by Julia Dahl
She and Trevor both needed new phones, so the next stop was the T-Mobile store, and then Macy’s, for something to wear; jeans and T-shirts, a jacket, a week’s worth of underwear, and a pair of boots she could walk in. Downstairs at the Louis Vuitton counter she bought a duffle bag to carry it all.
At the Holiday Inn, they ordered a pizza to the room and Claudia told Trevor what she had planned with Lesley. He was, she imagined, a little bit impressed. Or maybe she wasn’t reading him right.
“What about the other one?” he asked. “Jeremy.”
“Do you know him?”
“No. But I saw him in the hall the other day. He was knocking on your door.”
“Was he carrying his guitar?”
“I think he always is.”
“Exactly,” said Claudia. “Check this out.”
She pulled up Google on the new phone, searched “Jeremy Cahill,” and clicked the first link, a local news article from a couple of weeks before:
NYU BAND WINS GREEN DAY CONTEST
By Lina Malloy
An NYU freshman and his band are the winners of a national search for the next great rock stars sponsored by Green Day.
“This is such an amazing opportunity to get our music to a wider audience,” said lead singer and guitarist, Jeremy Cahill, 19.
Cahill is a Music major and says he and his bandmates in “Rock” just started playing together last fall.
“We were on the same vibe from the first day of practice.”
In a statement on their website, Green Day’s front man, Billie Joe Armstrong, said that “Rock” was “the most original, exciting band we heard … we can’t wait to get them in the studio.”
Rock’s other members are Chris Azarian, 19; Dante Nilsson, 21; and Kingston Wilcox, 22.
“What a douche,” said Trevor. “It’s such an amazing opportunity to share our music. Does anybody even listen to Green Day? They’re, like, fifty.”
Claudia laughed. “Any ideas?”
Trevor thought about it. “What if he couldn’t play the guitar anymore?”
JEREMY
It was raining Friday when Jeremy Cahill’s father called and asked if he’d take a late LIRR train home so he could get up early and help with the front gutter, which had come loose again.
“Your brother is working double shifts or I wouldn’t ask,” his father said when they spoke. “When your record drops you can hire me a groundskeeper!”
Peter Cahill mentioned the Green Day contest in one way or another every time they spoke, and Jeremy had stopped reminding his father that he had not won an entire album contract, but a contract to record a single. Or at least that was his understanding. It had been a month since they got the news, and details were still scarce. There had been a meeting around a conference table at the record label in Midtown, and a tour of a recording studio, though not, apparently, the studio they were going to record their song in. The executive said it would all be worked out later.
Rock was only five months old when they entered the contest with the song Jeremy had written and that they’d set down in an NYU studio. Four guys: Kingston Wilcox, the drummer who’d dropped out of Juilliard and who Jeremy met at a gig in Brooklyn; Chris Azarian, a freshman from California, who played bass and sang backup; Dante Nilsson, an enormous Wisconsin-bred farm boy who’d taught himself a dozen instruments by the time he was twelve, and played keyboards, trumpet, harmonica, and, in a pinch, rhythm guitar; and Jeremy Cahill, lead guitar, lead vocals. They called the band Rock because their mission was to rock. Let Sam Smith and Nick Jonas get you laid, Rock was going to get you on your feet. Get you moving. Rock played get-drunk-and-dance music. Everybody loved it. They could have played two gigs every night, but Jeremy was choosey. Right after they announced the contest winners, City Winery called and said Steve Earle wanted them to open for him at his monthly show. Jeremy turned them down.
“It’s all tables and chairs and people sitting there eating,” he said to the guys. “It won’t work.”
“But it’s Steve Earle,” said Dante. “He can hook us up with a lot of people.”
“Not if we play a shit show. I’m telling you, you’re gonna get up on that little stage and look out at all those moms and dads eating their fucking crostini and sipping wine and you’re gonna lose your hard-on. Trust me. We gotta play where we can really play. Steve Earle is, like, seventy. He’s cool but he’s cruising. That’s not us. We gotta stick with the brand. Rock doesn’t do dinner theater.”
The record company had tied the announcement of the winners of the “Green Day on Campus” contest to the band’s world tour and Jeremy and all the guys from Rock got floor seats and backstage passes to the show at Madison Square Garden. In the green room, the band stood around waiting for Billie Joe, who they had been assured wanted to meet them. When he finally appeared, shorter than them all, with wild black hair and eyeliner and high-top sneakers, he was in a hurry to get on stage, but took a minute to shake everybody’s hand and congratulate them.
“Really fantastic playing,” Billie Joe said to Jeremy when he introduced himself as lead guitarist. “Great song, but I’ll tell you what put me over for you guys was that guitar intro. You write that?”
“Yeah,” said Jeremy. He’d written the whole song.
“Man, I wish I’d come up with that! I couldn’t stop thinking about it. That fingering isn’t easy. I’ve been playing guitar all day every day for thirty-five years and it took me a minute to get it. But it feels like I should know it already, you know? Like it’s gonna be part of the canon. Dire Straits. The Who. The Kinks. You guys are, what again?”
“We’re Rock,” said Jeremy.
“Rock. Okay, okay, I dig it. Rock. Fuck yeah. Rock.”
A stagehand brought them back into the audience just as the lights went down in the arena. Everybody was ready to rock. Thousands of people squirming and shouting and whistling in anticipation of getting to experience three men playing their music. Jeremy looked around him and felt certain that this was his future. How could it not be?
About halfway through their set, Billie Joe came to the microphone:
“We’ve got a seriously talented guitarist in the audience tonight, everybody. He and his band just won our ‘Green Day on Campus’ contest and you all are gonna hear that single soon. I promise, I promise, you’ll love it. So, Jeremy? You down there, mate? Not in the loo?” Billie Joe put his hand over his face to shade his eyes from all the stage lights. “There you are! Come on up. Think you can handle ‘American Idiot’?”
Jeremy didn’t even look at his boys; he took the metal stairs to the stage two-by-two. He had willed it into happening. Someone handed him a guitar and he strummed a few chords and they were off.
* * *
“Dude, this is officially the best night of your life so far, right?” said Dante when the concert was over and they were riding the escalator down to the subway below Penn Station.
“A hundred percent,” said Jeremy.
“Where should we go?”
“Somewhere cheap,” said Chris. “And not exclusively hetero.”
“On the best night of my life so far I want to get laid,” said Jeremy. “I want to fuck a hot chick.”
“You can do it, man!” said Dante. He swept his arm around at the teeming masses of sweating Green Day fans above and below them. “The city is your oyster. Ladies! Ladies! Do you recognize this man? He played tonight!”
Scattered laughs and a couple shouts of “Woo-hoo!” emboldened him.
“He’s single!”
“So’s she!” A brunette half a floor below them waved her arm and pointed at her friend, a blonde. The brunette was wearing a T-shirt with the word “Bride” on it in glittery letters. The blonde and the half dozen women around her were wearing matching pink “Bridesmaid” T-shirts. The blonde had her face in her hands for a moment, then pushed her friend and laughed.
“It’s true!” she shouted.
“Jeremy?” said Dante. “Wh
at do you think? Swipe right?”
“Get her number!” shouted the bride. The bridesmaids shrieked and applauded. People started taking out their phones. Get her number! Get her number!
Jeremy stopped at the landing, his friends jumping up and down behind him, and greeted the blonde. She was older than him. Thirty? Maybe thirty-five. She wasn’t awful but she was not the hot chick he was going to fuck tonight. He and the boys were not following a bachelorette party to some dumb club—though Chris might have loved that.
“I’m Beth,” she said. She was smiling but she looked sad. Jeremy figured maybe she’d just been dumped. “Sorry, my friend is drunk and crazy. You were great up there.”
“Thanks. Wanna give me your number?”
He put it into his phone under “Beth”—no real point in asking a last name. She was probably from Long Island just like him. Probably worked in a health club or a bank. She couldn’t get him anywhere.
“Thanks, Beth,” he said, winking. It all felt like a performance. “I’ll text you.”
And then he kissed her. Grabbed her around the waist and laid one on her. The crowd went wild. Beth didn’t push him off and when he pulled away she was laughing. She waved and pushed up the escalator back to her cheering friends in pink and white. Jeremy took a bow.
The plan was to get a drink and a shot at the Bryant Park restaurant where Jeremy’s brother, Lars, tended bar, then head back to the Village. Lars had been working for the same restaurant group for more than a decade, first in Rockville Center in high school, then the Upper East Side, now Midtown. Lars would hook them up for a couple rounds, and after that they’d go to Down Under on Bleecker, where their IDs worked. Down Under had three-dollar PBRs, and Chris had once gotten a blow job in the bathroom from a stage manager at the Lucille Lortel.
Bryant Park was crowded. Green Day fans loading up before heading down into Grand Central and the train home to wherever; workaday men and women in bad suits, held too late at the office; and tourists on expense accounts, red-faced and handsy, sleeves rolled up, signaling the waitstaff for more more more.
“How was it?” shouted Lars from behind the bar, waving them over. Dante and Kingston and Chris talked over themselves to tell of his little brother’s triumphs. Shots were poured and pounded.
“This kid got our mother’s talent and her looks,” said Lars.
“What’d you get, Lars?” asked a man who looked like a regular. Shaggy gray hair, yellowing moustache, a Levon Helm T-shirt.
“I got you bastards!” Everybody laughed.
“I’m so proud of you, little brother,” said Lars, popping caps off bottles of Bud for the boys. “You know who’s gonna want to fuck you now? Claudia Castro.”
“What!” said Dante. “You fucked Claudia Castro?”
“He hooked up with her. Didn’t get it in. Am I right, J?”
Jeremy had made the mistake of bragging to his brother about making out with Claudia Castro, and now, just like his father with the Green Day contest, Lars brought it up constantly. To Lars, the Claudia Castro hook-up meant that Jeremy was making all the right choices. Positioning himself with the right people. Making the right connections and the right impressions. Lars, like most bartenders, was big on connections. Bringing people together, making things happen. His goal was to own his own bar by thirty-five. He kept everybody’s business card and treated everybody as a possible investor.
“How did we not know this?” asked Dante.
“I knew,” said Chris. “It was early, right? First couple days of class.”
“You know who her dad is, right?” shouted Lars.
“It was just a hook-up,” said Jeremy. “She was cool. We just don’t really run in the same circles.”
Obviously, he hadn’t told anyone that he texted her half a dozen times before finally giving up. He saw her around campus sometimes, but she wasn’t at the dorm much. He’d followed her on Instagram right after the hook-up and never un-followed. Her feed was mostly a cliché of cocktail glasses, skimpy tops, and manicures, but she also posted some pretty cool art. The art part annoyed him. It didn’t bother him that a vapid rich girl had decided the boy from Long Island wasn’t worth her time, but the fact that she had taste, that she had ideas—shouldn’t she have seen that he wasn’t just another freshman doofus trying to decide if he should go into law or business? He was going to be a star.
“Well, she better catch you on the way up,” said Lars. “’Cause once you’re touring with Green Day I know you ain’t gonna try to keep a lady at home.”
Everyone agreed this was exactly right. If Claudia Castro wanted a piece of Jeremy Cahill, she better take it soon.
And, because it was the best night of his life, who should he see when they finally got to Down Under? Claudia Castro, sitting at the bar, already drunk enough that when he bellied up beside her and gave her that Green Day grin, she smiled and wrapped her arms around him for a sloppy hug.
“I know you!” she said. “See, I told you people were still around. Spring break is for assholes.”
“Claudia’s been drinking,” said the guy next to her. Jeremy recognized him from the dorm but didn’t know his name.
“We’ve all been drinking! Everyone here has been drinking, Chad. And we are going to continue drinking!” She motioned to the bartender, then looked at Jeremy. “What are you drinking?”
“Let’s do a shot,” said Jeremy.
She agreed. “Tequila? Chad, you want another shot?”
“Why not?”
“Three shots of tequila!”
The tequila was poured. Jeremy looked around for his bandmates but they’d all found friends in various corners of the bar. What a night, he thought.
“To the best night of my life,” he said.
Jeremy didn’t know if Claudia heard him. She drank the shot, shook her head, and then hopped off the barstool.
“Save my seat,” she said, touching Jeremy’s chest.
And because it was exactly that kind of night, Jeremy wrapped his arm around her waist, put his face in her neck, and whispered, “You got it, baby.”
When she was out of earshot, Chad said: “I’m fucking her tonight.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“She’s been a bitch to me for years, and tonight she’s all brokenhearted and here I am, listening to her bullshit. That shit ain’t free.”
“I hear you.”
“You could probably fuck her, too. Seriously, I don’t mind sharing. And she’s not gonna remember a thing. Trust me. I’ll even let you go first.”
“That’s kinda fucked up, man.” But as he said it he started to imagine and he started to get hard. He was going fuck Claudia Castro on this perfect night after all. It was fate.
* * *
Ten days later, Jeremy was sick of thinking about Claudia Castro. He was sick of thinking about Chad and his father in the big black car. He was sick of seeing that video in his head, and he was sick of thinking about the thirty-thousand dollars he couldn’t make happen. He wanted to think about music, he was trying to think about music. He was trying to get inspired. When he turned into the Mews that last night of the first part of his life, he was headed to see a professor and then to the dorm to drop off his guitar before catching the late train back to Long Island. He was walking slowly, trying to lose himself in the surround sound of his $300 headphones, twiddling his fingers with Slash to the opening bars of “Sweet Child of Mine,” when what the cops told him later was probably a baseball bat came down against his skull.
TREVOR
It had seemed like something he could do when they talked about it in the hotel room. She told Trevor she paid cash for the bat and the gloves and the duffle at the Astor Place Kmart, and got the NYU cap from the store on Broadway.
“You went down to campus?” he asked, trying the cap on. It was a little small.
“I got there right when they opened. Nobody saw me. I was thinking it would be a good way to make sure you blend in, but cover your face a bit,
too.”
“That makes sense.”
He adjusted the brim and imagined her in his mirrored sunglasses, looking for the sporting goods section, the hat wall. Presenting the sleepy cashier with a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill. Maybe even walking out without the change. Jeremy and Chad were the criminals, but Claudia was the one who had to sneak around. Trevor looked in the mirror. He’d set his mind to this, but when he saw himself in that stiff new purple-and-white hat, his mind sputtered. What was he doing here? He should be in class. The lecture this afternoon was scheduled to be about unions; he’d even done some of the reading about factory accidents and child labor when he couldn’t sleep the night before.
“Was the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory near here?” he asked.
“The what?”
“A bunch of people died in a fire a long time ago…”
“I know what it is,” she said. Was she talking down to him? “What made you think of that?”
“We’re talking about it in one of my classes.”
“Do you not want to be here?”
“What? No.”
“No? You don’t want to be here?”
“No, I do want to be here.” It was the truth. He wanted to be there with her. He wanted to be the person doing this for her. With her. And he wouldn’t tell her he was nervous. She didn’t need any more burdens. He was going to be brave.
“But you’re thinking about class,” she said.
“I can’t always help what I think of. Can you?”
This gave her pause. She sat down. “I wish I could. All I can think of is what happens when everyone in the world sees that video.”