by Mercy Brown
“Are you guys still playing the Melody with us next Friday?” Herb from Buttcrack asks. “I just made the flyers, dude. The mailers are already sent out.”
“I’m playing it,” Julia says. “I can’t speak for this asshole.”
“We’ll play it,” Matt says. “We can be professionals about this, can’t we?”
There’s no real precedent for this kind of situation in the scene. People fuck around, sure, but usually they’re not in the same band, because, hello? Band rule number one, remember? Don’t fuck anyone in the band! This is the exact reason the rule exists. Because we’re musicians and we’re for the most part fairly deep-feeling folk and shit happens and shit happening should feed your art, it shouldn’t make you cancel booked shows. If you want to be able to eat and buy gas and otherwise make some kind of living so you can continue to make your art, you’ve got to keep your shit together. That was my whole point.
This is exactly why I’m back to believing fucking Travis was just a terrible idea. This is why Jeff and Sonia keep shooting me these worried looks all night, enough so that Millie finally asks me if everything is okay and I have to lie and say, “Things are great!” And shit, they were great until all of this, and now I’m careening from feeling totally fucking awesome when I’m with Travis to feeling like a guilty creep who’s fucked up the best thing I have going for me when I’m not with him. I don’t know how to feel or think about anything right now. I just feel fucked.
And the only one who can help me figure it out is home writing a paper on Bob Marley.
***
“How was bowling?” Travis asks when I call late to let him know I got home fine. Of course I did, why wouldn’t I get home fine from a place that’s all of ten minutes from my home? This is ridiculous. I don’t need to be calling him every time I take a shit now, do I?
No, I don’t say anything like that. That’s just the mouth in my brain talking.
“Julia and Matt broke up,” I say instead.
“Yeah, George mentioned there was drama. Matt’s an asshole.”
I’m silent.
“How is Julia?”
“She’s miserable.”
“Well, I guess she would be.”
“Exactly.”
He pauses. I say nothing.
“Are you okay?” he asks. “You sound upset.”
“I’m not upset. Why would I be upset? I’m fine. I’m not upset. I don’t sound upset.”
“I’m coming over.”
“You are?”
“Yeah,” he says. “I’ll be there in five.”
“What about your paper?”
“I’m almost done now, just a few more pages and then my references.”
“You don’t need to come over.”
Now he’s quiet.
“What happened, did they break up Circle Time?” he finally asks.
“Not yet,” I say. “But I have no idea how they’ll manage it. And see? This is why I was worried about all of this in the first place! What are we even thinking, Travis? What the fuck are we thinking?”
“You promised you weren’t going to freak out on me, Emmy. You promised!”
“You can’t control when you’re going to freak out! That’s completely missing the point of freaking out! Freaking out is an organic process, it’s wild and unpredictable. You don’t fucking schedule your freak-outs, okay? They just happen! That’s what freaking out is!”
“I’ll be there in five minutes.”
“Travis.”
“What?”
“Bring me french fries.”
“Do you want a shake?”
“Yes.”
I don’t even have to tell him vanilla.
After we hang up, I glance over at my guitar, sitting in its stand in the corner of my room, looking at me, perfectly calm like my life isn’t about to fall apart. I put the phone down and pick it up, and as soon as I hold it in my arms, I settle down.
My guitar is a ’59 Gretsch Double Anniversary in two-tone green. This guitar and my rig, a ’74 Fender Twin with a matching custom cabinet, are all I have left of my father, Len Kelley. My father’s gear was sent home by the surviving members of Consequence after he died, even though we hadn’t heard anything from him in five years. I still have the note from the singer that says Len always wanted me to have it. My mother wanted to sell it, but I begged her in the biggest argument we’ve ever had to let me hang on to it. I barely won. It’s not that I’m not practical, and I know Mom could have used the money. She wanted to put the money towards my college savings. But this gear is the most beautiful and long-lasting thing my father has ever given me, and as mad as I am at him for leaving and for dying, I just can’t let it go.
I’m sitting on the bed, strumming quietly when I hear Travis pull up in the van. I hear him come in the front door, ask if I’m upstairs. I hear his boots on the stairs as he trudges up here. My door is open and he stands in it holding a shake and a bag of fries and it smells like normal. I tell him to come in and he does. He puts the food on my desk and sits down next to me, but I stand up, put my Gretsch in the stand and sit on my desk chair, facing him.
“Emmy, we’ve got this under control, okay?” he says. “Please don’t get so stressed out, it’s going to be fine.”
“Yeah, well what if it’s not?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Because I’m probably going to fuck it up,” I say. “In case you haven’t been paying attention, I don’t have a good relationship record. Remember the Michael Bolton Fan Club president?”
“That’s because you’re more band-obsessed than boy-crazy,” he says. “I happen to be in your band, so I think I have a chance here.”
“But this is exactly why it’s a bad idea,” I say, and I feel my chest is all tight, my face getting hot, and now my mouth is starting to move before my brain feels clear. “It’s not just you and me that will be hurt if things fuck up between us.”
“You’re getting way out ahead of things here,” he says. “You already have us signed to Geffen and getting a divorce when we’re just starting out.”
“It doesn’t feel like we’re just starting out,” I say.
“We’re just starting from a different place,” he says. “It’s not like I just met you at a party.”
I let out a long, deep sigh. I can’t look him in the eye. I’m such a fucking mess with all of the infinite shitty possibilities laid out in front of me for how this all might come to a sucky dramatic conclusion, à la Circle Time’s implosion at Carolier Lanes tonight. I can’t reconcile how I want him with all that we’ve got to lose.
He reaches for my hand but I pull it away.
“What if I just can’t do this?” I say, my heart in my mouth.
He stares at me. I can’t read him at all. I hate myself so much right now, I can hardly take it.
“Can’t?” he asks. “Or don’t want to?”
“I just don’t want to fuck everything up right when things are starting to take off. We just got this WJHU gig—do you know how much that will help us when we’re trying to land a CMJ showcase? We’ve already got Ag Field Day booked with Ween. Just because we’re lusting after each other isn’t a good reason to put all that in jeopardy.”
“Lusting after each other?” he says. That disappointed face of his, it really kills me.
“You know what I mean.”
He thinks for a minute, looks down at his feet. Then he reaches for my hand again. This time I let him take it, and it makes me feel so much better and so much worse all at the same time.
“What do you want to do?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” I say. I know I should have a better answer than that, but I don’t. “I just think I need to slow down.”
“Okay, then,” he says, nodding in agreement, but then he looks sort o
f confused. “Wait, what does that actually mean? No more sex? Because I’m fine with not having sex, if that’s what this is about. Well, don’t take that the wrong way, I don’t mean ‘fine,’ like I won’t miss it. ‘Fine’ isn’t really the right word. I mean, of course it’s fine, but I’m just saying that sex isn’t really the issue for me.”
“It isn’t?”
“No,” he says. “It isn’t.”
“Well, what’s the issue for you?”
“I don’t really have an issue, I guess,” he says. “I just don’t want you to freak out.”
“I do like having sex with you,” I say. “It’s not that.”
He laughs, and now that I hear myself say it, it sounds ridiculous, because I like having sex with Travis like I like not being attacked by killer bees.
“I mean, I love having sex with you,” I say. “It’s probably the best thing I’ve ever done.”
He glances up and looks at me like I’m crazy or something, but then he gives me a small smile and nods, and I can’t read that mouth of his at all.
“I understand,” he finally says. “We’ll slow it down, okay? We’ll just dial it back here until we’re back to where you feel okay.”
“Can we even do that?” I say.
“Sure. We can do anything we want, can’t we?”
“Do you hate me so much right now?”
“Emmylou, I could never hate you. Don’t be ridiculous.” Then he laughs. “But I could definitely put you over my knee again.”
I don’t think I need to mention here just how I feel about that remark. It lands in the room between us like an unexploded bomb.
Chapter Seven
Sure, dial it right back until I feel comfortable again. Sounds totally reasonable, doesn’t it? Sounds like a real mature, sensitive plan to tackle the myriad of complicated feelings going on between me and Travis right now as we wade through the murky new normal of post-sexageddon. We’ll just go back to not fucking. Everything else will stay the same. We’ll go slower, whatever this means.
But while I’m left still thinking about Travis day and night, fantasizing about all the different ways he’s already had me, kissed me, felt me, held me—shit, I am fantasizing about the way he drinks coffee or puts on a pair of socks—he just backs right the hell off like it’s nothing. He acts like there never was a sexageddon at all.
He doesn’t drop his paper off for me to look at on Sunday, and he doesn’t call me after work. I finally call him, feeling pathetic, right at around six and ask him where the paper is. He tells me he’s had George—George!—proofread it. George was a history major for fuck’s sake. What does he know about the semicolon? Nothing, that’s what. Can he hyphenate? Not if he had to save his own mother from a dangling participle could the guy hyphen correctly.
“Well, you’ve got better things to do,” Travis says. “Like review for your exam this week.”
“I don’t need to review,” I say. “I can take that exam right now and ace it.”
“Why don’t you see if you can take it early, then?” Travis suggests. “Just in case?”
“Ask Professor Dickwad for a special favor? He’ll never let me do that.”
I’m prolonging the conversation as much as possible because I’m hoping Travis is going to ask if I want to go to the diner or something. But he doesn’t mention anything even remotely related to the remote possibility of seeing me tonight. I break down and ask him if he wants to go get a slice, but he’s already eaten and he’s in a cleaning frenzy because Mama Omaha comes tomorrow and she’ll want to swing by the house.
“You should see George—he’s actually cleaning the oven right now.”
“Do you need any help?” I ask, and now you know I really want to see him because I would rather sew my own fingers together than clean something.
“No thanks,” he says, pleasant enough. “I’ve got it covered.”
Fine, then.
“So . . . what are you going to tell your mother about your neck?” I ask.
“I’m not going to tell her anything,” he says. “Don’t worry.”
“Are you going to tell her it was Millie?”
“Emmy, I’m twenty-two years old. I don’t have to explain my hickeys to my mother. She’s not going to want to hear about it anyway. At best she’ll give me a withering look and make me put some of her cover-up on it before we go out to dinner.”
“Is it still that bad?”
“Not really,” he says.
Here’s where I’m hoping he asks me how my ass tattoo is looking, and I know the answer because alone in my room today, I’ve probably looked at it in the mirror about five times. Or maybe fifty. But he doesn’t bring it up, and I don’t, either.
Travis is acting totally normal, just the same as he ever did before sexageddon. But I don’t feel “okay” like I am supposed to with things “dialed back.” I’m more of a “this one goes to eleven” kind of gal, I guess.
He picks me up for rehearsal on Tuesday night and the conversation is all about his visit with the woman who ironed his Levi’s all through high school. (I had no idea Travis wore ironed Levi’s in high school, by the way. If he were any other guy, this would change everything.) We talk about what we should put on the set list for Baltimore and, as we hash it out, I realize that going back to “normal” after we’ve had all this amazing sex feels much weirder than the way I felt when we were doing it, or when we were in his kitchen making grilled cheese immediately after bonerfest on Saturday afternoon. So even though we’re acting normal, like nothing ever happened, the old normal is totally weird. Fuck me with a Telecaster, I don’t know what the hell to do now.
“Travis,” I say as we’re about to get out of the van at the beat brothers’ house. He cuts the engine and looks at me expectantly. “Are you mad at me or anything?”
“No,” he says, shaking his head. “I swear, Emmy. I’m definitely not mad. Why, are you?”
“No,” I say. “I’m just, I don’t know. Confused?”
“Confused about what?”
“I don’t think I know what ‘slow’ means,” I say.
“Sure you do,” he says. “You just don’t like it.”
Then he smirks at me like an adorable jackass, gets out of the van and strolls on into the house.
***
Late Wednesday afternoon we’re cruising down I-95 in Steady Beth, aka the Mystery Machine, even though we look more like a meth lab than a bunch of meddling kid detectives in Travis’s plain, unadorned crap-brown Chevy custom van. She’s really not much to look at, but that’s the point. You don’t want to haul thousands of dollars’ worth of gear around in a van that looks good enough to break into. We don’t even put band stickers on her, because there’s no more expedient way to alert the gear thieves out there (and there are many, trust me) that you’re hauling thousands of dollars’ worth of gear than to plaster your truck with band stickers.
Travis is cranking Pavement, so we’re all singing at the top of our lungs to “Range Life,” and now that we’re back on the road, things feel okay again. Maybe I’m confused, but I’m okay. These dorks are my family and I would get in the van and go literally anywhere with the three of them. I feel like after two years of this insanity, they know me better than my own mom, and maybe that sounds sad, but it’s the opposite of sad, because it just goes to show you how close we all are. As much as I want to make it in music, as much as I want to be successful and get signed and make a living this way, it’s this connection the four of us have that is really the root of why I’m so protective of it. It was rough growing up with a single mom, just the two of us against the world there. Since being out on my own, Stars on the Floor has come to feel like my biggest anchor in the world. With the way I am, the things that go through my head and tear at my heart, sometimes I feel like without Soft I might float right the hell away.
&nbs
p; “Don’t worry, we’re in no hurry!” we’re all singing as we arc over the Delaware Memorial Bridge, the lights of a container ship coming up the river, glowing in the sharp night air.
The van gets quiet and then Joey asks, “Hey, who’s the musician you’d be most interested in having a homoerotic experience with?”
“Henry Rollins,” Travis answers immediately, confidently, like he’s already put some thought into it. I laugh so hard peach Snapple almost comes out of my nose.
“Really?” Joey’s eyes perk up. “Dude, Rollins is fucking manly. He’d break you in half.”
“Worth it,” Travis says.
“I’d go with David Grohl,” Cole says. “All that hair kind of does it for me.”
“I didn’t know you were into drummers, Coco,” Joey says, tweaking Cole’s cheek. Cole smacks his hand away.
“Grow out your hair and then we’ll talk.”
“I’m not being the bottom,” Joey says.
“You say that now,” Travis says.
“What about you, Joey?” I ask. “Who’s your gay crush?”
“I’ve been putting some thought into this,” he says, rubbing his chin. “It’s a tough call, but I think I’d really have to go with Henry Rollins, too. I mean, Black Flag? Who wouldn’t want to fuck all of Black Flag?”
“That’s what I’m talking about,” Travis pipes up from the driver’s seat.
“Me, too,” says Cole. “Because he’s fucking Henry Rollins, that’s why.”
“Right?” Travis says. “We can group-hug him.”
“What about you, Emmy?” Cole says. “Who’s your fantasy lesbian hookup?”
“Probably Millie Vagaboss,” I say.
There’s a moment of stunned, awkward silence in the van and I feel my face go bright pink. I’m surprised Travis doesn’t run us right off the road since he’s staring completely wide-eyed at me in the rearview mirror.
“What?” I say, probably more defensively than is quite necessary. “Millie is hot, come on!”