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# Rock 'n' Roll, Becoming a Bird Without Feet — Chapter 003
## 1. Poverty, Destitution, Hardship (2)
It was good news.
Of course, this man wasn't offering to treat him as a musician.
It was obviously session work.
But it would bring in money.
One job would give him enough money to live on for at least three or four months.
"Did something happen to the band's guitarist?"
"Haha, good grief. Who would start a band in times like these? Unless they want to starve to death. You know K-pop,
right? We're preparing a four-member girl group that we're aiming to promote not only throughout Asia but in the West as
well. We chose a rock 'n' roll concept for their debut album. There are plenty of young guitarists, but we thought a
deep, seasoned sound like yours would suit it better, so we looked around and came here."
"……"
K-pop.
In other words, they wanted to put his guitar sound into dance music.
Baek Chang-hyun held his tongue.
He wanted to yell at the man to get lost right then and there, but he couldn't.
He had run out of rice.
"……The sheet music."
"Oh, damn, I didn't bring the sheet music. But all the guitar sound consists of is riffs. You just need to work out the
riff sound from the chord progression and add maybe two bars of a short solo that you like in the middle."
"……"
"The payment is about this much. We're offering a little more than the usual industry rate."
The middle-aged man handed him a note.
Baek Chang-hyun opened it and tightly shut his eyes.
Fifty thousand won.
That was the payment for recording the sound for just one song.
Of course, there were conditions attached.
It was a buyout contract with no share of the copyright, and his name wouldn't even appear in the credits.
It was a one-sided contract, but for an old man living in a rented room that cost three million won a year, it was an
offer he couldn't refuse.
"……I'll do it."
"Ah, Mr. Baek. You made the right decision. The recording is in three days. If you give me your phone number, I'll send
you the address of the studio. I'll also send you the cloud storage path for the sheet music file."
"I don't have a phone."
"What? Ah…… yes."
The man stared blankly at Chang-hyun with an expression that seemed to say, What kind of primitive man is this in 2024?
Then he came to his senses and laughed.
"Phones are basically shackles anyway. I'm jealous. I'd like to try living without a phone too."
Taking a pen from his pocket, the man wrote an address on the back of his business card and handed it over.
"Come here by four in the afternoon three days from now."
"Excuse me, I'm sorry, but could you give me some of the payment in advance?"
"……"
The man looked flustered.
They had never worked together before, and it was their first meeting, so naturally he was reluctant to hand over an
advance when Chang-hyun had asked for one right away.
Chang-hyun lowered his head and said,
"I don't have money for transportation to the recording studio."
"……"
The man was startled again.
Then he glanced around the miserable state of the rented room where Chang-hyun was sitting, sighed, and pulled out his
wallet.
"Industry practice makes it difficult for me to give you an advance, but I'll at least give you enough for
transportation."
A single yellow banknote, bearing the image of Shin Saimdang, the mother of us all.
It was more than enough to call it mere transportation money, but from Chang-hyun's perspective, free money was simply
welcome.
"Thank you. I'll be there on time."
"Yes. I look forward to working with you, sir."
The middle-aged man took one more glance around the rented room before leaving.
He was more polite than expected.
Usually, successful people like him felt uncomfortable even setting foot in places like this, but he maintained his
manners until the very end.
Of course, once he left, he would probably call whoever had introduced Chang-hyun and give them an earful.
Chang-hyun shoved the money into his pocket and quietly followed after the man.
If he went around the back of the rented rooms, there was an alley leading to the market.
The alley was frequented by tourists who stopped to smoke while sightseeing, and cigarette butts were scattered so
densely across the ground that it was difficult to see the pavement.
Just as Chang-hyun had expected, the man was on the phone, cursing.
"Hey! You said he was talented! You said he'd been around the underground rock scene for more than thirty years and was
the real deal! So why the hell is someone like that holed up in a dump like this? If that guy comes to the studio and
can't deliver a proper performance, you're responsible. I'm going ahead with this because I trusted you, you bastard."
Well, that was still pretty mild.
The guy who came to hire him last year had grabbed his phone and even cursed his parents.
After making a short call, the man lit a cigarette and smoked it heavily before disappearing.
Chang-hyun waited until he was completely gone, then looked at the cigarette he'd left behind.
It was only half-smoked, and he hadn't even put out the ember.
Picking up cigarette butts left by other people and smoking them was an everyday occurrence for him.
Chang-hyun bent down, picked up the cigarette the man had discarded, and brought it to his mouth.
"Looks like he's got plenty of money. If he throws it away without even smoking half of it, I'm the one who benefits."
With the cigarette someone else had smoked and discarded between his lips, Chang-hyun looked up at the sky and muttered.
"A four-member girl group."
If someone had made this offer to him twenty years ago, he would have kicked them out without a second thought.
He had been young then, filled with nothing but arrogance and stubbornness, completely consumed by his pride as a rock
star.
But things were different now.
Was it because his life was impoverished?
No.
Hadn't he reached the age when he had to finally admit the truth?
That rock wasn't the only kind of music.
"If it can move people's hearts and open the door to the world of truth, what does the genre matter?"
It was such a simple fact.
Yet he had realized it far too late.
Only after approaching sixty had his stubbornness and arrogance finally begun to loosen their grip.
Just then, he saw a young man and woman enter the alley and light cigarettes.
The two were dressed head to toe in luxury brands and seemed to be having quite a good time sightseeing here. They
chatted about what they had seen and which stores had interesting things.
Judging by the way they addressed each other, they appeared to be a young married couple.
I wonder how my wife is doing.
Although they were divorced, his married life with his wife had been quite happy.
These days, whenever he looked at novels, they were full of stories about men who struck it big after getting divorced
or became rich from cryptocurrency after their divorce.
The wives in those novels were usually portrayed as women who cheated on their husbands or immature wives who couldn't
understand their husband's financial difficulties and simply spent money recklessly.
But Chang-hyun's wife wasn't like that.
"It was all my fault."
He gave a bitter smile.
His wife had been kind, gentle, and patient.
For fifteen years, she had worked at a restaurant to support him and treated him like a husband even though he hadn't
earned a single penny.
In the end, she couldn't endure it forever and left him, but he didn't resent her.
No, if anything, he was grateful.
She had taken care of a man like him for fifteen years, treating him as her husband.
After finishing the rest of the cigarette, he slipped his hand into his pocket and felt the banknote he'd received
earlier.
I'll buy a pack of cigarettes, two bottles of soju, and five packets of ramen.
Transportation wouldn't cost much, so he could afford that much of a luxury.
The neighborhood grocery store he usually went to had so much credit debt under his name that he figured they'd demand
he pay it back first if he asked for anything.
So he went to a market shop he had deliberately avoided and bought cigarettes, two bottles of soju, and five packets of
ramen.
He was lucky.
There was a promotion where buying five packets of ramen got you one extra packet for free.
"That's 16,300 won."
"……"
When he silently handed over the money, the woman at the register asked,
"Do you have any points?"
"No."
"……"
She flinched again.
It was because of that damned voice.
A chilling, hoarse voice that, if heard at night, could make you mistake it for the voice of a grim reaper who had come
to take you to the afterlife.
Most people hearing his voice for the first time reacted this way.
Perhaps realizing that she had been rude, the woman quickly counted out his change and handed it to him.
Chang-hyun stuffed the money into his pocket and turned around, but he could feel her gaze following his back.
Without saying anything, Chang-hyun left the shop and touched his throat.
My voice wasn't always like this.
From 1989 until now.
He had abused his throat for thirty-five years.
It wasn't because he had sung too much.
There was simply something wrong with his vocal technique.
Why?
Try doing nothing but death metal and thrash metal for forty years.
There was no way his voice could remain intact.
Suddenly, he remembered the time before he started his band, when he had gone up onstage at his high school festival and
sung Elvis's "Love Me Tender."
Because he attended an all-boys high school, he hadn't received any cheers from girls, but his music teacher had told
him that his voice was very soft and pleasant.
He would never be able to make a voice like that again.
There was a time when I was proud of having a voice like this.
The younger generation of metal musicians had envied his voice.
If he simply shouted using his natural voice, a roughness came out that they couldn't even dream of producing.
Of course they were jealous.
Chang-hyun sighed as he recalled the past.
"I need to find a stable job."
By this point, there wasn't a job Chang-hyun hadn't tried.
Construction labor was a given. Since he had no particular skills, he had also worked as a driving instructor for a
taekwondo academy and driven a bakery truck.
He had been fired from both the taekwondo academy and the bakery truck job.
Chang-hyun touched his tied-up long hair.
Parents had complained about how a teacher could have hair like that, while a branch manager had criticized the hygiene
of the hair of someone who transported food ingredients.
In short, he had been fired because of his hair.
But he hadn't wanted to give it up.
Headbanging onstage with short hair simply didn't look right.
Back then, he had at least had an opportunity to perform once a week.
Now he didn't even have that.
It had already been more than seven years since he had stood on a stage.
Yet he still couldn't bring himself to give up his long hair.
"It's all pointless anyway."
He should cut it.
Once he finished this job and received the five hundred thousand won, he would pay off some of his debts and cut his
hair.
Short hair would mean having to visit the hair salon more often, but so what?
If he could get even the jobs he had been fired from because of his hair, he would make enough money to cover the salon
expenses.
He wasn't going to perform onstage anyway.
What use was long hair?
When the shop told him they charged separately for a bag when receiving his purchases, Chang-hyun simply carried the two
bottles of soju and the ramen in his bare hands.
He returned to the alley behind the rented rooms and opened the new pack of cigarettes he'd bought.
It was his first time smoking a fresh cigarette in a long while.
"Cigarette prices have really gone through the roof."
Four thousand five hundred won for a pack.
No matter how much prices had risen, this was ridiculous.
Back in the old days, he could have bought an entire carton with this much money.
But what could he do?
Tobacco was a state monopoly, so he had no choice but to pay the price they set and smoke.
If he didn't like it, he could quit.
He inhaled the smoke deeply into his lungs and exhaled.
The area around him became hazy with smoke.
Of course, it wasn't all his smoke.
Tourists came here specifically to smoke so frequently that the place was always like this.
"If I could have just one more chance."
He laughed bitterly at his own words.
This wasn't some fantasy novel.
What god would ever give him another chance?
If he had the time to say things like that, they would probably tell him to go out and work instead.
He had spent his entire life stubbornly clinging to what he called his convictions, even though they were nothing more
than arrogance disguised under a noble name.
He was simply receiving the price he deserved.
No one had ever forced him to live this way.
It had been a long time since he had smoked a fresh cigarette instead of a discarded butt, so he felt dizzy.
Perhaps it was because it had been so long since he had smoked an entire cigarette.
He rubbed the tip of the cigarette with his fingers to put out the ember, then tucked it back into the cigarette case.
He could smoke the rest later.
Walking toward his rented room while dangling the bag of ramen from his hand, Chang-hyun muttered,
"Let's have a bellyful of ramen and soju for the first time in a while, then go to sleep."
If only he wouldn't wake up again once he fell asleep.
After all, in this impoverished and wretched world that endlessly repeated itself, he would only open his eyes to the
same miserable life all over again.