by Mercy Brown
And we both laugh because, obviously, somebody has turned the TV all the way up. Oh well.
I think this is the pause before he grabs his wallet and takes a condom out, but he doesn’t do that. He lays there next to me, looking at me all quiet and thoughtful. He’s still holding on to my hand. I turn to him, open my mouth to speak, and if I could turn back time, yeah, if I could find a way, I’d take back those words that were so fucking stupid, I still cringe when I remember them to this day.
“Maybe we can just be bandmates with benefits,” I say in this light, joking manner.
His face turns dark like it’s in the shadow of my own stupid.
“Bandmates with benefits?” he says. “Are you serious?”
“Yeah,” I say. “No? What’s the right answer?”
“The right answer is that you want more from me than just benefits.”
“I have a lot more from you already,” I say. “That’s the point. I have the best guitarist in New Brunswick. I have you in a band that I love like my own family. What more can I ask than that?”
“Plenty,” he says. “If you actually wanted more.”
I don’t know what to say, because right before this moment I felt like I finally had it all. I thought I’d figured it all out. As my guitarist, I’ve managed to hold on to Travis for two years. Two whole years. I’ve never had a boyfriend that long. Remember Josh? That was horrible, and then he dumped me. He dumped me! I didn’t even like him by the time he dumped me, but I was still really fucked up over that. I just can’t imagine how I’m going to deal if Travis becomes my boyfriend and then he dumps me, too. Not only would I lose him, I wouldn’t even have a band anymore. And the likelihood of me doing something stupid and losing Travis, well, I think it’s pretty obvious just how realistic that scenario is.
“I’ve got everything I want now with the way things are,” I say. “Don’t you?”
“No,” he says. “I don’t.”
I can’t lay here naked with him looking all pissed off like this. I get up and pull a T-shirt and pajama bottoms on as he waits for me to say something else. Something better. I know what he wants to hear—he wants me to say, Oh, Travis, you’re the love of my life, yes, of course I want to be your girlfriend. If the band doesn’t work out, so be it. You’re all that matters. And you know something? He does matter. He matters to me more than anyone or anything, but the problem here is, if things don’t work out with him, where will I be then? How am I going to deal with that? I’ll lose my best friend and my band. And no. Just no.
I wish I was the kind of person who gets quiet and thoughtful when I get nervous, but I’m not. At all. I’m a rambler, because of course I am. So now as I’m having a panic attack, I’m saying things right as they pop into my head because this is Travis here, and I have never had to be careful with him. I haven’t learned how to be careful with him. In fact, I haven’t even learned yet that there are times when I should be careful with him. With him I have no filters, there are no games. There never have been games between us. Not until now. Not until I fucked him and fucked everything between us at the same time.
All my anxiety starts to run away like a freight car, right off the fucking rails, and it all spills out of my mouth of like so: Look at Circle Time, Travis. Do you want Soft to end up like that? We can’t shake things up like this just before we’ve got this big Ag Field Day show. Joey will freak out. What if he leaves? If we can’t agree on what our status is here, then we’ve just got to keep it in our pants, all right? Before we fuck our friendship all the way up. No more. We’ve worked for two years, Travis. Two years to get Soft this far, and we’re so close to a CMJ showcase. If we can’t agree on how to handle this, then we just have to stay friends and that’s it. It’s for the band. Nothing is more important than that right now.
He doesn’t interrupt me, not even once. He stares, his eyes dark and vacant, out the window.
The sight of Travis’s face normally always makes me feel so at home. When he’s lost in the sound he’s making with his guitar. When he’s laughing. When he sees me and his eyes go soft and happy. When he’s talking about European history. This face he’s wearing when he leaves? It’s awful. It’s blank, cold, and far away in a way that’s all new to me.
And the worst part is, I know it’s all my fault. All I want is to keep him around but I can’t figure out how to stop pushing him away.
***
Tuesday night, Stars on the Floor rehearses in the band cave. It’s the first I’ve seen or spoken to Travis since my very unfortunate tirade, because for once I really do give him space, because I’m terrified that he’s hanging in there with Soft by the thinnest of threads, and anything that comes out of my mouth now will likely snap it. Unfortunately, the angsty funk that is pervading the air between me and Travis has infiltrated the band cave, and it’s completely fucking with how he and I play. And now I’m pissed, too. Right now we are tearing through “Daylight in Exeter” and we are fucking this up so bad I can feel my dinner making its way up into the so-mad-I-can-puke zone. At the end, we barely all manage to finish the song in one piece it’s so bad. Joey asks us what the hell we’re thinking, how did we both miss that change, but miss it in completely different ways?
Travis turns his back to me and faces his amp, adjusting the volume up. I look down at my pedals and fiddle with tuning my guitar.
“Let’s do it again and try not to suck this time,” I say.
“No, something is wrong,” Cole says. He puts his bass in the stand. “What the hell is going on?”
Travis turns back around and faces me. His guitar is slung low on his hips, and he’s gripping the neck like he’s trying to strangle it. He just looks at me, raises his eyebrows, and I glare at him like the menace I wish I was.
“Oh Jesus, are you two fucking?” Joey accuses us. “Say you’re not fucking.”
Travis doesn’t say it, so I do.
“No, we’re not fucking. We did hook up, but it won’t happen again.”
“Oh fuck no,” Joey says, rubbing his face with his hands. “Are you kidding me?”
Travis looks pissed and Joey and Cole look like they’re about to deck him and take away my front-girl parking space.
“It happened, it was a mistake, but we need to be adults and move on,” I say. “You know, shit happens.”
“Travis?” Cole says, like he’s waiting for some additional explanation. “Is this . . . are you, I mean . . . seriously?”
“What?” Travis says. “There’s nothing else to say about it, is there?”
“You guys are okay?” Cole says.
“Yeah, we’re awesome,” Travis says, leveling a look at me. “Don’t we sound like it?”
“This is totally not cool, you guys,” Joey says.
“I know it’s not cool, that’s why it’s not happening again,” I say.
“How’d you feel right now if it were me and Cole who hooked up?”
“You guys aren’t gay,” I point out. “Are you?”
“No, but if I was, I’d probably hook up with Travis, too,” Cole says. “So I guess I can understand how that could happen.”
“You do?” I say.
“You would?” Joey says.
“No way, really?” Travis asks, and by the surprised and flattered look on his face I can only assume he wishes he’d hooked up with Cole instead of me at this point.
“Sure,” Cole says. “Either Travis or Ron. Ron has serious charisma.”
“You’d hook up with Ron?” Joey says. “What about me? I’m the one who carries your damned bass cabinet around every weekend.”
“You’re not my type,” Cole says with a shrug. “I like light-haired guys.”
“Dave Grohl isn’t light-haired,” Joey argues.
“Now you guys are just fucking with us,” I accuse them, but I still can’t tell. You never can tell wi
th the beat brothers.
“Let’s play it again,” Travis says, and turns back to his amp, so we start the song again. This time it doesn’t suck at all. In fact, this time we play phenomenally together. Maybe clearing the air with the beat brothers helps, I can’t say, but I think there’s also something about Travis and I being so angry and in that tight space with all that loud noise that makes the set take off and get to a whole new place. We sound like we’ve been touring for years. The problem is, as good as it sounds, it doesn’t make me feel any better.
Travis leaves right after rehearsal. There’s no small talk, no shop talk, no shit talk or anything. He doesn’t even say good-bye and I never, as long as I’ve known Travis, have seen him be this much of a dick to anyone. I guess I deserve it after everything that’s happened, but I had higher expectations, I have to admit. I thought beyond everything else that’s happened, he and I were good enough friends that we could work through this. I thought beyond the sex and the confusion that goes along with it, Travis and I had a bond, a friendship that was unbreakable.
But this is breaking us. I can feel it.
Chapter Thirteen
Somehow, miraculously, Stars on the Floor doesn’t fall apart. Five weeks have now passed since I first fucked Travis, or maybe “fucked with” Travis is more like it. I’m always worried Travis is going to quit, but three more weeks pass from the last time we hook up and he doesn’t. He keeps coming to rehearsal, on time, every week. I don’t know how we all manage to suffer through with Travis permanently on his man period, but I have to give him credit because he doesn’t quit, and that’s all I can ask of him. I guess I can’t even ask that much, but I do because that’s just how I am.
But while he may still be in the band, our friendship has taken a serious shitter, and this is slowly sucking my soul away from me. I knew he’d need time to get over things, but I really did think he’d get over it and we would just go back to being friends and move on. I keep thinking maybe, hopefully, this is going to happen, because he’s still here—he’s still in the band. But he doesn’t call me, ever. He doesn’t hang out with me outside of rehearsal and shows. There are no trips to Sam Ash. No flyering, no breakfasts at Neubies, no more parties. After we played the Demarest basement and the Dead End show he just dropped me off and went home. He’s not really being a dick or anything, he’s just distant, and even though I still see him three times a week, I miss him. Desperately.
I know I should get him alone and explain that I’m just an asshole. I’m just afraid. I’m just not good at boys, at all. I’m good at bands, or at least I used to be. But he knows all this already anyway, and since he hasn’t actually quit yet, I figure my best bet is to not rock the boat further with my mouth. Give it time, like George said. Give him time. It’s not easy, though. Being quiet about these things, especially with him, is maybe the hardest thing I ever try to do. But he’s still around, so I think it’s working.
It’s April now, the Saturday before Ag Field Day, when Sonia comes to my door with the cordless phone and tells me it’s Billy Broadband.
“Next week is the Ag Field Day gig,” Billy says. “Can you come on the show tomorrow night to talk about it?”
“Sure,” I say. Billy plugs all the local bands on his Sunday show. We’ve been up there plenty.
“Great. You and Travis should play a song on the air.”
“Yeah, sure,” I say and feel my stomach twist because now I’m going to have to call Travis and ask him, and I don’t call Travis now. I make Cole or Joey do it. “Which one do you want?”
“Give me something new,” he says. “See you at eight.”
I hang up and take my guitar off the stand and hold on to it and realize that we don’t have any new songs. Soft hasn’t written anything new since all this shit between me and Travis happened, because writing songs is an altogether different kind of thing than just playing them. To write songs, you need to talk. You need to throw ideas out there for other people to potentially love or hate or even laugh at. You need to be able to argue and negotiate and generate ideas, and that’s pretty difficult to do with someone you’re barely speaking with because you’ve fucked with his heart so much.
I start to play my guitar and think of my father. I think of all those shows Len played with this very Gretsch, and I wonder what he’d say if he could see me now. Then I get mad at myself for caring what that asshole would say about anything about my life. He wouldn’t care, that’s the whole problem. If he’d cared, he wouldn’t have left, would he?
Now I think about Montana (the trucker, not the state). Montana says he’s coming to the Ag Field Day gig to see me play on his way back through from Maine. When Montana called to let me know he was okay, he said he wanted to take me and Travis out for a burger to thank us when he was next in town. That’s when I told him about the show. He said he wouldn’t miss it. I’m sure he’ll hate it.
I’m still playing my guitar as I think about all of this, my fingers finding all the notes without me having to think about them, just wandering along the fretboard like lost souls until a pattern emerges and soon I’m lost inside of some lilting, melancholy riff, wishing Travis was here to make it better. Aching that he’s not here to make it better. Travis makes everything I do better.
I have no idea how long I’m sitting there playing when Sonia comes in my room.
“That’s really pretty,” she says. “What’s it called?”
“It’s new,” I say. “I just made it up.”
“I love it,” she says. “You should finish it before Ag Field Day.”
She’s right. As usual.
I finally get up the nerve to call Travis. He’s surprised to hear from me, but not when I tell him about going on Overnight Sensations. He says that it’s fine with him. I mention maybe we should get together today and practice for it, and he says he’s working on a paper and we can play “Daylight” and it’ll be fine.
“Come on, Travis,” I say, and I know I sound a little pathetic but I can’t help myself. “Please? I’ll help you with your paper. Bring it with you.”
He’s quiet for a minute. I’m not sure what sways him, but he says fine. He’ll be there in an hour.
Now I’m really nervous, because he’s coming here and I’m definitely not his favorite person these days. I strum my guitar again, but my fingers slip up and fuck up the riff I’ve been playing perfectly for ninety minutes, because I’m even more nervous than I was the first time I stepped on stage at CBGB. Travis was there that night, too. I turned to him right before we were supposed to go on and I said, “I can’t do this, I’m going to throw up. I can’t get up there.”
He took me by the shoulders and said, “Yes you can. You’ve worked all year for this moment. Don’t think about it, just get your ass on stage and play.” And then he turned me around and gave me a supportive shove towards the stage.
And I did get on stage. And we played our asses off that night, too, and it was amazing, being on the stage of CBGB, even if it was half empty and Tuesday night and I had a paper due the next day. Because this was the same stage where I saw Sonic Youth play when I snuck in underaged, where Gibby from the Butthole Surfers stood right next to me and I felt like yeah, this is the world I want to be in. This is where I belong.
And I didn’t puke, either.
Travis shows up at my house with his acoustic guitar and I bring him up to my room and I’m remembering the last time he was here and I feel a terrible ache in my heart. An ache for how we used to be, how easy it once was to be near him. This moment here is where I could, I should say something to explain what my problem is. I should open my mouth and tell him how I really feel but I just can’t do it. It’s all weird and quiet between us and he’s not filling the empty space between us with his easy chitchat and I just don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to do. It’s like I’m staring at the CBGB stage all over again and I can’t get on it. An
d he’s not nudging me this time. There’s no pep talk.
So instead of doing what I want to do, which is tear that jacket off of him and kiss him with my whole tongue, instead of running my sad and hungry hands through that jungle of wavy blond hair, instead of telling him I’m desperately afraid because I already know that I’m absolutely in love with him and there’s no going back for me, I pick up my Gretsch from the stand.
“Want to hear this new thing I wrote today?” I ask.
“Sure, why not,” he says.
“Take your jacket off, stay a while,” I try to tease him, but he doesn’t take his jacket off. He just stands there with his hands in his pockets, looking down at me, waiting.
I try to play him the guitar part but I fuck it up and it sounds all wrong.
“No, no, that’s not it,” I say, and my voice is shaking as I speak. My hands are shaking. “Hold on, let me get it back in my hands.”
“It’s okay,” he says, and then he takes his jacket off and sits down on the bed next to me. “Relax, Emmylou.”
I take a deep breath and start again, and now I’ve got it back and it sounds good. I keep playing and glance up and I can see he digs it. He’s nodding his head in time with the song, tapping his knees, and then he starts humming along once he picks up the basic melody. Then he pulls his acoustic guitar out of the case, tunes it up, and starts lightly strumming this chord pattern beneath the picking thing, and before I know it he’s writing a bridge and a chorus for it. And it’s perfect.
“I want to try something here,” I say, and it’s like I can breathe again. My head is buzzing with that electricity I get when I’m creating something like this, and it’s always ten thousand times better when I’m doing it with Travis. I pull my lyrics notebook out and open it to the last thing I was working on, and I’m super nervous to sing it for him. I take a deep breath and say, “Keep playing,” so he does while I pick up a pencil and start editing, scribbling, rearranging words on the paper. Then I start to tentatively sing over the chords Travis is playing.