The story below is a work of fiction, but please read the footnote*.
The evening of my first show with the band was that one annual autumn night where the season’s first frost comes. Pitch black by dinnertime, gentle smoke scent but no fire, powdered ice on the fallen leaves. Was there a significance to this. It was a fun surprise, like the world wanted to draw out a bit of exuberance from me—graduate students never check the weather unless they want to miss class or if I smell rain and I want my hair to behave. I cut mine a few days ago for the winter…no, for the band. Not for the guys or for self-initiation, but for tonight’s gig. It was at a party in a first floor on-campus apartment. It will be close quarters and my hair is (was) butt-long and I didn’t want it to get snagged. My head favors a right tilt when I sing, and Mick and Not Mark are always stage right. Double the threat of getting hair caught in their guitar-knob things. I’ll explain Not Mark’s name later. Why couldn’t they just be both left-handed. Now my hair starts covering one eye or the other. I need to figure that out. Us women and our hair—always either removing it or making it bigger. That’s what I need to consider every day. Not my account balances my grades my parents my brothers my dead gerbil from 3rd grade. Not about walking back to my apartment at night. Not about my scooter’s paintjob. Not about the department chair I always need to keep happy with my studies. Not about far future fears. Hair.
We roll out our gear and stack everything near the outside door. Lots of people there, milling around outside despite the cold, and in the apartment itself from the looks of it. Everyone stares at me until I realize they are watching us. Why do I think like this, and anyways why wouldn’t they stare: a passenger van, trailer, and a bunch of their peers and pricey musical equipment, backing up onto the strip of grass right near the door. My first year here, I was surprised the college allowed things like this. It’s a dry campus and these unofficial events can attract the wrong behavior. The bros make do with glass bottles of root beer and dirty white baseball caps. A few cruisers outside and a pair of cops overseeing from a distance. Should I feel safe or uneasy about that. We’re playing for free but we’ll sell things. We wait outside since the band before us is still playing. I should go in and watch them, be a supporter. I don’t see anyone out here that I know but why would I on such a large campus. The rest of the band does. What do you do in these situations. Go wait in the van or go try to talk to someone. These options seem like failed decisions but a bad idea is preferable to doing neither, nothing. I itch to bring my phone out to salve myself but I refuse. I should be more outgoing. No one likes a shy singer unless you’re Jim Morrison but you have to be on drugs to make that work. The other guitarist, Mark thought of me or felt really bad seeing just me sitting on a speaker cabinet and introduced me to one of his friends. Not Mark, his last name is “Naughton” and his first name isn’t “Mark,” so that’s how he got his name. Mick and Mark are both named “Mark” but Mick lost the coin toss, I was told, and he had an unpronounceable last name, I guess Polish.
Mark, me, and Mark’s Friend go inside to watch the band play their last few songs. A jam band. Every college needs to have one resident band of this type. That’s not me looking down on them. They are bros having fun but the music is the kind you can kind of soak in without needing to pay attention. We’re not that kind of band. We are like needy dogs, always following whining barking. I bet half of a dog’s barks is their version of profanity. A lone man quietly walking up the street…well if I see him from a bay window I better start cursing him out violently. I know two of the jam band guys from undergrad music classes. One of them I sat next to for a whole year and we joked a lot. I don’t know his name. Wait, I’ll be honest here, I forgot his name, just like Mark’s Friend. We talked at the first class and me thinking it was unusual because no one my age introduces themselves and includes their surname like he did. I have to stop to think about what year I graduated high school so how are you gonna expect me to remember a new person’s full name. I even forgot the band’s name even though they just said it. Was one of those “The” something something “Band” names. Would they be so on the nose as to put “Jam” in their actual name. Maybe even have like the jam you put on toast as part of their logo. I should’ve been a Marketing major.
Almost forgot to warm up. I jam jab in my ear monitor and connect it to my phone. I sort of planned on doing this in the van but not with this weather. I can do it in the bathroom but I don’t want to have people hear me and ruin the mystique. Can I just…can’t they, can’t The Toast Jam Band play one more song while I do my business in the bathroom. You’re welcome for the pun. Doesn’t matter. Too much noise around here, and I can like turn the sink or tub on. I also like to do stretches and hyperventilation breathing exercise. Well, no, it’s not hyperventilating but someone hearing it might think that. An old talk show host I heard used to do that every night before he went out for his monologue. Bent over at the waist, deep breaths, deep exhales, repeat. Probably moaned all weird while an assistant nearby pretended not to notice. Did he ever let out farts doing that. The bathroom is really small but I make do in the bathtub. Will people notice I did that in here. Resting bathtub face.
Done. Toast cleared their gear out so I help the guys load everything in and set up. “Help” because I don’t need to set up much for myself except my ear monitor…already done, mostly…the laptop, and a little mixer I have to get the click track and the guys’ sound to my monitor. Our drummer, Todd, needs the click track as well, obviously. We’re no amateurs, and all our songs have pre-recorded tracks accompanying them. Who out there is still naming their kid “Todd.”
We’re almost done and the guys do a quick sound check. While they do that I check the mixer, the laptop, and double-check some cables, and when they finish I start off the introductory track from the laptop: a bit of pleasant noise that hints at the bluster to come. Someone taps my shoulder. It’s Kimberly, my freshman-year roommate. I think she spells it unconventionally but it’s pronounced correctly, normally. Why am I so focused on names tonight. She used to be kind of chunky but she lost all of it. She was in my intramural cross country group that I think inspired her to join back then. She didn’t do it sophomore year so I always wondered if she was running by herself. I want to congratulate her because she was self-conscious about how she looked but can you mention that sort of thing these days. What if she had a parasite that ate half of what she ate. Isn’t that what they do. She said she was on her first date. With who. Todd. Your drummer. Oh, he didn’t mention it but that’s cool. I guess it’s a bit weird to have a first date at a party where your band is playing but is it really weird for the guy. It’s probably good to make a first-ish impression for a potential girlfriend by displaying a performing talent. Todd is the elder brain behind the band so maybe he has the rizz to pull it off in the first place. I don’t think guys are into that so much, like switching the guy and the girl in this situation. I’ll admit it’ll be in Todd’s favor. I’d be lying if I didn’t find that one raggedy middle-aged guy beautifully manhandling the life out of that piano at the school theater concert series last year a little too unconventionally handsome. Maybe it was his arpeggios. I squirmed in my seat.
There’s some friendly shouting somewhere but I ignore it and continue with Kimberly. Something hits me in the back of the knee, a half-full plastic water bottle. One of the guys or probably Todd threw it and they’ve been yelling at me to come over for prayers. We gather around the front of Todd set and bow our heads and Todd does his thing. Some bands of our ilk do this. I personally don’t prefer such public displays but we’ve always done it like since I joined. Mark or maybe Mick moves on my left and I think his knee is touching mine; I have one foot on the top of Todd’s kick drum. I like the stretch even though I already did that in the bathroom. It’s not annoying but why do I focus on it. Opening an eye to check seems like a bad idea.
First song. Not a song proper but it’s the prerecorded track of sounds that I started a few minutes ago that we eventually play “into.” What’s the term for it. It’s short. Not me, though, I don’t do anything vocally so I wait with the microphone in the back near Todd where it’s shadowy, and kind of sway but with purpose but not like an autistic bro ready to unleash. When you’re a girl and into the performing arts you can get away with doing a lot of weird things and people assume that’s how you are, so I don’t hold back. I was a performance major so I know the score but the rock world was alien to me before the band. Still is, mostly, but thank you YouTube for supplying endless live performances of bands I’ve never heard of with 100 million Spotify listeners. My mental need to take notes on how to lather up audiences in small venues. My dad, of all people, he made sure to tell me not to do the pinky-under-the-mic thing that a “proper” vocalist tends to do to make sure the mic head is angled optimally towards the mouth. He actually told me I need to “loosen up.” How did currently-living generations get so that the parent has to tell the kid to “loosen up.” He was right, though. Do I look properly contemplative doing this swaying or have I destroyed the thin line between histrionic e-girl and artist. I’m describing this very detachedly after the fact but be aware I am acting rather naturally here so don’t get the wrong picture. This is much more my prayer time so I should really stop thinking about myself. Should I have actually practiced this at rehearsals.
Second song. Before we go into it I step out and introduce us in that aggressive yelly voice you have to do to start engaging the audience. We are packed in tight and thankfully some people are crowded around us to watch. It was a subtle fear of mine that we’d be playing to people eating chips or playing some gacha games. How bad would it have been if I tripped on or even just stumbled over Not Mark’s pedal board on my way to the front. Fall face first into someone’s crotch like in an old comedy movie. Kill me now if that’s the first impression I make. We start the song and the energy we all bring curls up into a ball and floats and quivers in the middle of us like a depth charge. It transports me to another world. This song is the conventional one that basically shows the band’s general style. A lot of bands do this, maybe subconsciously plan this for performances because of that. If I had to describe our sound to an outsider like me, it would be fun-lovin’ melodic rock peppered with what I’ve found out are called breakdowns. Plenty of primal movements and swinging limbs and instruments where we can. I learned to make do with my arms and mic. It’s very physical but thank you lifelong running career for giving me lung capacity and longevity to make it easy, even fun? Having hair helps with the visuals. Again with me and hair. Rock guys might claim to not care about being so caught up in organizing the spectacle but it’s more of a concern than I thought. We had a vocalist before me, and since I need to take these things way too seriously I wanted to ask him about his lyrics. He moved out of state and I preferred to do that sort of thing face to face so he agreed to Skype with me. He was too shy to me to be a performer but he had a lot backstory on what he wrote. Maybe he was kind of grumpy about it all because my vocals replaced his on the demo we recorded. One thing about how he delivered some words was the the long “e” sound you hear in the word “me” he’d always do like a long “a.” So “me” sounded like “may.” This is a very rock thing to do but come on. I don’t want to be hoity toity but proper enunciation while performing is one of my things. His lyrics…I didn’t want to change his lyrics but I’m not about to sing romantically about a “her,” even sideways-like. I did cut my hair short and, oh,…I am wearing a flannel shirt right now. No boots though. I’m not gay but are people thinking that. Am I even allowed to think stereotypes anymore. In addition to bathtub face do I have gay face now.
Third song. People clapped rather loudly after the first real song. Good. Now there are more people crowding around so I get that surge of encouragement that musicians get when they know they are doing something right. We are crowded in pretty badly but I’m not minding. Mick and Not Mark are making sure to control their chaos nicely. Here’s a good opportunity to tell you that another one of my things is looking at people in the eye when I sing. Performances in my usual repertoire don’t allow for this, since I would be on stage with lights right in my face and the audience out there being a pile of lumpy shadows. Senior thesis performances were spread over a few weeks, in alphabetical order, and my last name starts with “Z,” so I had the benefit of figuring out what worked and what didn’t after watching some other seniors from a privileged spot in the room. The performances were mostly during the day in an intimate room, not in the auditorium with a full sound system, and I found that looking people in the eye when singing was an extra way of “feeding” them the performance. I don’t like calling it “intimate” but that’s what it was. Some people couldn’t maintain eye contact that long, I found. I’m rather proud that I won the staring contest every time that day, or at least it ended in a draw.
Fourth. This is a minute-ish-long instrumental track from the laptop with some piano tickles over the bed of weird white noise and low-end grumbles. We use this time to tune and adjust things, drink water…I’m starting to get sweaty. I use this time to engage the crowd with some banter. I did this a bit before in between songs, but now I have more of a canvas to work with. I’m not a terribly funny person but if I pre-plan a few ideas to keep in pocket I can get by. I ask if I can borrow someone’s hat because I felt out of place and one of the bros in front put his on my head. He looked clean so no lice but you never know. Someone from the back of the room flung theirs over so I put both of them on. If one of them had lice, the other two of us are screwed. I got a few laughs out of it. I gave the hat back to the guy in front of me and tossed the other one to the back from where it came. I asked if anyone had another water since mine ran out. Todd yelped. He was set up right in front of the fridge and he had the door open, handing out waters. I just noticed we were set up in the kitchen. Someone in the back of the room burped really loudly.
Fifth song. I’m sort of late for count-off the cue in my ear monitor and had to yelp out the name of the song really quickly and I—my voice got really squeaky in my ear. I was able to preempt it a bit by saying “hey-real-quick-this-song-is-called-blah-blah-let’s-go.” Am I starting to get annoying instead of funny. This is a new song that’s not on our demo that I got to write my own vocals and lyrics for. Todd helped me a bit on the words but they are mostly mine. They’re fine but likely they’ll change later. They’re somewhat about a cousin of mine I learned to like. He’s a he but I did a thought experiment where I changed it to a she and it sounded a little date-rapey and I felt bad if a bro were singing this and he didn’t mean it like that at all. It’s just about his cousin. Relax, people. There was a part in this song that the guys really argued over when we were writing it. Todd thought it sounded too much like a song from a big band. Something “Veil” or “Veil” something. Here’s one secret about singers that need to prove something, like me, that I’ll let you in on. When we write our own vocals, we often like to put that one really high note somewhere in there to demonstrate that we can actually hit it. Especially live. It’s kind of like the PR thing that gym bros have. It’s considered bad form to put too many of these notes in one song, and I have it twice in the bridge where that particular melody doesn’t happen anywhere else in the song. Do non-music people ever think about these things.
Sixth song. Nothing to mention here but I have to pee. Am I not being active enough to sweat all of this hydration out. After this song we play a little 30-ish second track interlude so the boys can tune up, something I had recorded on a few weeks ago on my 4-track: a quick lo-fi ditty of me tunelessly singing that I then fed through a bunch of audio filters so it sounded like an old-timey, alternate history version of my voice. What would a steampunk version of me look like.
Seventh song. Our last one. It’s a good one to end on a high note, which I’ve learned is better than letting the audience down easy. My persistent eye contact method threw me into an existential crisis late in the song. I’ll explain this. There was some movement in the crowd in front of me, probably someone trying to make their way through the crowd, so everyone sort of gets distracted and shifts around. I get a quick few seconds’ view across the room and my eyes land on him while he’s looking right at me. Right at me but maybe past me, like he’s dizzy and trying to get his bearings and he’s focusing on something to get his bearings and it happened to be my eyes. I’ll name him Not Todd. Not Todd doesn’t really see me but does he think I am singing to him, flirting with him, dedicating this song and my entire career for the sole purpose of him noticing me. I could look away now but it’s already too late. We’re married and doing our first dance as husband and wife. He wanted me to sing at the reception but I didn’t want to be that sort of show-offy bride when he doesn’t have a talent. And now I’m eight months pregnant with his fifth child. I hand him his lunch as he leaves for his shift on the docks, cigarette lodged like a pencil in his ear, he kisses me goodbye and I wait for him to turn around so I can swipe at my upper lip because his short mustache tickled too much. I wear sundresses even to bed because of the ventilation. Not Todd’s mother competes with me but she’s open about so it doesn’t seem abusive. His dad calls the bedroom the “playroom” every time he’s over for Sunday supper. I serve everyone on tray tables as they watch TV. We’re in a nursing home now, in wheelchairs, holding hands but we can’t remember each other completely. The fog of rock and roll.
All of this happened within two seconds, and then something shakes me out of the trance. It’s a particularly bombastic part with some interesting synchronizations I can’t put fully into words. There’s no singing, so I am free to move and feel the music as I see fit. Then the unimaginable hit me so fast I can’t remember where on my head it landed until much later. While my eyes are closed and I’m moving around, I’m smacked right on the right side of my face with something. It was too hefty of a hit to not be Not Mark’s bass head. Seeing stars is an actual thing, I found out. Damnit, Not Mark. Is it bad that I thought a mild curse word. It all happens too fast that I can’t process the injury, if there is one, and the song ends. I give my departing little speech and we all begin to break our gear down.
Not Mark didn’t say anything to me so I assume he didn’t know he hit me. Or Mick hit me. I don’t really feel much of an injury until I come back in from rolling an amp cabinet outside. My eyebrow is feeling sore when I wiggle it or even blink so I swipe at it with my fingers. There’s blood. How did I not notice blood. Mick and Not Mark look at me like I mortally insulted them. They ask if I’m okay. I mean, I guess I am but it’s starting to hurt more and more. We continue talking as I bring the case with our little mixer in it outside. Mark brings out a carton of unopened ice cream and someone’s t-shirt for me to put on my eye. Where did he get the shirt. Or the ice cream for that matter. It starts to hurt more and more, even with the pint stuck to my eye. I feel something. Mark, Not Mark, Mick—one of them points at me. I feel it more on my face. Blood coming down to my chin. I sit on the edge of the trailer and open my eye because I closed it. But I see nothing. Am I blind. No…it’s just swelled shut. I have to wrench my head to the side to pull enough face muscle energy to open it, but it hurts too much to even do that. There’s quite a few people watching.
Not Mark, looking at the carton on my chopped up meat eyebrow, says he wants a mint chocolate chop sundae. Now one of the cops comes up. This can’t happen. He asks me if I’m okay, miss. Yes, I am, just had a little band accident. Not Mark says I was flat on the last song so he reset me with a punch to the face. Mick kind of laughs. Someone shut Not Mark up. Someone get Todd. Where is he. Get him to shut Not Mark’s retarded mouth closed. He’s going to make this bigger than it should be. The cop didn’t laugh, his face looking like the voice that forces you to slice your neck open like in that movie. What movie was it. The cop’s shoulder radio thing garbles something out and he responds to it. This can’t happen, God. I can’t have a police report on this. What’s your name, miss? Amanda with an A, I tell him. It’s a joke I hadn’t used in a while that one of my brothers said I should use. Did the injury knock the memory back into consciousness. Amanda with an A, are you driving the van? No, I’m not. I’m glad the cop used my joke back to me. May I see your eye, he asks. I move the mint chocolate chip away and he leans in with a pencil-sized flashlight. How is that thing so bright for a small object. He clicks it off. You’ll probably need stiches. I’m going to call an ambulance to have them look at you. My crazy idea to do this as part of my dissertation is going to implode. I can hear Dad’s “WHAT” when I tell him what happened, but he’ll relax after that. Mom will blow the roof off whatever building she is in. It will flip and then land back in place but look all damaged, like that one Tom and Jerry cartoon I saw.
My brain sleeps as the minutes pass like days and soon the candy red-white lights hobble and bobble and blink as the ambulance shambles backwards over the frozen commons lawn. I can just walk over to it, officer. No, Miss Amanda with an A, the ambulance is almost done. The cop goes over and talks the driver and it takes eons to do a fifty-point turn on the lawn just to shove its French door backside up to me. Don’t worry, Miss Amanda with an A, it will swallow you and your career in music and your entire life whole. It won’t hurt.
Then he is there. The staring boy, Not Todd, right in front of me: my future husband, proposing to me with his knee dug firmly into the frost, a multi-million dollar-sized rock on a ring—it’s too big but we’ll resize it later. It’ll go around my waist. Will he slap a ring onto my nose, Abraham-style, call me Sarah with an S, consecrate my hundred-count brood as God’s chosen people, launch them out to every planet in the solar system to conquer whatever heathen nations already exist. Destroy all the tentacled alien men women children livestock idols. Did my injury change my future trajectory. Instead of the mustache and picket fence I’ll be cast into legend in their alien Bibles as the one-eyed mother of all the planetary races. Abraham, in front of me…he’s not doing any of that. Just staring at me and my bleeding t-shirted mint chocolate chip ice cream eye. Also pointing, as though no one knows what’s going on or what it looks like. Why is he doing this. What’s the point. That’s a good pun. I should remember it when I’m able to use it but right now I have children numbered as the stars in the sky to worry about.
“Illuminati confirmed.”
Abraham said it, still pointing. What does he mean by that. I let out an inquisitive moany grunt. I look at him with my one undead eye. Oh. I get it. The meme is probably older than he is but he meant it sincerely. Should I laugh. I don’t feel like it but I don’t want to embarrass him. Would it embarrass him more if I laugh. Why isn’t this situation explained to us in school. This nation’s educators have failed us.
The two EMS guys look at my eyebrow and say medical things and say I definitely need stitches. Can you give me a prescription for my parents so they don’t cancel everything and marry me off to Not Abraham. It started to snow or it was already happening and I needed two eyes to see it when it really started. Am I seeing everything on a minutes-long delay. I hop off the back of the trailer as the two EMS guys open the ambulance maw and then guide me to it like a virgin sacrifice to the volcano’s edge. I feel a sudden stab of euphoria. The snow and the smoke smell and lingering high of nailing the performance and marrying and shoving a battalion of spacefaring children out of my womb like an eternal sow will do that to a girl.
I hear Todd talking daggers to someone in the way that he does, maybe to Not Mark. Is his date with Kimberly in ruins now. Oblivion consumes me as I stare down the ambulance throat. The universe is probably telling me something new but I never figured out with she was saying previously. The universe is a woman because no man would be so cryptic. Someone give Not Todd Abraham my number. What would churches look like on Neptune.
* A rather long slice of life narrative, but I have a lot of history from which to draw, being in bands for a good part of my younger years. In the middle of the first draft, I found that the narrator was a little too much like me and I wanted to switch it up to get and give a different perspective. It wouldn’t matter to most readers but it mattered to me personally, since I didn’t want it to be too autobiographical. So in addition to changing some key information, I made some significant changes to Amanda (with an A). She’s:
- A graduate student pursuing an advanced degree in music
- A singer
- An outsider to the rock and metal world
- A Gen Z-aged woman
All of which didn’t and don’t apply to me. I am pretty sure I played a show in an apartment once, though.
2 Comments
Now that was excellent, Jay.
Thanks Ed!