“Huh. Bass without drums?”
He grinned. “I figured you’d say that. I know a drummer who’s looking to get out for a while, too.”
“I like playing as a trio . . .” In the back of my brain, songs started stripping down and rearranging themselves.
* * *
—
Two days after the antique store show, I drove out to the tiny cottage where Silva’s friend Marcia Januarie lived. She answered the door in shorts and tank top. “Sorry in advance for the heat inside. AC broke and I was hoping to get away with not turning it on again. Fall isn’t supposed to be this humid.”
When we shook hands, I glimpsed a small sliver of a possible future: the bright urgent heat of a new musical collaboration blurred with the bright urgent heat of a new love; a collision that would work for a while, until it didn’t; a map to a new and uncharted place. It was a terrible idea to mix the two, when drummers willing to tour were so thin on the ground, when anything that tanked us might tank the band, but really, nothing about this idea wasn’t a terrible idea, so we might as well go all in, especially when one handshake said so much. She’d sized me up in the same way, I could tell, leaving us in one of those rare instant mutual attractions. I hadn’t felt that in a while.
Silva showed up a minute later and we set up our gear in a loose circle with the drum kit that already took up a large portion of the room. Marcia was right about the heat; the room was stifling.
“Can we open a window?” Silva asked.
She shook her head. “Only until we start playing. I found the farthest place from neighbors I could, but they still complain. I’ve got it pretty soundproofed as long as we keep ’em closed. That okay? I’ve got fans.”
“It’s not any worse than my club was in summer. I’ll survive.” It was a little hot for me, but I was feeling her enough to agree to anything.
We played a few covers and one of my songs. Silva’d been a good bassist all those years ago, and now he played even better, filling in spots in the song where I might have missed a second guitar. Marcia’s drumming was compact and spare, perfectly in the pocket. Three songs in, I thought it would work; four songs in I knew.
After, we opened all the windows and ordered pizza and poured bourbon over ice, tossing around possible band names, laying out a loose practice schedule and our expectations for each other and the band. When Silva headed out again, I caught him winking at Marcia on his way out the door.
She returned to the couch with a second drink for each of us. The glass was sweating.
“So,” she said. “I’m not reading this wrong, am I?”
I’d always appreciated direct women.
* * *
—
My van stayed parked at Marcia’s for five days: five days of sex and music and getting to know each other, in no particular order. When we finally dragged ourselves from the cottage, it was for her to show me how Nashville had changed. Silva had said as much, but I had to see it for myself: the walled-off estates, the enormous StageHolo compound, the Ryman and Opry turned drone-infested shrines, all the clubs gone the way of all the other clubs. I shouldn’t have thought it would be any different here. The songwriting community hadn’t had to change too much; they were just working for a different kind of publishing company from the one Before.
It made sense if I thought about it that way, but it still made me angry. That night, the power died halfway through practice, and I said it was time to discuss where we were going and when.
“We’re going to need a name,” Silva said.
I pictured another hour lost to tossing random phrases at each other. “I don’t care what we’re called.”
“Luce Cannon? It worked before.”
“Not Luce Cannon. Not any of my old band names. This is something new and it deserves to stand on its own.”
Marcia stood and stretched behind her drums. “Ice cream, anyone? If this is like last time, I’m losing everything in the fridge again, so we might as well eat it now.”
Silva and I put down our guitars, turning off the amps so they wouldn’t surge if the power came back. We leaned over the kitchen bar, where some light came in from the moon. I took the offered spoon, but Silva passed on the ice cream and poured himself a bourbon.
“Dessert Spoon,” I said. “The Countertops.”
“Is that how you came up with all your band names? Random items in front of you?” I didn’t need light to catch Marcia’s disapproval.
“None of them mean anything until people notice you. Sure, there are some awesome names, but some of them are only awesome because you like the music.”
“But the other side is true, too.” Silva dipped into the nearest pint. “There are good bands with names you can’t forgive.”
I took the pistachio ice cream and roamed the room, naming things. “The Festival Owls. The Thesauri. Carpet Cleaners—hmm.”
Marcia laughed. “Those are awful. We might as well start throwing random words together. Lunchpocket. Powersuck. Cassisfire.”
I walked into her crash cymbal and had to grab for it to keep from starting a chain reaction. When I’d extricated myself, I asked, “What was that last one?”
“Cassisfire. Cassis and Fire. The two flavors you’re not eating since you stole the pistachio.”
“What’s cassis?” Silva asked.
“A berry. The ‘fire’ is cinnamon chocolate chile. Y’all are both missing out.”
I said it a few times under my breath. “Two words, not one. Cassis Fire. Like ‘cease fire.’ It’s not awful.”
“Better than any of those others,” Silva agreed.
“Sweet,” said Marcia. “Can I have some of the pistachio now?”
The power didn’t come back on, but by the end of the evening we’d finished all three pints and come up with a plan for a minitour to test the waters. They were both interested, ready in the abstract, but I was the one pushing. The thought of that StageHolo compound in the same city had me itching to get out again, like they could infect us if we were too close for too long. Sixteen solo shows had been enough to tell me I’d missed both road and band, not one or the other. The two combined, plus the new connections, the reconnections, the audiences, the kind strangers, the people who became less than strangers in days spread out over years: those were the things that could fill the hole inside me called home. Nothing else gave me that fix.
30
ROSEMARY
Badge
She was working up to asking one of the street musicians outright when the barista, Sadie, invited Rosemary to her band’s show. After all her searching, it was as easy as an invitation; it had taken exactly what she’d been told all along. Get involved, get to know people, and you’ll find out what’s happening. Sadie might have been flirting with her, too; Rosemary still found it maddening that people in the real world didn’t use the same markers they did in hoodspace. Anyway, she wasn’t getting involved this time.
She thought of everything that had gone wrong in Baltimore, and debated not even going. It was one thing to stumble across a venue and later give it up to her bosses; it was another to come in as an invited guest, knowing she was a Trojan horse. She settled on attending with her new precautions in place. When she put her Hoodie on that night, she altered the settings to make the GPS tracker mirror her phone’s location on her bedside table. She’d left her wallet there as well, taking only cash and her driver’s license, so her spending couldn’t be tracked. As far as the company was concerned, she’d taken the evening off.
The address was a warehouse by the river. The thought occurred to her as she walked through the dark that Sadie could be a serial killer luring her to a deserted location. Then she remembered she’d had the same thought about Aran as she approached the 2020 for the first time, and remembered the way Luce had welcomed her, and her heart ached. She wondered if she’d ever thin
k about it without shame.
“You’ll know it because it’s a giant building painted the ugliest shade of yellow-brown in existence.” Sadie had leaned over the counter and pressed a plastic coin into Rosemary’s hand. “Repeat the directions back to me so I’m sure you’ve got it? We’re trying to keep too many people from searching the address.”
It was hard to discern the color with the sun down and the security lamps in the parking lot throwing a sodium-yellow glow, but she was confident she’d found the right place. Other people arrived on bicycles and on foot from other directions, most in twos and threes. The parking lot was weedy and overgrown, every inch of the chain-link fence hosting a locked bicycle. As she passed under a security camera, she noticed it was aimed at the sky instead of the entrance, if it was on at all.
She followed the others to a door on the building’s far side and into a low-ceilinged office. Passed her invitation chip to the Door Alice, played in this instance by a fit and pox-scarred boy in his late teens. He gave her a curious look.
“Sadie invited me.” She waited for him to say, “Go back to wherever you came from,” or “I don’t know who that is, Officer.”
“Welcome to my shitty warehouse,” he said.
“Yours?”
“Yep. Hey, don’t look so surprised. Brown people can own warehouses.”
“Sorry! It’s because you look so young, not because you’re brown . . .” She started to explain, but he’d already moved on to the next person waiting to enter. Her record for insulting gatekeepers she should befriend was now two for two.
She walked through the next door, and the office gave way to a warehouse. The space had been divided at some point; it was nowhere near as large as the building’s footprint, though still bigger than anyplace she’d ever been other than the SHL hangar. She made out two orange Exit signs along the opposite wall from where she’d entered; nice to know there were other ways out. There were probably fewer people inside than had crowded into the 2020, dispersed over a larger area. She still felt more comfortable on the fringe and didn’t see a strong reason to press forward toward the low stage on the interior wall.
It reminded her of the hoodspace club where she’d seen Patent Medicine, the Bloom Bar. There was even a bar along the side, or at least an old conveyor belt studded with a dozen picnic coolers. People shoved their hands into the ice for drinks, then tossed cash into fishbowls interspersed between the coolers. An honor system. She glanced at the bills in the fishbowls and tossed a five into the nearest one, choosing an icy cider from among the beers and soft drinks.
She spotted Sadie at the same time Sadie spotted her. “You came! Do you hug?”
Rosemary nodded, still pushing her own limits. Sadie was a big woman, even bigger without the coffee counter in between them. The hug was strong and solid, and not long enough for her to get uncomfortable with the contact. She managed to return a one-armed squeeze with the hand that wasn’t holding a drink.
“Did you have trouble finding it?”
“You were right about the color.”
“Ha!” Sadie had great dimples, but Rosemary was Not Getting Involved. “True, but that doesn’t make it any easier to find.”
“Your directions were fine, thanks. Um, what’s the order?”
“We play first, then a duo from Charlotte, then the Simrats. You’ll like them.”
“Oh! I’ve listened to one of their songs! I can’t wait to hear you all,” Rosemary said in all sincerity. She was curious what to expect. She’d found the Simrats on the same underground site where Joni’s band had a page; they had a trippy sound, with better production than a lot of the other stuff she’d heard. They’d been on her maybe list, depending on how they came across live, if she could find them playing somewhere, which she finally had.
She had another thought. “Do bands from other cities play here often?”
“Not very. Lucien used to live here before he moved to Charlotte for love”—she elongated the last word, bringing her hands up under her chin in a mock swoon—“so when he wants to visit we build a show for him.”
Sadie excused herself to get ready, and Rosemary was alone again. All around her, people chatted with each other. She still envied the ease with which they navigated the space. Did anybody else here feel as awkward as she did? She scanned the room’s edges, looking for someone else hugging the wall, and was surprised to find several. One corner held an entire herd of office chairs gone feral. Three people raced chairs down the far side of the room, leaning over the seatbacks like jockeys, with their friends cheering them on.
Sadie’s band started playing. The chair racers kept racing, and a few others continued chatting near the drinks. Rosemary triangulated between the stage and the emergency exits.
She hadn’t asked Sadie her band’s name or their genre, and now that she heard it she had no category for it. Sadie played bass, and Nolan James played fiddle, with a guy she’d never seen before on guitar, and a woman she recognized as one of the coffee shop Hoodie-workers on drums. Despite the acoustic instruments, they had a looping, funky groove, and harmonies that reminded her more of R & B than rock or pop or folk. An intriguing sound, and they had a good interplay onstage, and most of the audience was up and dancing. Even though she had told herself to stay analytical, to hold herself back from feeling anything for these bands, she couldn’t help moving with the music. Forget analytics; they were fun.
The second group turned out to be a married couple, two handsome trans cowboys from Charlotte. Both guys played acoustic guitar, and their songs were catchy and clever. She filed them into her mental maybe box. She sometimes thought she was too easy to please, but she recognized the difference between liking a band and thinking they were SHL material. Two different things, especially when a definite yes came along to recalibrate her.
The last band took a little longer to set up than the others had. The guy who owned the place stood watching from the doorway, so Rosemary walked over to talk. If she was going to practice chatting with strangers, it made sense to start with the ones she had questions for. “So, uh, I didn’t mean to doubt this was your place. I just didn’t figure the owner was involved. I thought maybe an employee was letting people in, or it was an abandoned building.”
He smiled back. “It’s not abandoned. My mom has a bunch of empties, though this is the only one with power. She’s been trying to get Superwally to buy it for a distribution center, but they say it isn’t quite large enough, and it costs too much to bring up to code. It’s been years now. She said I could skate in here in the meantime, so here I am, ‘skating.’ You’re friends with Sadie?”
“Yeah.” Better not to say new friends. “Rosemary. Nice to meet you. Do you do this a lot?”
“Tomás. Twice a month.”
“Are there other places doing this, too?”
“Acoustic rooms, yeah, people’s living rooms, but as far as I know, this is the only one big enough for bands. I’ve got the space, why not use it?”
“You’re not worried about getting raided?”
“Dude, I’m terrified of getting raided, but if we all live the way they want us to, all scared and alone, nobody would ever hear a band like the Simrats.” He nodded toward the stage and grinned at his timing.
“Friends, Romans, Countrymice,” whispered the lead singer. “Lend me your ears.”
The lights went out at the moment they hit their first chord. The band’s clothing glowed under black light. Their instruments, too, painted to shine, and streaks on their faces. It reminded Rosemary of phosphorescent underwater habitats in aquarium vids. The band had at least ten members; it was hard to tell exactly how many in the mass of glowing limbs and instruments. Drums, two guitars, samples, a horn section. Their sound filled every corner of the room. The singer had a voice as good as any Rosemary had ever heard, slippery and strong, twining around and over the instruments without ever g
etting lost behind them.
On a hunch, she pulled up her Hoodie. Sure enough, a free local Veneer was available. She accepted it, and the space went even wilder. Now strange glowing cloud-animals drifted through the air above her head, dipping and diving, chasing each other. She dropped out of hoodspace again; she didn’t need the distraction from their sound.
This couldn’t be the same band she’d listened to on the drive. The fantastic live sound was nothing like the recording, which had been interesting at best. They deserved a larger audience than the group dancing in this room. She debated filming a clip, but didn’t want to risk it if she hadn’t managed to turn off the metadata the way she thought she had. Her description would have to do, packed with as many superlatives as she could provide.
Their third song sounded familiar. It took her a minute to recognize Luce Cannon’s “Blood and Diamonds” filled out and swung, the horn section adding something she wouldn’t even have guessed could be added. She forgot her professional reserve and screamed the words along with the others in the room: part of the song, part of the band, part of the moment. Part of other moments, too: the first time she heard “Blood and Diamonds,” in her mother’s car on the way to get ice cream a month before everything went bad; “Blood and Diamonds” playing hourly on the nurses’ station radio in the hospital, telling her she was stronger than she knew, strong enough to walk out someday soon. It didn’t matter that this wasn’t Luce’s original; this was a new version for the new Rosemary. She had room in her life for both.
Maybe this was why people risked arrest to come out to these shows. You could do the same thing at an SHL show, and if you’d never been in this room you might not even know the difference, but there was a difference.
Walking back toward her rented room after the show, she tried to analyze her exhilaration. She’d arrived here down on her job, but she could still take some selfish joy in the perks, when the perks involved spending her nights listening to amazing bands. Beyond how much she’d loved the music, she genuinely liked the idea of creating opportunities for musicians who had worked hard despite there being no end goal; they couldn’t be playing music in hopes of someone like her walking in the door. It wasn’t a money thing, either. They had to be playing because they loved to play, or believed in their songs, or something like that, which meant she got to ride in and change their world—not that they had any obligation to say yes when she offered it. This time, she’d find a way to do it right. She couldn’t fix what she’d done to Luce, but surely there was a way to get these bands attention without ruining what they had; there had to be a solution somewhere, if she could just think of it.
A Song for a New Day Page 29
