by David Arnold
Pontius Pilot starts in on his first song, and some people get up to dance, and that’s when I see her. Or I think it’s her, hard to say from here. I circle around to the other side of the room, and—yeah. Definitely her. Up by the stage, dancing, singing right along with Pontius Pilot.
Sara knows all the lyrics.
54 → masks
Me: My phone is almost dead so last check in. You ok?
Penny: Nope. Got stabbed
Me: Not funny
Penny: Also mugged. It was your standard mugging/stabbing
Penny: Shit night to this point
Me: Don’t say shit. And I shouldn’t be much longer.
Me: Down to 6% so text for emergencies only.
Penny: I see people eating fries. I’ll have some of those
Me: I wasn’t taking your order. Also what people?
Penny: Chill. Some kids are out here smoking and they have fries. Is it McDonald’s on the inside too?
Me: No
Penny: WAIT. Is this place like an undercover McD’s???
Me: It is not.
Penny: OK. Mark Wahlberg sends his regards
Me: OMG. Gotta go. Out soon
* * *
After Pontius Pilot finishes his last song, he disappears backstage through a door labeled MESS/GREENROOM in white stenciling. I’d spent his whole set debating whether to go up to Sara, but at the moment she’s nowhere to be found, which is probably for the best. I didn’t sneak out of the house and get SHTBCKT stamped on my hand so I could flirt.
The voice of Val and Alan’s cousin rings in my ears: Act bored, like you’ve done it a thousand times. I yawn like, No big deal, push open the MESS/GREENROOM door, and walk backstage.
For precision: it is immediately clear that the mess in MESS/GREENROOM is meant to reflect both a state of disarray and a fully equipped kitchen. In that kitchen now, a man with a mustache stands over a sizzling deep fryer with a metal basket of fries. Behind him are two doors labeled with that same white stencil: BACK ALLEY and PISS CHAMBER. To my left, a lounge, complete with couch and card table, amps and cables, guitars and beer cases. The shirtless guitar player from Rippd is lying on his back on the couch, studying the ceiling, and smoking weed.
From the stage on the other side of the wall, the next act begins. It’s a girl’s voice, whimsical and weightless, more painting than song, really, and I stand there trying to think of something to say, but all I can do is listen. The song is short, maybe a minute and a half, and for its duration, it’s like all three of us in the room are under some enchantment. Before the next one starts, I’m about to ask if they’ve seen Pontius Pilot, when a toilet flushes from inside the PISS CHAMBER, then a running sink, and then . . . the door swings open.
“Oh,” I say. “Hi.”
Philip Parish looks at the man with the mustache, who shrugs and shakes his basket of fries. Parish pulls a bottle of water from the fridge, chugs it, wipes his mouth on his sleeve. “You with Harrison von . . . whatever?”
Shirtless Guitar Player pulls the joint out of his mouth, yells at the ceiling, “Harrison von Valour Jr. sucks giant steaming turd balls!”
Parish rolls his eyes.
“I’m not with Harrison von Valour Jr.,” I say. And even though I thought they were a jillion times better than Rippd, I figure this guy just got his ass handed to him by a cynical MC in front of a bunch of underage kids who didn’t really like his set all that much to begin with, so I add, “And I agree they suck giant steaming turd balls,” just for an added sprinkle of camaraderie.
Back out onstage, the angelic voice sings, and this new song is even more iridescent than the first, its architect in possession of that rare magic that renders the resonation of melody through air both inevitable and miraculous: this girl sings the way most of us breathe.
“I have something for you.” I pull the photo out of my pocket and hand it to Philip Parish. He takes another chug of water, looks down at the picture for what seems an endless second—and maybe because I’d anticipated some seismic shift in the room where his heartbeat gradually increased, decibel by decibel, as if plugged into one of these old amps until the whole venue shook and rattled, all of us joined together in a communal orgasm of shit making sense for once, of beautiful things happening for once, of removing the mask to find the man for once, instead of it always being the other way around—maybe because of all this, the smoky-rough voice of Shirtless Guitar Player cuts so deep.
“That your boyfriend?” he asks, nudging Parish in the ribs, draped over our shoulders like a soaking wet quilt. I hadn’t even heard him get off the couch.
Parish’s eyes change, flicker to a fake sort of cheeriness. I could’ve sworn he was about to reach out and take the photo, but instead he says, “I have no idea who that is.”
Slowly, from the bottom up, my legs begin to lose feeling. “AP English, Iverton High. You dropped this in my classroom.”
Parish looks at Shirtless Guitar Player like, Get a load of this kid. “I did what now?” he says to me.
“Last year. You performed for our Magazine Mega Gala.”
Shirtless Guitar Player chuckles, drops back down onto the couch.
Parish laughs too. “Oh, right. I remember that.”
“You spoke to my class afterward. You had a notebook, and this fell out of it. I picked it up, and I think maybe—I don’t know. I thought maybe it was important.”
Philip Parish glances around, chugs the last of his water, tosses the empty bottle into a trash can. “I’ve never seen that picture in my life.” But he doesn’t look me in the eye when he says it, just shakes his head and, without even a good-bye, disappears through the door labeled BACK ALLEY.
“You sure you ain’t with Harrison von Valour Jr., kid?” says Shirtless Guitar Player from the couch, and there’s a loud hiss to my right as the man with the mustache drops another batch of frozen fries into bubbling oil. As if to punctuate the disappointment, the angelic voice onstage has been replaced by the mumblings of Dave, those miraculous (and far too short) songs supplanted by his flaccid ponytail. And my own heartbeat increases in volume now, decibel by decibel, as if plugged into one of these old amps, a cold announcement that shit rarely makes sense, that beautiful things seldom happen, and that, more often than not, what’s under the mask is a total letdown.
55 → meanwhile, on my fun gay ballsack
Sara Lovelock is perched, literally, on top of my car. Through the windshield, I see Penny with her pepper spray at the ready, twisted around in an effort to keep both eyes on this perfect stranger sitting atop the vehicle like a sentry on post. I may be wrong, but it appears Mark Wahlberg is taking a nap in the backseat.
Dog has mad chill.
“Nice ride,” Sara says, patting the roof.
I zip up my jacket. “My friend Alan calls it . . .”
“What?”
“What.”
Sara pulls her hands into her coat sleeves. “You said, ‘My friend Alan calls it,’ and then you stopped talking.”
“I’m afraid it wouldn’t be appropriate.”
“Noah. I’m literally sitting on top of your car.”
“Okay, then. So as you can see, the car is a Hyundai hatchback, and my very classy, not-at-all-juvenile friend Alan used to call it my ‘fun guy ballsack,’ until we—”
“Fungi? Plural for fungus?”
“I always heard, like, a dude who is fun. Either way, he recently discovered Hyundai is pronounced hun-day not hun-dye, and so then Alan was all, ‘Even better!’ and that’s pretty much the story of how my Hyundai hatchback became known as my fun gay ballsack.”
Dog’s owner has zero chill.
“Good story,” says Sara.
“Well, don’t ask me to tell it again. It was just a one-time thing.”
Penny’s arms wave frantically from the front seat, and
I’m about to open the door and tell her not to worry about this random girl on the car, when Sara says, “So you gonna ask me out or what?”
“What?”
“Damn, son.”
“No, I didn’t mean . . . Sorry, you caught me off guard.”
She pops her hands out of her sleeves, slaps them on the hood (causing Penny to jump about a foot in her seat), and pushes herself down off the car. “So we keep running into each other, and I’m not one to tempt fate. Also, I have a thing for guys who wear the same clothes every day.”
“I have ten on rotation, FYI. It’s not like I wear the same actual T-shirt every day.”
Behind us, the driver’s-side window rolls down a few inches. “Noah?” Penny is holding the pepper spray out, eyeing Sara suspiciously.
“It’s fine, Penny. At ease. This is Sara. She’s a . . . friend.”
“Hi,” says Sara, smiling at Penn. “You’re Noah’s sister?”
Penny glares at her, says nothing, rolls the window back up.
“Sorry about her. She’s a little weird.”
“I mean, I did climb on top of a car while she was inside.”
“True.”
“Dog didn’t seem to mind, though.”
“That’s Mark Wahlberg for you.”
“You named your dog Mark Wahlberg?”
“I think I’ve met this evening’s quota for stories that make me sound like I have no friends.”
“Fair,” she says, smiling, like that.
“Okay, well.” Do it. Just do it. “You wanna go out sometime?”
“No way, dude.”
The sudden urge to vomit . . .
“Kidding,” she says. “I’d love to. You got your phone?”
I pull it out of my pocket. “Um. It’s dead.”
“Noah, Noah, Noah.” She opens the door of the car next to mine, climbs in, and grabs a pen. Then, from her pocket, she pulls a crumpled piece of paper and starts writing.
“How’d you know it was mine?” I ask. “The car, I mean.”
“Oh, I stalk you online? Yeah, I pretty much know everything about you, social security number, felonies, that kind of thing.”
“So you probably saw I’m wanted for seventh-degree murder.”
Sara smiles, hands me the crumpled paper. “What’s that one again?”
“It’s when you consider killing your friend’s twice-removed cousin’s boyfriend.”
“Well, I’m sure he had it coming. But seriously. That time you came over to see my brother, you backed into our driveway. I could pick that thing out of a hatchback lineup.”
I look at the crumpled paper expecting a phone number, only to find something that looks more like a list:
This Can Only Get Better
Moby Dick Sucks
Alone or Lonely
“Are these songs?” I ask.
“The other side. And don’t think for a second this is a fool-around invite. It’s not.”
“It’s not.”
“I’m a classy girl, Noah. Treat me right, or rue the day you were born.”
In her backseat I spot a guitar case, and it hits me. I flip the crumpled paper back over, and the angelic voice rings in my ears, each note a vibrant color floating around like particles of dust in the sunlight. “You sang tonight.”
Sara looks in her lap, and I can tell I’ve changed the tenor of the conversation. She starts the car but doesn’t drive off.
“You were amazing,” I say.
“Thanks.” She doesn’t look up. “You know, I never really understood what Henry meant when she talked about exiting the robot. I thought I did, but I didn’t. Until I started playing out. When I’m onstage, I don’t think about any single person in the audience, or any single person in my life—I just lose myself completely. Go empty. Which is nice. Or not nice, but necessary.”
“Sounds exhausting.”
“The hard part is finding myself again afterward, filling myself back up with me. Also, the whole music-peer thing.”
“Music-peer thing?”
“I’ve played out enough to know, musicians are all about vulnerability in front of an audience, but put them in front of other musicians, and it’s the tight-lipped, stone-cold fucking cool act, a total zero-sum game. God forbid one artist show weakness in front of another.”
We say good-bye, I promise to call or text, and as I watch Sara’s car disappear into the wintery-dark streets of Chicago, I know exactly what to do.
56 → revolution in their bones
“Five minutes,” I say through the window, holding up five fingers. Shrug, hold up the other hand. “Maybe ten.”
Penny hasn’t moved since Sara left, just sits on her knees in the driver’s seat, staring at me through the window (which she refused to roll down for me). Sara must have really spooked her.
“Sorry, Penn. I’ll explain when I get back.”
At the main entrance the bouncer takes one look at me and shakes his head. I show him the SHTBCKT stamp on my hand, to which he says, “Nice try.”
“I was just here, like, five minutes ago. You don’t remember?”
He throws a quick but pointed gaze across the street, where a police cruiser idles silently, parking lights on, cab lights darkened.
Shit’s about to go down in this bucket.
The bouncer says, “Beat it, kid,” and I head through the side parking lot, down the street a full block until reaching the alley behind Windy City Limits, where I double back behind the buildings. Hustle between dumpsters and fire escapes, avoid puddles of God knows what, and in my head, Parish’s words weigh heavily: I’ve never seen that picture in my life.
I think about the masks we wear, who we wear them around; I think about what Sara said, how musicians are vulnerable in front of an audience, but “tight-lipped, stone-cold fucking cool” around other musicians. Say, in the greenroom of a venue at which you regularly perform. Say, in the presence of another fledgling local musician, one who has very clear opinions about his fellow fledgling local musicians.
I find Parish leaning against the dirty brick wall, smoking a cigarette.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” he says, like we’re old friends, like we’d planned to meet back here all along. I hand him the photograph, which he accepts without question. “‘When he approaches the light his eyes will be dazzled, and he will not be able to see anything at all, of what are now called realities.’”
“What?”
“‘Allegory of the Cave.’” Parish takes a long draw, exhales into the cold air, and then slides down the wall until he’s sitting on pavement. “Plato. You know it?”
In ninth grade I’d gone through a bit of a philosophy phase: paradoxes and Nietzsche mostly, but with a soupçon of Cogito, ergo sum for good measure. At that age, philosophy is a rite of passage and, like a new photographer taking pictures of dead leaves or books on the beach, my philosophical output was little more than mimicry.
“Picture yourself at the back of a cave,” says Parish. “You were born in this cave, it’s all you know. You’re all tied up so you can’t move, not even your head. All you’ve ever seen is the wall in front of you. Behind you is a fire, and between you and that fire is this little path. People walking around, carrying stuff up over their heads. Now, you can’t turn around, but because of the fire, you see their flickering shadows on the wall. And since you’ve never seen the people walking, never seen those objects they’re carrying, never seen the fire itself— that shadow on the wall? That’s your reality. And those people walking around, free to leave the cave at will, trading in that little fire for the great big sun, they’re the enlightened ones. They know true reality.” He pauses a moment, smokes, stares at the boy in the photo. “Abraham and I used to talk about Plato’s cave all the time.”
All my hairs stand
on end. “What?”
Parish holds up the photograph, points to the guy in it. “My little brother, Abe. He was obsessed with the ‘Allegory of the Cave.’ We used to marvel at those Greek philosophers, man. Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, those guys had entire revolutions in their bones, but they weren’t flashy about it. The ‘Allegory of the Cave’ is a written-out dialogue between two dudes. Just a conversation.”
There are times when I wonder if everything that’s ever happened in my life right down to the finest seed of minutiae was planted on purpose, in that exact spot, and that one too, so that one day a tree might grow tall and mighty, affording me a shade of acumen I might otherwise have missed entirely.
“The ‘oral exchange of sentiments, observations, opinions, or ideas,’” I say, stepping into that shade, recalling a conversation from so many months ago; and later that night, after Circuit had finished fucking with my brain, an encounter with his neighbor, who talked of God and caves, who lovingly rubbed the ears of a shape-shifter named Abraham.
“What’s that?” asks Parish.
“Definition of conversation,” I say in a breath.
“You know that shit off the top of your head?” Parish doesn’t wait for an answer. “Sentiments, observations, and what else?”
“Opinions and ideas.”
Parish smiles up at me. “I didn’t catch your name.”
I step up against the wall, slide down next to him, and offer a handshake.
57 → Philip Parish, a conversation
“I’m Noah.”
“Philip. You want a cigarette?”
“No thanks.”
“Smart man, Noah.”
“Yeah, I mean—never really understood smoking, no offense.”
“Nah, I mean Noah from the Bible. All buddy-buddy with God, saw clouds no one else saw. Even when everyone laughed at him building that ark, he went on and did it anyway. I do wonder about those animals, though. All cramped up for days on end.”