7. Hawk
It had been a week.
An entire week of reading letters and sorting boxes, and I’d barely scratched the surface of the fan mail that was piled up in my attic. The amount of stuff fans had sent us over the years was astonishing. There were cards and photos, poems and lyrics, and more than a few pairs of panties.
Those went right in the trash.
But it was the demos that had been keeping me up lately. Dozens and dozens of submissions, first on CDs—took me a fucking minute to locate something to play those on—then on flash drives, some of which held entire albums’ worth of material.
Most of it was shit, kids dicking around in their parents’ garages like we used to do, dreaming big and rocking hard, even if they stunk.
But there were a fair number of songs that were pretty fuckin’ good.
And a few that were great.
I was playing one of the great ones, leaned back in my office chair, eyes closed as I listened to a killer song by a band that called themselves Strap-On, when someone knocked on my open office door. Looking up, I saw Gavin and Alex standing there, looking confused as fuck.
“What the hell is this?” Alex asked, gesturing to the air vaguely.
“Strap-On,” I responded with a wry grin.
“I asked what the song was, not what your latest kink is, you asshole.”
“Fuck off,” I said lightly, pausing the song as the guys dropped into the seats across from my desk. “The band is called Strap-On. Or at least they were. I think this demo is over a decade old.”
“So how the hell did you get it?” Gavin asked, his fingers drumming lightly on his thighs.
“Dude, there are so fucking many. Here, look.” Rising from my chair, I headed for the far side of the study where Harry and I had lined up all the bins of mail, lifting the one we’d set aside for all the demos. “Look. There are, like, thirty in here right now, but I still have so many boxes to go through. Oh, shit!” Setting down the demo bin, I pointed at the others. “There is a bunch of stuff for you guys here, too. I’ve been meaning to call you, I’ve just been—”
“Losing your fuckin’ mind?” Alex asked, and Gavin nodded sagely. “Hawk, man, I’ve been calling you for two days. I finally had to call the house. Do you have any idea how long it’s been since I used a land line? Harry told me you were working on a ‘special project,’ so Gav and I headed right over.” He paused, his eyebrows scrunching together before he went on. “I had hoped you were working on some new music.”
His words hit me like a punch to the gut, and I frowned, turning to look out the French doors to the pool to keep myself from saying something I would likely regret.
No, I hadn’t been working on new music.
No, I didn’t think I’d be working on new music anytime soon.
Or ever again.
But I couldn’t tell that to the guys; not when they’d already been more than patient.
After shit fell apart at the Grammys five years ago, we all agreed that Black Kite would go on hiatus for an indeterminate amount of time.
And while I couldn’t give less of a shit what Lewis was up to, I knew that both Alex and Gavin had been offered other projects, lucrative offers that I wished they’d accept.
Instead, they languished right along with me, wasting time and wallowing in what used to be.
At least Gavin was still playing, sitting in as a session drummer at a few studios around town when he could score a gig. I was glad; that guy wasn’t good at sitting still.
“Hey,” Alex said, coming to stand beside me. “I know it’s been shit, man. I didn’t mean to pressure you. You know Gav and I are here. Always. I just thought you might be ready. No shame if you’re not.”
I nodded, not speaking, but the way my guts were knotting told me that it might be past time to be honest with my friends.
My brothers.
The only people in the world, besides Harry, who stood by me through it all. When I was at my very lowest, and the line was drawn in the sand, Gavin and Alex hadn’t hesitated to choose a side. They’d picked me, even if it would eventually cost them everything.
“Now, tell us what’s so special about these boxes.
I blew out a relieved breath, grateful that he was letting me off the hook. Turning back to the boxes, I picked up the next one in the stack and took off the lid.
“I was checking out the attic over my garage last week—” I began, but Gavin cut me off.
“There’s an attic over your garage?”
“Right?” I laughed. “I had no idea. Anyway, there’s a ton of shit up there. Old tour merch, a bunch of our instruments from when we were kids. It’s a fucking Black Kite goldmine. And tucked behind all that stuff was all these fuckin’ boxes. Like, dozens of them, all full of our fan mail.”
“Fan mail?” Alex asked, reaching in and plucking a letter off the top of the pile inside. “I didn’t think we got any fan mail? Like, didn’t the label handle all that shit?”
“They did. Their way of handling it was to box it up and shove it in my attic. I guess we musta told ’em to at one point or another, but no one ever brought it up again, so the boxes have just been piling up.” Tossing the lid aside, I grabbed another letter, this one in a black envelope with our name and information scrawled across the front in silver ink. “Harry has been helping me kind of catalogue them, because they are mostly boxed up by year. Then we see who they are to, and sort them again.”
“And that’s where the demos are coming from? The letters?” Gavin asked, tapping the letter rhythmically against his thigh.
“Exactly. You should see the kind of stuff people have sent us, man. There’re a ton of art, like drawings of us and our logo and shit. There’s poems, and songs, and a fuck ton of love letters and marriage proposals.” Gavin laughed, but Alex physically recoiled at the thought. He’d never been shy about his desire to stay single for life.
Especially after witnessing the disaster that was my marriage.
“You want some help?” Alex asked, jerking his head at the box. “Like, we can hang for a bit. Give you a hand with the sorting and shit.”
I blinked, a bit stunned. It had been so fucking long since we’d had something to do together.
Something that actually mattered, anyway. We’d spent a fuckton of time getting drunk together over the last five years.
“Yeah,” I said, my voice rough. “That’d be great.”
We settled in, the guys getting a kick out of reading some of the ridiculous stuff that we were sent, laughing and sharing the best parts together before sorting it into the bins for later.
We’d just finished the delicious lunch that Harry had brought us when Gavin reached into the box, pulling out another envelope, this one catching my eye.
“Wait!” I practically shouted, my hand latching onto his wrist.
“What?” he asked, suddenly panicked as he dropped the envelope back into the box. “Is it anthrax! Do I have anthrax now?”
“What?” I cocked my head at him. “No? What the fuck, man? There’s no anthrax.”
“There could be,” he muttered sullenly. “It’s like you guys never watch the documentaries I send through the group chat.”
“Because they suck,” Alex and I said in unison, causing Gavin’s pout to deepen.
“I just need this one,” I said, plucking the envelope from the box, my pulse racing when I spied the blue glitter ink on the front.
“What’s so special about that one?”
But I didn’t answer. I was too busy staring at the row of delicate feathers that had been sketched along the outside of the envelope. I checked the postmark, the date indicating that this one was sent almost a full two years after the first. I could tell, now that I was looking a little closer, because the artwork had matured in that time. Last time, she’d drawn a beautiful rendition of a feather, with strong lines and good definition, but it paled in comparison to what I was looking at now. The first envelope had displayed one large feather across the entire back side, but this time her work was much more refined, with a series of different feathers placed all along the outer edge of the envelope, like a frame. Holding the envelope up, I looked at the small feathers closely, marveling at her talent. The intricate lines of the feather’s barbs were clear and clean, the shading indicating they were Black Kite feathers, just like the first time, and now they looked more like photographs than drawings.
She’d been working hard, and for some reason, I felt pride flooding my chest.
I didn’t know what it was about Wren’s letter that had stood out to me when I’d read it, but I found myself going back to it over and over in the last few days.
She’d been funny, brash, and bold in her writing, and I appreciated that, because that’s how I was when I wrote songs.
Fuck what people thought; I’d write what I felt, and that was it.
That’s how Wren’s letter had read to me, like she was surrounded by people who didn’t understand her, who wanted to change her, and she was raising a middle finger to the lot of them and doing what she wanted anyway.
It was totally rock and roll, and I respected the hell out of her for it.
I’d wanted to write back to her, but there were a few things that had stood in my way, one of which being the fact that she hadn’t put a return address on the envelope, so there was no easy way to find out exactly where it had come from.
The second thing was that the first letter had been sent over twenty years ago, meaning that sweet Wren Blackburn was well into her thirties now, probably married and no longer using her maiden name. She could be halfway across the country or even the world, living her best life and listening to our music on some fuckin’ oldies station, thinking about the good old days as she folded her husband’s Jockey shorts.
But even with all that in the way, I had still set the letter in the drawer of my desk, keeping it safe and separate for reasons I couldn’t understand.
So to find a second one, another letter from the funny kid who had dug in her heels when the world told her to change, felt like a stroke of luck.
Maybe I could follow Wren’s lead, digging in my heels a bit when the world was telling me that I was done. That Black Kite was done.
Maybe I could be bold again, too.