it was just the three of us and the surreal normalcy of the common room.

Zach looked like he was about to say something as he fussed with his ball-hitting stick. He squinted and then started to go a little blurry as well. I straightened where I was sitting and watched with my jaw clenched.

With a vibrant blink, his eyes turned a sharp shade of green. The facial changes seemed more subtle with his eyebrows darkening. The Star Wars shirt shifted for a long-sleeved gray sweater. And he wound up in a skirt. But that wasn’t the most obvious change.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

The poor guy got tits way out there. Extreme rounded pillows level. I swear I could see his nipples wanting to destroy the material.

“Oh, woah…woah,” was said with a different voice than he had moments ago. Connor checked that the new girl before him was Zach. She didn’t have an immediate answer, which made sense. Anyone put through something like that would absolutely question who the heck they were in the aftermath.

Her search for understanding went in a particular direction. She squirmed a little and pressed her thighs together. I looked around too. Something was absolutely going on and my heart thundered in my chest for a weird, messy ball of reasons. Was something happening because of our proximity to the billiards table or was it something through the window? I didn’t have the faintest clue about that, but I had an increasing hunch about what was happening with Zach.

She had her legs together and was bouncing on them in a way that made her look like she was about to shudder and moan. This weird guy liked to watch hardcore porn whenever he came around to visit our dorm. Josh knew him from somewhere. What Zach was doing felt like the prelude to one of those videos.

I wasn’t a prude or a horn dog, but I still couldn’t stop myself from watching with my mouth slightly open and my eyebrows raised as I leaned forward and gaped at what this second spontaneously created girl was doing. Clearly, she was about to get off. Never in a thousand years would I have put money down on this interruption to a prosaic pool game.

She was crossing over into territory that made me quite concerned about anyone else stumbling across our current situation. Thank goodness it was a lazy afternoon. Before it surpassed not fake When Harry Met Sally territory, Zach came to her senses and looked brightly embarrassed. I didn’t blame her, but this was definitely the last straw for hanging around.

The new girl stumbled through some words, but I wasn’t paying attention because I wanted out before I became the next, salacious sideshow. I gripped Parsley securely, checked to make sure I hadn’t dropped anything out of my pocket or left anything behind that would’ve required me to swing back around, and left through the sliding door to the immediate right.

The air inside the common area wasn’t particularly stuffy, but I could breathe easier walking along the side of Carting Hall. Some guys were working on their tans on the lawn chairs spread across the brick walkway. The aquatic pool was past a fenced enclosure and shared by these three newest dormitories.

I had to swing around and cross the sidewalk in front of the basketball court to cut around the satellite financial aid and undergraduate admissions complex. From there, I slowed down near the softball and football fields.

They were twelve dorm halls on this side of campus and four on the other. I liked my little niche towards the main road. North, South, West, and Pelmont Hall. The mystery of the inconsistent naming wasn’t really a mystery, but I preferred to keep it that way. Just like I was perfectly fine never knowing what happened to Taylor and Zach, so long as the same fate didn’t befall me.

On the first floor, I saw Brian putting together some stuff to cook. Immediately, I swung around and decided to use the external stairs instead of the elevator. Talking to him was a thing best avoided. Pausing on the second landing to look across campus, the dorm complex I’d just abandoned looked the same as any typical day. No signs fluttering in the air that two guys had spontaneously gotten in touch with their feminine sides. Still, I could smell something off, like the foreboding doom wafting off a nuclear power plant after it's gone uncontrollably critical. If that was a bad thing. I wasn’t a nuclear scientist, I just had a neighbor in the room across the way who was taking classes to be one.

My dorm was the one on the far side that I shared with Josh, Patrick, and Drew. The plush t-rex head was half stuck out of the couch with a gap to suggest that the full creature was right behind. Patrick must’ve put it like that. Drew was responsible for the mesh bags on the wall for extra storage. And I was responsible for the black and white jazz musician posters adorning each wall. Someone’s mom was responsible for the cluster of short bookcases like truncated end tables encircling the main couch.

“Hey, buddy! What’s the good word?” Drew rolled out from the nearest room in his electric wheelchair.

I considered hanging Parsley up in my room but instead flopped down on the couch with her nearby. So many things popped into my head that I could’ve, should’ve, and shouldn’t have said out loud. In the quiet moment of reflection, Drew took the initiative and announced, “I got ripped off online!”

The temptation to ask if it was porn or a girl floated through my neurons, but I mercilessly stifled it. That would’ve been more of a Patrick thing to say. I plucked a few strings while I asked, “What happened?”

Drew enthusiastically regaled me with the full details of this injustice. He subscribed to a Los Angeles area playwright around our age who performed his own music and had a local theater situation or something. I had half-listened to him talking up the virtues and talents of this particular creator about a week ago. Unfortunately, the situation had soured when Drew agreed to fund his most recent project through a crowd donation website that I was vaguely familiar with. My roommate subscribed for just a month and canceled several days ago before the first.

This precise effort to get access had run afoul of the website’s structure. Drew was charged twice.

“He ripped me off for $5.12!” Was the best summation. An emotional torrent of huffing along with an extended frown accented his point. I inquired whether he had gotten in contact with the website about refunding the additional charge. He had but without the immediate progress expected.

Gesticulating and propping himself up in the chair with his artificial left arm, Drew resolved, “I know where he lives and I’m going to talk to him! He owes me $5.12. We can talk this out like men.” Losing that amount of money wasn’t a good thing but considering how well-off Drew’s family was and the additional cost of going to the LA Basin to resolve this… Just didn’t seem worth it. But I wasn’t gonna fight that battle, especially with all the other craziness orbiting around my brain cells.

Drew was the first person I met when I first arrived at Cressman University. He took me around the whole campus and made me feel welcome. It was just the two of us for most of the semester. Eventually, I met Patrick and Josh through my classes and it was a perfect fit with our different but complimentary personalities. Patrick was always easygoing and liked to treat Drew like a little brother. Josh was a mix of super mature and playfully juvenile.

It was just the two of us right then as I filled the air with a nervous, tight little melody. I supported Drew in whatever financial revenge he wanted to conduct. The problem was still feeling like I was standing too close to Ground Zero for something I didn’t understand. Warning my roommate about what was going on felt like a good idea, but I barely had the words inside my head to personally contextualize what happened, let alone translate that for someone who hadn’t been there. And the worst part was, I felt like no matter what I said to Drew, he would be instead intrigued and skeptical, and roll himself over to that hall and probably wind up with a big honking pair of tits. I refused to imagine further than that.

Drew was heading out though, to grab a wheelchair-accessible Lyft to take him over to the Basin. He had ambitions greater than just knocking on this Internet person’s door though. It felt like the lost dollars were just an excuse for a mini road trip. If I was in a different state of mind, I eagerly would’ve joined him for the opportunity to just drive a little way and let the tangled blocks of words settle and assemble into something creative in my mind.

It didn’t matter where I was going either. I just had to get away from here.