Punk and Zen

by JD Glass

  There were broken strings in Belgium and the hunt for their replacements—I think in Antwerp. The little bit of French I knew did me absolutely no good there because they spoke Flemish—that wasn’t even an option in any of the schools I went to! Ended up ordering strings from the States—Mandolin Brothers, to be precise.

  Graham took us out to drink absinthe somewhere—I don’t even know where anymore, if I even knew at the time. I kept dreaming about swords, vampires, and Tang. I think I was more afraid of the Tang. Then more traveling. We slept ten on the floor in Berlin where people said we were absolut uber feist, which I think meant we were cool, and learned that it was okay to call the booking agent (who occasionally forgot to pay us) das Arschlock, then showered in cold water again in Prague. It ABC was back to Germany for one night (!) and we raced from there to Paris. There may have been breathtaking views into Spain, but I slept, one hand wrapped around my guitar, and I think both Stephie and I leaned against Jerkster—he made a good pillow.

  I went crazy trying to find the right change per country and figuring out the different codes I needed to call. A few times I had to use either the bar phone or the hostel phone—and the fuckers almost always charged me double or triple whatever the rate was.

  At least I could find a Coke anywhere we went—I count that as a good thing, really.

  On the very few times I was able to get in touch with anyone, I managed to get through to Samantha’s phone when she wasn’t sleeping and I wasn’t in the process of racing across the continent.

  “How’s it going, baby?” she asked me in that sexy undertone that made me sweat.

  Christ—it had been over a month already. Speaking with her was worse than just missing her, because it made her seem closer than she really was.

  “How bad is it?” she asked, teasing.

  “Depends,” I answered, “on whether I’m asleep or awake.”

  “Really?” she purred. “And why’s that?”

  “Because when I’m asleep, I’m either dead to the world or having nightmares—mostly about Tang,” I joked, “but when I’m awake…that’s different, because then I’m aware of how much I miss you. How about you?” I asked in return, pitching my voice lower. “How bad is it?”

  “It’s horrible,” Samantha answered, all play and pretension gone from her voice, “it’s been absolutely wretched.”

  “Wretched, huh?”

  “Don’t tease, Nina. I’ve lived in England for years—I’ve learned to say wretched.” I could hear the smile in her voice.

  “I wasn’t teasing,” I protested mildly. “I just like the way you say it. Besides,” I added, “I don’t want you to be wretched.”

  “There’s a bright side,” Samantha said cheerfully. “I’ll be done in two weeks, and then I can come and meet you.”

  That sounded great! Two weeks? Awesome! Except…

  “Sam, I don’t even know where we’ll be in two weeks,” I reminded her. “This tour seems to be a seat-of-your-pants ABC Page 218production.”

  “Well,” she drawled, “I have a solution for that. Call my apartment and leave a voice mail when you know where you’ll be. I’ll pick up the message and come to you. Yes?”

  “Yes!” I agreed immediately. “Brilliant! Two weeks, then?”

  “Two weeks and I’ll be wherever you are, and then,” her voice dipped into a low-pitched roll, “I hope you have a few days off.”

  God…just the thought of being next to her was enough to make me want to jump out of my skin.

  “Still there?” she asked.

  Oh yeah. We were on the phone.

  “It’s going to be a long two weeks,” I sighed.

  “It’s been a long month already,” she returned.

  Finally, I asked about Fran. As much as I both relished and in some ways feared this thing between Samantha and me, so full of beautiful, painful potential, I was still in many ways reeling from Fran—but I didn’t want us to just drift apart, either.

  “She’s…she misses you, horribly,” Sam admitted heavily.

  “I, uh, I miss her too,” I admitted.

  “You would…you should,” Samantha said, her words simultaneously sad as well as sympathetic, “you’re blood-bound.”

  I considered her words. Sometimes, Sam said these things that sounded like I should really know what they meant, like I was remembering them or something, but they also confused me because I didn’t—not really.

  “Hey, you know, I tried absinthe—and now I’m sorry I did,” I told her, filling in the quiet.

  “Why’s that?” Samantha asked. “Bad taste? Tired of seeing green fairies?”

  I laughed at that idea. “You know, I don’t remember. But no, it’s the nightmares.”

  “Oh yeah? What kind of nightmares?” she asked, almost too casually. I answered anyway.

  “Well, I don’t know if they qualify as real nightmares,” I cautioned. “It’s mostly just these vague images, like, ABC Page 219I don’t know, these things are trying to catch me or something.” I felt completely embarrassed telling her that, but truthfully, they were starting to get to me, just a little.

  Samantha chuckled and the sound was reassuring through the miles. “Well, that sounds normal enough, love. I’m sure you guys are picking up more fans and more media attention. What’s chasing you, baby, cameras or agents?” she asked, humor still in her voice.

  “Um, honestly? They’re these huge ten-foot shadow hounds.”

  “Shit!” Samantha swore and dropped the phone. “Ow!” I heard her exclaim in the background, along with the sound of plastic skittering on a hard surface until she picked it up again.

  “Hey, still there?”

  “Still here,” I answered, bemused. “Did you hurt yourself?” I asked, thinking of the “ow” I’d heard.

  “Yeah…no, I’m fine. I just jammed my finger in a drawer while I was looking for something,” she answered, obviously annoyed with herself.

  “Wish I could kiss it and make it better for you.”

  “Me too, but at least your wish already does.”

  “Does what?” I asked.

  “Make it feel better.”

  Silence stretched out as we both really felt the miles between us.

  “Take this number,” Samantha said briskly, all business.

  “All right, give me a moment to find a pen.” I hunted around the front desk counter until I found one, then tested it on a scrap of paper to make sure it worked.

  “Okay, shoot!”

  She gave me the numbers and I repeated them as I wrote them down.

  “What’s this for?” I asked curiously. I recognized the country code for En gland.

  “It’s an emergency number,” Samantha explained, “in case you can’t get in touch with me—or I can’t get to you.”

  “Okay…” I answered slowly, “whose ABC number is it?”

  I could hear Samantha inhale. “It’s Candace’s.”

  Oh. Wait. What?

  “Samantha—no, absolutely not,” I said flatly. “I’m not calling her.”

  I heard her let that breath out.

  “It’s only if there’s a real problem. She will, absolutely, help,” she said. “She is fond of you, you know.” She let that sit there in the silence.

  Yeah. I was aware of exactly why she was fond of me, too. In fact, I’d been fond of her as well. This sounded like the ideal recipe for a disaster. I promised myself that no matter what happened, that phone call wouldn’t.

  “Besides,” Samantha added unhelpfully, “she might find you first.”

  I was starting to suspect that Samantha was taking some sort of subtle, okay, it wasn’t so subtle, pleasure at my probably obvious discomfort.

  Two weeks. Another two weeks, and I could breathe again.

  I got in touch with my parents, who spent our precious minutes asking things like, “Are you eating? Are you watching your money?” and my dad chimed in with, “Hey, watch out for those fast European girls—they’re not�
��well…just be careful.”

  I saved Coke cans with different labels and languages on them for Nanny—she liked that sort of thing—and sent them to her when I sent postcards. Victoria, I mean Tori (she’d hugged me tightly about the neck before I’d left and told me she wanted to be called Tori) I sent funny little toys that you could find in the middle of this very popular chocolate—Kinder Chocolate Eggs—we found everywhere we went (totally addictive! But banned in the US because apparently Americans are too dumb not to eat the toy inside), while Elena I tried to find dolls for—those collectible ones that are dressed in whatever the national tradition is? Your mom or grandmother would remember them. Anyway, Nico I mailed these digest-sized comic books I’d picked up at different railway stations. They were, every single one of them, about World War II. The only exceptions were about World War I.

  It made me wonder if Europe was like America in that way—you know, what they say about the Civil War—how way down South in the land of cotton, the Civil War is not forgotten? But I didn’t really get time to ponder that too much; there was too much going on.

  Nico sent me packages—books, clothes, whatever I asked for, complete with Oreos (couldn’t find those anywhere—and I love those—Double Stuf, please) in care of the label, who’d send it on to me. I asked him for toilet paper in the next one.

  As for the rest of the band, Stephie tried to call John every day and cried; they’d started dating about a month before we’d left—finally! The nerves made her throw up before every show, occasionally several times a day, and I felt pretty awful about that. Jerkster stopped using lines and finally got laid. It might not have been skill, though; it might have been the language barrier, because I think that happened while I was trying to track down strings in Belgium.

  I lost weight. We all did, though I shared my Oreos with everyone as soon as I got them, but I gave most of them to Stephie. It seemed to be the only thing that didn’t bother her stomach.

  We washed stuff in sinks, sometimes ourselves, as best we could. I also discovered that when you wash leather pants in the sink, they feel like gooey mush when you put them on damp—and even worse when they get cold. The plus is that they molded to me perfectly.

  Graham showed us the sights, such as they were—mostly bars and music shops and clubs, with some very cool shopping on the very few occasions we could get away. Of course, Steph and I started adding to our now-collective wardrobe, and Jerkster bought a motorcycle helmet he insisted on playing in. Ah, so what, he liked it. Then he started buying bizarre stickers for it.

  I did call Dee Dee at the bar, just to keep in touch, and besides, I wasn’t counting on anything. Our contract wasn’t forever, and I’d still need a job when I got home, you know? Just in case things happened and were, like Stephie said, shit.

  I tried to call Fran—and got right through to her answering machine. I said hello and left it at that.

  I started to lose track of days and started to keep a closer eye on the money. The promoter was “forgetting” to show up—again—which required many phone calls from me and from Graham to both labels and to a gentleman named Enzo at Rude specifically to straighten it all out.

  More and more people attended every show, and we were starting to see more and more flashbulbs during and after. I didn’t think about it much at the time—no one in Adam’s Rib did, anyway; we were so caught up in the playing and the traveling. The fact is, we were getting more and more attention, and we were a band with no product to sell—no record, no Tshirts, nothing but a memorable show, just like a one-night stand.

  We were so new to the business that it hadn’t occurred to any of us that the combined facts of our schedule being a matter of public knowledge and our growing fan base meant that more and more of the attendees weren’t coming just to see the Microwaves, but us as well—and even us instead.

  A band that had been even a touch more seasoned than we were would have known that this meant negotiation, this meant a raise, that in fact, at five and a half, almost six weeks into the tour, we deserved a break. And Graham, even though he had his own stuff to look out for, looked out for us in this instance.

  “We’re going to Barcelona,” he announced to us while we nodded along in the train. I glanced up from my book and raised an eyebrow at him. Yeah, duh. That’s where we were going.

  Graham cleared his throat in the resounding silence that met his grand announcement. “Then there’s a show in Ibiza.”

  I didn’t even look up from the book this time. So…what? We knew that too—and it would be a train and a boat, or a train and a plane. Probably train and boat, we figured, because it cost less.

  “We’ll be spending a few days there—just to relax, get drunk, get laid.”

  “Yeah heh!” Paulie-Boy screamed, fist stuck straight up in the air, the first to react. I looked up from my book again and glanced at Jerkster and Stephie. They stared back at me, just as confused as I was as the rest of the band jumped up and started dancing around the car.

  Graham gave us each a sly smile and sat down on the arm of my chair. He casually slipped an arm around my shoulder. “You…don’t know.” He narrowed his eyes wickedly. “Ibiza is…the party capital of the world.”

  Jerkster, Stephie, and I looked at each other—we were from New York. ’Nuff said, as far as we were concerned.

  Graham understood our silent exchange.

  “It’s not that sort of party,” he explained, rubbing his hands together. “You will get to experience why,” and he stood up again and did a little tango-style two-step, “the Latins are the better lovers and why,” and he struck a very prim and proper pose, “we Europeans think you Yanks are so repressed.”

  Even Jerkster raised his eyebrows at him at that, and after looking at our faces, Graham cracked up hysterically.

  “You’ll see,” he said as he walked away, back toward the dining car. “Lady of Spain, I adore you,” he trilled, waving a hand behind him.

  We eyed each other again.

  Jerkster stretched out and went back to sleep.

  It was midnight or thereabouts when we arrived in Barcelona, and since load-in for a gig usually started somewhere around seven in the a.m., it was right to bed, as soon as we could figure out where that was. This was the first time we weren’t staying at the friend of a friend’s cousin’s wife’s brother’s dog’s lover’s ex-girlfriend’s place. It was an honest-to-goodness hotel room—two rooms for the Microwaves (and they needed it) and one, count ’em, one for Adam’s Rib.

  I got to the room first, Stephie a step behind me. We’d left Jerkster back somewhere in the hall, playing with the ice ABC Page 223machine.

  Stephie stood next to me as I stared at the single beds from the middle of the room. We exchanged a look that said, “Where’s Jerkster gonna sleep?”

  “Not with me.”

  “Not with me, either.”

  Hey, it really is true what they say about band telepathy, though an observer would have seen only an exchange of arched brows and a couple of strange mouth movements. That’s totally okay—Stephie and I knew what we meant.

  He marched into the room singing something atonal, kilt swinging, and helmet full of ice under his arm.

  “Hey.” He stopped short as he saw us. He looked at the beds, then back to Stephie and me. “Who’m I staying with?” he asked, a wide smirk showing his teeth as he glanced from me to Steph. “No, wait, don’t tell me—you guys are gonna share!”

  I put my guitar—which was still slung over my shoulder—down safely in a corner while Steph and I exchanged another look.

  She slapped his helmet off his hands and tossed it to me.

  “Yo, wait!” Jerkster exclaimed. “Give it…” He lunged for me and I jumped out of the way. Since he’d had to bend when he reached, I did the logical thing—I dumped it on his head, then shook it to make sure all the water came out.

  “Oh that sucks, that sucks!” he bellowed as the ice and the cold water flew over him.

  “You�
�re sleeping in the tub,” I told him as he straightened, that smirk for each of us firmly in place. I tossed the helmet back to Stephie, and she held it dangling from the strap as she leaned her weight on the opposite leg.

  “You’re gonna need more ice,” she told him, flicking her finger against the helmet.

  “Don’t do that!” Jerkster asked as he snatched the helmet from her. He inspected it. “Poor George, did she hurt you?” he asked the sticker as he smoothed it.

  “George?”

  “Yeah, for Georgie Porgie Pudding Pie,” he said and showed us the sticker—a yellow square with a cartoon pig dressed in a blue sailor suit. “I’m getting more ice,” he informed us.

  “Okay,” I drawled as he walked to the door. I picked a bed and threw my stuff on it while Stephie did the same on the other side of the room.

  The next morning was as brutal as we’d predicted, and for the record? Neither Stephie nor I really let Jerkster sleep on the floor or in the tub—I called the front desk and asked if they could send us up a cot, a foldaway bed, or failing that, at least a half dozen pillows.

  The fact is, we’d all bunked together on many occasions, but this was an opportunity to sleep on a for-real bed, not a sofa, a floor, or a seat that didn’t recline enough while the ground whizzed by underneath and the overhead lights never really went out.

  I’d already left messages for Samantha letting her know we’d be in Barcelona, and called from the front desk as soon as we’d walked in—after handing the clerk the equivalent of several dollars—to let her know there’d be some downtime in Ibiza before we went back to the mainland and on to Madrid.

  I didn’t know if I’d see her in Barcelona, Ibiza, or Madrid, but I was certain on one thing—I hoped it was sooner rather than later.

  We took some time in the evening for general and maintenance grooming to make sure we’d hit the stage looking the way we wanted to.

  I’d made a few small changes: I’d let the red streak fade, and the black, too; my hair was a bit closer to its actual color. I’d also started to let it grow on the sides by my ears so that it swept down into a curved point along the line of my cheek. Stephie thought it was cool—she said it matched my smile. Jerkster didn’t notice, but I didn’t expect him to. Graham thought it looked cool and apparently a little something else, too.