Hot and Bothered(70)
He thought he was going to throw up.
“You’ll be great,” said Cindy, smiling.
He followed Becca into the wings and waited his turn. By the time he got out on stage, people had sat at the dinner tables, and servers were bringing around salads. His stomach coiled at the sight of food, and then twice as hard at the sight of all those faces staring up at him.
“I’m thrilled to introduce Mark Webster, formerly of the band Sliding Up,” Becca told the rapt audience. “You probably remember ‘Twice as Nice’?”
The crowd murmured its approval.
“Mark’s here to talk to us a little bit about how music lessons changed his life.”
When she stepped back, he stood for a moment with the mic in his hand. He wasn’t sure he could even speak. And then he found Haven in the crowd, and she smiled at him. A full-on smile of pride and delight, and he thought, I can do this.
“I’m better with playing guitar than speaking,” he said. His voice was huge and echoey in the ballroom, but it sounded okay. Steady. “But I was told you wouldn’t appreciate me singing my speech.”
Laughter.
“It takes a lot to make me talk in public. I was never the guy in the band who did the witty little interludes.”
More laughter.
“So you know if I’m up here talking to you, it’s because it’s about something really important.”
They were watching and listening, and to his shock, he was enjoying this. They were waiting for him to say something, and he had something to say.
“My dad, who raised me pretty much on his own, was a good guy. He wanted the best for me. But there wasn’t much for me at school.”
He told them how he hadn’t been particularly good at academics. Or at sitting still. He’d been just getting by, he said, and slipping back as the work got harder and there were more and more kids who were just plain smarter than he was. He’d been a wisp of a kid back then, and he had friends, but only a few. He had been shy and quiet and not particularly athletic at that point. “Now you wouldn’t want to meet me on the basketball court,” he said, grinning, and they laughed again.
That laughter was as much of a high as the applause had once been. Better, because he was doing something that came straight from his soul. This laughter felt like the applause he got for playing the blues, or the smile on Gavin’s face when Mark had shown him that guitar lick.
“And then one of the older kids in the neighborhood handed me something. It could have been a bong or my first beer or a crack pipe or a cigarette, but it wasn’t. It was a guitar. He let me play his guitar. And everything changed for me. Practically overnight.”
A deep hush descended, one he could feel in his own body.
“I started doing better in school because my dad and teachers told me I could only have guitar lessons if I kept up my grades. And suddenly I had friends, because a guy with a guitar was cool and useful. A guy with a guitar got the girls.”
More laughter.
“I’ve had my tough moments,” he said.
The faces in the audience were upturned. He saw sympathy, not judgment for what he’d done wrong. These people were hearing his story, and they were seeing him as a human being.