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By Root 642 0

a regular thing, which is how come I wasn’t too disgusted by my performance that night. And maybe I should confess that I nearly blew it, too. This is where Mom’s good/bad interference comes in. What happened was, she dropped into this little gallery in the neighborhood, to see if they’d be interested in exhibiting her stuff, and she got talking to the owner, who turns out to be Martha’s dad. And somehow they got onto the subject of the Little Berkeley Big Band, and like two seconds later they’ve divided up the rides. I’ll be honest here: I completely freaked out when she told me. No amount of singing her song would have calmed me down. She explained that she met this guy who lives real near and his daughter was in the band and so he was going to drop us off and pick us up this week and it was her turn next week and . . .

“Stop right there.”

“What?”

“Do you realize what a bunch of pathetic losers they are in that band? You really expect me to sit in a car with one of them every week?”

“I’m not asking you to date her. I’m asking you to sit in a car with her for ten minutes once a week.”

“No way.”

“Too late.”

“Fine. I’m quitting the band. As from this second.”

“You don’t think that’s an overreaction?”

“No. Goodbye.”

And I went up to my bedroom. I meant it. I was going to quit. I didn’t care. Even if I was giving up a future career as a superstar jazz trumpeter, it was worth it if it meant not sitting in a car with Eloise and her bad breath. Or Zoe and her quote unquote gland problem (in other words her intense fatness problem). Anyway, Mom came up five minutes later and said that she’d called the guy and canceled the ride, told him I had a doctor’s appointment first so I wouldn’t be leaving from home.

“A doctor’s appointment? Great, so now everyone thinks I’ve got some gross disease. Thanks a lot.”

“Jesus.” She shook her head.

“And anyway, how am I going to get out of coming back with them?” I will admit, I was being pretty difficult.

She shook her head again. If I hadn’t been so mad, I might have felt sorry for her. “I’ll think of something.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Just get in the car. We’ll be late.”

“No. Now it’s too embarrassing. I’m still quitting.”

“Paul will be disappointed. I got the impression that he had high hopes for you and Martha. He thought you sounded like . . .”

“Whoa. Martha?”

“Do you know her?”

“Maybe.”

“Do you like her?”

I tried to be cool about it. “She’s OK. I’ll just go and find my trumpet.”

Respect where it’s due to Mom: she didn’t say anything. Didn’t even smile in a way that would have made me freak out all over again. Just waited for me downstairs. She was still in the wrong, though. OK, it turned out well, but there was like a 99.9% chance (or rather, because there are maybe fifteen girls in the band, a ninety-four-point-something percent chance) that it could have been a total disaster. She didn’t know it was Martha, or even who Martha is, so she was just plain lucky.

Before we get back to me in the car with Martha, which sounds way more exciting than it actually was, there’s one more bit of the story that’s important, but I’m not too sure where to put it. It should either go here—which was roughly where it happened—or later, when I get back from rehearsal, which is where I actually discovered it, and where it has a bit more dramatic effect. But the thing is, if I put it later, you might not believe it. You might think it’s just like a story trick, or something I just made up on the spur of the moment to explain something, and it would really piss me off if you thought that. And anyway, I don’t need any dramatic effects, man. This story I need to calm down, not pump up. So I’ll tell you here: I messed up the VCR recording of the Lakers game. I was so mad that I watched five minutes of The Matrix, which meant removing the blank tape. I remembered to take out The Matrix tape, but I forgot to put another one back in. (I forgot because once Mom mentioned Martha, I was in kind of a hurry.) But I didn’t know I’d messed up then. See what I mean? If I’d left that part until