UnWrecked Press presents: Free Fiction Friday

This week’s Free Fiction Friday story from UnWrecked Press is “The Rise and Fall of Basskick.”

UPDATE: Now that the free week is over, you can read the rest of this story by downloading an ebook from Amazon and Smashwords. Then you can read it on your laptop, desktop, Kindle, iPad, Nook, iPhone, or whatever device you use to read ebooks.

This story includes characters we first met in my novel The Prodigal Sons, except it’s over a decade later.

Basskick the band just might be getting back together again!

The Rise & Fall of Basskick

The year I turned forty was the year it hit me at last that I wasn’t going to make it as a rock star.

It’s the kind of thing can bring a guy like me down. I never talked about it with my friends. They never talked about it with me. But I knew it. Deep down. Inside the eyes of the guys working underneath the hoods of the cars at my shop. The guys that came in off the farms, dusty, bits of corn still in their coats and seed caps, coming in off the fields, manure still stuck to their boots. Needing us to fix their wife’s cheap compact cars so they could commute to their part-time jobs in Raleigh or Rocky Mount. All of us carried this fact inside us.

None of us were going to make it.

The band, which never officially broke up, was always going to be just what it was. Something we did on the side. It was just going to be us, working like this for another twenty, thirty years, until we retired, sat around for ten years, and died.

How about that? How about that for a prospect?

The only thing that kept me going was Kaylee. My girl. She made it okay for me not to be a rock star. Let me tell you how.

* * * * *

This all started way before Kaylee was born. Way before I knew who I was. Back when things were easy and fun.

Look. When you’re just a stupid kid in your early twenties, you think pretty much anything could happen in your life. All you have to do is just throw some effort at it, swallow some drinks along with it, and you can make it happen. The world was your oyster. What did you know then?

And in the years that’ve built up since, how did you manage to forget it?

We had this band, called it Basskick. Yeah, stupid name, I know. But it sounded good, at first. Problem was, we didn’t even have a bass player. We had guitars, three of them to be exact, and Russ on the drums.

Russ was a madman on the drum kit. He thought this was life. You played drums, you had gigs, yeah, sometimes you went to work, sometimes you called in sick. Maybe you made some cash, beer money.

Me, I thought bigger. I knew that once we stopped covering the popular heavy metal headbanger bands and started making our own music, with me doing the lyrics—we’d start getting somewhere. Start making some serious cash.

Because all of us were struggling. We were kicking to get by in an economy that was crap, in a town without much left to give. We’d practice a couple times a week, whenever we could get together. Most times it was out in an empty bay of my auto shop’s garage, or in Charlie’s dad’s barn. Most of the time out on the farm, I figured we were turning the cows’ milk for that day into churned butter with the overamped guitars we used to make up for the fact that we had no bass.

But we were going to it. We were working to make it happen. Russ was printing out flyers when he was supposed to be fixing engines or changing oil in my garage, or me, writing lyrics at my desk instead of dealing with customers or the bookkeeping. Or Charlie, skipping out of the nightly chores so he could go and get his guitar tuned up or trade in some old baseball cards or comics to get a new amp or mike. Or big Freddie, donating blood and plasma and any other bodily fluid he could get paid for. It all went to the Basskick cause.

And then, when Charlie got laid off from the battery factory and had to move four towns away for a new job, we recruited William into the band, it all just clicked.

William was a guy I’d known all my life. How many people can you say that about these days. His family lived down the gravel road from my own, and I remember playing with him in their hay barn and in the attic of their huge farm house as far back as my memory goes.

William still lived with his parents. Lived with his grandma. And that summer, after his grandpa passed on, he was living with his brother again. He was having one crappy year, let me tell you why. After Gramps died, William’s wife leaves. Moves out and leaves town altogether after living with him and all his family, sleeping in the same bed he’d slept in all his life, putting up with all that because it was supposed to be temporary. Couple years pass, and they’re still living there.

But I could tell he was ready to make the break, he was ready to move away. But his dad always needed help there on the farm, something was always falling apart. William was working all the time for his dad. We all knew how it goes. You do what you can, you do what you have to.

* * * * *

Read the rest as an ebook from Amazon and Smashwords.