I started taking lessons once a week at the most embarrassing place one can learn how to play the guitar—the Lesson Factory. The Lesson Factory was like the Walmart of guitar lessons. It was connected to the Guitar Center and inside there were about ten soundproof cubicles, each equipped with two chairs and two amplifiers and your very own defeated musician recruited off Craigslist. I was lucky enough to be paired with a teacher I actually liked, who must have considered me a welcome break from prepubescent boys who exclusively wanted to learn how to play Green Day songs and the intro to “Stairway to Heaven.”

The lessons couldn’t have come at a better time. That same year Nick Hawley-Gamer took the seat next to me in English and it felt like I’d won the lottery. I’d heard about him because he was Maya Brown’s neighbor and ex-boyfriend. I didn’t have any classes with Maya, but she was known to all of us because every boy in our grade had a crush on her. Infuriatingly, she was objectively pretty and popular but masqueraded as a tormented alternative. She dyed her brown hair jet black, wore caramel-colored corduroys, and would write things on her arms in pen so she wouldn’t forget them, thoughts she later wrote in her LiveJournal, which I followed assiduously even though we weren’t friends in real life. Her entries were made up of Bright Eyes lyrics conflated with her own romantic encounters and meandering ruminations largely written in the second person, directed at someone anonymous who had either wronged her or for whom she desperately longed. I thought she was one of the great American poets of our time.

Nick had shaggy blond hair, painted his nails with Wite-Out, and wore a silver hoop earring in one ear. In class, he was quiet and terribly slow, like he was stoned all the time. He was constantly asking me when assignments were due and if he could borrow my notes, hapless requests that I deftly roped into my private mission to befriend him. In middle school Nick had a band called the Barrowites. I didn’t know anyone who played in a band, and it felt impossibly cool that Nick already had one. They put out one EP before disbanding, which I diligently hunted down from a friend of a friend. It was a burned disc folded inside a homemade paper envelope with drawings and titles written in Sharpie. As soon as I got home I slipped the disc into the boom box I kept on my desk. I sat on a rolling chair and listened, still holding the paper envelope in my clammy hands as I pored over the lyrics, imagining Nick Hawley-Gamer’s wildly sexually experienced past. There were five tracks, the last a song called “Molly’s Lips.” I wondered if Molly was another one of his many exes, or if it was perhaps a pseudonym for Maya Brown. I was too stupid to know that “Molly’s Lips” was actually just a Nirvana cover, and I’d like to think that Nick was at least too stupid to know that Nirvana was covering the Vaselines.

Eventually I worked up enough courage to ask if he wanted to “jam.” We met at lunch under a tree by the soccer fields. It didn’t take long to reveal how horribly inept I was at the guitar. I had never “jammed” with anyone before. Nick would start a song and I’d have no idea what key it was in or how to accompany him. I tried to quietly hunt and peck for the right notes, attempting to hone in on a simple lead line vaguely rooted in the scales I thought I knew, before eventually apologizing and giving up completely. Nick took it in stride. He was patient and nonjudgmental and offered to play along instead to the songs I knew. We spent the rest of lunch trading verses on the White Stripes’ “We’re Going to Be Friends” and the Velvet Underground’s “After Hours” and it felt like the most romantic miracle of my young adult life.

When I had written a few songs of my own, I decided to sign up for an open mic night at Cozmic Pizza, a restaurant downtown with café table seating and a small stage behind the front bar. It had glossy cement floors and high ceilings and usually hosted jazz nights and world music. I invited my friends to watch me play. The place was mostly empty, but still you could barely hear my Costco acoustic over the clanking of pint glasses, the slamming of the pizza oven, and the cashiers calling out names to collect their pies. I was elated by my seven minutes of fame. Because I’d brought a group of friends, the open mic slots slowly transformed into my own sets, opening for small local artists. I took press pictures of myself in my bathroom with a self-timer, scanned them onto my dad’s computer, and used MS Paint to design promotional flyers. I bought a staple gun and hung them on telephone poles around town and asked local businesses if I could tape them up in their windows. I made a Myspace and uploaded the songs I recorded on GarageBand. I emailed the link to local bands and promoters and begged them to add me to their bills. I played high school benefits and developed a small local following, mostly of friends and classmates I pressured into attendance, until finally I was “big enough” to land a slot at the WOW Hall opening for Maria Taylor.

On the day of the show, Nick came early for moral support and waited with me in the greenroom until it was time for my set. I’d never been in a greenroom before, but even so it hardly felt glamorous. The room was brightly lit, closet-sized, with two benches and a mini fridge that sat atop a wooden table. Nick and I were sitting on a bench facing the door when Maria Taylor came in with a flannel-clad bandmate. She was intimidating. Dark, wavy hair framed her intense features, most recognizably her long, prominent nose and willowy figure. I held my breath as she entered. She mumbled, “Where’s the wine?” and then left.

My parents came and stood together in the back. I played about six acoustic songs, seated on a metal fold-out chair, wearing a striped rainbow shirt from Forever 21 with faded flared jeans tucked into brown cowboy boots, an outfit I actually thought made me look cool at the time. By then, thank god, I had at least upgraded to a Taylor acoustic and played out of an SWR strawberry-blond amp I’d chosen solely because I liked the red-and-cream color combo. I fumbled through open chords, using a capo along the neck for each song so I could reuse the same chord shapes. I sang teenage songs about longing for the simpler times, not realizing that’s exactly what these times were supposed to be. When I finished, I got a “Good job, sweetie” from my parents, who generously allowed me to hang around for the rest of the show.

Maria Taylor played a red Gretsch hollow body that looked comically large on her thin frame. I grabbed Nick’s shoulder in excitement as she started the chords to “Xanax,” the lead single off her new record that I’d been putting on all my mixes. The song started like a ticking clock, drumsticks clacking against the snare rim as she cataloged her anxieties and fears. “Afraid of an airplane, of a car swerving in the lane…of the icy mountain roads we have to take to get to the show.” She jolted her torso forward into the last strum, and the members of the band, who’d stood stock-still through the entirety of the first two verses, collapsed in unison into the chorus.

Even as I sang along to a song that specifically addressed the constant challenges of life on tour, even as I watched them play to a small ridge of at best thirty people in a small town they probably regretted booking, witnessing someone who toured the country playing songs they wrote was a revelation. I’d shared a stage with this person, sat two feet away in the same room as them. I had glimpsed the life of an artist, and it felt, for a moment, like a path slightly more within reach.

After the show Nick gave me a ride home in his parents’ Nissan Maxima. He was proud of me, and it felt good that someone I looked up to was seeing me in a new light.

“You should really record an album of all your songs,” Nick said. “You should look into the studio where we recorded the Barrowites.”

* * *

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THE NEXT MORNING, my mom took me to lunch at Seoul Cafe, the restaurant near the university run by a Korean couple. The husband worked the floor while the wife cooked in the back. Its only fault was that the service was slow, the husband easily flustered when he had more than three tables to deal with. As a work-around, my mother would call on the drive over about halfway between our house and the restaurant and phone in our orders in advance.