Chapter One: The Final Session

Chapter One: The Final Session

Jeremy sat and stared at the numbers on the dial. The slightest of grins came to his face as he thought about the logic behind the non-existent number 11. “It’s louder than 10” he said to himself.  

There was a time when louder was all that mattered. Now, sitting among relics of days gone by in a room long removed from its original purpose, Jeremy was taken back at the sheer silence that surrounded him. The silence bothered him. The room, though sound proof, was never built for silence. This room brought volume and spoke of energy. This place was brim full of beginnings. How ironic what was the start of a journey would now be the culmination of that journey in shame and despair.   

He wondered what sounds would accompany his next actions. Would the stretching of a mic cord make a sound? What he had planned was not the manufacturer’s intended purpose. Surely his intentions would void the lifetime warranty. 

There seemed no need to rush. Jeremy leaned back in the worn recliner and stared long and hard at the cord wound tightly around the asbestos covered pipe hanging from the ceiling rafters. He thought about the scolding he received years ago from a roadie after he displayed his cord winding prowess. “You’ll break the connectors on the ends wrapping it that way”. He wondered what the roadies would say now seeing the form his cord winding had taken. 

No need to rush, he told himself. Jeremy knew of no other option than the plan he had devised. Because no escape revealed itself, and because it was evident that so few truly cared, Jeremy abandoned the need to weep or lament. If there was control to be had, he would avail himself of such. He had never felt more out of control than he had in the past year.  

His eyes surveyed the room. An upright piano stood in the corner among the many dust covered objects. Who knew when the last time that piano would have been played? Jeremy surmised it was brought in for a single session…a single song…that needed that sound of acoustic keys ever so slightly off pitch with a tenor ambiance. Almost a ragtime sound, he thought. Though he could hear the sound, he could not place the song. He was certain that it was never used in any of the recording sessions he attended. 

A slight breeze moved some stray newspapers on the floor. The room was surprisingly warm given the absence of steam heat. The radiators proudly stood…defiant of the deterioration around them. Oh how the band used to complain about the radiators. Inevitably, one of the heaters would begin to creak and groan right in the middle of a recording session. It was a well-known fact that the moan and pounding of the old heating system was left in a recording by The Faction. What seemed like a progressive idea at the time later became a bit of a challenge. Try duplicating a rebellious steam radiator in live performance…it’s tough to do.

Nearly anything that could be salvaged or sold had been removed from the room. Gone were the electronics except for those that were beyond repair. The mixing console was still in place behind the large, now broken, window on the opposite wall. Jeremy experienced a grimaced grin remembering his antics at getting the attention of the sound engineer without making a noise. He could still see the tops of their heads as they crouched over the console, his hands waving in the air as if he were directing an airplane to its gate.  

Just below the broken window was a large burnt spot in the exposed wooden floor. While most of the room retained the now spotted and worn carpet, someone had pulled the carpet back and started a fire in the corner of the room. Vagrants, Jeremy thought, no doubt. 

The idea of vagrants inhabiting the room in which Jeremy now sat did not sit well with him. How one poor choice led to a series of many poor choices was largely the reason for his being in this place, but couldn’t he have stopped the process at some point? Why couldn’t he have asked for help before the incremental acceleration of mistake upon mistake? Was he no better than a vagrant?   

If Jeremy Miles was anything, he was a decision maker. His decision at the moment was to forego any thought of reason or explanation and to be about the matter at hand. Standing from his chair, Jeremy proceeded to place the gutted guitar amp under the array of mike chords strung from the pipe. The narrow top of the amplifier would prove difficult on which to stand while simultaneously making it easier to tip. Tipping at this moment was the objective.

Wesley walked perplexed. Why would he be sent to make an appeal to someone without having all of what he deemed necessary information? What kind of organization was he to represent? As he crossed the street and stepped upon the crumbling sidewalk, he wondered if he had been set up for failure. Perhaps failure would be the greater lesson. He rolled his eyes at that notion. If failure was the best teacher, he had sat through countless lessons.  

His final destination that evening was a familiar one, but arriving alone was not what he had been instructed to do. The town that he once knew now revealed a dark side that Wesley had never noticed, or perhaps had never existed. If it were possible for doors, streetlights, and alley to speak, Wesley’s surroundings spoke of the pursuits of individuals with little care for anyone else. Telephone poles littered with flyers listing flats for rent or items for sale served to confirm the blank look on the few faces who lifted their gaze from the sidewalk as they walked by. Wesley dared not utilize a public telephone booth for being accosted with advertisements of sales of a much different, and more desperate level. 

Reaching the next corner afforded him the opportunity to hail a taxi. It didn’t take Wesley long to determine that the few taxi’s he encountered over the next 15 minutes had no intention of stopping and picking up passengers in a place like this. Wesley was a long way from home.  

Jeremy couldn’t remember the last time he had been home. Oh, he could recall several memorable occasions in the place that he lived…one in particular was instrumental in the circumstances of the moment…but he really couldn’t remember being home. 

Home, for Jeremy, implied a place of belonging, a place of safety and comfort. Home should be a place where the pace of life could shift into neutral…if only for a moment. Since his parents had passed, a shift into neutral was mere fantasy. Success had brought many good things to Jeremy’s life, but they also brought his siblings in the process. 

Truth be told Jeremy’s brother and two sisters had as many problems as did Jeremy. 

The rustling of the newspapers on the floor distracted Jeremy just enough that he caught his bearings once again. In his gaze was that discarded guitar amp. Walking over to it Jeremy brushed what seemed like years of dust from the face of the amp. “Volume, Gain, and Distortion” he announced to the empty room. The irony of their labels only served to infuriate him. He thought about volume in his life. He returned to his siblings and wondered how their lives might have been affected if he hadn’t had the money he did. If he couldn’t afford to bail them out every time they acted so irresponsibly, would they have come to grips with the results of their actions? How could his good intentions have turned out so poorly? 

Jeremy stared at the Gain knob. Turn this knob up and the warmth of the amplifier could be realized. While it made the amplifier louder, it simultaneously made the sound fuller. The sound became rich. 

“What does it gain for a man to attain the whole world but lose his soul”. The words echoed in Jeremy’s head. He knew that line word for word…he knew it was Bible…though he could never find it on his own. He never completely blew that scripture off, never dismissed it fully, but he never understood it like he understood it now. 

He’d trade every bit of the gain in his life if he could only go back and rewrite the past year. The last year was one of

Distortion.

Jeremy hung his head reading the label under that third knob on the amp. How many times had he watched a guitar player fiddle with the distortion knob on an amp. Virtually every song he had heard in this room had some level of distortion. The amp manufacturer promised bluesy, grungy, and dirty tones from the distortion feature…tones from the slightest of dirt to the heaviest of metal…all accomplished by the manipulation of the distortion knob. 

But that was just the problem, thought Jeremy. For the past year he had been convinced that he could manipulate the distortion that accompanied his life. A bit of dirt, a bit of grunge, would never prevent him from returning to a clean signal. C’mon…it’s manageable. To play clean in life was a simple as the turn of a dial. 

The thought caused Jeremy to kick the gutted amp half way across the room. 

Wesley figured it was two kilometers or so to his destination, and with his new found frustration, he found the energy to walk.

Why would the company set me up for failure? 

It made no sense. Lessons learned from faulty efforts or errant application…those were the kind of lessons that developed an individual. Tested tools utilized to better a person. Lessons learned from misguided attempts to be effective were often measurable…something to be grasped and embraced for future applications. But lessons from ambiguity? Lessons from absence? He struggled to believe that the organization had a grasp on the depth of the challenge that had been placed…

Smack.

The football came from nowhere. It stunned Wesley for a brief moment. The ball hit him with such force that it knocked his cap from his head and landed perfectly on the corner post of an iron gate. 

Laughter ensued. 

Not the kind of laughter which one is asked to join in, or laughter at the odds of a hat finding its way to a gate post. This was the kind of laughter at the expense of another. The kind of laughter unaccompanied by an apology. Laughter that Wesley knew all too well.  

Three lads across the street filled the next few moments with jeers and insults. He paid little mind to what they had to say. Instead, he picked up the ball, and with the leg of a Manchester goalie, kicked the ball two blocks down the street. The ball, as a result of a perfectly centered kick, never touched a car or any other object…but instead was received by yet another ensemble of neighborhood adolescents. This took the focus off of Wesley and fully on the new possessors of the ball. An all-out pursuit immediately commenced…met by an all-out escape. 

The commotion relieved Wesley of some of the pressure and frustration of the moment. He thought about the kids as he walked. He thought about his own childhood. He thought about that football. 

Tall kids are expected to be athletic. Wesley had been a tall kid growing up. Nothing but muscle and gristle, he was the kind of kid who burned more calories in the process of eating than in consuming the food. As much as he tried, “Stick” was a slur with which he would have to live. 

As a result of his height, he was nearly 5’7” by the sixth grade, his rapid growth left him on the awkward side. At least that’s what people told him. His relationship with his father might have had something to do with his lack of speed or grace. His adoptive father. 

Wesley’s father worked long hours at a transmission shop just a few blocks from their home in Jasper, Indiana. Jasper was as quiet of a southern Indiana town as could fit the definition. It’s not that things didn’t happen in Jasper. It just that the things that did happen didn’t happen on a scale that should matter 

Even as a kid he understood the financial constraints that impacted his parents. It wasn’t that his father had little use for him or ignored him in any fashion. He knew that bills must be paid. He saw his parents do “without”. While he wasn’t completely certain whether they were simply poor or very poor, he knew “money does not grow on trees”. Still, when he rode his bike down to the shop, it was difficult when work took all of his father’s attention. It was difficult standing at the old gas station service bay doors and trying to converse with the lower torso of his father as he wrenched on automobiles. How he hated standing behind the yellow line that separated the auto shop from the rest of the world. 

I’m family…not the rest of the world. 

If only he had taken a few moments to throw the football with me. No one else was around…his boss wouldn’t have known. Or maybe he could have invited me into the garage bay…shown me what he was doing. Insurance…I know, I know. The insurance company won’t let others in for fear that they might get hurt. Yeah…I get that. 

But I wasn’t an “other”…I belonged on the inside. 

An outsider…that’s what I was. Always on the outside.

Jeremy had placed one foot on top of the amp when a thought pushed its way past the jumble that was now his mind. Did he owe her an explanation? The thought had no power to inspire him, only lead to greater frustration and for a moment, served to motivate him to proceed with the task at hand with greater speed. But he backed away from that thought. 

He did owe her an explanation. Not that she would understand. How could anyone understand, for that matter. The fact that no one could understand was a large factor in bringing Jeremy to this conclusion. Was life worth a daily struggle if condemned to a virtual isolation? 

Jeremy turned from the amp and began another visual survey of the room. Paper was in abundance, as newspapers were scattered about the place. Finding a sheet with enough blank space to compose a message, well…that would take a bit of doing. Finding a pen, that might be a challenge. The drawers below the mixing console proved a bust. Nothing but a few paperclips and an old reel-to-reel tape were found. Jeremy wondered what might be recorded on that tape. Wouldn’t it be strange if it was one of his old sessions?

Kicking around the papers, searching the window sills, looking through some old boxes proved useless. He was just about to give up on the task when he noticed a clipboard hanging from a nail next to a closet door. He instantly recalled the purpose for the clipboard and grew a bit optimistic about his pursuit of a writing utensil. This was the checkout list for the use of recording equipment that was once stored in the closet and, sure enough, attached to the clipboard was a pen. The kind that banks use…with the curly wire attached to a desk so that no one can walk off with it. The wire had served its purpose, thought Jeremy. The pen was still here…at least for the moment. 

Jeremy tore the pen from its security wire with a renewed sense of frustration and despair. Now that he had the means to communicate, he had to determine what he was going to say. 

He couldn’t bear to address her by name. He would start with the body of the message. If he could address it to her, he would do so upon completion. If he could complete this. 

He began, “Why is one life worth more than another? Who has the right to elevate the importance of one individual over anyone else? It’s that very thought that has brought me to this conclusion. One life wastefully spent should not be at the expense of someone with sense to live their life well.” 

He stared at those words for a moment. He saw no need to detail the decisions and events that would define a wastefully spent life. If she wasn’t aware of his decisions at this point, she certainly would be in the near future. How accurate that information would be presented to her was out of his control. It had been out of his control for some time. The kernel of the truth…the essence of what would be discussed…was enough to make his case for his decision. 

Would she read arrogance in his statement? Possibly. Did he feel any nobility in his decision? Or was this the coward’s way out? 

Pushing those thoughts aside, Jeremy continued. 

“I would like to say that I’ve always loved you, but saying so would only serve to undermine your trust in me yet again. Suffice it to say, in the midst of my self-centered ways, I loved you for your efforts to help me take my eyes off of me. I want to think that this last action is my ultimate effort to alleviate you and the people that we know from casting your glance on a canvas that does nothing but…”

“Jeremy” A voice interrupted his composition.

“Great, thought Jeremy, just when I was on a roll.”                

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