by Jeff Gomez
“This is Charles.”
“Charles, hi. This is Heather from Tom’s office. Tom would like to know if you’re free to come by tomorrow at eleven for a chat. Does that work for you?”
Even though this sounds like a question, it’s not. When anyone on the sixteenth floor wants to talk to you, you cancel whatever else you’re doing.
“That sounds great, Heather, thanks. I’ll see you then.”
He hangs up the phone. He lets out a breath and then holds his face in his hands.
I need that job. Goddamnit, I need that job.
He suddenly hears a knock and looks up. It’s Dylan.
“You planning on doing any work today, Charles? Or are you just going to sit around all day?”
Dylan grins and then walks away, cackling.
Fucking cocksucker.
Mark pulls up to Dave’s house. It’s a one-story ranch with peeling paint and a patch of dirt for a front yard. Instead of a garage there’s just a carport covering an ancient Volvo, old patio furniture, and some tools. Above the mailbox the big tin letters which spell out the name ROWLAND are covered in rust.
Mark gets out of the rental car and walks up the front steps. On both sides of the walkway, half-buried in dirt, are supermarket circulars, fliers, and free newspapers still in their plastic bags. The white paint on the door is peeling. When he knocks, his knuckles come back dusty with dirt.
“Holy shit,” Dave says, opening the door. “Mark Pellion! Is that you?!”
He’s put on about twenty pounds since Mark last saw him. He’s now also wearing glasses with cheap-looking brown plastic frames. His sideburns are huge, hanging below each ear like flaps from the hat of his brown curly hair. He’s wearing jeans, no shoes, and a blue T-shirt inside out. He pulls Mark in for a hug.
“Good to see you again,” Mark says, pulling away.
“Yeah, yeah,” Dave says. “Come on in and take a look at the old homestead, such as it is.”
Dave steps aside and Mark enters. The house smells like dust, mold, and stale cigarette and pot smoke. There are piles of stuff everywhere. Old magazines, CDs and LPs, bulging manila folders held closed with huge red rubber bands.
“Come on in,” Dave says. “Have a seat.”
Mark looks around but can’t really find a place to sit. Every surface is covered in some kind of junk.
“Sorry.” Dave removes a stack of books from a corner of the couch so Mark can sit down. Dave dumps the books onto a stack of posters sitting next to the fireplace. He grabs a barstool from the kitchen and brings it into the living room.
“So, man, how are you? How’s it feel to be home again?”
“It’s okay,” Mark says. “A little weird, I guess.”
“Yeah, I bet.”
Dave leans over and grabs a pack of cigarettes from the top of the TV. He lights one, takes two huge drags, and then ashes into a coffee cup. This reminds Mark of one of his old lyrics: using a saucer as an ashtray.
“Well, it’s good to see you again, man. It’s been too long. Too long.”
Mark just nods.
“Looking forward to the show?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Mark says. “I guess.”
“Cool. Speaking of which, and not to be a dick or anything, but I hear from Gary that you haven’t reached out to him yet.”
“Oh, yeah. Gary texted me, but I haven’t—I didn’t text him back. What’s up?”
“What’s up, Mark, is that he’s renting a practice space for you guys to rehearse in. The show’s in less than two weeks, you know. It’s practically just a week away.”
Mark kicks at old copies of the Kitty Courier sitting on the floor.
“Yeah, I know. And that’s a good idea. Have him send me the address. In the meantime, I’ve been listening to the old songs. I’ve been practicing.”
“All the old songs?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I mean, the songs from the other record. The one they finished without you.”
“Yes, Dave, even that record. I’m an adult, Jesus. The gig’s going to be fine. I’ve done my homework. Don’t worry.”
“Yeah, but it’s not just you. There’s Gary and Steve, remember? Don’t you think you might need some time?”
“For what?”
“I don’t know. Chemistry?”
“We’ll be okay, all right? You’ll get a nice chunk of change and everything will be fine.” Still kicking at the newspapers at his feet, Mark remembers something from the other day. “Speaking of which, I saw the story.”
“Wasn’t that cool?” Dave polishes his fingernails on his T-shirt. “I drummed that up myself. The editor’s an old friend of mine. I used to date his sister. Until he told me not to.”
Mark grins. As much as he hates to admit it, he did get a kick out of seeing himself in the paper. His dad’s still carrying it around with him wherever he goes.
“And, guess what, man?” Dave says. “I got you another one.”
“Another what?”
“Another interview, dude.”
“What? With who?”
Dave gets off his barstool and walks to a coffee table covered in scraps of paper. He comes back with a bar napkin.
“Guy named Seth.” He offers Mark the napkin. Mark doesn’t want to touch it. “He saw the article in the paper and got in touch. Wants to talk to you this week.”
Mark turns to the wall. All he sees are stains.
“I don’t know, Dave. I haven’t done an interview in a long time.”
“Come on, Mark. It’s for the Times-Dispatch, not some rinky-dink little rag from around here. And we’re lucky because the guy lives in Kitty. Plus, this one won’t just be about Bottlecap. It’s a bigger article. It’ll cover the other bands, too. The Deer Park guys are all over it. They’re meeting with him right now, in fact.”
“I don’t know, Dave. I don’t want too many people to—”
“Too many people to what, Mark? To know about the show? To come see you guys play?”
He doesn’t answer, but Dave can tell that’s what he meant.
Mark finally says, “It’s been twenty years, Dave, since I’ve played those songs. Since I’ve been on stage. That’s a long time.”
“I know, Mark. And I’m not saying you guys are going to be like you used to, but it’ll be better than nothing. It’ll be better than, you know, not even trying.”
Mark shrugs his shoulders. He’s not so sure Dave’s right. Maybe nothing would have been better. Maybe he should have stayed in New York.
“Look, Mark, just talk to the guy, okay?” When he doesn’t answer, Dave adds: “The whole world doesn’t revolve around you, you know.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Now Dave shrugs. He says, “There’s a lot riding on this. For me. For Gary and Steve. For the guys in the other bands.”
On the wall, in the kitchen, Mark sees a poster for one of the first Bottlecap seven inches. He designed it in the apartment he saw last night. He has a copy of it, too, in a storage facility in Chelsea near the Westside Highway. Every year or so, when he goes there to store yet more stuff that doesn’t fit into his apartment, he pulls out his old box of Bottlecap stuff. He’ll spend ten or twenty minutes fingering the records, flipping through posters, stickers, fliers. He doesn’t know what to make of any of it anymore.
“What are you saying, Dave? You still want to be famous? To ‘make it’? You’re not a kid anymore.”
He pokes at his gut and says, “What, you think I don’t know that? But who’s to say I can’t keep making art?”
A stack of old Violent Revolution records sitting on a table catches Mark’s eye. On top is a CD compilation from the Disappointed. Perennial also-rans, even in Kitty, the band only ever headlined the Scene during the middle of the week. Never even toured beyond Virginia. Mark wonders what those guys are doing now. He figures that, in about a week, he’ll find out.
“You think what we did back in the ninet
ies was art?”
Dave snatches the CD out of Mark’s hands.
“Well, we certainly weren’t wasting our time. Because if we were …” Dave stops and looks around the room.
Mark’s about to speak when a kid outside on the sidewalk makes noise. At first it’s cackling laughter but then, a muffled fall, followed by tears. The sound of a mom comforting the crying child gets fainter and fainter as they sprint home for a Band-Aid and Bactine.
“Look, maybe you don’t need this,” Dave says. “The money or anything. You’re up there in Manhattan, and that’s a million miles from here. But I need that cash. It may not seem like a lot to you, but it is to me.”
Mark doesn’t tell him that one of the reasons he’s never come home is because he doesn’t want to have to tell anyone how small his life is in New York. He knew people assumed, because it was the Big Apple, that he was living large. He used to stay away because of questions about his past. Why did he do what he did back in the Bottlecap days? Why did he walk out on the band? But, more and more, he stays away from Kitty because of questions about his present and future.
Mark finally says, “I’ll do the best I can, Dave. With everything. I promise.”
Dave slaps him on the back.
“That’s my boy.” He glances down at the napkin and squints. “Let’s see, for the interview, the dude’s name is Seth. He’ll meet you at the Dark Star Lounge—”
“Where the concert is?”
“Yes, Mark, where the concert is. Thank you for paying attention. He’ll meet you there Thursday at five. Okay?”
Mark reaches out and takes the napkin. He can see it’s from Jake’s Bar and Grill. He says, “Okay.”
Ashley’s been in meetings all day. Ever since she arrived at work a little after 9:00 AM she’s ping-ponged back and forth from meeting to meeting, conference room to conference room, office to office. She calculated once how much time she spent in meetings and, over the course of a year, it added up to a month. Four weeks of her life each year was spent in small rooms with people she doesn’t really like. She imagines spending a month in Paris or Rome, or on a beach somewhere doing nothing but drinking cocktails and soaking up the sun. She’d prefer any of that to meetings.
Now that she has a few seconds to spare—there’s something on her calendar starting at four o’clock and going until the end of the day, she can’t even remember what it is—she goes into her email to look again at Craig’s message from yesterday. She reads it over and over, trying to decide if she should write back.
Ashley,
Hi, it’s been a long time, I know. I hope you’re well and that you don’t mind me reaching out to you. And not that I don’t think of you often—which of course I do—but I thought of you today when I saw an article (check out the link below) about a bunch of bands getting back together that we used to like. Seeing those names brought back all the years we spent together and, because of that, I had to write.
I know that things ended badly between us, but that was a long time ago and I thought, well, I don’t know. Just that I would reach out and say hello. I hope you’ll write back. If not, I’ll totally understand and wish you a happy life.
Best always,
Craig
She clicks on the link and sees the story about Bottlecap. Some of the band names sound familiar, but only vaguely. She and Craig used to listen to a lot of music back then, but it was more his thing than hers. These days, she only listens to NPR.
Ashley clicks back to Craig’s email. She’s thought about him over the years—some movie or TV show reminding her of him—and whenever that happened she’d smile until her memories got swallowed up by how it ended. Because of this (because she knew how those memories would always end) she got very good at short-circuiting any thought of Craig—pushing it aside so that he would rarely, if ever, enter her mind.
Her hands hover over the laptop. She tries to weigh the pros and cons of responding.
What could be the harm of writing back? What’s the worst that could happen?
She gets a reminder for the 4:00 PM meeting, fifteen minutes away. Ashley leans into her computer and quickly writes to Craig. She presses SEND.
After what seems like just a few seconds, she notices something in her inbox. It’s from Craig.
It sends a shiver down her spine to know that he’s out there, at that moment, thinking about her and writing the words that just appeared on her screen. It’s almost as if they’re having a conversation, their first in decades. She’s breathing fast as she reads his response.
Ash,
Thanks so much for writing back. After all this time I wasn’t sure what you’d think of me or us or the time we shared. And I hope you don’t mind my asking, but do you want to try and get together? Just to say hi? I’d love to hear about what you’ve been up to all of these years. What do you say? Lunch? Saturday?
Let me know.
C
The reminder for her meeting pings again. She looks and can see it’s 4:00 PM. She clicks on the small X in the corner of the pop-up window. She turns again to Craig’s email, focusing on two words in particular. Lunch. Saturday. She can’t remember ever having lunch with Craig. Not when they were dating, or even when they lived together.
There’s nothing more unsexy than lunch.
So she writes back.
Yes. Okay. I’ll meet you. Just let me know where and when.
“Ashley, you coming?”
Heart still racing, she looks up and sees Bea standing in the doorway. She’s holding a large present covered in Spider-Man wrapping paper.
“Jenna’s baby shower, remember?”
Ashley remembers signing a card and contributing twenty dollars towards a Target gift card. She also remembers hoping she’d be busy when the day of the shower actually rolled around. It’s bad enough that Margot was by yesterday with her infant.
“Of course,” Ashley says. “Be right there.”
Bea smiles, nods, and disappears down the hall, heading toward the break room. Ashley sits there for a second. She hears noise coming from the direction Bea just headed. She figures everyone’s there, the shower has already started. Ashley slowly reaches to where her purse is sitting on the ground. She grabs it and places it on her desk. She closes her laptop and slides it into the purse. On the bottom of her purse she sees a few loose pills. They’re yellow, triangular. Dylar. She stopped taking it a few months ago—too many side effects—preferring the Protraxanon. But she left the prescription bottle at home, so she fishes out a Dylar tablet and swallows it dry. She slings the purse over her shoulder and begins to tiptoe out of her office.
“Ashley? Where are you going?”
She looks up to see Jenna standing in the hallway, blocking what would have been a perfect escape. Sherry, the nosy receptionist, is in the break room with the others. Jenna’s wearing a white cotton top stretched over her huge stomach. Ashley can see her belly button bulging out, practically the size of a doorknob.
“Oh, Jenna, hey. I just need to put a few things in my car.” She points to her purse. “Laptop and—stuff. And then I’ll be right back.”
“Okay, well, hurry up or you’re going to miss the games!”
Jenna smiles as she speaks. She practically glows. Ashley never really liked Jenna, but now she hates her. Jenna starts to walk down the hallway, one hand on her belly, exhaling in short breaths that sound like she’s already gone into labor. Bea runs back into her office, coming out a second later holding a large sheet cake outlined with blue icing. The top of the cake reads IT’S A BOY. Jenna follows Bea into the conference room. The chatter of voices rises to a crescendo, everyone saying how great the cake looks, everyone saying how great Jenna looks. Sherry’s voice rises above the others screaming, “Joy, joy, joy!”
Ashley tiptoes through the lobby, tiptoes out the door, gets into her Prius, and drives away.
Craig comes back from a late afternoon errand to discover that the office has been rearranged. Where his desk
was this morning there’s nothing but a keg and a box of red plastic cups. Underneath the window overlooking the parking lot, where there used to be a printer and a caddy full of office supplies, there are now bags of chips, pretzels, and cookies. In the kitchen the coffeemaker’s been moved to make way for a margarita machine and someone—an intern, maybe—is filling the refrigerator with bottles of beer. Craig tries to remember if there’s a party today or if they’re celebrating something, or shipping a new version of the site, or if it’s Steve Jobs’s birthday, but nothing comes to mind. It could also just be that it’s Wednesday.
Craig spots Josh in the corner, helping one of the coders move a Ping-Pong table into the conference room. Josh, wearing pool shoes with socks, baggy shorts, and a T-shirt that says HTML 5, catches Craig’s eye and nods. Craig returns the nod and then continues to look for a place to sit.
Wandering through the office, Craig sees messenger bags, fixed-gear bikes, yoga balls, a case of tequila, but no desks. Finally, in the corner, where there used to be two whiteboards on casters, he finds six desks pushed up against a wall. Four of the desks are occupied by coders with headphones on, their fingers moving madly across their keyboards.
Craig’s used to this. The layout of the office changes every couple of weeks. Sometimes there’s a warning, sometimes it’s a surprise. Josh thinks that it keeps everyone fresh and on their toes. Craig thinks that it’s bad for morale and shows that Josh can’t make up his mind about anything.
I used to have an office. With windows, a view, two seats for guests. A little table. A radio. I used to have a door.