The next day after school, Jerry's Father brought him to his cheese-making class. He dropped him off at the door and then went to do the shopping. Jerry walked in trying to come up with an excuse to cut the class, and go and practice with Jimmy.

He didn't have to bother. As soon as he entered, the stench of sweaty socks left in a mound for months, slowly absorbing one another's foulness assailed his nostrils, the foul odor of a million public lavatories. The stinkiness of cheese! The teacher greeted him as he came in through the door, only for Jerry to vomit ice-cream, breaded fish, and mushy green peas (school lunchtime leftovers) all over the teacher's shoes.

Jerry looked up at the cheese-making teacher, who looked back down at him through some very thick spectacles. Despite his stomach clenching from the vomiting, Jerry decided this was as good an excuse as any. He said sorry and ran back out of the class as fast as he could.

With his dream from the night before still feeling slightly real in his head, there was only one place to go. He went straight to the dump. A strange mouse was setting up the most elaborate sound system he had ever seen.

He had stacks of assorted speakers and was putting together long banks of different colored pedals. Each pedal had a mind-blowing number of buttons and knobs for twiddling and pushing.

"Hi, I'm Jerry! You here for classes too?" asked Jerry.

For the second time that day, somebody looked down at him through glasses. This time, however, the tall thin mouse was wearing sunglasses, despite it not being very sunny or even that bright. The mounds of junk kept most of the sun out.

"No, little dude. I am The Ghost, guitar slinger extraordinaire. I'm about to school Jimmy Halloumi on how to play a real guitar. This is a guitar showdown," replied the tall dark mouse in a monotone nasal voice.

"What are these?" asked Jerry pointing at the banks of pedals.

"They're my effects, they give me my sound," the mouse answered.

"Hi, kid!" Jimmy's chainsaw growl of a voice alerted Jerry to his arrival.

Jimmy, who had been watching The Ghost through the window of his shack as he set up his equipment, walked up with a wooden chair and an old rag in one hand, and a battered and scratched acoustic guitar in the other.

"Eh, Jimmy this guy is... "

"Yeah, I know kid, this is kind of a regular thing," he answered, as though it wasn't strange at all.

"Do me a favor kid, put this blindfold on me, will ya?" he said sitting down on his chair and holding the guitar between his legs.

"Blindfold? Won't that be a bit of a disadvantage?" asked Jerry.

"That's kind of the idea, kid."

Jerry did as Jimmy asked and stepped back. Between the blindfold and the sunglasses, Jerry wasn't sure that either of them could see the other.

Suddenly Jimmy began to play. Every finger was in motion, spilling out a melody from the old guitar that seemed to paint a picture of another place, a world full of sunshine and rain, mountains and green, joy and sadness. Every sound evoked a wave of dancing people who seemed to clap in time to the chords, he strummed in dramatic chords every so often to break up the complex tunes and counter melodies.

As the final note faded, Jimmy took off his blindfold.

"As the challenger, I get to start! It's in the rules!" the Ghost objected.

"We get to warm up, don't we?" Jimmy pointed out.

"Warm-up! That was your warm-up!" said the tall, dark mouse in a state of shock. The truth was he had never heard anyone play the guitar that way. The Ghost ( whose real name was Kevin) only followed fashions and wasn't aware of the blind Spanish composer Issac Albeníz's Asturias.

If he were honest, The Ghost could never have imagined anyone could play an acoustic guitar like Jimmy just had. He ceremoniously unplugged his guitar from the stack of equipment and turned and left with a dismissive sigh and a melodramatic wave of his claw.

"Did you say this happens a lot?" Jerry asked.

"Almost every week, some young whippersnapper comes looking to see if they can play better than me. I thought that's why you came, the first time I saw you. Since that wasn't the case, I let you stick around; humility goes a long way in my book. Well, you better get started. Do you remember the riff from yesterday?" Jimmy went through the notes quickly on his guitar.

"How could I forget?" answered Jerry.

"Good" was Jimmy's reply, as he set the metronome ticking. This time the rhythm was slightly faster.

The slight change in tempo took Jerry by surprise at first, but gradually he started to get into the swing of things. Soon he even got bored and started to improvise. Messing around with the order of the notes. Seeing if he could find other notes that Jimmy hadn't shown him that might fit.

"Good work kid, let's leave it for today, do your parents know where you are?" he asked

"No, they think I'm at a cheese-making class."

"Cheesemaking, huh? Maybe you should tell them the truth. In the end, lies always come out."

"Yeah, It's just, I don't think they'd understand. Talking about the truth, is this you?" as he asked, Jerry took the photo he'd cut from the magazine and showed it to Jimmy.

Jimmy looked at the photo and for a moment his face indicated that he had gone somewhere, like when he was playing.

"Yes and no, kid. That was a different me, at a different time. Back when rock was the music of the revolution and we thought a single song could change the world," He said with a hint of melancholy in his voice.

"Maybe it still could," suggested Jerry with some hope.

"Nope," Jimmy said shaking his head "now everything's bops and beeps," he said looking over at the stacks and banks of equipment the tall dark mouse had left behind.

"It ain't got no soul kid, no soul at all and I ain't sure it was so pure, to begin with. You'd best get back; before your parents start worrying about you."

Jerry set off, running as fast as he could. He arrived at the youth center to find his father and the Cheese-making teacher (with some surviving green peas and toffee flavored ice-cream still pebble-dashed across his lower half) discussing his disappearance.