Chapter Twelve #2
He lightens the mood by telling me about the time he and his sisters attempted to make their own zip line with a coat hanger.
I convince myself this break from working is necessary, that I’m doing this for the article, relearning how to tell stories again.
I’m doing this for us. Not us, but for Sloane and for Dax, not Sloane and Dax.
We can’t be that right now, I remind myself not for the first time.
But god, I wish we could be.
At first, I wondered if us having so much still to learn about each other meant that what we’d shared wasn’t as deep as I thought, but I’m beginning to understand we went as far as we could that summer.
In the intervening years, we’ve grown up, discovered new depths in ourselves.
We have the capacity to hold so much more now, and I’m greedy for every drop of him.
Sinking down, I rest my cheek against the back of the couch, peering over at Dax doing the same from the opposite end.
“Tell me a story,” he murmurs.
“Another one?” I laugh.
He grins, nodding as his ink-stained hands trace the curve of my ankle.
I think he might be greedy for me, too.
[Excerpt from Sloane Donavan’s Final Revelations interview transcript]
1999: To Dax or Not to Dax
JONAH: We had no fucking clue what we were gonna do.
BARRETT: Wes [from Immaculate Conceptions] and I had gotten really tight, and I felt like shit about our situation—Marcus not being fully better—and I had to come clean: Final Revelations needed to drop out of the tour.
Wes wouldn’t let us quit. He drove up from Columbus, said his cousin was in a band, and maybe their vocalist could fill in for Marcus on tour.
None of us really liked the idea, but it was kinda our only option.
We’d let some other guy do the bulk of the vocals, Marcus could do backup and play guitar, and Final Revelations wouldn’t lose the momentum we’d worked so hard for.
CAIN: I didn’t think it would work. Marcus has a good voice, and he was pretty. Girls actually came to our shows. Girls didn’t go to lots of hardcore shows back then. I didn’t think anyone could fill his shoes, but I humored everybody and went to check out this new guy.
DAX: I had no idea that show was an audition.
BARRETT: I laughed my ass off when Dax got on stage.
I knew the kid. He skipped school to hang out at my house a lot.
We kinda forgot he was a kid because it just felt like he’d always been around, and he didn’t act like a kid.
Y’know how kids are usually overeager and try too hard to prove themselves?
Look what I can do! Dax wasn’t like that.
He was quiet. He just… listened. I knew he was in some pop-punk band, but I’d never really seen him perform because he was playing at The Lot and all the starter-band venues and we were playing bigger places at that point.
CAIN: So we roll up to the dive bar all-ages night and head down to the basement—and it’s packed. It’s so hot in there you can practically see the sweat dripping down the walls.
JONAH: I’d seen Dax sing before—with his other band.
He had a good voice, but we were a metal band, so I was like, This guy?
Actually, I think I said, “This kid?” because that’s what Dax was, even if he didn’t totally look like a kid because he’s fucking giant.
[laughs] He didn’t have any tattoos yet, because his dad wouldn’t let him. Like, he was a baby.
DAX: I remember losing one of my gauges right before I went out, and not wanting to go on stage with one butthole ear, I shoved a soda pop cap in my ear.
BARRETT: I may have laughed when Dax came out—but I quickly shut the fuck up.
JONAH: I remember thinking, Wes’s cousin is going to be so pissed at us for poaching their guy.
I think I’m the only one who knew immediately that Dax wasn’t going to be just a fill-in.
Marcus was good—is good—but Dax has that…
“star power” sounds so dorky but that’s what it is. You can’t not watch him.
CAIN: I’d never seen anyone that young be so good, so confident.
DAX: I had no idea what I was doing.
BARRETT: After the set, we—Jonah, Cain, Marcus, and me—looked at each other, nodded, and that was it. It wasn’t really a question. It was either drop out of the tour or… Dax.
DAX: I’d heard of Final Revelations. Everybody had.
Anybody local that was semi-making it? You were both rooting for them and deeply jealous of them.
But I was still in high school, so I figured my time would come later, once I found a band I actually wanted to stick with.
I was almost always in two bands at once.
I liked the more melodic stuff, but I also liked the heavier bands.
I wanted to do both, but no one was really doing both in one band back then—not yet.
Final [Revelations] was pretty heavy in their earlier days, but there was something to how Marcus wrote, the way he structured the songs—I felt like we got each other in a way that ten, twenty, thirty years down the line, people would cite him as paving the way for my future band.
I didn’t dream we would end up in the same band.
So, when they asked me to fill in? I went to school the next day, cleaned out my locker, and went to rehearsal.