by Dessa
Midnight it: To set the knob on a sound console to zero so that the dial points straight up, like the hands of a clock at midnight. (I made this one up, and I think it’s got promise.)
MOUNTAIN: The name of Doomtree’s fifteen-passenger Econoline tour van.
One-off: A single show, not part of a routed tour.
Over/Under: A complicated betting game in which small amounts of money are won and lost based on the ability to accurately predict a bandmate’s one-word answer to the question, “Overrated or underrated?”
“Okay, Paper Tiger: Divorce. Overrated or underrated?”
[All passengers in the tour van quietly place bets on which he’ll choose. Meanwhile Paper, in silence, contemplates everything he knows about divorce. He may consider the challenges of single parenting, private property law, the women’s rights movement, the genetic foundations of pair-bonding. He’ll then compare his assessment of the merits of divorce with the broader cultural appraisal—an impression he’s gleaned from a lifetime of watching movies and TV, reading VICE and the New York Times, and conversations in bars and classrooms and on the train. He is strictly forbidden from offering any of his rationale.]
“Underrated.”
[Paper shakes off his own private turmoil—who wants to say divorce is underrated?—while money trades hands. Now it’s Lazerbeak’s turn.]
Spit a pella: To perform a rap verse a cappella. The rest of Doomtree argues that I invented this term, out of whole cloth. I did not. But I concede that it sounds dated and like it’s trying much too hard—a description that sometimes fits me too.
Phoner: A publicity interview conducted by phone. While on tour, this type of interview often happens in a moving van, with bandmates listening in, mocking your answers, or talking whenever you’re silent, pretending to be the interviewer on the other end of the line.
Punisher: A relentless fan who won’t heed polite cues that a performer has other work to attend to. Rappers sometimes give one another discreet signals to indicate which members of the crowd are punishers.
Radius clause: A term in a performance contract that prevents a musician from booking a second show within a certain number of days and a certain number of miles from the first. Designed to consolidate draw and ensure that an artist does not book shows that might compete with one another. Very difficult to explain to old high school friends asking if you’ll perform at their son’s best friend’s school’s fund-raiser.
Rat king: The tether-ball-sized knot of microphone cords that forms in the center of the stage as five rappers run around each other all night. Nearly certain Cecil Otter coined this one.
Ring the mics out: To test microphones for feedback and remove problematic frequencies. Part of the preshow sound check.
Spitter: A technical rapper, capable of delivering complex patterns at speed. (In Doomtree, Mike and Sims are, arguably, the spitters.)
Tour blues: Spells of sadness that hit either midway through the routing—when you sulk against the window with your headphones on for seven hours a day—or after you’re home, where you have to do laundry at regular intervals and maintain human relationships and everyone confuses your job with a vacation which is insulting and you are exhausted and have what might be bronchitis and you’ve lost a lot of muscle mass sitting in the car all day and have blown out your knees by jumping on them as soon as you’re out of the car and now that there’s actually some downtime you’re not sure how to function without the adrenaline baseline of living in a moving vehicle with the other Lost Boys.
Truth or Consequences: A municipality in New Mexico where tour vehicles are often stopped and checked for contraband, particularly drugs.
Van call: The time of day at which all members of the crew must report to the tour van for departure to the next city.
Walk-ups: People who purchase tickets at the door, as opposed to in advance of the show.
X: My ex-boyfriend. Depending on how you count, we dated on and off for thirty-two months or fourteen years. We’ve been in the same rap crew for most of our adult lives. We’ve been trying to fall out of love, and stay out, for a very long time. This is my side of our story. He was nice enough to green-light the telling of it. (He was, and is, a pretty remarkable dude.)
Breaking Even
—
Sometimes in the tour van, I do math in my head to kill the time. I’ll calculate how many cashews I would have to eat per day if I were allowed only cashews (198), then calculate how many minutes would pass between each cashew if I had to eat them one at a time and at even intervals (7 minutes, 16 seconds), and then how many more cashews I could eat if I’d lived during the Rubenesque era, permitted to carry another twenty-five pounds of cashew weight. Sometimes I’ll figure out the collective sleep debt of all the members of the touring party. Or I’ll try to calculate how much extra gas we burn to haul the trailer, to haul our bodies, and to haul the gas itself before it’s burned by hauling. Then we stop for gas. And I buy coffee and cashews.
A lidless Styrofoam cup of coffee must be tipped slightly when we pull into motion. This is intuitive, everyone does it: you hold the coffee away from your body, making a suspension system of your right arm, and you tip the cup in the direction of travel to compensate for the sloshing of the coffee, which has been at rest and would like to stay that way. But by the time the cruise is set at 79 (86 if Sims is driving), the coffee has acclimated to the motion and the cup can be held level. Which means the formula that would describe this cup-tipping isn’t governed by speed, but by acceleration, the first derivative. My calculus is rusty at best, but I remember the notation as lovely. The symbol for integral, slender and curving, looks like one of the f-holes on a violin.
A day on the road as a touring musician promises ninety minutes of bright lights and twenty-two and a half hours of transit, setup, teardown, and restless sleeps in shared beds.
Tour makes my brain jumpy; like a pet that hasn’t been walked, I get overeager for exercise and conversation. When a pair of primatologists came to my last show in Berlin, I begged them to stay afterward to talk awhile. I got too drunk to remember all the details, but we stayed a long time at the merch booth and they humored me with a little free lecture. They said chimps live in unit groups of forty to sixty. Some chimps crack nuts against stones, while some crack nuts against tree roots—unit groups just teach their young to do stuff differently. Those differences, the researchers said, might be considered essentially cultural. I leaned in and said, “Oooh, that’s a controversial idea, right?” Depends on who you’re talking to, they answered. Zoo primatologists never use culture—“the C-word”—but the field guys are more open to the idea. I thought the zoo team sounded greedy and stuck-up, trying to keep culture, morals, and tools for human use alone. Then again, I was exhausted and drinking whiskey and oversensitive.
On European tours, like the one I’m on now, we often travel by rail. Last night’s show was in Manchester, England—a private party in a fancy hotel. My friend and DJ, Paper Tiger, performed with me. Now we’re on board a train headed to tonight’s gig in Bristol, where we’ll reunite with the rest of the Doomtree guys. We’re seated as far away from each other as two passengers could be: Paper’s seat is in the last car, F, and I’m in A, a whole report card away. We’re now stopped in the woods and the train hasn’t moved for over an hour. Because it’s just killed someone.
When we first stopped, a woman came down the aisle to speak to each of us individually. I heard her tell the man in front of me: We’ve been involved in an incident. We don’t yet know how long we’ll be delayed. Then she came to me and I leaned toward her to receive the message like a communion wafer.
When the delay stretched past twenty minutes, the catering cart started giving out free sandwiches in my car. I asked for a second sandwich and walked it back to Paper. He asked if I heard anything when it happened. Papes (most everyone in Doomtree goes by three names—we’re
like a Russian novel) wears Ray-Bans and pressed shirts, buttoned all the way up. I told him it happened in two parts: the small thud of the initial impact and then, as we were passing over the body, the sound diminished with each successive set of wheels.
By the time the formal announcement came over the PA, I had returned to my own seat. Obviously, we’ve been in an incident, a woman’s voice began. A long time passed before she continued. She explained that we had to wait for emergency personnel to come and meet us in the woods. Her voice gave out at the end of every phrase, like a top wobbling off axis. I wondered where this woman was located on the train. Probably in a little closety office with a black handset on the wall, like a phone booth. I imagined her trembling between phrases, capable of mustering the dispassionate tone that must be used when speaking into the phone for only a few seconds at a time. Somewhere an org chart with roles and responsibilities probably determined which employee is supposed to make this sort of announcement—most likely the lead attendant. But listening to her struggle, it seemed that this duty would have been better assigned to whomever on board knew and liked the driver the least—whomever would be least affected by him holding his head in his hands in his cockpit, waiting for a doctor to arrive and tell him what he already knew. And what he must now tell his wife.
Now the train attendants apologize every quarter hour. They are very appreciative of our patience. People call their secretaries/boyfriends/nannies to inform them that they will be missing the meeting/can just hail a cab/should not be expected at dinner. I text Becky, who advances my tours, to let her know that Paper and I might not make the sound check in Bristol. And that it feels awful to be on this train. I don’t like all the apologizing—very civil, sterile, very strange.
A woman seated nearby says she has a friend who works in trains. She says that after this sort of thing, drivers get a whole week off, and that they go straight to counseling. A week seems so obviously, grossly insufficient that I wonder if I am naïve in my understanding of the nature of this incident (which feels like an unduly delicate way of avoiding the word accident). Maybe it happens all the time. Maybe the driver had a week off just last year, maybe there is some drivers’ slang for these extra vacation days, maybe he has memorized the psychiatrist’s questionnaire, which must be administered—letter of the law, buddy, bear with me—to ensure that he has not been traumatized. Maybe there is a code in the inventory spreadsheet to track how many “incident sandwiches” were comped by the catering cart. Maybe the expense of these sandwiches is built into the price of all the train tickets.
I’ve heard that it’s impossible for a train engineer to avoid hitting a person on the tracks ahead. Factoring in the human response time, the momentum, the friction brakes—by the time a human form is near enough to be perceived, it’s already too late and the train can’t be stopped in time. Last night, I would have confidently related that fact at a bar, but now I’m not sure where I heard it or if the source was credible.
Men in blaze orange vests arrive to the site. I can see them outside through the windows, taking photos of what happened. They walk the length of the train. One of them stops right outside my window and aims his large camera somewhere below my seat. If I could calculate the angle just right, I could position myself to catch the scene reflected in his dark lens. A pool shark would know just where to stand to bounce the image off the glass. I stay seated.
I have been preoccupied with death—mine and other people’s—since I was a kid. I consider myself the steward of the old woman I will become, and I’m aware that with every day, we are closer to the same person. My parents used to joke that I was eight going on forty: I was a middle-aged baby boomer trapped in a little girl’s body, worrying about money, and aging, and the brevity of this entire human experience. I’ve always been keenly and uncomfortably aware that all of my ambitions have a deadline; I have to get all this stuff done before my body fails. It’s part of the reason I get restless on tour: these hours are numbered, I can’t afford to waste any in transit.
The woman comes on the intercom again. We’ve been given the official all clear. We thank you again for your patience and understanding. Pause. Today’s total delay: ninety-four minutes. There is only one more station before Bristol, where Paper and I will disembark. I decide to do a little math.
Given that a southbound train is delayed by ninety-four minutes, how many people would have to be on board for the sum total of their delays to equal the length of one human lifetime?
Let d equal the length of the delay: 94 minutes.
Any span of time can now be expressed in terms of d. A day, for example, is just over 15 delays long, or 15d. A year is 5,591d.
A person of unknown race and gender living in England has a life expectancy of 79 years.
Let l equal 79 years: 1 life.
The initial question—how many delays are equivalent to a lifetime—can be notated: xd = l.
To solve for x, I have to convert those 79 years into minutes and then divide that figure by 94. I pull up the calculator app on my phone and figure that 441,727d = l. One life can be expressed as the combined inconvenience of 441,727 people delayed for 94 minutes.
How long would the train be that could accommodate 441,727—nearly half a million passengers?
I email a few questions to Becky. She’s a crackerjack researcher—used to be a librarian. Within minutes, she replies with answers, citing her sources. Each train car is about 24 meters long, including the gangways. The capacity of each car averages 52 passengers. Becky also sends me a link to a news story about the accident, now picked up by the press. I skim it, looking for information about the person dead beneath my seat, but there are no details. I go back to the math.
The train that could hold half a million riders would be 127 miles long. It would have 8,494 cars. That’s the minimum length of a train that could warrant all this apologizing, I think—where the loss on board begins to approach the loss below.
But a train of that length is unlikely to kill a man, because a train that long would barely have to move—it would almost span the distance of the whole journey from Manchester to Bristol. So to take the trip, one would simply walk south, stepping car to car. Each would house its own community, a discrete unit group of fifty-two, with its own rules of class and culture. Walking south, the dialects would change; the songs for birth and war and marriage would be transposed into new scales; the hot cars would go nearly naked, the cold ones cloaked in fur. And when she grew hungry, the traveler would kneel over her cache of nuts and make use of what was offered—tree root or stone—to take her meal. Or perhaps the traveler would be handed a sandwich wrapped in cellophane with which to mourn the dead.
Milk
—
The trick to formulating a good would-you-rather question is finding the fulcrum of pain. You’ve got to balance the question right there, on the point at which both alternatives seem equally unconscionable.
“Could you date someone who didn’t believe in global warming? Or, wait, could you date a Holocaust denier? Like if they were perfect—the love of your life in every other way?” Sims, I think, asked that one. Sims does CrossFit and has blue eyes and insanely long eyelashes that bother him because they smash against the inside of his sunglasses. He’s usually got a three-day beard and the cleanest clothes of anyone in Doomtree. We joined the crew at the same time, quit smoking at the same time, and are both stubborn enough to occasionally butt heads on band business stuff. He’s one of my favorite people.
The rest of us in the van, en route to Madison, contemplated his question. Would we rather abandon a once-in-a-lifetime romance or spend our lives loving unreasonable bigots?
Sims put a thumb on the scale. “And they’re vocal about it, like, active on Internet forums and stuff.”
We all groaned. Shit, I couldn’t do it, I said. Even if I could stifle my conscience, I’d just be too embarrassed at parties.
/> We made it to Madison, loaded in the gear, and milled around the cold basement of the club, waiting to sound check. We ate corn chips and hummus, which is what all musicians everywhere eat before sound check. When the caveman carved the first bone flute from the femur of a deer, he ate a corn chip with hummus before playing the inaugural note.
I asked the group, “Would you rather be submerged in a bathtub full of kombucha, milk, or marinara sauce?”
“For how long?”
“Like, fifteen minutes, half an hour.”
“Could I wear a condom?”
“Sure.”
I thought this question might be a nonstarter—was already thinking of ways to modify it—but to my surprise a couple of the guys picked kombucha.
“Ew. Really?”
“Yeah,” said Paper Tiger. He did a little shimmy. “Bubbles, man.”
But milk is clearly the correct answer, I said. Cleopatra bathed in milk; the phrase “milk and honey” conveys luxury and decadence; lotion is practically just thick milk. It wasn’t even a good question, because the answer was so obviously MILK.
X, who’d been long considering the alternatives, piped up with his answer: marinara.
At least one set of eyes rolled—some crew members suspected that this was a purely contrarian maneuver. I wasn’t so sure. In almost all dimensions, X is an unusual dude.
There was an outpouring of anti-marinara sentiment. It’d be impossible to rinse off. It’s acidic. The only time people ever willfully submerge themselves in a tomato base—let alone a meaty sauce—is because they’ve been skunked. We waited to see if he’d reconsider.
X has a particular way of screwing up his face that wrinkles his nose; it’s a charming, boyish expression. I think he knows it’s a charming, boyish expression because sometimes he does it in press photos.
“I just think I’d like marinara.”
