CHAPTER 4—MATH, HAIR, MUSIC, AND SAND
I can't count.
Well, actually I can count, but apparently not after midnight.
Remmi was reading the last chapter I had posted online and suddenly stopped and looked at me funny.
"Jon Eric---we weren't in ninth grade five years ago." Pause. I looked at him funny.
"What do you mean?"
"It was four years ago."
I think. I really know how to do that, you know. Think, I mean. "No, it was five years: ninth grade, tenth grade, junior, senior, freshman in college. That's five."
Then it hit me. That sounded logical after midnight the other night when I wrote that chapter. But it doesn't sound too smart now. I need to write this stuff while I'm still awake. For a guy who always got A's in math, I should be able to count to four. Weird.
...
Next, I need to explain my hair. And yes, I have some. Quite a lot, in fact. And it's not a weird color.
Remmi has curly hair. I have straight hair. Always been that way. And since we were little kids it was a little long, over our years, a little on our neck in back, looking like a lot of other kids. But one day that began to change.
My dad was in a band when he was in college. (Come to think of it, maybe when he was in high school, too. I never thought to ask. I've got to remember to find out.)
Anyway, he was the drummer. And his hair was really long. No, longer than you're thinking.
It was way down his back. The picture at our house doesn't show how far down his back, but it's obviously way down there. It's a great picture, too. He looked really cool. My mom says he looked hot. Strange that opposite words can mean almost the same thing, depending on who says them.
Anyway, he says he probably would have stayed with the band and made it his life, except for three ladies he learned to love even more: the water, his boat, and my mom. My sister keeps wanting to make herself number 4, but he reminds her he made his decision before she was born. She still pouts over that. She wants to be number 4. But he won't say that. It would mess up his story.
Anyway, I love that picture and love the way he looked, and I always wanted to look like that myself.
As I got into around fifth grade, people began to tell me I was becoming good looking like my dad. (Humility says I shouldn't report that, but honesty says I must. So I did.)
Then it happened. One night at dinner, there sat my mom, my dad, and Riley (my brother). My sister was somewhere else. I forget where.
Anyway, having worked up my nerve, in the middle of a hamburger I announced, "I'm going to stop getting haircuts." The conversation around the table came to a screeching halt, like a car about to hit a stupid cat that should have gotten out of the way.
Then my brother says, "And are you going to stop pooping and peeing, too?" He messed up my little speech. But it was so funny I had to laugh, too.
My mom who never gets upset (not usually, anyway) says, "So you want to grow your hair long?"
Uh, yeah.. "How long?"
I give a chop to my left arm, just above the elbow. "Something like that." Then silence from everybody.
Then my dad begins to smile a little. "I think he wants to look like I used to look." My mom has this "Oh, yeah" look in her eyes, probably remembering that she fell in love with the guy in the picture when he had that long hair. My dad, I mean.
Then my dad asks how school was today or something that had nothing to do with hair, and that's all anybody said about my little announcement. And every day I checked in the mirror to see if it was any longer. I thought I saw something, but never was sure.
But my hair continued to grow. After a couple of months it began to stick out funny on the sides, so my mom (who is great with hair) got her hair scissors and did a little something so it wouldn't look weird. And now that I was in the ninth grade it hadn't been cut since then. Three years of hair. It was long.
When I decided to let it grow, I also decided not to tell Remmi. I wanted to see if he would notice. I kept waiting and waiting, and he kept not noticing.
Of course, your hair doesn't look any longer today than it did yesterday, even though it is a teeny bit longer. And because Remmi saw me every day, he didn't notice the gradual change in how long my hair was. If he saw me three months later he would have noticed something, but not the next day.
That was until somebody at school said something about how long my hair was getting. Remmi was there and heard what the girl said and had that "What is she talking about" look in his eyes. Then he looked at me and stared and suddenly it was like he was looking at me for the first time. It was so cool. I can still see him. He finally noticed it. My hair was getting longer.
After school he said, "Jon Eric, how long has your hair been growing?"
"Probably since I was born," I answered him. He scrunched his nose funny. I can still see it.
"No. That's not what I mean. When did you...start letting it grow?"
I told him about my dad's picture (which he had seen lots of times) and my little announcement at dinner. He was shocked. He couldn't believe he hadn't noticed it. And he told me he really liked how it looked. He kept walking around me, looking like a man buying a car.
That was all I really cared about. Remmi liked it.
,,,
Later in the sixth grade, I think it was, I told my grandmother or an aunt or somebody who was over at our house that I may want to start a rock band someday. I had been taking piano for a couple of years and I was getting really good, but people hear rock band and they think guitars.
So the Christmas when we were in seventh grade, Remmi's parents and my parents got together and decided we needed guitars. So they drove up to the state above us where there's a big city, went to a music store, and came back with two identical guitars (except they were different colors of wood) hidden in the truck for our Christmas presents.
When we got them we both were a little surprised. We don't play the guitar. But then they explained that they had set up everything for us to start taking guitar lessons after the first of the year.
And we did. We worked hard at it. Remmi would come over after school and we would go upstairs and strip and get out our guitars and practice the stuff the teacher gave us. This went on for about a year. Two naked guitar players trying to find chords and put our fingers where our fingers needed to be.
Remmi would get better, and I would get better. He would get even better, and I would get even better. Remmi would improve. Then Remmi would improve a lot. Remmi would learn a new something on the guitar that sounded awesome and learn more chords and new licks and stuff.
But I wasn't getting any better. Something was wrong here.
I took piano from the same guy we were taking guitar lessons from. One day the teacher (knowing we were best friends) sat us down with our parents. He told us he had noticed that, although I had more raw music ability (I wasn't sure what that meant at the time), Remmi had more guitar ability. He told us that he felt I should focus on the piano and the keyboard and Remmi should focus on the guitar.
At first I felt like somebody had slapped me in the face. I wanted to play the guitar with Remmi. But after a few minutes sitting there about to cry, I realized the man was right. I was getting really good on the piano, just like Remmi was getting really good on the guitar. I told the teacher our idea about starting a band, and he suggested that maybe I should get an electronic keyboard. It plays just like a piano but does more stuff. All the bands have a guy who plays one.
My dad, not liking to see his son looking miserable, asked the teacher what kind of keyboard to get, and the next Saturday my dad, me, and Remmi drove up to the big city and went to that music store and came home with my keyboard, a keyboard stand, a set of headphones and some portable speakers and all the cords.
After a few days I felt like this was where I belonged. I began to figure out how to get all the sounds and do all the settings and use all the built-in styles that gave you sort of a backup band.
My teacher worked with me on it and showed me how to do stuff I hadn't figured out. He gave me some pop music to work on and showed me what I should do with it, and how to make it sound good with guitar.
And after maybe five months Remmi and I were really sounding great together, he on his guitar and I on the keyboard. This was how it was supposed to be. A band was being formed. But that would happen later.
...
As I told you before, we live at the beach. There is sand everywhere for miles. Left, right, down the road, up the road, and under the road. Sand. Nobody has grass, unless they brought in some dirt from somewhere else. Sand. Everywhere sand. Everybody has sand.
And some of that sand is in a huge sand dune. A big, huge pile of sand, bigger than you ever saw. It's like a mountain of sand. Our parents gave us hang gliding lessons there for my twelfth birthday party.
We had climbed it lots of times. At night, with the wind blowing off the ocean, it feels especially great up there. You can see forever.
One Friday night, well into fall, it was especially warm. It felt like summer almost. Beautiful day.
Remmi came over after school (as usual) and his eyes were bouncing sort of. I knew he was thinking.
He said, "Jon Eric, lets climb the sand dune (he actually called it by its real name which I'll skip) tonight.
I thought a minute. "Okay."
Then, after a mysterious pause, he said, "Let's do it naked."
Naked. That sounded cool. At night it was dark up there. Especially if there wasn't a moon. You'd get some lights from the buildings around there and some street lights down on the road, but it was fairly dark.
The thought of climbing the dune naked sounded cool to me. But I thought that maybe we should wear our sneakers. But the warm breeze blowing through our balls sounded great. But I was scared.
"Uh, I have another idea," I said. Cautiously.
"What's that?" He was suspicious.
Let's wear no pants but just our sneakers and a long tee shirt. And when we get to the top if there's nobody there we can take off the shirt and then we'll be naked. We don't have to worry about being caught.
He thought about that and said okay. So we told our parents we were going hike the dune around nine o'clock and we'd be back before midnight. They were cool with that. We skipped the naked part.
So about nine o'clock with our longest tee shirts covering everything and our sneakers (no socks) we headed to the sand dune. It wasn't far. We cut through our church's parking lot, staying away from cars so nobody would come over to say hi if somebody was there.
Then we went down the street to an okay place to start climbing, and we began.
Walking up a sand dune is not easy, so you keep at it. It's a big place. Huge. It's a hard climb.
We finally made it to where we thought the top was. The view down to the ocean is really beautiful, even at night. There didn't seem to be anybody around so we took off our shoes and took off our shirts and put our shoes on our shirts to keep them from blowing away. There we were. Two naked guys.
We kissed for a while and played with each other's balls and dick and butt. Felt great with the warm breeze. Then we wrestled. We thought about sucking each other off but our dicks were full of sand by then and that didn't sound very good to put in our mouths. So we kissed some more and got really horny. We finally shook enough sand off our dicks to jerk off and it felt awesome. In the breeze.
We didn't know what time it was but we figured we should be getting back. We sat down and put on our sneakers. Then we stood there another minute to enjoy the wind blowing through our balls one more time. And that's when it happened.
A gust of wind came up and it picked up our shirts and turned them into kites.
Remmi yelled out, "Oh, crap, grab those" and we took off. But like I said, it's dark up there and it was getting darker and we absolutely could not find our shirts. Running down a sand dune is not easy, especially in the dark. They were gone bye-bye.
Remmi said, "What do we do now?" All I could think of was, "Sneak home. Carefully."
So we headed back down the dune. Then we heard voices and realized some other people were coming our way. But we were so panicked we just kept going down.
Two guys who looked to be in high school or college came a few feet from us. One of them said, "Is that legal?" Remmi answered, "Dunno. Never asked." We kept moving.
When we got to the bottom we tried to figure out the best way home to not be seen. There were no great options for two naked ninth graders to walk home. Every time a car or truck came by we had to find a place to hide, and sometimes we just hoped they didn't notice. If someone did, we'd be in deep doo-doo.
Finally we got to a side street. We decided to head to Remmi's house because we knew his parents would be gone until after 1am. We passed one of the rental houses and I had a great idea. Most of them have an outside shower so people can wash off the sand and not take it into the house, so we found it in back and showered off. We were hidden behind the little wall and we were safe and were having fun again.
Finally, we remembered we'd better get going so we went to his house. Made it. Unseen (as far as I know).
Remmi loaned me some shorts so I could walk into my house.
When I got there my mom was still up. She asked, "How was it?"
All I could think of was to say, "Unbelievable." That was it. Completely unbelievable.