Lo Fi

Chapter 2

2.

Oh, I used to play in a little jazz trio around town. That’s none of anybody’s business. I hear they’re closing it down. You can’t start a fucking band in your thirties! Do you have a guy? I might have a guy. I don’t know if there’s any good sushi in this town. I heard Miranda throws the best Christmas parties. They’re doing the show in their basement. Double bass, I think. Nobody listens to Can except that guy. All they gave us were these meat wipes and now I’m fucking starving. You know who I’m talking about. Tour bus broke down, right on I-24, out by Whites Creek. The Delta Saints, next week! People are going to be skating down Broadway. Supposed to get more snow than we’ve had in a decade. She needed an extra uke for the picking party. He can put you on the list.

Nick arrives at the bar wearing a peacoat and a beanie, his cheeks ruddy and damp, looking like the warmest person in the room. Gloves without fingertips—who needs them? His grin from across the small room is a sliver of white gold, honey. When I stand up to hug him, my legs are loose and wobbly, like I’ve been sitting for weeks. The beer rushes from my head down to my arms, to the tips of my fingers. I steady myself with a damp palm on the bar, then reach back to finish the beer Sloane left me.

—Look at you, so warm, I say, as Nick folds me into a hug. He smells unfamiliar.

He pinches at my leather jacket. My shoulder blades, the back of my neck, shiver. He brings his hands to my cheeks—his fingertips freezing along my jawline. Like an animal, my clit pulses. Smoke on his breath, beneath artificial spearmint.

—Look at you, so cool. Hi, he says again.

For a moment I’m sure we’re going to kiss. My lips part unintentionally. I’m wet, just like that. The scraping of a barstool against concrete, the belly laughter of strangers. Nick pulls his hands away. The heat in my chest dissipates, trying to find a place to rearrange, like a blocked electric current searching for a new source.

—How is it out there? I ask.

—Everybody’s freaking out. They’ve obviously never experienced a Chicago winter. What are we drinking? he asks.

He sits close to me and I point out the beer menu. He takes off his coat, revealing a chunky sweater. I want to wrap myself in it. The music overhead is a touch too quiet, and I’m trying to follow it—the opening chords of—

—What time do you need to be back? I ask.

—An hour, he says.

Our windows of time are always so paltry. How could anyone possibly sustain something like this? With so little oxygen, so little time?

—Sixty entire minutes, all to myself, I say, dragging my bitterness through a half smile.

Nick looks around. He doesn’t register the irritation in my voice. He runs a hand through his long hair, on the cusp of scraggly. He’s been on the road too long. I tell him about the A-listers in the corner, behind him.

—Who? he asks.

—Never mind. You need a haircut, I say, taking the ends of his hair between my fingers.

—Do I? he asks, leaning in toward me slightly. People like it right now, I think.

What I want to say: What people? Who? Am I going to get you to myself tonight? Do you still live with the girl who has my name? Are we going to—

—Oh hey, he says. I think we’re going to record that demo I sent you.

—Really? Will you do it here in Nashville?

—Oh, I don’t know, he says. Hadn’t really gotten that far.

I wait for him to say more but he doesn’t. A beer and a half is enough, my chest lighter, my hesitation dissipating like clouds scattering.

—Guess what, I say.

—What? He smiles back, light, amused.

—I finally wrote something. Or, well. The start of something. We’ll see. But it had been a minute.

—Yeah? he says, looking right at me, eyes glinty and sharp.

The look has me ready to surrender, to tell him about the song, every nascent, sloppy bit of it. He squeezes my leg and every inch of me warms.

—It’s barely—

—You want another round? he asks. Before I head back?

His beer is somehow already three-quarters gone, and he glances at his phone. The light in the taproom dims slightly. An old Big Star song comes on.

—Looks like they’re bumping sound check up fifteen. Oh hey, I put you on the list, right?

The snow muffles the city.

People stay home, traffic piles up on Charlotte, Twenty-First, Eighth. The heat kicks back on at The Venue, but it won’t be warm enough until the space is full. I want whiskey and blankets, soup and endless beer. Cotton beanies, heated front seats in expensive cars, tissues by the bedside, grilled cheese that stretches neon orange when you pull it apart. Hot coffee, hot tea, hot toddies, hot baths. New gloves, a new coat, a new car, a new—

—Did you fix the list? Julien asks.

—I’m going to go talk to the band about it, I say.

—Doors are in less than fifteen, he says.

And even though I know he’s just doing his job, trying to make sure someone is actually in charge, that someone is actually working—

—I know, I say.

—Fifteen, he says.

—Heard you the first time, I say.

He’s looking down at his phone as I head upstairs. The Venue is still quiet now, but energy is starting to collect, little pockets of warm air gathering throughout the space. The bartenders lining up, Colt haranguing everyone about properly closing out their tabs at the end of the night, merch guys straightening screen prints on the tables in the back, holding beers and unlit cigarettes.

I knock on the greenroom door, like a fan. Timmy answers and looks at me for a moment like he doesn’t recognize me, then gives me a lackluster hug and says Good to see you again. Nick is sitting on the couch with his feet up. Open Rolling Rocks dotting the coffee table, Styrofoam cups of cold coffee, an open bag of tortilla chips.

—Come hang, he says. He pats the space next to him on the couch.

I sigh, looking at his hand against the worn-in tweed. Doors are in nine minutes. It seems like just long enough to—

—One drink, he says. Like we didn’t just have several.

—You know I’m working.

—So am I, he says.

That easy fucking grin. You want to grab it, try to hold it in your hands.

—Right, I say.

But I do it. I go and sit next to him, and when he leans to open a beer for me, I lean back, letting my hip bone press into his.

—Tough gig, he says.

—Oh please, I say.

We take a sip and I wait for him to actually say something, to contribute to the conversation, to actually advance the plot. When he doesn’t, I say:

—Doors are in five; I really can’t stay long. I should go back downstairs.

He turns to me then.

—Did I tell you about Coachella?

Four minutes. I take several large gulps of beer to swallow down my…surprise? Envy? Irritation? Nick’s looking at me eagerly now, his eyebrows high, his face bright bright bright.

—No. For…wait. Are you fucking with me?

He takes a long pull from his beer. Doors are in three—or probably in two, or probably in one, or already happening, who knows, because I always lose track of time when Nick’s face is in front of me. He reaches across us and starts to adjust my necklace then. My chest warms quickly, prickling, like placid water about to boil.

—It’s not a huge slot or anything, he says. Saturday, though. Not the smallest stage, obviously not the biggest. Right before Mumford.

—Seriously?

He’s twisting at my necklace now, his fingertips callous against my collarbone.

—It’s tangled, he says.

—That’s amazing. I mean—

He looks at me closely, his fingers unclipping the necklace.

—We’re not supposed to tell people yet, but—

—I’m not people, I say.

He laughs quietly. He rehooks the necklace around my neck.

—You’re—

—Doors, Julien says, appearing in the doorway. Irritated. My body flashes hot. I turn around quickly, catching Nick’s thumb on the necklace he was just fixing. The cheap, fake metal tugs and then gives, snapping quietly.

—Fuck, he says.

The necklace slips off my neck.

—Sorry, I say, though I don’t know who it’s meant for. I’m coming, I say to Julien.

I look down at my beer, then at Nick, then at Julien. Nick’s holding my necklace in his palm, passing it to me like it’s a broken guitar string. Something you’ve used and worn out—something to toss.

—We’re late, says Julien.

I look over at Nick and say:

—Congrats.

Downstairs, Julien asks:

—Did you fix the list?

—Fixed it, I say, which of course is a lie.

The show is sold out, so the door is a nightmare. The entryway to The Venue is horribly icy, people coming through with slush sloughing off their cowboy boots, their Vans, their cheap Target shoes. Lips are cracked and cheeks are flushed. Everybody everywhere is fucking freezing, but I’m edgy with Nick in town, and I can’t stop bitching. I swear I’m the coldest. I swear I’m the victim. I swear I’m the only one. Here I am working the door—Nick’s a floor above me, and I’m stuck hoarding in strangers.

I’ve stamped barely a dozen hands when a girl in a skirt and a jean jacket slips outside on the sidewalk. She’s on the ground, wailing. It’s unclear if it’s her arm or her elbow or her wrist or her shoulder, but something is broken, she shouts. People slip past as she screams; Julien is on the phone talking to the paramedics; the first band is going on. I’ve lost track of Nick—he’s upstairs drinking backstage, surely. Four people come in with three tickets, begging us to let their friend in anyway. Two people who aren’t on the list swear they are. They weren’t even on the first draft, the one where my own name was spelled wrong. Jess never comes, but one of the guys from Denim does, using her name to get in. When I tell him he’s not on the list, he just keeps spelling her name for me, saying k like it’s a secret password.

And then he looks at me and says, Hey, did you do an open mic a few months back? Over in Midtown? Aren’t you the girl who—

—Go ahead, I tell him, rushing him through. It’s fine, you’re in. His laughter—is it echoing up from the stairs or from last year?

Andy comes down thirty seconds later with some underage kid I let in, and I get a short lecture about ID’ing properly, about the exorbitant fine we can be charged for something like that. Do I have ten K? he asks. No, I don’t fucking have ten K. I haven’t seen him this irritated since Eddie started, his temples pulsing in the shadowy light, his cell phone in his hand like it’s connected to his palm.

Our sound guy, Danny, wouldn’t come out in the snow, and the bands are pissed at having to do everything themselves. Simon’s here to run monitors but he’s drowning. Flirtation Device tours with their own guy who offers to help the openers, but he’s drunk and edgy and precariously too close to fucked-up to be manning the boards alone. I can tell all the way from the door that something’s off with the sound. The heat is back on, but everyone is bitching about how cold it is, even with all these people, even with the heat cranked up.

I barely see Julien all night. When I finally catch his eye, at ten fifteen, a few minutes before Nick’s set, he looks exhausted, frustrated, his face drooping, his ankle twisting in a constant circle, the toe of his Converse squeaking into the slick, slushy linoleum.

—How’d you meet him? Colt asks at the bar.

Nick’s onstage now. I’m still on the clock but getting a drink, waiting for Julien to cut me. The band is starting into a new song, and now I’m trying not to look in the direction of the stage. Colt’s face is dotted with sweat, his cheeks bright.

—Michigan.

—I said how, not where, he says. Look at you, all shy. Are we going out after? Snowmaggedon, baby.

—I don’t know. Can I just get a Four Roses and a High Life?

The song is picking up energy, all thrumming bass and exquisite harmony. I want to ignore it but I can’t.

—You have any Xanax? I ask Colt as he slides the drinks to me. A bit of whiskey splashes out, and he wipes it down with a white bar rag. The song is trailing off, and Nick is bullshitting with the crowd while his lead guitarist quickly works to fix a broken string.

—All out, Colt says, his voice carrying across the bar.

—Come on.

His eyebrows lift and he shrugs. A small girl with a pixie cut elbows her way to the bar on my right.

—I have some other shit I can give you, though. It’s close enough. Come by, he says.

The next song starts, one from the first album that I love. The beat is urgent, the kind of pulsing that begs you to participate, to clap, jump, shake your head. The crowd quickly starts stomping along, singing loudly—so many eyes fixed on Nick. We’re all overcompensating for the cold, dancing and shouting, manic bright sunshine energy on a snowy night. Nick walks into the crowd, not once but twice, and our lights guy isn’t prepared to follow him. The spotlight searches and falls short as Nick jumps around, singing in the dark, the crowd’s collective voices drowning him out, his long hair framing his face and his throat pulsing in the light of the shadows, all that strained effort of singing without a microphone. I hate how much I love him right then, somewhere in the hazy in-between—friend, lover, ex, fan—as I watch him sing his songs, everybody else screaming along, his words on our mouths.

I go out for a cigarette as the crowd starts to dwindle after the show. Lights are up, spirits are too. Maybe it’s just me—I’ve always been prone to exaggeration when it comes to Nick—but it’s been a buzzy show. High energy and low inhibitions, everyone trying to stay warm beneath the lights as the city gets colder.

Julien’s in the parking lot below, hunched over and talking through the front window of a car. He’s not wearing a coat; he must be freezing. I don’t recognize the car, though I do recognize the wild laughter that pours out of it. The loud cascade of joy you can hear from all the way up here: staccato sixteenth notes.

My cigarette won’t catch with the wind this strong. I stand out there anyway, though, the cigarette cold in my lips. Down below, Julien leans into the car; then the door on the balcony swings open behind me and Timmy walks out.

—Great set, I mumble.

—Hey, thanks, he says.

He flicks on his lighter and the balcony is silent for a moment. Without Nick physically present, Timmy and I have never had much of anything to say to each other. Down below, the sound of tires on concrete, a red Jetta flicking its blinker on—Jess driving away, Yeah Yeah Yeahs pouring out of her window.

—I should probably get back to work, I say to Timmy.

Do we matter? Shooting the shit with the band or out there in the crowd, our faces blurry, pixelated. Sometimes enthralled, enchanted, luminous. Other times apathetic or distracted, staring at our feet or our phones, maybe even actively uninterested, maybe laughing. In the blissful moments, it could be transcendent there in the audience: drunk, howling, finally putting words, notes—music—to a feeling. But the band matters more than we do, right? Inherently, they do. We pay money to see them, to hear them. And yet they can’t exist without us. There’s no show without an audience. There’s no them without us.

Inside, the night cleaning crew is bagging trash and sweeping up neon wristbands and damp napkins, plastic straws and paper tickets. Colt and his crew are running receipts in the back, looking ragged: T-shirts pitted out, sweat glowing on their foreheads beneath the bar lights. I go to the office to get my things, wondering if Julien is ever going to actually cut me, wondering if he was leaning into Jessika’s car to kiss her, if maybe they’re the kind of people who keep kissing even after they’ve broken up, if maybe they both miss each other, still want each other, still think about each other. Even if she does prefer women. Even though he just kissed me.

Someone knocks on the office door, and before I can say anything Nick is there, electric, the adrenaline of the night still shimmering off of him.

—Holy shit that was fun, he says.

He’s glistening.

—It was great, I say. Lights couldn’t keep up with you.

He walks across the room quickly now and takes my right elbow into his palm so that I am standing in front of him, our bodies close.

—I’m glad you were here, he says.

—I mean, I live here. I work here.

He laughs and shakes his head.

—Shut up. I know. But it just made it, I don’t know. All the better. Knowing you were out in the audience.

He hooks a single finger into the collar of my shirt then, tugging me toward him. Like I’m on a leash, like I’m his.

—Hi, I say.

—Hey.

He presses into me then, mouth hot with whiskey. He tastes like the past. I run a hand up his neck, into the long mess of his hair, like I can pull us into the present. He’s already hard—too easy—and I wonder if it really even matters that it’s me he’s kissing, if he’s thought about this moment as much as I have, if I really could just be anyone right now. Any stupid girl in any stupid town who loved his stupid band.

He slides a hand under my shirt, his hand slick with sweat, my bra slipping up easily. His fingers on my nipples, then up to my neck, then back on my chest. But I am still in the office, I am still at work, I am still—

—Let’s go, I say. Somewhere else, okay?

I pull back from him and his frustration comes off him like heat. He kisses me again.

—Where are we going?

—Come on, I say, pulling away from him. I gotta clock out. I’ll meet you downstairs, okay?

At the door, I’m waiting on Nick, who’s run into fans by the merch table—the kind who linger. Julien is running a mop across the floor, trying to remove some of the clinging, desperate slush.

—How was it? he asks. I didn’t get to see much.

—It was good. It was fine. Is that girl okay?

Julien shrugs.

—She’ll be fine. What a mess.

—Seriously. Thanks for dealing with the ambulance. I can’t believe we’ve never had to call one before.

—You’ve never had to call one before.

—Like I said, I don’t want to be in charge.

Julien nods.

—Did Jessika end up coming through after all? I ask.

—You’re cut, by the way. I can get the rest of this.

He motions to the mop, the stubborn slush on the floor.

—You sure? I can—

Nick: on the stairs, a Rolling Rock in his hand.

He is still bright, his body looking elastic, free. Julien’s shoulders are stiff. The mop sits propped up under his elbow.

—Do any of y’all need a ride? Andy asks from the top of the stairs. Things are getting messy out there.

—Do we? Nick asks.

—Julien, Nick, Nick, Julien.

—I think we’ll be fine, I say to Andy, not knowing how we’ll get wherever it is that we’re going.

He nods and disappears into the stairwell. Julien puts his hand in the air, an animatronic flick of the wrist. Nick says:

—Hey, man.

—Julien works here, I say. With me. You met, or, well, you saw him earlier.

—Yeah, I thought so. Thanks for everything. Great spot. Good crowd tonight.

—Glad to hear it.

—Sorry I made your partner in crime late for doors, Nick says. Wanna get out of here then? He looks at me.

—All right, I’m gonna make sure everything’s closed out upstairs, Julien says, and starts up toward the main space, meeting my gaze for just a moment. We share a quick, uncertain look—eyes that I can’t read, lips that are holding something back—before I follow Nick out into the freezing night.

I stretch my legs out and make sure our knees touch. The van is supposed to leave at midnight, but it’s never going to happen. The roads are a disaster; the rest of the band is downtown; Nick doesn’t even want to drive to his hotel. The streetlights glow softly through the windshield as we pass a joint back and forth. I’m already higher than I want to be—every noise, even muffled beneath the snow, surprises me. The van is cool and smells like sweat, stale bread, fatigue.

Nick presses his knee into mine and exchanges the joint for a small bottle of cheap whiskey. It’s been a long time since we’ve fooled around—ever since he started seeing the other girl with my name, I’ve been good. Even in May, I was good. It helped, of course, that we didn’t have enough time. We never have enough time.

But now he reaches for my leg, lets his fingertips graze my knee and then drop, drumming his fingers along the floor, like his touch could have been an accident. A car engine starts somewhere in the parking lot and I tense up, my legs pulled into my chest and then extended again. This time, I’m more obvious about touching him. I press my hand to his ankle, run it up the inside of his leg and then back down. He glances up and we look at each other quietly for a moment, his hair in his eyes. He presses a hand more intentionally to my shin, my calf, the back of my leg. He grabs, runs his hand beneath my jeans. I inch toward him so that his hand can reach my thigh.

I reach between his legs, watching as he grows hard against his tight jeans. I run my fingers across the denim. He leans forward; someone calls out a name in the parking lot, the light rushing amber and golden through the windshield. I sit up and then so does Nick, and we pause there for a moment, our faces very close, our breath choppy, as if we’re trying to see how close our lips can get without actually touching, and then his lips are on my neck, running hot across my skin, my jawline, my ear, but not my lips. I go to meet his mouth with mine and he finds my chest. I reach for his belt buckle; he leans into it and kisses me everywhere but my mouth. I want to scream. I find his lips and he pulls away, some coy bullshit that should make me hesitate, make me stop, make me want more than this but I will take any of this: I have him, we are here. I press my lips to his chin and neck and chest and nipples, the convex curve of his ribs, his waist, then tugging down his briefs, I put him in my mouth. The snow falls silently.

His dick is very big, slightly curved, it is hard to take him all the way into my throat but I do it, whiskey and sweat and strain. He presses his palms lightly against my head, pushing me down just barely as I bob—first hungrily, then with a gritty determination, then eventually with irritation, anger, frustration, and then, finally, my jaw sore and my eyes watering, he comes into my mouth, with so little warning that I gag as he hits the back of my throat.

I swallow. There’s nowhere to spit anyway.