Player One: What Is to Become of Us Read Free

I was blackballed for whistle-blowing. Hey, any more of these nuts — maybe a bowl with some actual cashew nuts in it, not just fragments?
    Rick wishes that one day someone would come in and confess that he was the one who stole Rick’s pickup with all of his gardening equipment in it, but he knows that’s probably not going to happen and that, truth be told, he drank away his landscaping career as well as his savings and his visitation rights, and all he has to show for it is a permanent sunburn and a dark aura that scares away the women who might like him, even though, over the decade-long span of his decline, he has become a listener and women like listeners. Or they’re supposed to.
    Oh well. Rick has serenity now. Kind of. Yet by and large he wonders why it is that we’re trapped inside our bodies for seventy-odd years and never once in all that time can we just, say, park our bodies in a cave for even a five-minute break and float free from the bonds of earth.
    At least music allows you to escape your body — in its own way. Rick feels nostalgic for the lounge’s pianist, Lenny, who was fired two weeks earlier for consistently making up the lyrics to songs as he played. Rick was used to it, but patrons hated it. When the night manager called Lenny to the bar area for his third and final warning, Lenny said, “The lyrics of a song are important only to a point. You probably don’t even remember the words to your favourite song, and that’s why you like it — because you like the words your brain made up to fill in the gaps. A good song forces you to invent your own lyrics.”
    “Lenny, it’s the goddam Beatles singing goddam ‘Yesterday.’ You do not invent lyrics for one of the most famous songs in history.”
    “I bring myself into the song. I am an artist. People listening to songs are like people reading novels: for a few minutes, for a few hours, someone else gets to come in and hijack that part of your brain that’s always thinking. A good book or song kidnaps your interior voice and does all the driving. With the artist in charge, you’re free for a little while to leave your body and be someone else.”
    Poor Lenny, now jobless, but Rick remembers what Lenny said about leaving your body for a little while — Rick remembers liking that bit — and in memory of Lenny he cranks the Miles Davis CD now playing — music without lyrics. Instead of inventing words to the music, your body invents emotions for the music.
    Rick sees a rogue glass shard from a bottle of southern-hemisphere Chardonnay he dropped the night before. As he bends to pick it up, he remembers Tyler’s seventh birthday, sitting with his son in a bedroom fort made of whisky boxes and blankets and sofa cushions, and he remembers shining a flashlight through his fingers and through Tyler’s, trying to convince his son that people are made of blood. He misses the good days and fondly remembers the rare mornings that were magically free of hangovers and when his head felt like a house in late spring with all the doors and windows wide open. And he wishes he hadn’t knocked over the twenty-ounce Aladdin souvenir plastic drinking cup full of $8.99 Chardonnay that night he was allowed to babysit Tyler while his ex-wife, Pam, was at her sister’s stagette party. Half a squeeze bottle of organic dish soap and six towels washed and dried twice, and she’s barely in the door, sniffing and saying, “That’s it, Failure Face. You’ve had your chance. Out. Now.”
    Mercifully, one thing people rarely tell Rick about is their dreams — both actual dreams and the dreams they have for the rest of their lives. We’re always hearing about “following your dream,” but what if your dream is boring? Most people’s dreams are boring. What if you had a dream to sell roadside corn — if you went and sold it, would that mean you were living your dream? Would people perceive you as a failure anyway? And how long would you be happy doing it?