CHAPTER 22
ROMY
The club is called the Tar Pit, which tells you the vintage: named by people who thought irony was a business model, kept alive by people who never updated the website.
It’s on Fairfax, it holds a hundred and fifty if the fire marshal’s feeling spiritual, and it’s where Knox Wildstone played his first LA show to eleven people, two of whom were me and Dean.
I have not been inside it in nine years.
Then the owner, a woman named Sal who used to pay us in beer and once in a couch, calls me and says the building’s sold, it’s condos in August, last show’s in May, come say goodbye to the room.
And then, after a pause that costs her something: he’s already coming.
Thought you should get to pick whether that’s a problem.
I pick that it’s not a problem. Which is its own kind of information.
I get there early on purpose, while the light’s still doing its last honest thing through the grime on the windows.
The room is smaller than my memory and stickier than my shoes would like.
The stage is four inches high. Behind the bar there’s a wall of band photos going back thirty years, and I find us without looking for us: 2009, Knox twenty-five and starving-beautiful, me beside him in a denim jacket I lost in a move in 2014, both of us squinting at Sal’s camera, the garbage-bag window era written all over our faces.
“You took that couch,” Sal says behind the bar, not getting up. “Still got the photo. Couch is dead. Photo’s forever.”
“The couch had it coming.”
She pours me a club soda without asking, because she remembers I stopped drinking on work nights in 2011, which is the kind of memory this city runs on and nobody credits.
“He gets here at eight,” she says. “Sound guy quit. I’m doing sound.
” She says it in the tone of a woman who has done sound for forty years and invented half of it.
Knox arrives at eight with a guitar he could trade for a car and doesn’t. We do the hug — we’ve learned a new hug this past year, the two-seconds-and-release, no hand lingering on a shoulder blade — and we stand there in our first room, both of us looking at the four-inch stage.
“Eleven people,” he says.
“Nine. Two of them were the bartender’s roommates and they left at the break.”
“You counted eleven at the time.”
“I was doing PR for you before I knew what PR was.” I set my soda on the edge of the stage. “You were terrible for three songs. Then you played After Midnight for the first time anywhere and the room changed pressure. Nine people. I remember every face.”
“I wrote the second verse in the bathroom that night,” he says. “You banged on the door and told me to stop hiding the good part.”
“I’d recognize that behavior now,” I say, and he huffs, and it’s almost easy, and that’s the danger of rooms like this. They run old software. You step inside and your whole system rolls back to a version of yourself that trusted him with everything.
We walk the room. We tell Sal stories she was present for.
The night the power died and Knox played the whole set unplugged on the curb and made forty dollars in a hat.
The night a label guy came and left before the second song and we celebrated anyway because the beer was free.
The couch. The hat, which Dean stole in 2010 and wore in a photo shoot in 2016 like a war trophy.
Somewhere in the second hour Sal does something unforgivable and perfect: she finds the recording.
Bootleg off the board, that first night, nine people and two roommates, hiss and feedback and Knox twenty-five years old announcing After Midnight with his voice shaking, and then us, the kitchen harmony, the one we worked out lying on a mattress on the floor of an apartment with a garbage bag for a window.
My voice comes out of the Tar Pit’s ruined speakers and fills the room I first sang it in, and neither of us says anything for the whole song.
Young me hits the high part. Young me doesn’t know what it costs yet. Young me thinks it’s free.
When it ends, Sal says, “Room sounds better with both of you in it,” and goes back to her cables, and the sentence sits there doing what true sentences do, which is not asking permission.
“She always did that,” Knox says. “Said the headline out loud.”
“That’s why you played here for free for two years.”
“That’s why I still would,” he says, and I believe him, and believing him is its own small tectonic event.
It stops being archaeology and turns into the thing we came for without saying we came for it.
He’s sitting on the stage edge. I’m in the front row of a room with no chairs, standing, because standing keeps my options honest. And he says, not looking at me, “I keep trying to find the first time I did it. The first piece I took without asking. I’ve got it narrowed to the Denver live record.
Your harmony on the title track. You wrote it in the car, you sang it once, and I put it on the record and called it an arrangement note. ”
“Denver was early,” I say. “But it wasn’t first. First was the Sycamore kitchen. You took the bridge of mine for the b-side and I let you, because it was good, and because you asked me after you’d already done it, and I was so happy you asked at all that I didn’t notice the order.”
“Yeah.” He presses his thumb into the guitar’s fretboard, not playing it.
Just holding it down. “Before everyone wanted pieces of you, you used to ask before taking pieces of me. Somewhere in there you stopped asking, and I stopped noticing you’d stopped.
That’s the sentence I’ve been trying to write for a year. ”
“That’s because it’s my sentence,” I say, not unkindly. “You can’t write my half of it. You can only stop singing over it.”
He looks up at that. Sal’s at the sound board, very busy, very deaf.
“Here’s what I know now that I didn’t know in this room,” I say.
“You thought love meant I had the highest pain tolerance of anyone you knew. Because I kept absorbing it. Every tour, every narrative, every time the machine needed me smaller and I got smaller. You didn’t experience that as taking. You experienced it as us winning.”
“And you let me,” he says. Not an accusation. An offering. He’s handing me the true version and letting me close my hand on it.
“Do you want to know the worst part?” I say.
“The Denver harmony. I heard the record on the radio three months later, in a rental car, and my own voice came out of the speakers doing a thing I’d never been told was on it.
And my first feeling was pride. That’s how deep the training went.
My voice, uncredited, unpaid, on a platinum record, and I sat at a red light in Denver feeling lucky to be useful. ”
“Romy.”
“I’m not saying it to hurt you. I’m saying it because you keep looking for your first theft and I keep telling you: look for my first payment.
The theft and the payment are the same event seen from two sides of the counter.
We were a store. I kept the shelves stocked and you never looked at the register, and we called it a marriage because the lights were always on and the music was so good. ”
“I let you because the prize was you,” I say.
“Every time I almost said stop, I did the math: the arena, the house, the life, him happy. I kept buying you with me, and the exchange rate kept getting worse, and I signed every contract.” My voice is steady.
I’m proud of my voice. “So when you stand there looking for the first time you took a piece, look for the first time I paid. It’s the same day.
Sycamore. The bridge. Both of us built this.
The difference is you were the only one who could’ve stopped needing the payment. ”
“I thought love meant I could always come home after,” he says. “After the tour. After the album. After anything. You were the place the road ended. It never once occurred to me the place had a load limit.”
“Palpable silence,” Sal announces from the board, “is still silence, and the next band loads in at ten.”
We laugh, both of us, and it breaks the thing open instead of sealing it, which is what laughing with him always did, which is the whole problem, which is why I have to be careful.
Sal refuses money for the soda. She makes us sign the wall by the green room instead, one signature each, and I notice we both sign small, leaving space. Old habit from a wall with thirty years of names on it. You leave room for whoever’s coming.
At the door she stops me while Knox is ahead, out of earshot, and says, “For the record, I never liked your odds and I always liked you.” Then she hugs me with one arm, the other hand still holding a roll of gaffer’s tape, and goes to yell at the next band.
He walks me to my car. Fairfax at night, the streetlights doing their sodium thing, my little car at the curb under a jacaranda that’s dropping purple on everything.
“I’m doing the anniversary show in June,” he says. “The stadium. You know about it.”
“I know about it.”
“I’m not going to sing it,” he says. “Our song. I’m not asking permission, because I’m not singing it.
I’m telling you so you don’t spend June waiting for a bootleg of me breaking our deal.
I couldn’t stand up in front of eighty thousand people and sing the harmony alone and call it tribute. It’d be a lie with fireworks on it.”
“Okay,” I say.
“Okay,” he says.
And then we’re standing by the car, and it’s the moment, and we both know it’s the moment.
He doesn’t move. I don’t move. His eyes go to my mouth and come back, which is its own confession, and I feel the whole undertow of twenty years, the kitchen, the napkin, the first chord in a bathroom, and it would be so easy.
It would be the easiest thing in the world. That’s what’s wrong with it.
“I still love you,” he says. Quiet. No music on it. Just the fact, standing on Fairfax under a purple tree.
“I know,” I say. “Don’t make that another thing you assume will save you.”
He takes it. He doesn’t argue, he doesn’t kiss me, he doesn’t reach. He steps back, both hands in his jacket pockets, the posture of a man physically holding himself to a rule, and says, “Goodnight, Romy.”
“Goodnight, Knox.”
I get in the car. He walks the other way.
In the mirror he’s a tall man under jacaranda blossoms, not looking back, and I drive home through a city we used to own together, to a house that is mine, and I turn on the hallway light, and it’s just a light, and I’m just a person who turned it on, and that’s a whole life now.
The Tar Pit becomes condos in August. Sal’s taking the photo wall with her; she says the couch photo’s going in her bathroom, which is the highest honor that room has left to give.
Some rooms you say goodbye to. Some rooms you carry.
The trick, I’m learning, is telling them apart before you’re standing in the wrong one at the wrong hour, rolling back to a version of yourself that paid for everything.