A Song for a New Day

by Sarah Pinsker

  “Your songs deserve a bigger audience. If I hadn’t come here I’d think you were still ‘Blood and Diamonds,’ not all your amazing new stuff. I’d never have heard you again if I hadn’t come here.”

  “And why did you come? You said you were here to check out music. You meant for StageHolo, not for yourself.” It wasn’t a question.

  “For both. I’d never have been able to leave home if it hadn’t been for this job. I wanted to go places. I wanted to hear music I hadn’t heard before, and see stuff I hadn’t seen.”

  “Ha. They sent you on tour.” There was no humor in her laugh. “Did they know I was here all along? How did you find my place?”

  “Aran Randall told me to come here.”

  “That figures.”

  “He said there was great music happening. He was right.”

  “And you thought you’d come in and convince me to leave everything I had going here? Or did you arrange the raid tonight, too, to give me impetus?”

  “I had no idea about the raid,” Rosemary said with what she hoped was believable sincerity. “I swear. And Aran didn’t mention you, only the 2020. I was the one who decided which bands to pass along.”

  “Wait—so if I agreed to sign, but only as ‘Harriet’ without the nostalgia factor, would the offer still stand?”

  “Mine stands,” said Rosemary. “I told them about you because you make amazing music, not because of your name.”

  “But you recognized me your first night. Did it color your opinion at all?”

  “It made me excited to hear you, but I wouldn’t have bothered telling them about you if you’d sucked.”

  “That’s comforting. Did you make this offer to any other bands here, or just me?”

  “You, the Handsome Mosquitoes, and Kurtz. Both of them have live auditions arranged. I was supposed to offer Joni’s band as well, but I never got the chance.”

  “So even if we hadn’t been raided tonight, you were taking my bands.”

  “Some of your bands, and only if they wanted to go. I have a feeling Joni wouldn’t have been interested.”

  “I’d guess you’re right. Okay. What’s the next step?”

  “The next step?”

  “Do you tell them I’m interested, or do I put on your hood thingy, or do they send lawyers to darken my doorstep?”

  “You’re interested? For real? I can reach them now if you’d like.”

  “Not tonight. Jesus. Come back tomorrow after I get some sleep and we can figure it out. Right now you should go home.”

  Rosemary let Luce walk her from the apartment, out the front door. “See you tomorrow,” she said. “I’m sorry this place is over.”

  “Me, too, Rosemary Laws. Me, too.”

  24

  ROSEMARY

  Walk Away

  Walking back to the hotel drunk wasn’t the smartest idea, but when she checked the time, it was later than the last buses, and she didn’t feel like waiting for a single-cell. She was waiting for the elevator, debating whether to send a message about Luce now or let Management stew on what they had done, when a hand touched her back. She jumped.

  “Nice place,” said Joni. She put her hands on her hips and made an exaggerated show of examining the vestibule. “Is this where your friends live?”

  “You scared me.”

  “Good.”

  “Why are you angry?”

  “Because after the police left, I called a cop I know, and she said the raid tonight was a tip called in from outside the city. You’re the only one who’s shown up lately from outside the city. And I went back to check on Luce, and I saw you walking out, and I thought I’d follow you a couple blocks, but you kept walking, so I kept walking to keep an eye on you, and sure enough, here we are at a hotel that I’m doubting is where your friends live.”

  “Can I explain?”

  “Please.”

  “Do you want to come upstairs so the lobby doesn’t call security because your voice is raised?”

  Joni shrugged and didn’t speak. Rosemary took the opportunity to cancel her elevator call for a single-person party, and call again for two, with an extra thumb-swipe to confirm.

  She’d finally figured out how to open the shades the day before, and had left them open. When they got into the room, Joni walked straight to the window. “I haven’t seen the city from this angle since I was a kid. It’s beautiful.”

  “Yeah. I stare out there every night.”

  Neither spoke for a minute, then Joni broke the silence. “So. Explain?”

  “I wasn’t the one who called for the raid. I swear I had no idea they would do that. I didn’t ever tell them where the 2020 was—not even the name!” She wracked her brain for anything she might have said to betray Luce and her club. “I work for SHL, but my job is to recruit new talent.”

  “Are you good at it?”

  “I don’t know. This was my first assignment.”

  “Were you successful? Did you bring back heads for your trophy wall?”

  No point lying. “Kurtz. The Handsome Mosquitoes. Luce. And I was going to ask you, only I never found a way to ask.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Your band is awesome. There isn’t anybody on SHL doing what you’re doing.”

  “Well, thanks. Did Luce really say yes?”

  “She said she’d talk to them.”

  “She said that before or after the raid?”

  “After. Joni, I really, truly didn’t know they were going to shut the place down.”

  “Huh. So you told them about all of us, but you never mentioned the club?”

  “I didn’t. They knew I had found a place here, but I only sent them names of bands and vid—” Oh. “The videos. I sent them footage of Kurtz, but I didn’t scrub the location. I forgot about the metadata.” She sat on the bed, covered her face with her hands. “I can’t believe I did this. But they would have found a way no matter what, I think. Whether or not I had done something stupid. They’d have tracked my Hoodie or asked the bands or something. I didn’t know ’til tonight, but I think they do that everywhere.” Rosemary didn’t open her eyes. She didn’t want to look at Joni. “So, do you have any interest? In being a trophy on my wall?”

  “Being a StageHolo musician? No, thanks. I can’t believe you’re still asking.”

  “You won’t even consider it? Making music full-time? Getting paid? Getting your songs in front of millions of people?”

  “I told you the night we met. They won’t want me. They’ll want to fix me in ways I’m not interested in being fixed.”

  “You won’t know until you try.”

  “No. I do. I’d rather play in my living room for six people than be a moneymaker for a company that deliberately ends scenes like ours or tells us we need to work on our sex appeal. They don’t understand that music isn’t just the notes we play. It’s the room and the band and the crowd. I’m not interested in faking any of that.”

  “But the room is gone.” Rosemary’s fault, even if she hadn’t called it in. “Maybe I can convince them to tell the cops it was a mistake. They raided the wrong place. I can still get Luce out of trouble.”

  “You do not get to fix this, Rosemary. You broke it, but it’s not yours to fix. You’ve done enough damage. That room is gone, but there are others. Or there will be. Maybe I’ll start one, but if I do, you’re not invited.” There were tears in Joni’s eyes, but she blinked them away. “What are you going to do? You’ve got your bands. What happens now?”

  “I hadn’t considered what’s next. I guess they grade my performance and then send me somewhere else.”

  “To poach more bands and ruin more live venues? Force them further underground until nobody can find them at all and everyone has to pony up to StageHoloLive?”

  “I don’t want to go back to Superwally. What else
am I supposed to do? I think I’m good at choosing bands—and yes, I understand not all of you want to be chosen—but I don’t want to shut places down. This isn’t what I thought I’d be doing at all.” She paused. “I’m so sorry, Joni. For everything.”

  “You should be. Whatever you do right now isn’t going to make up for it. Remember that.”

  Both of them were silent for a while, until Joni shook her head and walked out without saying another word. If Rosemary had known a single thing to say to make things better, she would have said it. She walked over to the window. It faced the wrong way for the sunrise, but the building across the street reflected it back at an angle, orange-gold on glass. Joni was ant-sized at ground level. An angry ant-sized woman. Rosemary followed her progress up the street until she disappeared from view.

  PART THREE

  25

  LUCE

  Are You Ready

  Any note can be played over any chord and any chord can be played over any note. I read that in a book about jazz. It doesn’t quite jibe with the Neil Young solo theory; that one implies there is such thing as a wrong note, one you move through if you hit it: dissonant, discordant. A pebble, a splinter, something stuck between the song’s teeth. Yes, live songs have teeth, and teeth are messy things, tearing and rending and helping spit ideas into the world. A live song has notes that don’t want to be there, that call attention to themselves in their wrongness. A botched chord, a chorus taken too soon, a forgotten lyric. I love those moments.

  Sometimes everything goes well, too. It doesn’t matter where you are, or how many people are in the room. The stars align, the band locks in, the audience gets what you’re trying to do, and you transcend bodies and bad days. The song is you, and you are more than yourself.

  If I can only express myself in song (or in words that describe song) please take these notes as a eulogy for people and places I’ve lost or left behind: my family, and that entire community that I grew up in, which took care of everyone but had no space for me; April, whose friends never held a memorial; the basement in Baltimore where I rebuilt myself, where I redefined community for myself in a way that I actually felt included. They’re all gone now. They simmer under my surface, boil over as chords wrung with bleeding fingers from a battered old guitar.

  When Rosemary came back for me the day after the raid, I didn’t answer the door.

  I watched her from behind my curtains on the second floor, waited for her to pound harder, call attention, try going around the back again. She did none of those things. She knocked, then paused, then knocked again, three times, harder. She looked up once, and I recognized the look on her face, even if I hadn’t seen it on her before. She looked hopeful.

  For a moment, just that moment, I hated her. What gave her the right to be hopeful, when she had so casually, so effortlessly, destroyed everything I’d created? She hadn’t meant to, I know; she thought she was helping. It was my fault for thinking I’d seen myself in her: the desire to exert some control over circumstances, to not be bound by a life planned by well-meaning others, to find community of her own choosing. I wasn’t sure how much of that was her, and how much I had overlaid.

  I hadn’t hated many people in my life; even when I ran from my family, it hadn’t been hate that drove me; it had been the fear that I would never get to be myself if I stayed. Their refusal to talk to me afterward had been on them. Pain, not hate.

  Hate was reserved for front-page villains. Abstractions: the pox, the bombers, the bombs, the gunmen, the guns, the chaos they sowed, the politicians who wielded restriction in the name of freedom and safety, or the ones who didn’t stop them, or the ones who were sure it would only be temporary. I could hate StageHolo and the other companies that sold the restriction back to people as convenience. I’d already been suspicious of their effect on our community, but now that I knew how they operated, I could spare some disgust, too.

  The last time Rosemary knocked, her face changed. She didn’t look hopeful any longer; she looked lost. And I thought: maybe she had been right to hope. We’d had a connection. The offer she’d made me had been sincere and generous. She could recognize what she had done but still hope to make amends for some of it. By hiding, I was denying her that chance. Even seeing all that, I couldn’t call down. I recognized her desire to make amends without being ready to forgive.

  She raised her arm to knock one more time, then looked down at her fist, unclenched it, and walked away. I thought of that often over the years that followed: the conscious letting-go. I wrote it into the song “Leaving Town” a few weeks later. I didn’t realize it would link me to her forever, but every time I sang that song there she was again, opening her hand, letting go. Letting me go. It was in that moment I knew I couldn’t stay.

  * * *

  —

  What else do I love about live music? I love when a band segues from one song to another, blending the two, highlighting their similarities before breaking them apart. I love when a band throws a snippet of a cover into one of their own tunes, gives away a piece of their musical identity, shows they know that those chords—the I, the IV, the V—share an unbroken lineage with almost every rock song ever written. It says I dare you to call me derivative, when I know better than anyone that they are all one song. Pick a note, any note. Wear it out. Play it again.

  I could have made a different choice. Opened the door for Rosemary. Offered myself to StageHolo in exchange for keeping my space. Started a new venue, improved security, developed new layers of Alice. Those options would have made more sense than leaving, but I couldn’t bear to see that basement sitting empty on a Saturday night or my own failures laid bare, and I couldn’t imagine ever saying yes to a company that had turned an enthusiastic kid into a weapon without her consent.

  * * *

  —

  If I had it to do over, would I save the 2020? The space shuttering pushed me back out into the world, out of my comfort zone. I had become complacent. I’d hidden behind my conviction that keeping the 2020 going was a public service. I loved that room and everybody who played there. I was glad I’d had the opportunity to give that gift to my community—and to myself—for as long as it lasted.

  I thought, too, of how Rosemary had come looking for music because she didn’t find it at home. I’d thought of myself as a vector for noise, and then I’d settled for being a vector for noise in one city, for the people who sought me out, for the people we trusted enough to let into the room. That was a slow way to pass a message, when there were kids like Rosemary out there waiting to receive it.

  Once I had that idea, I realized the road made more sense. Time to unclench my fist and let go of the comforts I’d accumulated. If the only constant is change, why fight it? Embrace the change, outpace the change, be the change, change the lineup, change the locks, change the key, change everything but the melody and the message.

  * * *

  —

  Daisy the Diesel Van was Alice’s discovery, at a city impound auction. Ten years old, with only three thousand miles on her, and not a dent or speck of rust; I guess nobody wanted to bid with the diesel price being what it was. What did anyone need with a fifteen-passenger van these days, anyway? I bought her on the spot. One of the kids who came to our shows worked at a garage that did biodiesel conversions. Some others helped pull out the middle seats and put in a bed, and then a cage at the back for my gear.

  Alice moved into 2022, one of the vacants I owned on either side of the performance space. I left a lawyer friend—his band was called Octopus Sex Arm—fighting to keep the 2020 from being seized, but he said I didn’t have to be there for that, and I didn’t think I could bear to be.

  I left Baltimore with: two guitars, acoustic and electric; my old Marshall amp; a week’s worth of clothing, plus leather jacket and two sweaters; stage boots, snow boots, sneakers; four paperback books; my swag suitcases; a case of fresh strings for each guitar; a dr
ive containing every song I could imagine wanting to listen to; my writing notebook; my bike; the ancient annotated Rand McNally USA atlas I had bought on the last tour Before. I sold or gave away the rest of the instruments and music gear, and boxed all my personal stuff to put in a friend’s garage. Not the first time I’d pared my life down to what I could carry.

  * * *

  —

  How do you find a place to play in a new city when everything is underground? Rosemary never did have to figure that out. We were handed to her on a silver platter. If she had known where to look, she’d have found the others. Step one: You scope out all the coffeehouses. All the dive bars. The bike co-ops. You know the look when you see it, the kids who share a collective secret. Getting them to trust you is harder. It takes time, but once you’re in, you’re in.

  The first destination I chose was Pittsburgh, Baltimore’s sister in rough-hewn beauty. Philadelphia or D.C. would’ve been closer, but I needed to feel like I’d gone somewhere I couldn’t turn around and head back from the same night. It had been so long since I’d been anywhere. I drove through Baltimore toward I-70 saying mental farewells: goodbye, 2020; goodbye, Heatwave; goodbye, adopted home. How many times had I left before? I could do it again. Reframe it to be about the place I was going, instead of the place I was leaving. Pittsburgh bands and clubs had always been unpretentiously fun. And all those rivers! I remembered driving through Pittsburgh on the last tour, seeing the venue from a bridge heading in the opposite direction, with no clue how to get turned around again. April drumming on the back of my seat, Hewitt repeating directions given by his phone as it rerouted us again and again. This time I couldn’t really get lost, since I didn’t have a set destination beyond the city itself.