bullshit

Before anyone knew that he played guitar: Johnny Licks was the poor kid from the trailer park with the funny last name. Now that he'd become somewhat of a local virtuoso, having mastered "Eruption," they said, after one listen (though there were many child skeptics and naysayers who called bullshit on this one), his name took on a folk-hero type quality: not unlike Johnny Appleseed. Suddenly kids were claiming with the authority of television sports commentators that he was fated all along to play guitar. "I mean, just look at his last name. Licks? How did we not see it coming?" they said.
His legend was the stuff of high school mythology: when kids you knew your entire life (or at least for the time you'd been in school) underwent unusual and sudden transfigurations, instantly relegated to celebrity status and often for the most mundane reasons. Of course: the flip-side to this was that the transfiguration process worked both ways. Kids who were formerly celebrated for one thing or another, lost favor with their peers and just as easily sank into obscurity.
Clive Hamburg belonged to this unlucky group. In former grades: he was known as "the Iceburg," a generous corruption of his surname (considering the easier corruptions they could have come up with) and also because of his cold aggression on the football field. Rarely did the Iceburg talk, not even to his fellow football buddies. They tried for a time calling him "the Burger," thinking it a playfully offensive enough pet name to get the Iceburg to break his frosty silence but they eventually retired this name after too many icy stares of indifference and general non-amusement.
By the time Clive reached high school, all his football peers had outgrown him. No longer the biggest kid on the field, he was now the smallest kid in class--though still hulking with craggy muscle and a turdy personality (there really was no better way to describe it). His appearance was comical: all that people-repelling turdiness and raw muscle compacted, compressed wide as if flattened like a grease-goldened cheeseburger, which, sadly, is exactly what kids started calling him after his child football star had faded forever with no hope of ever lighting up the Nicetown School Athletics Program again. Too small to be a lineman and too short to play linebacker (his former position), Clive gave up football altogether.
He wore the face of an angry Indian stereotype but like the Sad Clown stereotype he suffered internally. And like most kids who suffered internally: Clive or "the Cheeseburger," as he was now called, decided to pick up an instrument: as a means to transpose his sadness into the tangible world. He played bass because he liked its chunkiness: that thick dumb sound which he felt like words he could not find or form in his brain--a phlegmatic sentiment eternally clogging up the back of his throat. Playing bass was a means of eliminating this throat-scratching wad of feeling--giving it back to the air or to the elements or to God, whatever cruel force had robbed him of his one true passion: youth football. Without football, Clive was useless. But the bass distracted him from this sad truth which most athletes must confront at some point in their lives: that the window of opportunity for an athlete is relatively short and that very few make a career out of it. It was fortunate for Clive that he discovered this truth earlier than his peers: the same guys who, when they were younger, called him the Iceburg, tentatively extending an invitation to Clive to be a valued member in their elite squad, though, tragically, Clive had no idea at the time that this is what they meant to express by this gesture. He was fortunate, he thought, that he never allowed himself to get too comfortable in that friend circle--to get too close to any of those guys. The pain would be that much more intense: watching them week in and week out every football season for the four years that he was in high school celebrated by teachers and principals, local parents and outsider kids wanting in and not being able to participate because of his size.
Once a week, Clive was driven by his dad to the local music shop where he was given an hour-long guitar lesson from Dave P., Senior Guitar Tech and frizzy-haired eighties scenester burnout. Clive's interest were in alternative rock bands from the nineties. Dave P. preferred face-melting bass solos and jazz fusion funk-punk (his hero was Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers). Every week Clive was allowed to pick one song for Dave P. to listen to (the following week) and teach him. At first, Clive suggested songs he actually liked--songs he actually cared to learn. Radio hits by Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Alice In Chains and Soundgarden. But he could tell Dave P. wasn't having any fun with this so he tried to pick songs he and Dave P. both liked--or: songs he assumed Dave P. liked, which translated to a lot of songs by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, a band Clive was only mildly interested in though he did find it enjoyable to see Dave P.'s childlike enthusiasm when telling Clive all the trivia he knew (and he knew a lot) about a particular Chili Peppers' song--the way he sometimes ran sentences together--multiple thoughts converging in a solitary voicebox output so that what came out was static nonsense--scattered ideas, half-finished sentences, like watching someone quickly flip through a book page by page and only catching stray sentences which, when put together, formed a murky theme but nothing close to coherency--it was a wonder Dave P.'s voice didn't explode.