by Zoe Whittall
“Baltimore is cheap and full of artists. Houses for sixty thousand dollars!” He yelled this in a triumphant staccato over breakfast at a diner in the East Village where we’d lined up Tylenol, plastic cups of apple juice, and coffee, trying to quell a hangover. I aimed the toe of my right foot toward his lap, a purposeful graze up and down, trying to get him to break. Show it in your face. He refused, though I felt precisely how I was affecting him. Instead, a slow sip of his coffee, eyes locked to mine in a dare. James. He would not break. He could meet me.
“Be my girlfriend,” he said, ragged breath.
The server was my saving grace, gliding over, coffee pot cocked on one hip.
“Refill?”
“God yes,” I said, a little too relieved. “But also no, to answer your question. What we have is great.”
“Sure,” he said, but I knew he was hurt.
I’ve always grown bored too quickly. I read the last page of novels first, to know if I should bother. I have a lot of lovers across the country. What’s the point of being a touring musician if your bed, in addition to being unpredictable, is also cold?
James knew that. He worked in a record store. He could get any shy, hot pussy in a cardigan with ironic lapel buttons he wanted. For some reason, he wanted me. That day, anyway.
What I like about tour life is how time functions in crescendos and fade-outs. Sunup and sundown don’t mean much, nor do squares on paper representing days. The driving, the paying of bills, the organizing of the money and the food, they’re like scales, methodical practice, and life continues through the lenses of van windows and into the wide-open eyes of endless teenagers, singing along.
The song ends. We always exit in the same order. Tom goes first. I place my guitar on the stand, glance toward the amps. The crows are gone, probably following Tom. The buzz in my whole body from the noise makes me feel as though I float down the stage stairs and into the performer tent. I grab a handful of frozen grapes, chase them with bottled water and lukewarm beer. The first few nights of tour we’d been excited about the green-room food, the baskets of pretty fruit, small fridges of beer, assortment of cold sodas, cheap wine in a bucket of ice. We felt like kids in the chocolate factory. Now we get tired, curl up on the couches, don’t talk, as Billy signs some autographs. I pelt Billy with a few grapes.
I like to do things to bring his ego down after shows.
“Dudes,” he says, mashing the grapes into his chest, then licking the pulpy slime from his palm. A green-room-wide groan. The girl with two ponytails shyly leaning against one of the tent poles giggles. She has a media pass, but that’s not why she’s here. I can tell she thinks he’s just hilarious and crazy, a small extension of that audience applause. She averts her eyes when I peel off my stage T-shirt, pull a tank top from my purse, rolling it down against my skin that’s still hot even though I’m beginning to shiver. The comedown. She waves shyly at me when we make a little eye contact. She could have fit two or three more of her bodies in her giant pants.
Where’s James? He’s usually so quick. So obedient. He knows he’s always on the backstage list.
The next band opens their set. The crowd roars.
After the show feels like morning. I go through the motions of waking up, washing under my arms with pink hand soap from the dispenser, wiping my skin clean with rough brown paper towel, those private actions in the green room among the crush of bandmates and their hangers-on. My jeans are filthy already. You don’t really have to wash jeans, according to Billy. If you don’t, they’ll last a long time.
This is a lie.
I washed everyone’s jeans back in Maine in the middle of the night. I couldn’t take it anymore. Something’s different, Tom had said the next day, after he got dressed. Are my legs bigger? My pants feel weird. Billy kept asking, What smells like flowers? I didn’t tell them.
How did Billy always find a girl, no matter what city?
Boys don’t line up by the door the ways the girls do. Instead, it’s a subtle nod from a cute guy at the soundboard. A proffered beer from the punk kid selling merch for the opening act. You’d miss those cues if you weren’t looking for them. For everyone in indie rock, to be seen as wanting was discouraged. Like dancing, it was too overt, beyond a shuffle, a nod, a vigorous nod if it was your favourite song.
So as a girl you get to be aggressive. It’s up to you if you want to make sure the venue staff doesn’t assume you’re a wife or the merch girl, or if you want to get laid, or paid, at the end of the night. When I sent a postcard to Amita back home, I scrawled You have to act like a predator if you want to be prey later. From each city, I’d send her the most pornographic postcards I could find, tacky naked girls on the beach with crude messages on the front. She was decorating our fridge with them.
No wonder I fucked it all up. No wonder it all went to shit.
I finally find James in the parking lot, leaning against the van. I walked out there on instinct because I’m used to loading gear, forgetting we hired roadies this tour. This was surely a sign of exhaustion. Having a crew made me uncomfortable, though my shoulder didn’t crack and smoulder every morning the way it used to.
James’s vibe is off. When he steps so close I can smell his aftershave, he offers a rough whisper. “Hey girl, great show, as always.” I lean in for a kiss but am denied his lips at the last second—just stubble.
I press my hands against his chest, intentional. I offer him a pull from my flask of whisky, and when James takes it our fingers touch only briefly. I feel it in my teeth. Still, I’d let him throw me up against the truck. After a show my body is still going going going, the rush like a tornado that lifts me up. I don’t want to plummet. James is a way to keep it going.
“I’d love to pick up where we left off,” I say. He pauses, steps back slightly. “Billy says there’s a good booze can nearby,” I continue, reaching out to grab his sweatshirt sleeve in a pinch. “Remember how much fun we had last time?”
Billy and I had been keeping a list of what all the coke dealers look like in each city in a small mint-green notebook, their first name and a pencil sketch of their face. We keep it in the glove compartment of the van with Bible Verses scrawled in Sharpie on the front. Baltimore is Kiki, who looks and dresses like a yoga teacher and wrote a master’s thesis on Gertrude Stein. Really clean, no burning, I’d written underneath a doodle of her sitting on the edge of a pool table, head thrown back, pointed toes, laughing.
I haven’t gotten high at all on this tour so far. I’ve been going back to the hotel with Tom to listen to the set recordings, maybe having a beer or two, but that’s it. This is our big shot, and so far we’re succeeding. Every crowd has been more invested than the last. Reviews are stellar. But now seems like as good a time as any. It doesn’t tire me out if I’m careful. Billy’s able to get high more often and still function just fine, but I don’t want to tempt fate.
“Missy, Missy, my girl, I swear, you’re not going to believe this . . . ,” James says, pausing to look back as a girl with thick black bangs and a Hüsker Dü T-shirt stretched over an enormous pregnant stomach comes into focus behind him. She teeters in high-heeled boots, looks at me shyly. James reaches out to her, fingers fluttering. “This is Holly. I’m going to be a dad!” he says. “Isn’t that fucking rad? Can you believe me, a father?”
Everyone around us, even the roadies who have never met him before, starts congratulating him. It gives me time to hide my immediate response of deep annoyance, both that I’m not getting laid later and also that James joined this new trend of breeding by friends who can barely sustain their own weird lives. James is the kind of guy who sleeps on the old couch in the screened-in porch of a house populated by musicians and fuck-ups, paying minimal rent. He’s the guy who brings scabies to your house and eats all your food, telling you he’ll replace it but then he leaves town. I already feel a little sorry for the eventual kid. I was the 1970s and ’80s version of that kid. At least I know enough not to have kids. I’d only want
to be a parent if I could be a dad in a 1960s sitcom. Come around when I want, tease them and be a hero, and then go live my life. I want to look like a girl, but I want the freedom to act like a guy. This makes me unlikable, but have you ever remembered a likable person? Especially likable, easygoing women. Women who say things like whatever you want is fine and agree with everything men say. They’re a dime a faceless dozen. They blur together.
How did James, the lovely fuck-up, make such a monumental decision when he can barely care for himself? It was probably less an active decision and more a passive broken condom, but still. I’m mad. I snap my gum, long dissolved of flavour, reach my hand out to shake the sweaty hand of his girlfriend. She must be rich. I try to catch a glimpse of her teeth.
“I really love your music,” she says, so sweetly, it crushes me.
“Thanks. And that’s cool, kid. You’ll be a great dad,” I tell James, patting his arm in an approximation of platonic.
I turn and begin loading gear, an excuse for James and Preggo to totter off together down the lane half lit by anemic street lights.
In the movies, whenever mothers run away, they always show their abandoned kids wondering and wanting, looking big-eyed and empty, crying in their bedrooms, searching for left-behind clues to their mothers’ departure. That was true for a year or two. Then I just stopped. I used to rubberneck at any forty-year-old in a batik dress. Now I don’t even see them. But my mother shows up in my dreams.
When I need comfort, I go to Tom. Whenever I don’t get laid at the end of the night, I end up with him back at the hotel eating a late dinner and watching movies.
After the gig, Tom and I drive the van back to the Best Western by the freeway, listening to the recording of our set, which Tom wants to critique. His biggest fear is that we will plateau and won’t keep growing creatively. He shares this ritual with me because he assumes my background in classical music means I’m a perfectionist. I’m not. It is one of the things I like about indie rock, that it’s expansive, improvisational, and emotional. We are close to its inception, we invent it as it emerges. I understand Tom’s vision and commitment. I don’t want to plateau either, but I want to grow outward, not implode from trying to keep it clean and meticulous.
“Do you agree?” Tom asks, and I nod. I’m not really listening. I’m cradling a lapful of fruit I stole from the green room, am halfway through a second peach even though my mouth stings from the acidity. I’m still feeling agitated about James. I want to put in my Bikini Kill tape and scream along with its brilliant, feral imperfection. I didn’t get to where I am without practising my instrument every day since I was thirteen. If there’s one thing I’ve always understood, it’s passion and commitment. But with music, not people.
Tom and I shuffle to our shared room at the hotel. The ugly paisley-patterned carpets in the hallway draw me downward, the elevator mirrors show us a sloppy picture of ourselves. My arms have tour biceps, my clavicle protrudes. I have pronounced tan lines from my tank top straps, and my wrists are white underneath my sweatbands. At only five foot one, I come up to Tom’s midsection. My winter skin is now striped with tan, freckles spread across my cheeks. Tom leans his forehead against the mirror and stares at his reflection as we ascend.
“Am I getting grey in my beard?”
“It’s the lighting,” I say, though I’m not sure. The elevator takes forever and the post-show crash comes quick, like I’ve been shot with a cartoon tranquilizing dart.
By the time we discover there’s only one bed in our room, we are too tired to go back downstairs to the front desk to request a different room. Once the adrenaline of live performance wears off, it’s like being dropped from the sky. We fall asleep holding hands like eight-year-olds while watching a rerun of Party of Five. I’ve spent a lot of my life jealous of people who have brothers—and now I get to have one. He’s an oddity among travelling musicians: faithful to his wife at home, insistent on getting at least seven hours of sleep a night. If anyone has temper flare-ups, he hands them fruit leather or granola bars from the front pocket of his hoodie and says Time out with a finality no one can dispute, and they go take five minutes.
Tom is married, but I fit well under the crook of his arm, and he gives me shoulder and arm massages that an acupuncturist taught him, and cups of water and fresh fruit, and I’m better on tour with his attention. Tom is both an exceptional father and musician, and aims, as best he can, for balance between the two. The only thing Tom isn’t good at, as far as I can tell, is meeting people and being social. Schmoozing. If you catch him at the right time, you can have a really great conversation, but he won’t engage in small talk. And that’s tricky because the networking thing is real, even if you don’t feel like it. Tom usually just hangs in the corner of the room, staring off, replaying the latest set in his head and trying to figure out how it could have been better. But he can get away with this because he’s a dude. His gender affords him this luxury. As the only girl in the band, I play some expected roles—I charm reporters, ask strangers for directions, get discounts at hotels, and let everyone feel like they know me a little bit, even if we just met. I get called cute, warm, friendly, lovely, and whenever I do I’m surprised. I’m none of those things. Not really. But I consider it part of the job of being in the world, what you can tolerate and what can get you through it.
I wake up to the sound of a delivery truck backing up outside our window, and I stretch out, longing for James or Hayden or that soft-faced guy from Albany, accidentally flopping my arm over Tom, who is still in a deep sleep. There is a knock at the door, first so sotto I dismiss it as ambient noise, but then it becomes insistent. I stagger to the door and unhook the chain and fling it open expecting Billy to push inside with a coked-up monologue. But it’s Tom’s wife, Cory.
“Oh hey, Missy, do I have the wrong room?” I understand immediately that Tom has never told his wife how it’s cheaper for us to double up in rooms, that Tom and I are essentially roommates. Of course, we hadn’t planned the bed-sharing, the hotel mistake last night, and that we were too heat-soaked and exhausted to complain. But Cory doesn’t know any of this and I can see I’m being reassessed in these few seconds.
It is a problem. She folds her arms. Her brow furrows. Her pupils constrict. I take an instinctive step back. It is also a problem that I was clearly sleeping in one of Tom’s old Sub Pop T-shirts and not much else. I just shake my head, and open the door wider.
“No, no, this is his room. We share sometimes, because it’s cheaper, you know. Not for any other reason, of course.” I’m muttering at this point, as her facial expression changes from assuming the best to assuming the worst. She yells Tom’s name so loud she’s probably waking up the entire floor.
“What the fuck is going on, Tom? I thought I’d surprise you. Well, this is certainly a surprise.”
“Oh my god, Cory.” Tom is wide awake, spine straight, and rubbing his stubbled face. “It’s only Missy. We were tired, the hotel made a mistake with the bed. You know we’d never, ever, come on, it’s Missy.”
I back away into the bathroom, because I can’t fully leave the room wearing only a T-shirt. This is when the previously chill tour started to go tits up, when I started making questionable decisions.
In the bathroom, I want to turn the shower on to drown out their conversation and take a long bath, but there’s a disconcerting rustling behind the plastic curtain. I grab the plunger in case it’s a rat when I notice a tattered lime-green Converse shoe emerging from the curtain. The name CECILY and a phone number in pen on the white plastic of the sneaker’s toe, which definitely belongs to Jared, the fiddler. He is Billy’s friend’s younger brother, so barely old enough to be on this tour. Maybe eighteen? Seriously irritating kid. I pull back the curtain to see him sleeping soundly in the tub with one hand down his pants, mouth open, drool heavy. A Spider-Man pillow behind his head, hoodie worn backward like a blanket. The tap drips on his shoulder.
I nudge him. “Dude, how did you even ge
t in here?”
“You opened the door when I knocked last night,” he says, half sitting up, rubbing his eye with a balled fist. “Billy brought a girl home and it was cold in the van.”
I remember none of this.
“Well, I need to shower,” I say.
He’s such a little twit, can’t stand up to Billy to save his life. Jared’s age and the fact that he never gets laid is an ongoing tour joke. Now he groans, then looks down, embarrassed, quickly pulls his hand out of his pants. He was just waking up, ready to go.
I weigh the options.
He is cute. Ish. I guess? He is a brat. Sometimes that works for me. What could happen next would likely be quick. Once I get the idea, I find it hard to let it go. I kneel on the edge of the tub as he blushes, flustered, eyes emptying.
“Do you know that crows always remember your face?”
“Yeah, everyone knows that,” he says, cocky. A blush creeps down his neck and he tries to pull his hoodie down to cover himself.
Instead of averting my eyes and giving him privacy, like most friends or like, decent human beings would, I decide to help him out.
“Want me to take care of that?”
His eyes go wide enough with shock that they pull me in, delighted by my own audacious offer. “Yeah, of course.” I lick my palm. Unbuckle his belt. His breath catches. I like to watch and hear the way people come. Tom jokes that I have sex the way other people watch TV, to chill out, or for an entertaining story. “No one would think it was weird if I was a man,” I’d said to him. He couldn’t argue with that, but he still quietly objected to my sexuality somehow, as though he had to because he cared about me. If he ever has more than one beer, which is rare, he goes on a paternal rant, which usually ends up being pretty boring and insulting. I would never have sex with Tom. Or Billy. I have boundaries. When I pointed that out to Tom, he’d looked vaguely hurt, then said I wasn’t hearing him. He always says I’m not hearing him when what he means is I’m not agreeing with him.