"I'm glad you're here to see me," he replied.
They kissed one more time and then parted, Michelle heading through the crowd towards the bar. Jake watched her until she disappeared and then mounted the stage again. It was almost time to go on.
The final minutes ticked by with agonizing slowness. By 6:55 all five band members were standing in the alcove, looking out at the audience they were to perform for. Matt, Coop, and Darren were all chain smoking to calm their nerves. Bill, who didn't smoke, chewed his fingernails. Jake sipped from his ice water and wished he could smoke. He still could not believe he was about to walk out on a stage, pick up his guitar, and sing for a group of people, that he and his comrades were going to be the center of attention, the entertainment for the first part of the evening. Jesus Christ, he thought, his hands shaking a little with stage fright. What in the hell am I doing here? I can't do this!
His anxiety was not really surprising. Jake had always been on the shy side. The second of two children, his older sister Pauline had always been the attractive one, the smart one, the one with the straight A's and all the friends. Though he had no doubt his parents loved him equally, Pauline had always been a tough act to follow. It was she who had competed in and won the Heritage County spelling bee in 1964, the year before Jake had even started kindergarten. It was Pauline who had won the school's speech contest in the sixth grade with her controversial discourse about how prayer really didn't belong in public schools. She shot through junior high and high school, her GPA never once dipping below 4.0, and graduated at the age of 17 in 1972. From there she had gone on to UCLA on a full academic scholarship where she had maintained a 3.9 GPA while taking twenty-one units a semester. In 1975, a full year before the rest of her class, she was awarded a bachelor's degree in Business. From there she had applied for and was immediately accepted to Stanford University's School of Law where she focused heavily on corporate law. Now, at the ripe old age of twenty-five, she was a junior associate for one of the most prestigious law firms in the greater Heritage metropolitan area.
Jake, by contrast, had always been what was known as an underachiever. He was intelligent, with a tested IQ well above what was considered average, but his grades from about junior high school on had been mostly C's and D's, with the occasional F thrown in when a subject was particularly boring to him. It wasn't that he couldn't do the work or that he didn't understand it, it was that the work was not stimulating enough to him, that he just didn't care very much about it. He had never been interested in sports, never interested in mathematics or any of the sciences. He entered no spelling bees, no speech contests, never ran for student council. The only school subjects he did enjoy were history, literature, and anything that even remotely applied to music or the arts. In these subjects he carried consistent A's and in fact often spent extra time doing research and reading on his own. By the age of fifteen he had developed strong, if occasionally naïve political opinions, most of them considerably left leaning. As he grew older these opinions strengthened and became more mature, more focused. Long before receiving his high school diploma he had grasped the fundamental unfairness of life, how things were canted in favor of the rich, the whites, the males, how the catalyst and explanation for any act of any group could usually be found by examining who had what to gain from it.
This un-childlike depth of thinking was one thing that kept him isolated from his peers. Another was the substandard physical characteristics his genetic code had forced upon him during his formative years. He had been shorter than average until junior high school when a growth spurt began and quickly shot him up to his adult height of six feet, two inches by his sophomore year of high school. Unfortunately, his weight had lagged somewhat behind, leaving him skinny and almost gangly until well into his senior year, at which point he began to fill out a little bit. The school jocks-always the elite trendsetters in a high school society-assigned him the charming nickname of Bonerack sometime during his freshman year. It wasn't long before the cheerleading clique and then the rest of the school picked up on this moniker as well and called him by it until virtually no one knew what his real name was. That was when they talked to him at all. Mostly he was simply ignored, the kind of kid who faded from memory the moment he passed out of view.
It was the stoner clique that accepted him as a member during his sophomore and junior years. The stoners didn't care what you looked like, as long as you liked to get stoned and would occasionally spring for a dimebag or an eighth and share it with the crowd. Jake, who discovered the joys of marijuana intoxication at age thirteen by breaking into his father's stash, embraced the stoner lifestyle with gratitude. Here he found something approximating friendship and kinship. But unlike the majority of the stoners, he seemed to have an instinctive grasp of where the edge was in the lifestyle and how to avoid going over it. He would cut school, but never enough to actually get into trouble or fail a class. He would smoke weed with them, drink beer with them, and occasionally do a little cocaine, but stayed away from those who enjoyed the harder drugs like PCP, acid, and the various forms of speed.
Even among the stoners, however, he didn't quite fit in, not completely. His deep thinking amused them at times but quickly gained him a reputation as being a little on the strange side and overly pompous with his knowledge. He did not repulse the stoner girls-many of whom were the biggest sluts in the school-but neither were they endeared to him either. He was just Bonerack to them, a nice kid who didn't talk much when we was straight and who talked about weird, political shit they didn't understand when he was stoned or drunk. He wasn't a fighter or a comedian or a particularly prolific supplier of smoke. Nothing about him bespoke any type of sex appeal or mystery. At least not until the day of the kegger at Salinas Bend. That was a day that forever changed Jake's outlook on life. It was the day he was shown the power of music, the power of entertaining.
It was not unreasonable for Tom and Mary Kingsley to expect that their two children would be musically inclined to some degree. It was a simple matter of genetics. Mary had a beautiful singing voice and had performed in church choirs during her childhood. She played several instruments, including the piano, the saxophone, and the flute, but her love had always been the violin. She could make a violin cry or sing or lull or hypnotize or do all at the same time. Her skill and mastery of the instrument had secured her a position with the Heritage Symphony Orchestra at the age of nineteen, a position she still held on the day her son sat nervously backstage at D Street West (It was also where she met her best friend, Lorraine Archer, Bill's piano playing mother). Tom had grown up with musical interest as well. He had a decent singing voice and played a mean blues guitar. He had even tried to make it as a rock and roll star before deciding to change his focus and settle on a career fighting injustice as an ACLU lawyer.
With Pauline, their firstborn, it could not be said that they were disappointed in her musical abilities. She took to her piano and violin lessons with the same determination she took to everything else and by the age of twelve or so she could produce palatable music with them. Her voice was pretty as well, the sort of voice that sounded good singing along with the radio or belting out a spontaneous tune in the shower. Pretty enough to listen to, to enjoy, but nothing exceptional. Music was something Pauline would always have a love for but that she would never have the drive to produce.