“Nah. They had stage lights in their eyes the whole time.”
Somewhere along the way, we picked up an arrogance, an isolationism. Beyond Wolf and I seeing each other at work, the four of us only saw each other once or twice a week. Then when you added Nico and Ryder to the mix, all we tended to do was hang out and fuck around in our circle until we had to play.
We were the worst at watching other bands. It was never like that when Wolf and I went to shows before we had our own band. As far as “networking” went back in those days, bands usually tried to meet other bands to gain advantages rather than actually wanting to hangout. They'd swap CDs and pretend they were each other's biggest fans, but in reality it was mostly bullshit. We really didn’t care much to try to impress anyone.
We were tight with a bunch of bands we grew up playing with and we were all very introverted. Selling tickets was like pulling teeth. Not because we were too lazy to hustle, but we had no other friends, really, outside of each other. The bands we did enjoy wouldn't take us seriously when we tried to tell them. Too much fake praise being thrown around. Meanwhile, Steve and I would be blasting their demos on road trips.
The joint was about cashed. Steve was on his fourth string when I went to pass it to him. He looked up at me from behind his sunglasses and said,
“That girl wants to suck my dick.”
I coughed out the smoke I was holding and started laughing. “What?”
I sat down next to him.
“That girl over there with the lighter colored jeans and that tight donkey ass on her.” Steve pointed.
She was standing in a circle with three girls and two guys, near the entrance of Mario’s. Sometimes we assumed our sunglasses put the rest of the world under our covert surveillance. As we talked to each other, she kept glancing back at us.
“NOFX hoodie?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“How can you tell?”
“Watch this.”
The next time the girl glanced over, Steve waved. She immediately looked away. Then, about three seconds later, she waved back. Her friends carried on their conversation, seemingly unaware of the exchange. Steve pointed to his crotch and inaudibly mouthed,
Do you want to suck my dick?
Of all the magic tricks I’ve seen in my life, this was up there with catching a bullet in your fucking teeth.
The girl simply nodded back:
Yes.
“Hold this for a second?”
“Yep.”
Steve Murphy walked off to have his dick sucked while I changed his last two guitar strings.
Eleven
“Ready when you are.”
We didn't mind a packed show, and the house was filling up. James Dean's Funeral were raging. They were fast and loud. Fun to watch, but they could stand to be a lot tighter.
Off in the corner, Nico and Ryder displayed our merch. Boxes of T-shirts and CDs sat on the chairs next to them. A guy in a leather jacket with an Anti-Flag back patch walked up to Nico and pointed at a tee.
“How much?”
“Twenty.”
“Let me get a medium?”
He handed Nico forty. Ryder reached into the box of T-shirts, pulled out a rolled-up medium shirt, and slipped a bag of weed into it before handing it to the customer.
I was standing near our gear, drinking my rum and coke as the singer from James Dean’s Funeral announced their last song. I looked around for any sign of Bungie, Wolf, or Steve, but I couldn’t spot anyone; so I walked over to Nico and Ryder to see if they knew where the rest of my band was.
“Where is everyone?” I yelled over the music.
“They were all in here ten minutes ago,” Nico answered. “Probably caught nerves and went to blow each other in the bathroom to calm down. Big circle suck!”
He made a dick-jerking blowjob sort of pantomime to Ryder. Ryder started miming as if he was providing oral sex to two penises at once.
I glanced over at the bathroom, then back at Nico.
“I mean, the door is shut. Should I knock?”
“Wait your turn, queer!” Nico laughed.
“I’m gonna check outside. Thanks for holding down the fort,” I yelled as I walked away.
* * *
I made my way out of the front door and swiveled my head left and right. They weren't by the pizza place, and they weren't on the corner by my car either. I decided to ask the cigarette smokers out front.
“Has anyone seen any members of my band?”
One guy pointed towards the corner of the street. “I saw them go that way, like, ten minutes ago.”
“Awesome, thanks.”
I headed toward my car hoping they would be around the corner, but when I got there, they were still nowhere in sight. I slipped into a low-grade panic while I tried to think where they might be. Having misplaced members in the past, I knew the most I could hope for was to find them all in the same spot. Luckily, I heard a cough coming from the back of Bungie’s van.
When I slid the side door open, smoke poured out into the street.
“Ayyyyyy!” Wolf, Steve, and Bungie yelled.
“Found you.”
Wolf handed me the last of their joint. I hit what I could without burning my fingers.
“Last song.” I exhaled.
They all responded in Italian accents: “Last song, ayyyyyy!”
I moved out of the way as they started climbing out of the van.
Steve kept the Italian bit going. “Hey, come on, get da fuck outta my way. I gotta go play a show ova-here.”
“Hey, ya mother called,” Wolf added. “She wants a little paesano in her butt.”
“Hey your mother's ass called,” Steve went on. “She wants to talk to my friend Guissepie from Long Island! Oh!”
“Come on, guys. Last song.” I herded them back toward Mario’s.
The door guy held the door open for us as Steve, Wolf, Bungie, and I stepped through that spiritual gateway once more, this time with significantly more swagger. We fucked around a lot. Most of the time, actually. But when it was time to be on, we were on. Once we flipped that switch, it was all business. We came to play a fucking show.
I always kind of dropped into a different mental state before a show, somewhere between meditation and tunnel vision. It was like getting a massage while skydiving. I don’t think any of us ever got nervous to play those early gigs. We were relaxed, confident. We owned it. This was our time, our room, our stage, our songs, our night. The crowd was going to love it or they could fuck right off. We never really cared. It was always about us having a good time. Fortunately, at Mario’s we could always count on a great crowd.
“Can I get a check on guitar left?”
The sound guy talked to us through the floor monitors, which took up too much space on the already cramped stage.
Steve placed his Rum&Coke (three quarters empty) on his amp along with a fresh one from his backpack. Then he picked up his guitar, faced the crowd, and stummed an A chord. There were a few whoops and claps.
“Guitar right?”
Wolf played a few bitey major chords without turning around. Instead, he tweaked the highs and mids on his amp.
“That’s good,” said the sound guy. “Bass?”
Most bass players would take this time to play some technical lick they'd been working on all week, but I never gave a shit and neither did any sound guy ever. I played each of my four strings open four times each, repeating that pattern until the sound guy dialed me in.
“Nice. Vocals?”
As Bungie tightened his snare drum head and shifted his floor-tom a little closer, Wolf, Steve, and I stepped forward toward our microphones.
Steve began. “Check. Check one. Check one.”
“Balls balls balls.” I added
Wolf: “Check two. Balls on your mother's face.”
Me: “Ass ass. Balls balls balls.”
Steve: “Balls against your mother's chin. Balls against your mother. One.”
Steve looked at Wolf to his right, me to his left, and Bungie behind us with one foot of his drum throne literally a half-inch off the back of the stage. We all gave him a thumbs up.
“Alright, we are Trouble Bored!” Steve said into the mic.
The crowd cheered back.
“This song’s called ‘Open Road Blues.’”
Steve palm-muted the intro:
“I went south for the summer just to catch a high
I didn’t know how long it would last
My little brother did the same on the Fourth of July
And don’t cha know, he never came back
I wonder where he’s gone,
Gone!”
The full band came in on that beat, kicking off the first song in our half-hour set. Wolf and I jumped around on the side of the stage. The crowd started dancing and singing along.
Throughout the set, Steve, Wolf, and I would all take lead vocals on different songs. We would share each other’s microphones and spend time on different sides of the stage. We’d play two or three songs in a row before stopping to catch our breath.
This was the only sport I ever competed in. We had incredible endurance and would go nonstop the entire set. If I had any energy left at the end, I would be disappointed in myself. Cough, gag, gasp for air, fine—but I could never allow myself to stop. I would have rather had a heart attack or stroke than go home wondering why I didn’t go as hard as I could have.
The lighting rig flashed reds, blues, and greens throughout the set. The entire band would be covered in sweat under those hot stage lights. Steve and I would eventually lose our shirts.
Flashes from the crowd's cameras would be going off here and there, which was awesome, even if we almost never saw the pictures.
Those thirty minutes justified every religious Saturday practice, every night off work, every ticket grind, every nocturnal flyer crusade. Those thirty minutes were all we lived for and all we could ever have hoped for. If it went good, we rode that high until the next show. If it went bad, it would hang over us the way any loss would to any other team. It really stung when the show fell apart for any reason, and plenty of times it did.
We were on a winning streak, and that made this particular night all that much sweeter. We were killing it. We rounded out our last song with as much energy as the first. It was about growing up in Schenectady.
“I was born out of luck.
Grew up to be a punk.
Always got in trouble with the man.
I was a high school dropout.
A six-string cop-out.
Hanging out in Rotterdam.
Passing out flyers, pushin’ station wagon tires,
through the hot side of Schenectady.
I never had to wonder what to do with all my summers.
Been in a band since I was fourteen.
* * *
Freddy was the man, always cooking up a plan
Trying to find some weed.
He got a job making movies for some overfed floozie who ended up causing a scene.
Nico sat alone with a broken collar bone trying to catch his runaway bride,
But it was just a dial tone so he hung up the phone
And drove off into the tide.
* * *
Ryder went down to Florida with a stolen cassette tape.
Tired of the closet so he made his escape.
Crashed his Bonneville into a fence,
And walked away with only a few dents.
Chris ran a saloon out of his mother’s laundry room.
It had everything our parents feared.
It had a full bar, guitars, cigarettes, and poker cards.
It was the height of our teenage years.
* * *
For these friends I live, and for these friends I’d die.
For these friends I would give the last breath of my life.
We met when we were young and we grew up on hard times.
Under the light of the General Electric sign,
Under the light of the General Electric sign!"
Steve ended it. “Thank you again. We are Trouble Bored. Goodnight!”
The crowd cheered: “TROUBLE BORED!”
We whipped around, flipped our amps off, and just like that — it was all over. The house lights came back on. The jukebox started playing The Living End’s “Roll On.” We immediately broke down our gear.
“That was alright,” I said sarcastically to Steve. We were stepping back into Mario’s after loading all our gear.
“Ah, we killed it. It'd be nice if we could get a bigger show, though,” Steve replied.
“I know, man. I'm emailing everyone I can. We sent out as many press kits as we could afford, but no one's calling. Maybe we need to go harder on MySpace?”
“Fuck MySpace. I already can’t stand it. Did we get everything in the cars?”
“Everything except the merch.”
“Nice.”
Steve and I stood toward the back of the crowd. We were watching the last band play when a girl with a yellow-green double mohawk tapped Steve on his shoulder and said,
“I want to swallow your babies.”
Twelve
“I’ll call you tonight. Bye.”
It was the first time I had ever heard the phrase. Steve and I both performed a double take as we watched her walk away. At first, Steve seemed shocked, maybe even disgusted. I felt a shiver travel down the back of my neck. Then he looked toward me for approval — as if I would ever talk a best friend out of his second groupie blowjob of the night.
“Well, Steve, in my opinion, it’s one man's decision to consent to a baby swallowing.” I patted him on the shoulder. “The choice is yours and yours alone.”
“I mean, I’ll consent the shit out of it. I just don’t know if I’ve got any babies left to swallow at this point.”
I laughed. Steve sighed, a true martyr, and walked off to meet the girl.
I waved. “Go with god, my friend.”
As I turned back to watch the last band play, Doug came over to chat and pay me.
“Hey, Gray! Great set tonight. You guys always do well. Here's one-twenty,” he said.
I reached my hand out for the money. “Thanks, Doug. We love playing here. We're looking to get out of town and hit up some other crowds soon, but we're having a hard time finding shows lately. Do you know anyone who could help us out?”
“Yeah,” Doug replied. “I can throw your name out there. You guys definitely deserve it. I'll see what I can do.”
I knew Doug had limited resources, but he was one of the only promoters we trusted, and I think he felt we were one of the only bands he trusted back. We both knew that if Doug could have, he would have started his own punk label and sent us on tour across the country. At the very least, we could count on him to get us another show at Mario’s soon. That fallback was more than we really had any right to ask of him anyway.
I shook his hand. I thanked him. I meant it.
Nico and Ryder were still sitting behind the merch table selling some of our items here and there. Wolf and Bungie were posted next to them, wallflowers for the rest of the night. Bungie swayed back and forth, a bit wobbly drunk as Miranda from Mega Bread walked over with a couple girlfriends in tow.
“Hey, guys!” Miranda waved.
Wolf stared at the floor.
“He-...hey Miranda,” Bungie stuttered as his face grew pale.
“You guys were so good tonight!” Miranda said.
Wolf looked off at the stage. “Thanks.”
“So...this is my friend, Marissa.”
Miranda's friends stepped forward just in time for Bungie to vomit all over their feet. The girls started screaming.
“Aw, fuck.” Wolf was in hysterics. “Gross!”
Nico and Ryder exchanged disgusted looks.
“Go find Grayson,” Nico said.
* * *
Ryder tapped me on the shoulder not less than five minutes after Doug walked away.
“What’s up?” I asked him.
“Yo, this guy Bungie is puking again, son!”
“Aw, shit. Goddammit!”
Every show ended the same: Drive Bungie home. Meet back at Steve's, drop off merch. Haul our gear down to the basement. I had Ryder drive Bungie home. Steve and Wolf smoked another joint on the way back.
“Hurry up! I gotta piss outta my dick!” Steve shouted out the window. It was midnight, and we were stopped at a red light in Albany.
“Yeah, let’s go!” Wolf yelled. “I gotta shit outta my ass!”
The light turned green, but the banter never stopped.
I leaned heavily on the railing leading up to Natalie’s apartment. These stairs were my final hurdle. One final “fuck you” after a night of backbreaking labor.
The morning after a show, I'd wake up with bruises all over my right knee—courtesy of my bass because I wore it way too low, as low as the strap would go, and I jumped around too much. My right hand would be cut up from the thick metal bass strings tearing my skin open. There would be blood on my bass. My neck would basically have whiplash after every show, which, it turns out, is not something you are supposed to have hundreds of times in your life.
I hobbled up to her door and unlocked it as quietly as possible. I took my shoes off and dropped my keys in the little leather tray she kept by the door, then tiptoed my way into her bedroom to find her slightly awake still, fully tangled up in her comforter.
“Hey. You're still up?” I asked.
“Gray-Gray,” she replied softly.
She was really cute when she wasn’t telling me what to do. I leaned in to kiss her forehead.
Trouble Bored Page 7