[No Jacket Required]

Teddy lost himself in the blur of black and white rectangles. He could have had his fingers on the strings of a bass, or a flying-V. He could have been just another guy in a band; if it weren’t for the years he’d spent on an uncomfortable piano bench, playing ‘Fur Elise’ over and over again. He’d have had the chance to escape the 61-key PSR225PC Yamaha, complete with built-in, pre-played songs by John Phillip Sousa and Chopin. Instead, he backed up the harmony on the BCI—Birth Control Instrument—and thought about how nothing riled girls up quite like a keyboard.

The rectangles crescendoed with each muted thud. He no longer saw hands, or the gold firebird wrapped around his middle finger. The black Sharpie “FUCK OFF!” Jake had scrawled below his knuckles yesterday, disappeared. He only heard the notes pump through his oversized black and silver headphones; felt them vibrate around the plugs through his lobes. He’d crafted these notes together during long nights of little sleep—nights where Chris took Teddy’s couch because he’d managed to bag another Metal chick with a drummer fetish. He’d spent those hours propped up against a wall in the front room, scrawling tiny eighths and quarters over a carefully penned staff. Sometimes he’d put words in over the notes, but he preferred to leave that space blank. He was no lyricist.

Even if Jake said he had a knack for it.

He lifted his head and peered across the practice space at her. She sat under Chris’ billboard-sized advertisement: “For a good time, call THE MEXICAN THUNDER!!” and his number. She peeled back the edge of the Band-Aid on her palm and stuck it back down. For a few seconds she stared, then started picking at it again. Around that time he felt something hit his shoulder.

Chris, already behind his kit and with the remaining drumstick in hand, motioned for him to take off his headphones.

“—try working on ‘Filtered’, since we haven’t gotten through it,” Roger said. The last two words of his sentence bounced around the room with the undue emphasis of standing too close to the microphone. It reminded Teddy of what Jake had said once: Roger didn’t sing—he intimidated with his voice.

“Do you think we can this time?” Paul asked, loading his tone with bitter syrup.

If he didn’t play wicked guitar, Teddy reminded himself. If. . .

He repeated this mantra and watched Jake grab her magazine and rest it across the caps of her knees. Her jeans, too short to begin with, hiked up farther so the cuff fell above her ankles. He almost missed the beginning of the song trying to figure out which socks she wore and if he’d seen them before.

The song started slow, like many cheesy ballads that made certain bands big in the eighties. Except their song had power. Teddy yanked his headphone plug out and played. He worked the notes, hearing them build up to the fabled point in the song they’d never reached: the chorus. His hands tingled. His breath caught. Almost. His fingers hovered over the keys. And they remained there when the song stopped, at the exact place, from the last twenty-seven attempts.

He inhaled deep and sighed. Roger dropped his hands from the mic stand and shoved a mass of curly blonde hair from his face. Jake casually flipped to the next page. Chris dumped his sticks into his lap and reached for the pack of Luckies taped under his chair.

“See? We’re fucking it up on the second verse, right after the drum kick. I think we should start from there,” Roger said.

“We wouldn’t be fucking it up if Jim knew how to tune his bass,” Paul chimed in, right on cue. James lifted his focus from his hands on the strings to give him a mild look.

Teddy reasoned that Paul played better than anyone they knew.

“I wouldn’t talk,” Roger said.

“And you’d know, singing off-key on ‘I wanna hate you.’”

“Shut your mouth,” James said.

Teddy saw Jake slip a finger under the fine black text and slide it along the page.

“Jesus Christ,” Chris muttered, through clenched teeth.

“What was with the Hendrix feedback? We’re fucking metal, not funk, alright? Keep it clean,” Roger said.

He closed his eyes and rubbed his face. The edge of his ring scraped his cheek, but he didn’t care.

“The song could use a little filling,” Paul said, “since Chris can’t keep up on the pedals.”

Chris yanked his cigarette from his mouth and entered the fray with, “You wanna take over, Jinks?”

“And leave Teddy as the only harmony? Not likely.”

An angry flush crept up Teddy’s neck.

“What do you think, Jake? It’s the bass right?”

“It’s not the goddamned bass! You spend so much time on all the fucking notes that you can’t keep up,” Roger said.

“Listen to the music, Roger. Your boyfriend’s off! Just because you’re fucking him doesn’t mean you should lower our standards.”

“Is it just the three of us, or is James playing fine?” Roger implored, ignoring the attempt to drag their relationship into this.

“I’m not taking sides,” Jake said. She bent forward, sniffed a cologne ad, wrenched away, and scrunched her nose so that it dragged her lip upward.

“Our standards?” Chris asked.

Teddy could think of a hundred more preferable things than jumping into the fray. Eating un-kosher hot dogs. Watching Chris nail the chick with too much blue eye shadow from last night’s show. Sleeping with her himself. But the band couldn’t stop once they got going. And if it seemed that there was a time when the argument ended, someone made sure to stick a marker in it to pick it up later.

“This is bullshit! Can everyone just shut the fuck up and play?” He said, cutting off James’ pledge of support to Chris, “I’ve got things to do, alright?”

Jake lifted her fist in solidarity and flipped back to her article. He smiled.

“I need a break,” Paul said, un-slinging his Peavey electric and leaving it behind.

Chris wedged his cigarette between his fingers for the chance to rub his face roughly, and admit, in as kind of a tone as he could muster, “He’s right, Jim.”

Roger turned away.

“Check out your ‘A’. It’s close.”

James licked his lips, plucked the third string, and cocked his head to listen. He did it again, and twisted a knob, tweaking it until he found the perfect pitch. Teddy heard it right away and reached for a chilled beer in the family-sized Coleman behind him. The bottle of Bud hissed to life and he crossed the room. He took a long swallow and slid it over Jake’s magazine, wiggling it.

“No thanks,” she said, waving it away and continuing to flip through the fashion pages.

“What’re you looking at?”

She used her thumb as a placeholder while she flipped it over to show him the cover. A bold yellow GQ sat printed over the head of the latest twenty-something Hollywood action hero. This guy starred in one of many disappointing adaptations of comics into movies, but he couldn’t remember which. Instead, he wondered what girls saw in him. What Jake might see in him.

“Hmm.”

“What?” she asked.

He lifted his eyebrow, the mouth of the bottle tipped precariously toward his lips.

“Nothing.”

And he drank instead of speaking.

Chris wandered over, and crouched down, blowing smoke across the pages.

“Looking for a new outfit for ‘Ken’, Jakey-pooh?”

“What’re you talking about?” Jake sighed.

“Get this. Jake’s been spending all her time making over this poor sucker,” Chris informed him, shaking his head ruefully and grinning.

“Who?” he asked.

“I love it when you talk about me like I’m not even there,” she said.

“Ashley’s ex.”

The name Ashley conjured up epic Christopher Ortiz diatribes about that long blonde hair, those impossibly big tits, her smile, her laugh, the way she said his name as if it were made of smoke. The way he never had a chance in hell because of her ex: the unfairly attractive, All-American, decked-out to the nines in body mods dude.

“That Warren guy she was always going on about?”

“That’d be the one.”

“Wait, the dude with the ‘stang?” He asked. He couldn’t put a face to the name, but he could conjure up his car. War drove a raven black 1965 Ford Mustang Coupe. Cherry. He’d had to wipe the drool from his mouth when he saw it.

“Yes, and you have no idea what you’re talking about, alright? So stop it,” she said.

“She’s getting all red,” Chris said.

“What is goin’ on?” He asked, drawing his dark eyebrows together.

“I’m trying to see if I can create the perfect man, except it can’t be done,” she said, curling her lip.

“Calm down, Billy Idol, we mean you no harm,” Chris said, holding his hands up.

Teddy chuckled.

“Shouldn’t you two be covering ‘All My Love’ or something?”

“Cover Zeppelin? Blasphemy!”

“It’s against our rules,” he said, giving Chris a nod and a salute with his beer.

“That’s right. It’s only cool to cover Phil Collins right now, isn’t it?”

“The man is a classic pop god,” Chris said.

“You know what would be awesome? If you made a metal version of ‘Sussudio’,” Jake said.

“Yeah?” Chris said, and got up from his crouched position to head back to his drum kit.

Teddy pushed up from the floor and wandered back to the keyboard. He nudged his mic closer.

Chris started with a simple beat. Thwap, tap, thwap, tap, thwap-thwap, tap. Teddy added in the trademark synthetic 80’s sound. Roger heeded its weird, primeval call, and made his way back to the microphone. Chris snaked the beat up, faster and faster. Teddy adjusted the melody’s backbone.

Roger leaned in, nearly pressing his lips on the head of the mic, and sang in a death howl, “There’s a girl that’s been on my mind, all the time, su-su-sudio.”

“Oh, oh,” Teddy came in.

“Now she don’t even know my name, but I think she likes me just the same, su-su-sudio.”

“Whoa-oh-oh.”

Jake shut her magazine and laughed.

“Nice,” she said.

“Oh, if she called me, I’d be there. I’d come running, anywhere. She’s all I need, all my life. I feel so good, if I just say the wor-r-d,” Roger snarled.

“Su-su-sudio,” Teddy sang.

“What the fuck is that?” Paul asked. He reached for his guitar.

The three of them stopped simultaneously.

“Just a little No Jacket Required from our man Phil,” Chris said.

Jake used the wall to climb her way to her feet, pausing only to stretch the kinks from her calves, and shake the stiffness from her knees.

“Alright, this has been fun, but I’ve got to be heading out,” she said.

“You can’t stay?” he asked. He focused on brushing flecks of saliva from the keyboard.

“No. I’ve got somewhere I’ve got to be. Sorry.”

“You’re going to miss out on Chinese,” Chris said.

“As much as I’d love some Golden Wok, I really have to go. Try not to kill each other while I’m gone, okay?”

The boys grumbled false promises to keep the slaughter to a minimum. From the corner of his eye, Teddy saw her smiling, twisting her magazine into a tube, and looking in his direction. He busied himself examining his instrument, and only lifted his head once she turned away. For several seconds he stared at the door closed behind her.

Without her, he once again noticed the band’s shared hovel. Strips of wallpaper printed with gold melons and orange butterflies curled. Spaces between the splintered floorboards opened peepholes to the basement. A couple of overturned amber forties collected dust in a corner. The hallway winding a path to the front door was so narrow only one person could pass by at a time. And with the piles of Modern Drummer, Guitar World, Rolling Stone, and Kerrang! shoved precariously against its walls, it was only a matter of time before they all met their end from an ill-placed cigarette. Something about her departure always made the two-flat bungalow look like a decrepit little shit-hole. As if the sunset color of her hair or the fire of her cheeks brightened this place. God knows the one bare bulb in the front room, flickering like a candle, didn’t.

He wondered why he bothered today to sign the lease for another year. Each of the former 355 days seemed like a repeat of the last. He worked his ass off for minimum wage, and the permanent smell of cheese and marinara sauce in his pores. The thick mess of dark curls that used to hit his shoulders had begun to fall out. He had shaved it off and tried to convince himself that he enjoyed the struggle.

But he supposed he put his illegible signature next to the ‘X’ because of Jake. His cheerleader. His biggest fan. She believed in that struggle. She’d told him that, after he’d gotten wasted on cheap malt liquor and picked a fight with Paul. As he sobered up on the bungalow’s stoop, with a split lip and a black eye, the street lights popped on, one after the other. Drizzle flashed like thin strips of Christmas tinsel. She’d sat down at his side under the awning, and shared the quiet. After hour-long minutes passed, she leaned over and rested her head on the space between his clavicles.

Her hair, poofed from the humidity, tickled the flesh under his jaw. And she whispered, with her hand on his waist, that she was proud of him. Not everyone was strong enough to be miserable. Few fought for their dreams.

“I am so proud of you,” she had repeated.

He supposed, while Paul plucked out the first chords of his solo in ‘Trouble Whore’, that that had been the reason.

Paul’s fingers wheedled and squirmed over the strings in hand-cramping speed. Teddy blinked himself out of his trance. He waited out the minutes until he could spread his fingers and join in. Roger tapped his foot, and just as he opened his mouth to let out a growl, the buzzer went off.

“Food!”

Chris leapt up and dashed around the magazines to the door. Teddy could almost see the grin Chris wore at the large paper bag pulled taut around so much greasy cuisine. Chris’ hands reached for it, but the delivery girl yanked it away.

“That will be $27.32.”

And then Chris would pause, and begin patting himself down. And when he came up with nothing but a tangled thread, Teddy heard him yell, “Anyone got any money?”

“I’m broke,” Roger said.

“Me, too,” James said.

“How much?” he asked.

While Teddy collected the cash, Chris would try his pathetic puppy eyes on the girl. But she knew his tricks and didn’t consider caving. He had a history of running off and leaving delivery people—like her on her first day—with nothing more than a triumphant cackle and an antique knocker in their face.

However, Paul intercepted. He waved three tens, stuffed them into the girl’s hand, and asked for the change. She handed over the difference and the bag, muttering in Chinese as she stomped down the front steps to her Schwinn and rode away.

“Since when do you have cash?” Teddy asked when they made their way back to the practice area.

Paul thumbed through a wad of fins and twenties. The tips of his canines flashed under his curved lip.

“Since now.”

“How? You win big at Harrah’s or something?” Roger asked.

“Maybe he bagged himself a cougar. Jinks set himself up for life,” Chris said.

James dragged a dumpster-dive poker table over and stuck the felt back down with his fist. Roger unfolded their collection of dented metal chairs from backstage areas at local bars, and sat down heavily. Chris hunted through the paper bag for his pork chow mein.

“How’d you get it?” Teddy said.

“It was a gift.”

“Who in the hell would give you something?” James said. He dropped his carton of chicken fried rice in front of him and searched for a fork. He found one by the back leg of his chair, and bent down to grab it. After blowing heartily on it, he turned it once this way and that, and dug in.

“Who got the egg rolls? I’m taking one,” Roger announced.

Teddy crossed his arms over his chest.

“A gift from who?”

“Our best friend,” Paul said, pleased. He popped open his beef kow and used his fingers to pick out a strip of meat.

Roger dropped the egg roll. Chris stopped deciphering the hieroglyphic black marker labels on the remaining cartons. James’ chewing paused, a wad of rice and green onion bulging his cheek.

“Jake gave you the money,” Chris said.

“Yep,” Paul said, and sucked the brown sauce off his index finger, “She was happy to.”

“Happy to,” Teddy repeated.

“Sure. Someone has to bankroll this operation.”

“You told her it was for the band,” Teddy said.

“It is. Most of it.”

“Most of it? How could you-”

“What was I supposed to do? The gigs at Limelight pay shit.”

The muscles in Teddy’s cheek jumped. His skin flushed a mottled red under his dark beard, and around the steel spike poking out from the crease under his lip.

“You get a fucking job. You don’t ask Jake for money.”

“And be a ‘food delivery specialist’ like you?”

“Go ahead and mock, Paul, but it’s my check that pays for this place. My money that lets you play those goddamned twenty minute solos!”

“My solos are the reason anybody’s interested in us at all! You think anybody’d come to see you play a fucking Yamaha?”

“I think they’d come to see me play a fucking kazoo if it meant they didn’t have to sit through your Van Halen wannabe bullshit.”

Paul sprang up and cracked his knuckles. Teddy shook his head, uncrossed his arms, and swung his thumb over his shoulder.

“You’re out.”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me.”

“You can’t kick me out, Theodore.”

“That’s amazing, ‘cause I am.”

“I’m lead guitar! How in the hell are you going to do anything without me?”

“We’ll figure it out.”

“It’s not your decision! Guys, c’mon. Tell him it’s not his decision.”

Roger snagged that egg roll again and picked the breading off. Chris clapped his pack on his palm and lit a cigarette. James smiled like he just won the Mega Millions.

“Guys?”

The floorboards under Teddy’s feet cracked like a judge’s gavel. He bent down, unplugged the Peavey guitar, and shoved it into Paul’s chest.

“Get out.”

Paul breathed heavily from his nose, and spat, “Fuck you!”

“You heard ‘im, Jinks,” Chris said.

“You’re on his side now?”

“If that’s how you want to look at it.”

“Then fuck you, too!”

“Door’s there,” James said and pointed the way.

Paul swung his guitar over his shoulder and pretended not to notice it smack into his back. As he passed by to leave, he flashed a silent threat at James. Teddy had seen James wither at such a look in the past, but today, the bassist returned it with a smirk.

Once the door slammed, James called out, “You forgot your jacket, asshole,” and waved the forgotten outerwear.

Teddy wove his hands together and ran them over his scalp. He exhaled.

“Great,” Chris said, “What’re we going to do now?”

“How are we gonna play?” Roger said. He flicked a wonton shaving off the edge of the table.

“Who cares?” James said.

Roger grimaced and shook his head.

Teddy sighed, loud and long. Finally, he took his seat at the table and pulled over the steamed plastic bowl of General Tao’s chicken.

“You know how to play guitar, right?” he asked.

“Yeah, a bit, but . . . “ Roger said.

“It doesn’t have to be forever. Just until we get someone new, alright?”

“Someone I don’t want to stab in his fucking sleep,” James said.

“We’ll put that in the ad,” Chris said.

James grinned.

“Who’s singing then?” Roger asked.

“Can’t you sing and play at the same time?” Chris said.

“Can you?”

“I’ll do it,” Teddy volunteered. He may have complained on the inside about playing the least sexy instrument, but he was comfortable working in the background. Status quo. The last 355 days popped into his head.

And Jake, her voice, her slight smile.

I’m so proud of you.

“Really, Theo?” Roger asked.

Teddy nodded and took a bite of the sweet ‘n spicy dish. Jake might not have been there, then, but everything seemed a little brighter.