The Musician's Song

A Story by Owen J Kato

It's literally about bananas.

The Musician’s Song

By Owen Kato

(This is written in freewrite, meaning no words were erased and it was written in 40 minutes or less without being thought of beforehand; sorry)

He had been up all night, struggling out a song of sorts. A song about his daughter perhaps. Or how he came here from a place much colder. A place where he could wear coats in the winter. Actual coats, not just thin-denim jean jackets. Big coats, with faux fur. Thick parkas and such. But he was here now, with his daughter and girlfriend, playing music on the streets, in the cafes, bars and pubs. He even played at a couple weddings but did not know why. And many of guests did not know why either. So everyone just stood there not knowing why, until he later got paid. The pay was decent. Any pay was decent for a musician in this age.

The morning came fast, as he awoke and slid his phone’s alarm off. Today, since he quit his job at the boutique clothing shop, was a day filled with recording and doing not much at all. He planted his feet on the hardwood floor and walked out his stuffy bedroom and into the living room. There, he glanced around, mostly at the floor: banana peels lay everywhere. Some were crumpled near the useless base heater. Others, by the front door. The whole bushel had been eaten. “F**k,” he said.

“Nan, nan, nan,” said a voice. Then came the slapping of baby limbs on hardwood.

Jarrett face palmed. “It’s like a f*****g Mario Kart track in here.”

“Don’t swear in front of Ryla,” said a voice in the other room.

“Nan, nan, nan," said a babies voice.

“Celene, she’s a f*****g baby, babies can’t swear.”

“Young kids can swear, Jarrett.”

“F**k,” said Jarrett under his breathe.

Celene came into the living room, rolling a plastic car large enough for the Ryla to sit in. It was red and yellow. “Go on now, and pick them up.”

“I have to go downstairs and work on my music. I play at the Southern tonight.”

Celene sighed. “But you hate it there. No one listens and everyone just drinks.”

“I know, but exposure.”

“Geez, Jarrett, just pick up the nans.”

“It’s f*****g bananas!”

He would always get stressed before a show because what else was there really to do? You’d wait and when you wait, you get stressed.

Jarrett picked up the banana peels, all six of them. Then he went down to practice and continue recording his song. The lyrics went like this:

Riding downtown looking at all the lights,

Night driving my Mitsubishi SUV--

“Nan.”

“How did you get down here?” Jarrett raised his voice to a near-yell. “How did Ryla get down here?”

“I don’t know,” said Celene.

Jarrett picked up Ryla. “You ate all the nans.”"he bounced his daughter up and down"“You ate them all, no more. Let daddy play music now and I will buy you all the nans in the world.”

“Nan, nan, nan,” said Ryla as Jarrett took her back upstairs and put her in mommy’s arms.

“Nan,” said Jarrett to his daughter, or was it to his girlfriend; he didn’t really know anymore.

Back down in his musical dungeon, he worked. Carving lyrics that weren’t quite cliché but close enough so that everyone understood them, even the really dumb people that drank too much. The problem with these people was that they enjoyed their own words far too much. Most of which were cliché AF. Jarrett’s weren’t, for the most part. Okay, maybe some songs had some. ‘Loose cannons’ perhaps. But that is neither here nor there. Actually it’s in Byron Beach. But the song with the words loose cannons was about another town"a town more useless than any other town. A town that if it didn’t exist, well, the world would still turn. Then again, the world would turn without New York, but don’t tell someone from New York that. Ever.

Any-f*****g-way.

It is debatable what Ryla loved more: her own Father or nan’s (bananas) And this was oddly concerning for Jarrett. Because Jarrett loved to be loved. But who doesn’t love to be loved you might ask? Perhaps Donald Trump or that guy who owns that fake wrestling organization or the devil; albeit I am not totally sure about the devil yet. Any-f*****g-way again, Jarrett worked hard at being a good Father. He would take Ryla on dangerous skateboarding rides and have someone film it. He would Skype with her with her grandparents, whom lived across the world, way over in Canada. And who cares about Canada right? Some Australian’s care about Canada, for the snowboarding. Oh, Jarrett lives in Australia. Forgot that part. But back to nans. Ryla would eat them for three meals a day. And snack on them in between. This was concerning for Jarrett as he hated nans. Loathed them even. But here they were, almost every day, all over his hardwood floor.

“I swear I am going to write a song about bananas.” Jarrett said to himself. “I swear I will.” Then he laughed. Mostly at himself. Then, he picked up his old sunburst Gibson dreadnaught acoustic started to sing:

Look at me, I’m the only one in this house from Canada

It’s too f*****g hot here, just like the Savannah,

Can’t escape the heat, sweat so much I wear a bandana

Oh, I had a daughter, and she’s addicted to the banana

Ya, ya, ya, she's addicted to the banana

For some fucked up reason semi-beyond him, he started to record the song. It was an absolutely and fantastically horrible song. Worse than the songs he wrote back when he was a wayward teen trotting the not-so-mean streets of his hometown, Port Koquitlam. Worse than the song he wrote about that time he woke up in the bathroom with a trash barrel over his head and he thought himself blind or dead or somehow, both.

The bridge came and then, from somewhere inside his soul, probably the really messed up part of it"probably the part he had left behind when he was young; the part where he drew copious amounts of blood on his action figures or the part of his soul where he took out the biggest kitchen knife he could find and amputated the limbs of a Macho Man wrestling doll the size of a midget. Yes, that part of his soul, that’s the part. And he started screaming:

Nan, nan, nanananana

But he wouldn’t say Batman at the end, or Hey Jude, he just kept going with what he had, strumming hard on his guitar like it was the last song he’d ever f*****g sing.

***

The Southern wasn’t a s****y bar. It wasn’t a good bar either. It stood in between them. It was casually typical in every way. People went there for birthday parties but never stayed long. People went there to get laid, and some often did. There was a pie shop across the street everyone went to after, too. F**k, it was a standard bar.

Jarrett would play in the front room. He hated playing there. He hated it so much, his girlfriend would not good see him there, because she knew him so well and just couldn’t stand how much he hid how much he hated playing there. But it paid 250 dollars for three hours of strumming. So it didn’t matter. It didn’t f*****g matter. What mattered was that Jarrett made enough so he could purchase banana’s at the local grocery store so his daughter could be fed; so that she would grow into something a bit smarter than the dumbass’ that frequented the Southern nightly. Yes, she would be better. Potassium would make her faster, stronger, and perhaps, somehow, someway, better at things like netball, or basketball or tennis or strumming a guitar. The future, she was the future"this banana loving kid.

And so the show began.

Jarrett started with a song called: Wood Walking. The crowd likes it. Well, some of the crowd. And despite how loud the mic and the speakers were amplifying his crafty folk music, the people of the bar still talked. They talked about whatever relationship problem they were having, or perhaps a promotion at work. Some would be travelers and they would talk about their next adventure, because you got to keep the f*****g adventure alive, you just got to. And then there was Jarrett, strumming parts of his soul out, the good ones, the ones that didn’t carve up a Macho Man with a kitchen knife, no. The one that spent hours in his room sucking. Sucking at strumming, at picking, at singing, at pretty much everything. But sucking can only suck for so long. And he got through it all. Now, Jarrett no longer sucked. And he has climbed out of that pit and is now getting opportunities. Opportunies like record deals and things involving lawyers. You know it’s big when it involves lawyers. F**k lawyers, but they are there. Meddling with the creative juices of people who dare to look to the fantastic, to the new. Or to be cliché AF: to the stars. Dreamers and s**t. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood and they take the road less travelled and s**t.

So Jarrett’s strummed pieces his soul out, singing a song about a storm of sorts, a hurricane and he starts to feel that he doesn’t want to play over the noise of everyone else’s personal problems. And that he doesn’t want to ever play at the Southern again. So he stopped his lyrics and said, while strumming on his guitar of course: Why can’t you just shut up about your lives and listen to the music! Oh baby, just shush your problems and pay tribute to your own self-silence.

The room fell music-less and word-free.

Somewhere, amongst the people, a cough is heard.

Jarrett played a C cord. The room was still silent. He started to strum. He started to sing. No one said a thing, they just listened. He smiled.

Then, out of the back of the room, came a flying banana peel and it slapped up against Jarrett’s cheek and fell, and hung over his guitar strings. He stopped playing. Now the room is somehow even silenter. Silenter isn’t a f*****g word but it should be.

Everyone looked to Jarrett. He had their full attention now. He looked down at the banana over his strings. He thought of his daughter. He thought of what she called bananas and he knew the perfect song to play.

The End