Lo Fi

Chapter 2

2.

Who was that? Julien asks, pouring me a Yuengling into a nondescript paper cup.

The bottle is the color of his eyes, which give away nothing. He asks the question like he’s asking if I want to order pizza—we pick up food around this time most nights. The lag: most of the early crowd has arrived, but the band isn’t on yet. It’s still raining.

—He didn’t even tell me he was in town, I say, mostly to myself.

People are arriving in the parking lot, oblivious and wet. Upstairs, voices shit-talking, shouting, ordering drinks, getting phone numbers, asking when the set starts, opening tabs. Sonic dissonance slightly muffled by the rain. For a moment I want to explain Nick to Julien, but something stops me. Julien’s looking back at a copy of the local weekly. A song of Nick’s hums in the back corner of my head, clashing with the opening notes to a Replacements deep cut over the house music.

—Not cool, Julien says, but I can’t tell if it’s a delayed response to Nick or if he’s scolding a girl who’s just tossed her umbrella into the parking lot.

The waves of rain swallow all the sound for a moment as we await the late, the already drunk, the question marks, the cool kids.

—Psalms or Sailor Jerry? I ask, nodding to a group of guys approaching from the parking lot. I’ll buy you a highball if you guess first.

The guys are drenched, they split instinctively, the first two to me, the latter three to Julien. Bible verse, I mouth to him.

Jacket sleeves up on the first, I press the stamp in. Philippians 4:6–8, inked onto the inner wrist. A passage I had to memorize as a kid. I try not to laugh—it was too easy. When the guys are out of sight, I glance over to Julien:

—Philippians, not Psalms. Does that still count?

—How do I know you’re not lying?

—Lying about Bible verses is pretty messed up. Cutthroat, even.

Julien laughs, shakes his head. The faintest blush of peach appears by his temples, maybe, or maybe I’m just having a bit of synesthesia, assigning colors to the slivers of our friendship. He looks back down at the magazine. A new song comes on, one that was number one for a million weeks when I was thirteen, a melody that’s impossible to forget.

It’s close to ten when the cool kids start filtering in. My aunt Izzy is one of them, cooler at forty than I am at twenty-three. She comes through the door shimmery, happy, dressed like Stevie Nicks in a long black velvet dress, a short man on one arm, a beautiful woman her age on the other. The woman looks like Izzy in that way that friends and couples do, when you can tell that certain people are together based on their style, their age. Their hair is the same dishwater blond, their chins small, pointed, slightly lifted. Their eyes warm.

—Anthony, Clem, meet my niece.

Clem drops Izzy’s arm to hug me. The three of them are perfectly dry, as though someone has ushered them in under an umbrella. Izzy hugs me: steak, expensive liquor.

—Look at you, hard at work, she says as I stamp her hand.

She says it earnestly, like she’s legitimately proud of this barelyajob job. She smears the ink on her left wrist with her thumb, presses a finger to my nose. Her finger is cold but my body warms.

—You look beautiful, Izzy says. You’ll come see me tomorrow? I have to be on set for a shoot in the morning, but come by in the afternoon.

Before I can even nod or introduce her to Julien, she floats up the stairs with Anthony and Clem like an apparition.

A text from Nick: What time do u get off?

It’s like this with us. Him living in my pocket, but not in my life. I start to respond, but when I glance up, my roommate, Sloane, is in the doorway, tipsy and gorgeous, bitching about the rain.

—Oh my lord, nobody knows how to drive in this city. I was like: I am not about to die driving past a discount liquor store because some guy from Murfreesboro doesn’t know how to steer through a puddle. That was absurd. Drivers here would never make it in—

—You’re here, I say, reaching out to squeeze her hand. We do not hug—we’re around each other too much for that. She waves away my outstretched hand.

—Barely, she says. That guy almost killed me. Like, there should be a phone number I can call. It’s supposed to be a black car service, not some sketchy airport cab company.

—You need a drink, I say.

—What a mess, Sloane says. Do you need my ID? Here here, even if you don’t. I just got a new pic anyway, let’s test it out.

I take her ID, turn it over in my hand. Of course the photo is gorgeous. It’s Sloane. She’s lightly tanned, her left eye hazel and her right a piercing blue, so that you’re constantly glancing back and forth, taking in their beautiful discrepancy. Everyone is always commenting on Sloane’s chimeric eyes and her cheekbones, the beautiful razor’s edge of her jawline. She doesn’t need a ticket because she works at the radio station in town, so she’s on the list for everything.

—I have our mix too, she says, holding a loose CD out to me. Please take this off my hands.

—You actually burned it?

She’s grinning but rolling her eyes at the same time.

—Like it was 2004, baby. But this is the last one I burn. You are the only person in the world who still has a CD player.

I laugh and twirl the CD around my index finger.

I wonder if Julien’s noticing her insanely symmetrical face, her eyes, that bone structure, those flushed cheeks. Barely any makeup, her hair dark and straight, framing her face in a bob. I have the urge to tell her about Nick showing up, but behind her a line has started to form again, people squinting through the rain, tapping their feet.

—Do you have to let these children in? she asks, widening her eyes and nodding to the crowd behind her, a trio of girls looking like they’re at their Very First Nashville Show. Cowboy boots and styled curls, everything ruined by the rain.

—I’ll meet you up there in a bit, I say. Go get drunk.

She scurries up the stairs.

More rain, more faces. A few minutes after Sloane, in comes a girl I don’t recognize: jet-black hair, in a tight leather miniskirt and black boots, a vintage T-shirt, gold hoops. Red lips, her hair curly: wild and thick and endless, the kind that would defy any attempt to straighten. She reapplies her lipstick, lets the line pass her by as she shakes off the rain. Instinctively, I touch my finger to my lips.

Julien’s nodding in conversation with one of the sound guys and the girl approaches and hugs them. The boys’ faces lighten at the sight of her, lips quickly settling into smiles. She does looks familiar, I realize now—from some after-party, most likely, or other shows around town. Could be an A I stamp their hands. After they leave:

—Was she on the list? I ask.

Julien glances over. He briefly holds his cup between his teeth as he flips through the local weekly.

—Yeah, I added her late.

—What’s her name? I ask, scanning the list.

—You’ve never met?

—Would I be asking if we had?

Julien raises his eyebrows at me.

—Jess, he says.

—She’s hot, I say.

He shoots me an unreadable look: lips set straight, like he’s tempted to smile but won’t.

—With a k, he says.

—What?

—Jessika with a k.

I want to roll my eyes but don’t.

—Are you in love?

Julien laughs quietly then—no teeth—and says:

—You’re absurd.

Before the band goes on, the house music plays LCD Soundsystem, Miike Snow. Without the headliner on yet, people are antsy, the collective level of drunk teetering over a delicate edge. My eyes scan the room for Nick and I run a hand through my hair. My whole body is buzzing. I want one of Colt’s benzos.

Like he is every Saturday, Colt’s behind the bar, short blond hair—he should let it go longer—and a white bar rag over his shoulder. He’s wiry, like a disheveled professional rock climber. So pretty, so fun to look at—even with Nick somewhere in the room. But with Colt there’s no real intrigue; it’s all right there on the surface, even if the surface is pretty good. Getting to him is the tricky part now, all the elbows and ponytails and shoulders between me and the bar, my free-ish drink. He catches my eye with his—steely blue—always looking like he wants to fuck while I try to decide how much I want to indulge the fantasy, how free I want my extra drinks to be.

The crowd is dense and drunk already and I snake through it. Strangers’ sweat collects on my elbows, forearms, hip bones, my T-shirt riding up. Cigarettes and store-brand deodorant, astringent perfume, coconut shampoo—then at last: whiskey. I reach for the bar like it’s a lifeboat.

—Christ, they’re vultures, Colt says, pressing his palms against the lip of the bar, leaning toward me. But not you. What do you want?

I hold up my beer. He wipes a bit of sweat off his face with his forearm, sinewy and damp with rain. His flannel is open, a vintage Doors shirt hanging loose from his frame underneath.

—That’s it? They can wait, he says, looking down at the dozens of people waiting along the thirty-foot bar that stretches toward the stage. Jessika is at the opposite end, tapping her credit card on the bar to get someone’s attention. She’s tall, or maybe she’s just got great posture and high heels. Either way she stands out, even from the opposite end of the bar.

I feel somebody pressing up against me, and I use my elbow to shove them off. Colt turns around, reaching up for a bottle of Four Roses. Around his waist a serpent tattoo curls as he turns back around and pours two shots, passing one to me. We take them and my throat catches fire.

—Do you have any—

A barback I don’t recognize—he must be filling in for our usual guy—whispers something into Colt’s ear, and he turns away. I reach behind the bar and grab a beer. Jessika catches my eye from down the bar and flashes me a friendly smile, impressed. A girl next to me stares. I look at her like What? and push my way back out of the crowd. Onstage, the opening band’s guitarist is thumbing through a major scale.

Nick is at the mirror in the men’s room when I walk in. I bypassed the line next door. My beer is flat. I swallow half of it as he looks up from the sink, wiping his hands on a paper towel. Gray eyes looking me over, a song of his in my head. I put your bag up on a shelf that I can’t reach / I can’t reach you anymore. The confidence I had when I walked in is disappearing quickly. I take a breath, try to shore it up.

—Man, Al, you didn’t have to follow me into the bathroom.

He smiles, tosses the paper towel in the trash.

—You didn’t have to follow me to my city, I say, sliding past him.

I say this like that isn’t exactly what I’ve wanted him to do for the past year, like I haven’t imagined him here dozens of times, checked his tour dates, drafted and deleted who knows how many emails and texts to that effect.

I let myself into a stall and sit down. The back of the door is peppered with promos: a Matt Pond PA show coming up in July, a study on gut health that needs volunteers at Vanderbilt, a new two-for-one beer night at the Beer Sellar downtown. Oh, and an old ad for an open mic last month. The open mic, the one I need to forget. I peel that one down and stand back up. I can’t pee while Nick’s out there listening.

—You’re not really gonna stay mad, are you? I’m here now, he says. We’re in the same place. Can’t we just hang out?

I open the door and step out of the stall. The lights are way too bright. I should talk to Andy about putting in something less garish.

—You didn’t come here to hang out with me, I say.

—That’s not true. Listen, we were supposed to go straight to Cincinnati from Atlanta, but Timmy got a last-minute session with a producer in town we’ve been trying to book time with, so we stopped last-minute. I’ve only been here for, like, six hours.

—We’ve been talking about you coming here for almost a year. Like you didn’t know I worked here?

—Okay, yeah, that’s on me.

—No shit.

He reaches an arm out for me now, his fingers slightly tugging at one of my belt loops. My feet are planted but weak; I’m a loose seed ready to be pulled. A snare drum in the main space taps out eighth notes—the band is out. A discordant series of cheers, distorted bass.

—At least come out with us after.

The door opens, a guy walks in. Nick’s hand slackens from my belt loop. The guy grabs a paper towel and leaves.

—I’m not crashing the band’s night.

—I’m not with the band, he says. I’m with Garret and Matt.

—You just said you were with Timmy.

—He’s still at the studio.

—I don’t know who Garret and Matt are.

—Really? Garret plays with—

—I don’t care who Garret plays with. And I’m not going to watch you guys do karaoke in Printers Alley.

Now he smiles. Like someone’s taking a photograph, like if he just keeps smiling I’ll forgive him. The problem is that I will, I already have, I will again.

—So take us somewhere better.

I like bad music.

I know enough about music theory to be dangerous, to recognize what makes a melody work or how to transpose a song from C to Am or why a perfect fourth sounds, well, perfect. But at the end of the day, I listen to the same old shit. Check my playlists, the records I wear down, all the pop singers and the one-hit wonders and the bubblegum sounds I can’t seem to shake. So on nights like tonight, when the whole purpose is to play music that was never all that great to begin with? Well, I’m just charmed by it all.

Once the band is on, though, you have to resist the urge to seem too into it. It’s a prerequisite for going to hear live music in Nashville: a little bit of you has to believe you could be doing anything the people onstage are doing, and doing it a little bit better.

—How do you and Jess-with-a-k know each other? I ask Julien down at the door.

I’m waiting to get cut for the night; I honestly can’t believe I’m still working.

—She manages Denim, he says. My friend Johnny’s band.

The name produces an immediate palpitation in my throat: Denim’s keyboardist was at the open mic—the one Sloane talked me into doing, the one I keep trying to forget.

—Do you know them? Julien asks.

Everybody in town knows Denim right now, I say, pulling my mind out of my memory.

—So she’s, like, a friend-ager or a real manager? I ask.

—Real one. She works for Red Light.

I wonder how she got a job at an actual management company at her age, how she’s already managing a band that’s opening for Fleet Foxes and Feist.

—Is she older than us? I ask. With that job, I’m surprised—

—I think we’re the same age, he says. Me and Jess.

—Wait, how old are you? I ask.

He glances at me, a look like I’ve told you this before.

—Twenty-five, Julien says.

It’s just a couple of years, but for a moment, still, I feel like a child.

—Are you two dating? I ask.

I haven’t worked here very long, but I know that Julien doesn’t usually “add people late” to the list. He’s strict about it. A pain in the ass, really. He looks over at me and lets the question hang there for a moment. He shrugs.

—We’ve gone on dates, yes, Julien says, and the door swings open: a rush of pounding rain and pretty faces and damp skin and the smell of smoke and burnt rubber.

I stop working before Julien officially tells me I can. I haven’t eaten, but I’m not hungry. I just want a drink, want to slip away into the night.

Eddie, the annoying new Belmont student we’re supposed to be training, keeps pestering me about his upcoming jazz gig. He pulls up a video of last week’s show, tries to shove it in my face while I’m waiting for my drink.

—I think Julien needs help at the door, I say, turning away.

Nick, then, on my other side.

—What do you want? he says into my ear.

—You really don’t need to buy me anything. I get—

—Jameson?

I should stay sober, stay mad, but I’m losing time with him, minutes and hours already slipping away into the rainy night. Our time has always been like this: an hour or two before a show or after, a sliver of an afternoon once he’s finished with sound check. I can’t waste any more of it.

—Four Roses, I say.

We weren’t supposed to keep up with each other after his Ann Arbor residency. He wasn’t supposed to get signed to Rough Trade, then Sub Pop. I was supposed to settle into my new city, to move on. I was definitely not supposed to fall—

The band is on, and everyone knows every song. Counting Crows and Third Eye Blind and Is this Spin Doctors or Lit or Deep Blue Something? Nick, singing into my face, his breath rye whiskey and ash. Is it too soon to ask about the other girl in his life? To shout her name above the music? When I start to, because I am a masochist, he just shakes his head, points at his ears. He’s got earplugs in, and he wouldn’t be able to hear me even if he didn’t.

The drums are simple but pounding, the energy of the front man is electric, his voice howling but familiar, the kind of timbre that can slip in and out of any imitation—in other words, perfect for a cover band. The crowd: swimmy, sweaty, everyone singing along, because everyone’s been listening to these songs since middle school, first on the radio in somebody else’s car and now in the white-noise background of pharmacies and supermarkets, and it’s a relief to hear them repurposed like this, as they were intended: for hordes of twentysomethings to shriek along to.

Even drunk, I can’t help but think about how our brains are wired to connect more deeply with the music of our youth, how a song you love fires off dopamine in your brain and hormones like you’re taking a drug—science, really, all that nostalgia for the bands we loved when we were seventeen.

For me it’s the songs from when I was twenty-one, only a couple of years ago—so many that remind me of Nick that I’ve stopped keeping track, stopped making mixes and jotting down lyrics, because it doesn’t really matter anymore. Even though every time I think of him, every time I see him, I want to ask: Aren’t there any songs that remind you of me?

Songs that remind me of Nick, in no particular order:

“Heavy Metal Drummer” (Wilco)

“Knocked Up” (Kings of Leon)

“All I Need” (Radiohead)

“Tugboat” (Galaxie 500)

“Disarm” (Smashing Pumpkins)

“Ziggy Stardust” (Bowie)

“Little Red Corvette” (Prince)

And one more Wilco, for posterity: “Jesus, Etc.”

When the show ends, the rain hasn’t stopped. Headlights shining from the cabs at the curb, chaos as drunk people splash to their rides. Julien takes off his red Chucks and puts on galoshes. He’s talking to Jessika beneath her umbrella, but he stops to ask me if I’m okay to drive. I tell him I’m not driving. Damp cotton socks, wet cement, wet leather, wet vinyl—

I drag Nick away from his friends and pull him into a cab, a tug on his jacket instead of his hand. The rain soaks us on the short sprint to the car, drenching my hair, my eyelashes, the back of my shirt. He reaches over and squeezes my thigh, asks how I am, a gesture right on the line of friendly and flirtatious. Though line is hardly the word, because the line is more like air between us—invisible but necessary, fluid but functional.

He pulls out his earplugs and says:

—Tell me about your new life. Is this what you do every night?

—More or less, I say, waving around the humid back of the cab, the squatty buildings of the Gulch obscured in the rain behind us. Nick looks around the back seat, as though this is where I live, as though this cab is my home.

He rubs at the foggy windows with his sleeve and leans back, tapping his long fingernails against the vinyl to a song I don’t recognize. With that expression on his face he looks drugged, which after two beers and three shots I suppose he is.

Out the window, a brewery under construction on Eighth; Bondi Blue neon, lighting up the hat store. I give the cabbie directions to a dive bar over on Twenty-First, ask Nick if he’s fine to smell like cigarette smoke in the morning. He says he already does—he can’t believe you can still smoke in bars here. On the way there, just ahead of us by the music school, a Toyota hydroplanes in the standing water, then skids to a stop, barely saving itself.

—How’s Allison? I ask, still dumbfounded that he’s been seeing someone in Chicago who has my name.

—Can you turn it up? Nick asks the driver as the song changes. I can’t tell if he heard me, but I can’t bring myself to repeat the question.