Chapter 5
5.
A warehouse somewhere in Germantown—you have to climb a ladder to get in. On the fire escape down at the record store, in the back parking lot, the crowd staring up, up, up. Inside the shop, the line out the front stretching all the way down Eighth. After-hours—two a.m.—Station Inn, Sloane and I there early, standing on the toilets in the curtained bathroom stalls while they try to clear everyone out from the midnight show. Rock Block: cigarette smoke pouring out of the Gold Rush. Springwater: so drunk we almost broke into the barbecue place next to Centennial Park. Downtown on the green in front of the courthouse. At a warehouse off Charlotte, a warehouse off Fourth, a warehouse off Chestnut. In the backyard at the Groove, somebody’s living room tucked back behind Eighth. At a house party down on Granny White, on Wedgewood, on Woodland, on Holly, on Elmwood. We try to go to all the local shows, but there are only so many hours in the day, so many nights we have free from The Venue.
In early November, Flirtation Device add a few new dates to their tour: the Theatre of Living Arts in Philly, the Knitting Factory in Boise, the Orange Peel in Asheville—and The Venue. Of course. It’s December, and the schedule doesn’t leave any wiggle room: they’re in Atlanta at Eddie’s Attic the night before, the Southgate House in Cincinnati the night after. Last week, when I turned on Grey’s Anatomy, I heard one of their songs. I wondered how much the placement paid, but not as much as I wanted to know if the song was about me. Remembering Nick was like accidentally biting the inside of your lip: at first it hurts, and then in the following days the spot becomes sore and swollen, making it impossible to avoid biting it again and again and again and again.
Because, the thing is, the song on the radio and that demo Nick sent—they were both about me. Definitely. I listened to the demo that night, on the walk home after Julien’s Halloween party. That night, I still had my doubts—maybe I was just buzzed, a little turned on, coasting on some inflated sense of self after flirting with Julien. But now I listen again and there’s no mistaking it.
It’s barely seven a.m. when I wake up. My sternum is tight, like someone has pressed their palms against my chest. I blame my late night last night. Or daylight saving time and the shorter and shorter days. Or serotonin. A dream I woke up from—gasping for air, body drenched in sweat. My underwear, T-shirt, sheets damp. I pop one of Colt’s Xanax and slip back under.
By ten, when I wake back up, the day has taken on a new, vaguely more welcoming shape. I peel myself out of bed. Concrete sky out my window. Temperatures have dropped to just above freezing for the first time in months; daylight hours are suddenly a priceless commodity. The Venue is closed tonight for a private event. A text comes through from a phone number I don’t have saved, asking if I’m coming to the photo shoot tomorrow. Can I bring The Venue stamp? They want every detail authentic. Or, more likely: they also need extras in the background of the video.
Jake, John. No. Jay? Jaylen. Jay. That’s it, Jay, a guitarist I met at a show last week. He asked for my number, then texted me repeatedly to follow up. A photo shoot over in Wedgewood-Houston.
Please come with me, I text Sloane. I don’t want to go alone to this. I add a link.
She doesn’t respond, but she’ll be there.
Later that day, heat cranked too high in the car, my palms burn against the steering wheel. Two new Justin Wilson songs have appeared online. The chords are elegiac, the fingerpicking is broken, sporadic—the way someone might play if they were learning a song for the first time. A true rough demo. Outside the clouds are slipping all the way down into the sidewalk, until sky and ground are one vast, disorienting canvas of gray.
Prescient, if a song itself can be prescient: the pre-chorus is the line he posted months ago: going away away away, always better this way. I can hear Esther’s voice braided into his, hollow and sad, but still beautiful. The first of the songs is short, the recording full of static, like a vinyl record playing through a fire. The second—unfinished, cut short, a build to a chorus whose crescendo never comes.
Without meaning to, I linger at the stoplight on the corner of South Street and Eighth, and I cry.
Some people don’t pay attention to lyrics. They’re all about melody, rhythm, timbre—their heads melting at the sound of a riff or the pulse of reverberation, the vibrations of a note throughout space. Not me. I am always lost in the words, transfixed by what they’re saying. And now it’s my obsession with words that has fucking fucked me. I’m so consumed with the poetry and the slant rhymes and assonance and the tender bits of alliteration that I forget about what it means to make a melody work, how to stay within the confines of a key. And yet—
My eyes are blurry, but I manage to pull into a spot in the parking lot of The Venue. The Justin Wilson songs have ended. Silence—and suddenly a different melody comes to me out of nowhere. First it seems to be somewhere in the back of my head, like I’m remembering it, a kind of melodic déjà vu. And then just in front of me, like a mirage on the horizon, a shimmery something I’m trying to reach out and touch—
Lines of my own:
This ain’t a holiday, It’s a fucking cliché
Dressed up like somebody you already are anyway
Voice Memos on, and I hum it into the black void of my phone. It’s not the same, but for a second it sounds like the song I was stumbling through up in the second space. A new iteration of it, maybe? I press Stop.
Songs so aching you can only listen to them once a year:
“Both Sides Now” (Joni Mitchell)
(All of them) (Elliott Smith)
“Everybody Hurts” (R.E.M.)
“Hallelujah” (the Jeff Buckley version)
“Halah” (Mazzy Star)
“The Blower’s Daughter” (Damien Rice)
“Limousine” (Brand New)
“The Work” (Frightened Rabbit feat. Archie Fisher)
“Casimir Pulaski Day” (Sufjan Stevens)
After Andy hired me, it took a full month for me to slip away from the door to catch a bit of a set. It was Dan Daniels’s band; I’d never seen them before. On a night when you were working the door, you could usually catch little moments of a performance—during a break, on your way to the bathroom, going to grab something from the office. By ten that night, the door was dead. Colt’s barback had already gone home, and I’d probably get cut soon. Danny was training Simon, who was bug-eyed stage-side. Eddie hadn’t started yet. The crowd was young, expectant—entry-level Sony guys and Belmont band-aid types. The collective musicianship in the room was absurd. So much talent in one space it was practically simmering. It was the tail end of winter, when you know there’s relief around the corner. Everyone’s holding out just a few more days—weeks at most—for spring to come. The days will get longer. The nights will get warmer.
I stood in the shadow of the stairwell. After a while the band left the stage, and it was just Dan up there, a little Taylor acoustic in hand, almost as small as Andy’s. I hadn’t been expecting—I certainly hadn’t been meaning—to cry. In hindsight, I blame the night, the weather, the whole goddamn winter, to be honest, but what Dan sang sent me into some kind of emotional trance. All of us, really. The kind where the crowd is so quiet you can hear a stranger clear her throat across the room, where even the sound of the bathroom door swinging open or ice rattling in a plastic cup is an interruption.
When I came to—the only phrase I have for returning from wherever the song had sent me—Andy was at my side. I panicked, apologized, remembering our interview: You are at the door, not in the audience. But he just looked at me and nodded, his eyes onyx and misty, a faint dreamy smile on his face. I walked back down the stairs.
Now he’s on the couch in the office, a mug of coffee steaming into a wisp of silver in the air. Dark jeans and a Rush hoodie, a binder and some papers in front of him, a few records stacked up next to an open laptop. One of Eddie’s button-downs—this one forest green—is draped over the arm of the couch. Andy stands up and opens his arms, offering a hug. I’m still coming out of a bit of a moment with the Justin Wilson demos, and he can tell I’m not myself.
He pulls me into a quick side hug.
—Aren’t you off tonight? You doing all right?
I stand up straighter.
—All good, I say. Sorry to interrupt.
—You’re fine, what’s up?
—Do you mind if I borrow the stamp today? These guys want to use it for a photo shoot.
—What guys? Eddie asks, spilling through the door. You got some guys?
—Go away, I say. He flicks me off, but to his credit he grabs his button-down and walks out.
—Are these the ones who emailed? Andy asks.
—Probably? By the way, it’s really beautiful up there in that storage space. Do you know the capacity?
His eyebrows lift just slightly.
—Around fifteen hundred square feet. Hold a hundred and fifty standing, maybe? Seventy-five or a hundred banquet? Not that we’re trying to have a banquet up there. It’s still not up to code, not for anything real. Why do you ask?
I shrug.
—Just seems like a waste.
Everybody here is always working on something. There’s the guy who lives over on Nineteenth, putting together a magazine, looking for writers, photographers, designers. The blues band, getting ready for a European tour, working on their GoFundMe. The photographer, the one you see at every show, shooting stuff for the Scene and American Songwriter, even Rolling Stone. Another local magazine, this one looking for editors, advertisers, countless pitches. A food festival, supposedly sponsored by a Very Big Band. A songwriting space, cheaper than anywhere on Music Row. A streaming platform that isn’t Spotify. A mini festival—Road to Bonnaroo, 8 off 8th, Next Big Nashville, AmericanaFest, Record Store Day. Everybody is always planning something else, something bigger, something they need everyone’s help to get off the ground. Musicians, sure, of course, but also sound techs and security, copywriters and essayists for their zines, lighting directors and door guys, promoters and photographers, club owners and city councilmen. Some days it really does feel like It’s All Happening.
—What the actual fuck are we doing here? Sloane asks.
She’s holding a brown paper bag of something, but pointing her keys at me. Like if I don’t back away she’ll plunge them right between my eyes.
—I just saw someone pissing on the roof of a booted car over there, and the train around the corner has been stopped for at least thirty minutes. I’m leaving before the sun sets, she says.
—What’s in the bag?
—Oh, I stopped at this bakery pop-up around the corner, she says, pulling out a couple of chocolate chip cookies. Want one?
—I’m good, I say, turning down the cookie.
I haven’t been hungry in days. Lately the only thing I’ve been wanting to eat is blue-box mac and cheese in the middle of the night.
—I got a galette too, Sloane says, chomping.
—Let’s just go get a drink, I’ll drop off the stamp and—
—And then we will get the hell out of here. I gotta go to a thing at the Five Spot in, like, an hour. Billy’s gonna be there. I’m giving him one of our mixes.
—You burned him a CD?
—Flash drive, baby, she says, waving a tiny thumb drive at me from her key chain.
I expect her to invite me but she doesn’t.
—I promise, I say. Just one drink, I’ll deliver the stamp, then we’ll go.
—God, this place looks sketchy as hell. Why is there a bathtub in the parking lot? Is that supposed to be art? That’s not art. Do any of the streetlights even work in this neighborhood? Or did the city just give up over here? Hello? she says, shouting up at the flickering streetlamp overhead. Hello! It’s fucking dusk!
Inside the warehouse, the Whiskey Riders—about as stupid a band name as I’ve heard, and there’s competition—are having a photo shoot. They needed a few extras, which seems like the type of thing Colt should be doing, but he left on tour with some friends of his last week, doing god knows what. Plus, I assume they wanted women. Bodies in the background in exchange for beer.
The place is freezing inside, and decorated bizarrely: Technicolor mushrooms made of papier-maché, against a green-screen background. The band is already there, dressed, improbably, as Oompa Loompas. Jessika’s there too, her camera slung over her shoulder, laughing loudly with the lead singer and the bass player in the corner as they huddle around a laptop, pointing and talking about something we can’t quite hear. She’s wearing a chunky sweater that hangs loosely over her frame, her curls pressed beneath a black beanie.
Another of Colt’s pills in my pocket, and I pour four fingers of whiskey into a red Solo cup and down it.
—I can never predict what you’re going to drink, Sloane says.
—What do you mean?
—You don’t have a standard order, she says. Shit, you don’t even have a standard liquor.
—So?
—Is there anything you don’t drink?
The hot, comforting sharpness of the liquor hits my throat. Molasses and smoke. I’m glaring at Sloane. She opens a beer with a clumsy bottle opener.
—Milk, I say.
Her laugh is sharp and throaty. Jess and the bass player finally see us and come over to say hi. The bass player kisses me on both cheeks like he’s a French movie star.
—Good to see you, I say, and I introduce him to Sloane. He shakes her hand, then points us to more alcohol and a small spread of questionable-looking drugs.
—You guys know Jess? he asks. Actually, I don’t know why I asked. Of course you do. Everyone knows Jess.
Jess reaches out to hug me. How are you feeling? she says quietly.
That shift in her voice—she’s stepped offstage again.
—Barren, I say, and she laughs like herself.
—Thank god for that, she says.
Sloane misses the exchange between me and Jess; the bass player has pulled her into another conversation, I can hear him explaining the concept of the video to her.
—How was ACL? I ask Jess.
She looks at me skeptically for a second and then responds:
—I mean, not bad if you like festivals. You should go sometime. Better than Bonnaroo. I don’t know why anyone would ever have a festival in Tennessee in the middle of the summer, but whatever. The guys were great though. How’d you know I was there? Oh sure. Jules.
—Julien, I say.
She narrows her eyes just slightly.
—I gotta go take a few test shots before we lose light, she says. We’re all going to get beers later, by the way, if you want to come. I can text you.
—Okay, yeah—
—Don’t lie, she says.
My chest tightens and I reach for a strand of hair at the base of my neck.
—I’m not lying, I—
—If you’re not going to come, it’s not a big deal, she says. Just don’t say you are if you already know you won’t. No pressure either way.
Her tone is friendly, but her directness still throws me. I get the sense that Jessika has almost never held back any of her thoughts, that whatever she is thinking at any given moment, she says. And she usually gets away with it, because she is beautiful and competent, and people want to trust her, want to tell her things—want to have sex with her. Even when she’s a little bit mean, a little bit forward. Then people just want to have sex with her more.
Sloane tugs at my arm.
—Al likes to keep her options open, she says.
Jessika runs a hand through her curls, then gives me a look I can’t read. She shrugs and says: Oh believe me, I get it.