Jernigan Read Online Free PDF Page A

what you got.”
    “Sure, great,” he said. He unplugged and replugged cords; the amplifier gave an echoing pop, warning of the vast deep silence about to be filled.
    “Just not too loud, right?” I said. “The old man doesn’t have mutant ears.”
    He picked the guitar up off the bed and slung it around him on its strap. “Okay now, watch,” he said. “I just learned this. Ready?” And he ripped off an ascending snarl of notes, both hands tearing away at the strings. It certainly sounded plausible. Even exciting in that cheap way.
    “Yeah,” I said. “Sounding good on that, big guy.”
    “Yeah, but did you see it?” he said. “What my hand was doing?”
    “What was I supposed to see?”
    “Watch me again,” he said. “No, look. Watch my right hand.” I watched, trying to ignore the godawful studded leather thing on his wrist, a gift from his little girlfriend. He played exactly the same sequence of notes again, as far as I could tell. (I’d wondered the first time if it had just been some random gabble spewed out any old way his fingers had happened to move.) “You see it?” he said.
    “What am I missing?” I said.
    “That last note,” he said. “To get it you have to come up here , see, with this hand. That’s what’s normally your picking hand. But you could never get your left hand all the way up from here to here that quick.”
    “You’re really serious about this, aren’t you?” I said. “How come you don’t want to be in a band?” Mistake: asking Why Questions was just a way of giving people shit. Judith and I had learned that in cognitive therapy. One more thing we’d tried.
    Danny said nothing. I stared, as I always did when I was in here, at his poster of blank-faced Elle Macpherson just about to rip open the front of her bathing suit. A Grecian Urn for the Dannys of the world. Well, at least we hadn’t made him a homosexual, although of course I knew that you didn’t make someone a homosexual. But thinking about Rick you wondered if Judith might have been carrying a homosexual gene or something that was in the family. I was relieved that it had stayed recessive (if it existed) although that was wrong too, to feel relieved, because homosexuality was just another way of being. And this guitar business was something else to be relieved about. True, he was getting C’s in school, but sitting down and actually working out something like the little move he’d just showed me argued that he wasn’t without some self-discipline, and that his attention span was all right even though I had taken LSD and he had watched so much television. Who knows, maybe the guitar might actually get him something. Oh, I know better than to think it’s all emperor’s new clothes and that you can be a rock-and-roll star without any talent whatsoever. But neither do you have to be a commanding genius; we all know that too. So why not Danny? And all that watch-me stuff: he seemed to be enough of a ham to get up in front of people. So why wasn’t he in some little band? And why wasn’t it all right to ask?
    “Forget it,” I said. “Look, I’m not trying to tell you how to have fun. The only thing I want to say about it is, if you ever do want to have some kids over to the house to play or something, it’s fine with me.” Part of why I was offering this was that he was spending too much time at the girlfriend’s and I had an idea the girlfriend’s mother wasn’t providing much supervision. Though I was a great one to talk.
    He shrugged. “Okay,” he said. I marvelled at the fine balance ofhis mind: my offer had just enough of an undertone so that to have thanked me would have compromised his dignity. It was neurotic to worry that he’d been born with something wrong.
    “Okay,” I said. “Listen, the lawn beckons. If you want to keep playing, you don’t have to bother with the headphones, ’cause I’m going to be making some noise myself.”
    “Okay,” he said. “Except if you’re