Boring Girls(41)

xXx

It was early August when Fern and I went downtown to look around at some stores. I’d been doing more around the house so that my parents would help me make some changes to my room, and they had upped my allowance as well, so I had a bit of money. Fern and I looked in a few of the thrift stores and didn’t find anything good, so we headed to the music store.

It had become a bit of a habit for us to browse the bulletin board by the cash register. There was rarely anything interesting: flyers for concerts we weren’t into, people selling instruments, offering piano lessons, stuff like that. I couldn’t think of a time when I’d seen anything on there that even came close to interesting, much less anything to do with heavy metal. None of us had gotten around to advertising on the board ourselves to find a drummer yet.

That day, however, we saw a new flyer. Drummer Needs Band — influenced by DED, Gurgol, Goreceps, looking for like-minded individuals to rock with. There was a phone number listed.

“Great!” Fern exclaimed, grabbing a pen out of her purse and writing the number down on the back of her hand.

“‘Looking for people to rock with’?” I wrinkled my nose. “That sounds dorky.”

“Well, it’s not like we’ve got tons of people to choose from. Let’s call him and see what he’s like,” she replied.

She was right. The flyer seemed almost too good to be true, despite its idiotic wording. We went to a pay phone on the street. Fern put in her quarter and dialled.

“Hi, yes,” she said shortly, “I’m calling about the flyer in Bee Music. About the drummer.” She paused, listening. I watched her face. “Yeah, we’ve got a band. Vocal, guitar, and bass. Doing original stuff.” After another pause she listed off a few bands we liked, mentioning DED and Gurgol. “We have a female vocalist, and I play guitar. So there’s two girls in the band.”

After chatting for a few more minutes, she set up a meeting with him at the tea shop for that evening. I tried to mentally calculate whether or not Edgar would be available, while she wrapped up the call.

Finally she hung up. “Okay, he sounded nice. His name is Socks.”

“Socks?”

“Yeah. He didn’t tell me his real name.”

“That’s not a very cool nickname,” I muttered. Pairing that with the I wanna rock flyer, I wasn’t feeling very hopeful. “He’s probably a complete moron.”

“Well, there’s only one way to find out,” Fern said. “I’m going to call Edgar and tell him to meet us tonight.”

xXx

The two of us met Edgar a half hour before Socks was supposed to show up. Edgar had been playing his bass all afternoon and looked pretty exhausted when he arrived and sat down.

“I’m really glad we found somebody. The songs are shaping up and it would be nice to be able to get together and actually try to play something,” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “This guy sounds like kind of a loser to me.” I explained to Edgar the way the flyer had been worded.

“So what if he wants to rock? He sounded perfectly nice on the phone,” Fern said, lightly slapping my hand and giving me a grin. “I mean, when it comes down to it, we want to rock too, don’t we?”

Edgar laughed. “I wonder why his name is Socks.”

“Maybe because he stinks,” I said.

After a little while, the bell above the tea shop door jingled, signalling the arrival, presumably, of Socks. We knew right away that it couldn’t be anyone but him. He was tall and burly, with long shaggy brown hair and a long goatee. He wore a metal shirt pulled down over his substantial belly and long black shorts. And bright white socks pulled up high on his shins.

“Oh, wow,” Fern said.

He scanned the room for a moment and when he caught sight of us, his face lit up and he raised his hand in greeting. “Hiya!” he said brightly, turning the heads of the other tea shop customers as he came to our table.

We all stood up to introduce ourselves and shake his hand, and then he pulled up a chair and we all sat back down.

“So, yeah, it’s great to meet you all,” he said. “I’ve been playing metal since I was a kid. I just got out of school and I’m looking for a band to play with, get back into it.”

“We’re just starting out,” Edgar said.

“You must be bass, right? Fern here told me it was two girls on guitar and vox, and a dude on bass.”