

Daron's Guitar Chronicles

Volume 1

A story of rock and roll, coming out, and coming of age in the 1980s

by Cecilia Tan
Daron's Guitar Chronicles

Copyright © 2010 by Cecilia Tan

All Rights Reserved

Contents of this ebook were serialized online at Daron's Guitar Chronicles (http://daron.ceciliatan.com) between November 2009 and February 2010. There may be slight variations in the text from the serialized version and the ebook version.

No reproduction without permission.

daron.ceciliatan.com

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# Table of Contents

Copyright Info

PART ONE: Summer 1986

1. I Love Rock and Roll

2. Invisible Touch

3. Another Lost Classic

4. Always Something There to Remind Me

5. Promises, Promises

6. Jet Airliner

7. I Love L.A.

8. Look at Little Sister

9. More Than A Feeling

10. I Ran

11. I Fought the Law (And the Law Won)

12. Message In A Bottle

13. Old Man Down the Road

14. Heart of Glass

15. One Thing Leads to Another

16. It's Only a Northern Song

17. Owner of a Lonely Heart

18. Moody Blues

19. The Logical Song

20. You Gotta Look Sharp

21. That's What Friends Are For

22. I Know What Boys Like

23. The Cure

24. All the Young Dudes

25. No Time Left for You

26. Suddenly, Last Summer

PART TWO: December 1986

27. Life In a Northern Town

28. Don't Do Me Like That

29. Tell The Moon-Dog

30. Tell the March Hare

31. You Got Another Thing Coming

32. Goody Two Shoes

33. Welcome to the Machine

34. Let's Dance

35. Electric Light Orchestra

36. Everybody Wants to Rule the World

37. Unguarded Minute

38. Sweet Hitch-hiker

39. You're All I've Got Tonight

40. Bring Me Some Water

Preview of Volume Two: Summer 1987

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#  Part One: Summer 1986
#  I Love Rock and Roll

After soundcheck me and Tollman and Doug smoked a little weed in the back room. That is, they smoked and I faked it. Tollman handed me the joint, and I cupped it and did what I thought was a pretty convincing inhaling act. Tollman wasted his toke talking mile-a-minute like always, but that was Tollman for you.

"... should be a hoppin' crowd tonight, boy, you see all them hogs out there?" he said. His stringy blond bangs hung over his eyes and you could never tell where he was looking. Tollman was a head case. He grew up in Providence, went to the Quaker prep school over the hill, did maybe a couple of years of college. Now, Mr. Alexander Tollman did everything anti-preppie, like calling motorcycles "hogs" and singing in a metal band. "They all out there with them hogbitch girlfriends on the back," he was saying. Jeez.

Doug took a deep drag and nodded while he held his smoke. I pretended to.

"You ready?" Tollman said, pointing at me with the joint before pinching it up to his lips.

I nodded some more. As long as I kept thinking I was relaxed and that everything was going smoothly, then it probably was. Not like this was a difficult gig, two twelve song sets of cover songs and some originals that sounded just like them. One night only, cash under the table. I'd told them I'd do it this afternoon when Tollman had stopped by the Aquarium to pick up some demo tapes.

That's why I wasn't toking with the guys. Weed sometimes flips me into this kind of paranoid nothing-is-right headspace. And that was something I didn't want tonight, easy gig or no.

I passed the roach to Doug, slid off the stack of beer cases I was sitting on, and my feet hit the ground kind of hard.

"Hey, where you going?" Tollman.

I made a tuning peg twist with my empty fingers.

"We got to get you dressed, cowboy." With his eyes curtained behind his hair, his smile was wicked.

"Right now?"

"Come on." He looked me up and down. I was in my usual clothes—canvas hi-tops, blue jeans, plain black t-shirt. My denim jacket was tied by the arms around my waist.

"What size feet ya got?"

"Nine?" I hedged.

"Doug, you a nine?"

Doug, who was considerably taller and heftier than either Tollman or me, held up his hands and laughed. "Try eleven and a half."

"Shit. Here, try these on." Tollman dug a pair of short, flat-heeled black boots out of his gym bag and held them out to me. I took them. Up close, Tollman had wrinkles around his mouth and eyes. He acted twenty five, but I was pretty sure we were talking more like forty. Scary, to think that he was twice my age and still playing Van Halen and AC/DC covers in places like this. The other reason I thought him older was his wife picked him up at the Aquarium the other day in a stationwagon--two almost-teen type kids in the backseat. Okay, he could be like thirty two, if he'd spawned when he was like twenty. I didn't know and I didn't want to know.

I put the boots on. They fit, and didn't even look that bad.

"Dunno, Alex. Kinda new wave-y," Doug said, his face tilted like he was trying to look at the boots without actually looking at them.

"They're better than what he had on," Tollman put in. "And what's new wave-y about them?"

"Aren't those the boots you used to wear in--"

"What else do you think he needs?" Tollman tapped his own booted foot on the floor and talked extra loud in an obvious attempt to change the subject. He'd gotten dressed before sound check and was already in skin tight spandex with a leopard print vest. "The jeans and shirt are kinda dumpy."

"Jeans look okay tucked into the boots," Doug said, "even if the boots are a little... Huey Lewis."

"Look," Tollman said to me. "Just keep the boots. I never wear 'em anymore." He had buckskin color suede ones on now, with a pointy toe and a bit of a heel that clicked when he walked. "Take off your shirt." He rummaged in the bag and pulled out something that looked like a loose butterfly net.

I hadn't moved.

"Go on, try it."

I pulled my shirt off and accepted the net. When I held it up I could make out arm holes. It was some kind of string vest and when it was drawn tight it made me look like I'd played cat's cradle in a tornado.

"Jeez, Tollman, he's as skinny as you."

"Well, he'll fit right in."

I hoped the dim backroom bulb hid my blushing. There was, shall we say, something intensely uncomfortable about about standing there with them staring at me.

"I still say the jeans are faggy," Tollman said and I felt a lump in my throat. What was I going to say?

Doug snorted. "You gonna lend him some spandex, too? Or maybe just a sock?"

We all laughed at that--if it hadn't been about me I might have even thought it was funny. Somewhere in my brain I was trying to come up a witty comeback but all I could really think was: jeezus but heavy metal guys have the weirdest sense of what's "faggy" and what's not.

Tollman had his hand on his chin, like that helped him think. Then his hand migrated up his face and held his hair on the top of his head, which probably did help him see. "I don't know."

Doug yawned. "Jeezus, Tollman, it's just for one night. You won't even see half of him behind the guitar."

"All right. Fine." He rummaged in his bag again. "Now for makeup." He held up a handful of round plastic tubes.

Doug gave me a slap on the back with his meaty bass-player hand. I must have looked sort of ill because he said, "Don't worry, it don't hurt."

There was a mirror in the men's room and they marched me to it like I was going to the gallows.

#  Invisible Touch

I always thought that eye makeup would be as garish and obvious to the wearer as it was to an onlooker—like horn-rimmed glasses or mirror shades or something. I was wrong; once the mascara and eyeliner and eyebrow pencil and whatever else were on, I forgot about them. Which meant that I got a mild shock every time I glimpsed my cats-cradled self in the men's room mirror. My hair wasn't long enough for head-banging and not the slightest bit wavy, so Tollman had slicked it back with some sort of goop. He'd tied a brightly colored scarf to each of my upper arms, too. I may be scrawny but if there's one thing playing a lot of guitar gives you it's biceps.

I tried to be invisible as I searched along the back of the stage in the dim lights for a good place to tape a set list for myself. The crowd was out there, drinking, smoking, laughing, on the other side of a chain link fence that separated stage from dance floor. The club was called "The Cage" and I felt like a circus animal up there, dressed in orange and fluorescent pink, getting ready to play a gig with a band with the fucked-up-edly spelled name of Tygerz Claw. (I think the theory was that if it worked for Def Leppard, and Led Zeppelin before them, it could work for these guys, but I didn't ask.) The Cage was a far cry from the home town bar where I'd played as a kid; in fact I'd call it downright scuzzy. They had Metal Night every Thursday, and Doors and Zep cover bands on weekends, and punk all-ages shows on Sunday afternoons, and for a town like Providence--which had a lot of local music and some legendary great clubs--the Cage was about as low as it got prestige-wise.

All of which I was trying hard not to think about, and which I would forget as soon as we started to play. I taped down my set list and took a quick look at my guitar in the stand, a Korean-made Fender Strat that had been mine since Jersey. It was the kind of guitar a teenager could afford by working after school at a dinky suburban music store, trading work for equipment and lessons because there was no one else around to teach him and because he wanted to spend as little time at home as possible. I resisted the urge to pick the guitar up and play a little, just to make sure everything was working right. The clock on the wall, caged in its own round mesh like the clocks on school basketball courts, said it was 8:35.

The set times were listed as 9pm and 11pm but of course the management wouldn't let us on until ten, on the universal night-club theory that people would drink more while waiting around. I stood off to the side of the stage while fully-clothed bouncers and stage crew type guys, with heavy bundles of keys hung from their belts, went up there from time to time with self-important strides. I wished I was wearing a shirt and jeans. I wished I had something to do to kill the time. I didn't want to approach the bar for a beer and risk getting asked for I.D. They didn't know me in here and the bartenders didn't know I was in the band. That left me with two options—stand out here in the jukebox noise shuffling my feet, or sit in the backroom with the guys more. I'd never learned to smoke (cigarettes, that is) and vaguely wished I'd brought my other guitar, my school guitar, an $800 Yamaha classical with rosewood fretboard and faux ivory pegs, to play. (I'd have to be crazy to bring it to a place like this, though.)

I decided standing around brooding about what to do other than stand around was another easy way to get sucked into a downward spiral, so I went back to the guys. Dave, the guitar player who'd broken his hand and who I was replacing tonight, had arrived and was regaling the others with the story of a motorcycle accident. From what he was saying this wasn't the accident that hurt his hand but was from a couple of years ago. He waved a Rolling Rock in the hand that had no cast. Dave wasn't gigging tonight but he was dressed like he could have been, a scarf around his hair, artfully ripped jeans over colorful tights, a red tank top cut down the sides. Ron, the drummer, was tapping his sticks on his thighs like he was playing along to a Walkman, though he wasn't wearing one. The song coming from the overtaxed PA system in the club was Quiet Riot "Cum On Feel the Noize" (fucked up spelling not being limited to band names) and I could see that wasn't what Ron was playing. Dave and Doug got talking about some other people they knew, and Tollman wanted to know how Dave's brother was doing in the machine shop where he worked, and so on and so forth. I was pretty used to sitting around with a bunch of people a lot older than me, listening to them talk, I guess. I sat there, occasionally laughing in the right places, while the other three shot the shit, Ron counted out time on his leg and we all waited for ten o'clock to roll around.

Later, I would stand at the sink wondering what to do about the mess all the inevitable head thrashing and sweat had made of my hair. By halfway through the second song the arrangement of goop disintegrated, leaving my hair hanging in pointy, wet-looking strands all around my head that poked me once the stuff dried. I would stand there at the mirror and debate the merits of running my wet hands through it or just dunking my head into the sink. Add to this the fact that as we we'd come off stage I'd made a terrible mistake: rubbing the sweat out of my eye with the back of my hand and, not knowing better, giving myself a raccoon eye. This would all happen before midnight. The set itself was fine.

#  Another Lost Classic

I was just wadding up a piece of toilet paper and wiping it under my eye when the door to the men's room opened, bringing a blast of club/bar noise with it: jukebox pumped through the PA, bottles clinking, people talking in that rowdy bar way. The wad of paper came away from my skin horrifyingly sooty-looking. Sigh. Despite having played a pretty fucking good set, actually, and having abstained from drugs, I was feeling pretty low at that moment, tired, unsure why I was there, exactly the mindset I'd been trying to avoid. Fuck that, I was telling myself. Don't be so fucking serious all the time. It was a ripping fun stupid wild set, full of gut-punching guitar solos like nobody writes anymore, and bikers' girfriends danced on the floor with plastic cups of beer in their hands while the bikers themselves nodded their heads with the riffs. It was the most fun I'd had in weeks. What's wrong with that?

That's what I was thinking when I looked up and saw who had come into the restroom. Two guys, one was Dave, who had to put his beer down before he could start trying to unzip his fly with his one good hand. The other one was someone I hadn't seen in a long time.

He was staring at me in shock and my face probably went through the same contortions, from disbelief (holy shit) through a kind of happy (well, gosh...) to a kind of guarded look (long time no see, huh pal?).

"Remo," I said. He looked like he hadn't changed, same buckskin-colored denim jacket and jeans, his hair and skin sandy to match the jacket, his eyes blue to match the pants. Remo was perpetually thirty nine.

"Daron," he replied. Then he took a step closer and held out his hand and we shook, which felt stupidly formal. I mean, Remo wasn't the huggy type anyway, and maybe he was afraid to get soot all over himself, but for someone who had once been like my uncle or my godfather or at least a friend, goddammit, the handshake was wrong. We were both smiling those fake smiles that just curl your lips and nothing else. It had been what, four years since we'd seen each other? But it felt like forty.

I started it. "Jeez, Rem', whatcha doing here?" Meaning, what are you doing in Providence and also, what are you doing in a dumpy beer bar like The Cage. I thought I did a pretty good job of keeping my voice neutral, but I found myself high strung with anger. We hadn't parted on great terms and in four years I was pretty sure I had graduated from surly teen to genuine angry young man. "Didn't think this'd be your kind of place."

"I was going to say the same thing to you," he said, his head a little sideways, giving me the same look Doug had given those fucking boots. Askance.

Anger doesn't lend itself to a witty rejoinder. I said something like "Fuck you," and Doug's head whipped toward us.

"Whoa son, I know you're still sore..."

"Don't call me son, and don't be giving me that judgemental look, you..."

"...at least give me a chance to say something before you tear me a new..."

"...what do you have to say about it anyway? Or did you think I was going to play blues all my life after you took off?" Sore was a good word for how I felt, kind of rubbed raw and stiff.

Doug stepped up behind me, though his big-brotherish stance was kind of ruined by his ineffectual attempts to zip himself back up. "You know this guy?"

"Yeah." I wasn't sure how to describe who Remo was in relation to me. It was easy, though, to describe him in general terms. Public terms. "This is Remo Cutler, from Nomad."

Dave's mouth opened and he went from tough guy to pussycat in an instant. "No shit, man, pleased to meet you! I listen to the Gary's Garage album all the time. I'm Dave." He held out the hand with the cast on it and then pulled it back and offered his left. Remo shook.

"Hey, I bet the other guys would love to meet you, too," Dave said, his hand on the door.

Remo never blushed, just smiled wryly as he eyed the urinal. "I, uh, I did come in here for a reason..."

"Oh yeah, sure, of course," Dave was saying as he backed out into the noise of the club. "Daron, bring him on backstage. We got beer."

When the door closed, Remo turned to me. I stood there, not sure what to say or what to do. The standoff was pretty much deflated. He eyed my getup and I resisted the urge to cross my arms over my chest. I was still feeling burned, but didn't have as much of an urge to yell at him.

"So, uh, how are you?" he tried.

"I'm working." No thanks to you, I thought. Ooh, that sounded bitter. Immature, even. So I didn't say it.

"You call this working? Daron, I ... oh, Christ, I have to say this. You look like a five dollar whore. I hope you know that. It's breaking my heart here, seeing you like this."

"Well, gee, Rem', it's really great to see you, too, after all this time." This was _not_ happening. This was like one of those nightmares where you show up for the recital and they tell you at the last minute it's not going to be a guitar recital, it's going to be a trombone recital instead, and there's just you and this stupid-looking brass thing and a host of deans staring at you. I'd been having that kind a lot lately, ever since the bill for next semester's tuition arrived. I could not stand there and let him put me down even if I agreed with him. I knew what I looked like. I turned around and walked out.

In the club it was more loud guitar riffs and thunderous drums on tape. Men in leather jackets held their dates around the waist, heavy-set older guys sat at the bar like fixtures, a couple of women dressed more or less like me but with glittery bras on and very tall teased hair stood around the women's room door with bottles of beer in their hands, laughing and clutching one another's arms with long red-nailed fingers. I went back to the wall of beer cases and pushed open the dressing room door. Unlike the men's room, the dressing room wasn't insulated from the club noise because the wall didn't run all the way to the ceiling. The room was stacked with black road cases with TYGERZ stencilled onto them. A flimsy card table held various pieces of band clothing, dry shirts, jackets, street shoes.

Remo was, of course, right behind me.

"Daron."

I stood in the doorway, wishing I had the Strat on. "What."

Remo was holding up his hands like he was either surrendering or trying to stop an oncoming truck. "Daron, hang on, jeezus." He had to shout to be heard. "I haven't seen you in like three years and I don't want to spend it in a dust-up with you. At least give me a chance to apologize."

"If you want to apologize, you can do it after the second set." I was being cruel now, if I was going to make him sit through Tollman's rendition of David Lee Roth for an hour.

I was surprised he agreed so readily. "Okay. Okay." He held up one hand like he was waving. "Meet you right here."

I nodded. Maybe in an hour I'd be feeling better. There was another hour of crazed stage play still to go. Remo went back into the crowd and I shut the door behind me.

Dave handed me an unopened Rolling Rock from the band stash and a lighter. I used the lighter to pry off the lid.

"Hey," said Ron, "you shouldn't be drinking."

I shrugged. I'd been nineteen for a couple of months. There wasn't much use lying about my age since I didn't have any advantages like height or good facial hair. I was five foot four, underfed, still wearing the clothes I'd worn in high school because they were what I had. "It ain't my first beer, Ron."

"I was only kidding," he said. He could hold a pair of sticks in the same hand as his beer, and drink, and not get himself in the eyeball with the sticks. "You look like you got punched in the eye."

"Thanks." I kind of wondered why Ron carried his sticks everywhere.

Dave tipped his bottle toward the door. "What happened to your friend?"

"He's constipated," I said.

#  Always Something There to Remind Me

I took Remo to The Brickhouse, a blues bar tucked on the edge of Providence's vacant downtown where the bouncers knew me and wouldn't bug me about not having ID. I was in there all the time. This was a kind of rough place, a different set of townies from the Cage, with regular brawls, but the music was usually good, blues in the Stevie Ray Vaughn mold which I knew Remo would like. Maybe that meant I wanted to make peace, or at least I felt a little guilty for making him sit through another hour of glam metal covers. I got a root beer in the bottle from the bartender, Remo got a shot of Scotch and paid for both. We sat down on a bench along the back wall and watched the band play for a while. It was almost like old times there except for the kind of sick feeling I had in my chest every time I thought about what I wanted to say. Maybe that's where that expression comes from, to get something off your chest. I might write a song about it later.

It was too loud to talk and Remo was starting to look impatient, so I pointed out a bouncer, a stocky, beer-bellied guy carrying an air horn. I put my hands over my ears and Remo did the same, watching me. The band finished their set, saying their thank-you-goodnights and then exiting. The crowd, mostly muscley-looking older guys (this was not a collegey kind of place) clapped and cheered for an encore. The bouncer was shouting something we couldn't make out. The guys pressed the stage. Then the bouncer let loose with the air horn, driving the crowd back. His mouth moved with unheard words while he blasted them. The stubborn men shouted for a while more and then the group broke up, shuffling back to the bar for another drink or heading out the door.

"What was that all about?" Remo said when we took our hands down.

"City says the band has to be off the stage by one-thirty on the dot even though the bar can stay open until two."

"Is it always like that in here?" He had a bemused look on his face.

"Pretty much." I took a pull on the root beer and looked around. The Brickhouse wasn't any more like our old home town place than the Cage was, I guess. Maddie'd never had to chase the crowd out with a horn, that's for sure. "So. Where were we..."

"I think you were getting ready to tear me a new asshole for leaving you behind in Jersey four years ago."

Put like that, the anger stuck in my craw. "Oh yeah," I said. "That's right."

"I mean, come on, Daron, you were fifteen. What, was I going to kidnap you or something so you could come with us? The deal was done. Proverbial fame beckoned. So we went. If there'd been some way to take you along..."

"I know." Of course he was right, but that didn't ease the itchy old feeling of abandonment. "But you never..." I tried to say it without choking. "I didn't understand why you had to move to LA. Once you were gone, there was no... _Safe Haven_ for me, anymore." I couldn't help but use the title of a song I'd played with them, those years ago.

Remo looked pained—it was a cheap shot, but I had known that would get him. "Jeezus, kiddo..."

"Don't call me that," I said, too sharply. "I know you did what you had to. I wasn't expecting to... I mean, I knew that playing with you guys on Wednesday nights and weekends wasn't like I was, like, integral or anything."

"You shut your mouth," he said, but in a kind way. "If you'd been any older, if you'd..." He shook his head and sipped his scotch. "What did you think you were, our mascot or something?" He was chuckling. "Oh sure, when you were like twelve, it was cute, getting you up there. But." He took a deep breath. Sitting side by side like we were it was hard to look directly at each other. "You got wronged, all right? Can we leave it at that?"

"Why, is there more to the story than that?"

He jumped a little in his seat, like I'd pricked him with a pin. "I'm just not into assigning blame or whatever. What's my responsibility, I apologize for it." He sipped his scotch while his eyes roamed over the thinning crowd. "I didn't come here to talk about all that old stuff, anyway. I gotta know, what the hell are you doing in Rhode Island? And..." He stopped but I knew he wanted to say: and playing in a cheesy metal cover band looking like a five-dollar whore. "Digger said something about you going to school but..."

"But you never asked him where." That was a low blow, I saw him wince out of the corner of my eye. "Conservatory. I'm studying classical guitar at RIMCon."

"Classy."

"Or I was." I stole a glance at him and his eyebrows were knit together in disapproval. "I was here on grant money, basically."

"Scholarship?"

"Sort of. I came up in the fall of 85. I'm supposed to go back in September for my third semester."

"You don't sound too sure about that."

I didn't want to tell him my problems. You'd think, me being bitter and all, that I'd want to paint as pathetic a picture for him as I could, but no. I wanted him to think I could make it on my own. "I'm working at a recording studio. I'm doing these fill in gigs sometimes." I wiped bottle condensation from my hand to my jeans. "There's really no street musicians in Providence to speak of..."

"Hey, kiddo, don't tell me you're busking for food money."

"Don't call me kid. And I just said there's no busking in Providence. The place doesn't have the foot traffic for it."

He took a bigger swallow of the whiskey and turned on the bench to face me as best he could. "So you got out of New Jersey on this scholarship, landed here, and now you're hard up for cash."

"I am not hard up."

"Daron."

"Okay, so the economy sucks here and even bands with steady work can't make enough to live on, unless you count the wedding bands, and even the studios are losing money because nobody can afford to record..."

"And you're telling me your scholarship doesn't cover what you need."

"No. It was a fixed amount of money and it's basically gone." I drained the last of the foam out of my bottle and set it down on the bench with a clunk.

"Do you want to go back? To school, I mean."

"I think so. There's a lot to learn still. And Bart's got another year to go, too."

"Bart?"

"My bass player." And best friend. The loud growl of motorcycles rumbled the wall behind us and I heard a car honk.

"So you have a band."

Okay, I smiled. "Yeah, I have a band." I stared into the dark hole of my bottle. "Of course, I have a band. I mean, what's the point of living, right?"

"Hot diggety." He was fishing in the breast pocket of his denim jacket. "You do have a demo tape, right? Here, would you send me one?"

I fished in my own pocket and pulled out a cassette. "Here." I traded it for his business card.

"Always prepared."

I sat back, realizing that the thing, whatever it had been, was off my chest. "I was never a Boy Scout and neither were you."

He put the tape into his own pocket and patted it like it was something precious. "It's been forever since I've heard you play."

"It's been about forty five minutes, actually."

He gave me a cocked eyebrow, a touch of consternation. "I mean really play."

"Just giving you shit," I said, and couldn't help but smirk. "My address and number are on there. Though I don't know how much longer I'll be there."

"And it's not like you can ask Digger for money. Or Claire."

I shrugged. My mother had hated me playing the guitar so much she'd forbid me to even practice in the house. And she held the purse strings in the family, so appealing to my father wasn't likely to do any good. Besides, begging him for money was one thing I never wanted to do. "I could ask, I guess, but I don't think it'd do any good."

"You mean you know where to get a hold of Digger?"

I blinked. "Isn't he at home?"

"Last I heard from him was, what, six months ago or so. He said he was..." Remo trailed off and stared at me.

I must have looked like I'd been hit by a car or something. I said it aloud. "He did it. He left her."

Remo was nodding.

"Holy fuck." I decided to look at the floor for a while. "And does the sonofabtich let me know? No." The abandonment wound sliced open again. Some night this is turning out to be, eh, Daron? "Oh, that motherfucker."

"He's been incommunicado. Claire had the phone at the house disconnected, they just hung up on me when I asked for him at the store." Remo put a hand on my shoulder. "I thought you knew."

"This is what I get for not calling home more often," I said, though I didn't mean it. Claire would always be the one who answered and she more or less treated me like a stranger ever since I moved out. Hell, she treated me like a stranger when I lived there. And what would I have said to her, or to Digger—hey, I'm broke and whoring myself out to poodle-hair bands? Yeah right. Oh, and by the way, I'm living a life of sin and perversion, too. Jeezus.

Remo was staring at me, not blankly, more like he was concentrating very hard, or trying to make some kind of decision.

"Well, anyway," I said. "I guess I'll be looking into McDonalds or something next. As soon as I get the money saved up, I can go back to classes. Or, I don't know, maybe I'll move."

"What about the band?"

My shoulders sagged. "Shit, Remo, I don't know."

"How much money are we talking, here?"

I held up a hand to stop him. "No. I know I was guilt tripping you earlier but don't make me a loan because of that."

"What do I look like, a charity ward?" he said, and it sounded like the old Remo. "Let me finish. How much do you need?"

"About three thousand for the semester." I was afraid to look at him now, afraid to look too eager, too needy.

"You been keeping up on the latest in live audio?"

"I do what I can."

"You want a road gig as a guitar tech?"

"Are we talking in theory or in reality? Do you have some friends who need someone or something?" I was trying not to hope too hard because I always end up slapped down and disappointed when I do.

"Yeah, there's this pretty cool band who are doing a warm-up tour in July, ten dates or so, starts on the West Coast and finishes up in Boston."

"I need the money by August 30th." We were practically the only ones in the place now. The clink of empties being collected and glasses washed came from the bar. "So who is this band and will I get along with them?"

"Daron, don't be thick. I'm talking about Nomad."

"Well, jeezus, why didn't you say so." Now I looked at him. He had this big shit-eating grin on his face and I couldn't help but feel a jolt of excitement. When I started to talk my tongue got all in my way. "Will I, I mean, will you need any, like, backup playing?"

"Jeezus, you want everything don't you."

"You bet I do."

"Okay, three thousand bucks, I'll put you in the set somewhere, and, shit, I'll probably have to get you a guitar, too."

"You don't have to..."

"Shut up when I'm being nice. Will you do it?"

I held out my hand to shake and he took it. "Tell me when I leave."

"We hit the road July 14th. I'll want you in LA by the first to rehearse with us."

"That's in like two weeks, Reem."

"Just tell me where to mail the plane ticket."

"You got it."

I didn't know what to say after that but it didn't seem like anything more had to be said. I walked him back to his hotel (There being only one major hotel in downtown Providence, that's what size city we're talking about here.) and we took turns carrying the Strat in its case. A fishy smell came from the river which ran mostly under the city and we walked through Kennedy Plaza with night summer breeze tousling my partially de-gelled hair. There were so many things I wanted to know now, things I wanted to talk to him about, like what it was like to tour around the world, to share a bill with Stevie Ray Vaughn or Bruce Springsteen, to appear in advertisements in guitar mags. There were so many things I wanted to tell him about, things that had happened after he'd left, things I'd learned. But they were all things that could wait two weeks and it felt good not to talk, too. The something was off of my chest and, as long as I didn't think about Digger, I felt damn good.

#  Promises, Promises

Not thinking about Digger was harder than usual. After I left Remo at his hotel, I walked back to the Aquarium first, to drop off the Strat there, which gave me twenty minutes to listen to Tollman's boots click on the sidewalk and figure out how I felt about the whole thing. I made my way along North Main, past darkened shops and quiet brownstones, toward the water. There was no one else on the street, no cars, no taxis, though I saw a rat scuttle for the sewer at my approach. Even in June there was a middle of the night chill and I buttoned the bottom buttons of my jacket.

I remembered one night when I was probably eleven years old, the first year Digger started taking me with him when he would sneak out of the house at night, sitting on a barstool at Maddie's with a glass of root beer in a real beer mug and my feet twisted in the rungs, Digger next to me ordering another Boilermaker. Sometimes when we snuck out it was to see Remo play or to meet Digger's cronies for poker night, but sometimes we just went out and hung around Madison's and once or twice Digger tried to teach me to shoot pool. This was one of those nights when there was no agenda, and Maddie and Digger talked about baseball and whatever else. And then at one point he leaned over to me and he said "Hey, kiddo, whatya think? Maybe you and me, should just take off and leave them womenfolk behind."

I probably said something like sure thing.

"That's right, I'll take you with me. We'll move to the city and go out every night of the week." I can see him saying it in my mind like a movie that I can rewind and play again and again. Stupid, I thought to myself, what kind of promise is that to make to an eleven year old kid? And what kind of stupid are you to still be thinking about it? I doubt my memory of it, even. In the movie of my memory he's still wearing a brown suit jacket and tie, the tie all loose around his neck, white dress shirt unbuttoned, the clothes he wore to work in the shoe store. But he usually took them off before we went out—he was usually out of that stuff before dinner time. I don't know. Maybe I'm making the whole thing up, but I don't think so.

I tried to remember if he'd ever said anything like that again, but I don't think he did. He never talked about leaving Claire in front of me after that, though he argued with her all the time--no, not argued, they _fought_ but it wasn't really like an argument with some kind of point that could be won. Maybe that night they'd started fighting before dinner, and he'd tuned her out by parking himself in front of the TV set. Maybe he didn't even eat dinner with us, just sat there like a zombie, not answering her, not acknowledging anyone, not bothering to go upstairs and change his clothes or anything, until after we were put to bed and she was asleep. That wouldn't have been the first time, if it was. But I don't have a clear memory of the evening's events before that moment in the bar, the foam of the root beer tickling my nose and the smell of booze on Digger's breath as he conspired with me.

Sad to think that was the closest we had ever been. For a couple of years the sneaking out was our secret; after Claire would mudpack her face or whatever and get in bed with earplugs on (because he snored, she said), Digger would get me out of my pj's and into jeans and we'd walk down to the main road where Remo or some other friend would pick us up, or we could walk all the way to town center, past the shoe store, to Maddie's. Yeah, when I was eleven, I thought my dad was the coolest. But by the time I turned fourteen or so, we stopped getting along so well.

I went around to the back of a brick building and unlocked the door to the Aquarium, punched a few numbers on the alarm pad (5-4-42, Bud, the owner's birthday) and went in. The lights were off and the clock radio on the reception desk glowed blue: 3:05. I untied my sneakers from the handle and slid the Strat case into the hall closet. I thought about leaving Bud a note that I'd have to take a couple of weeks off, but I could just tell him tomorrow. It's not like he had money to pay me most of the time anyway. Not that I wouldn't have taken steady pay if it had been available, but I needed the experience.

I was tempted to phone Bart from there, to tell him about the gig and what all else. I went around to the receptionist side of the desk, which was fairly well-tiled with colored squares of paper with notes written on them. I didn't know if they were the sticky kind or if they'd all move if I accidentally swept my arm across the desk. I sat in the chair without disturbing anything. I hadn't talked to Bart for like two weeks, not since he'd gone to Cape Cod with his father and step-mom. I might have called if it hadn't been quite so late and if I had been sure I remembered the number. I wanted to ask him if he'd give me a ride to the airport, too. It'd have to wait until tomorrow.

If I started home right away, I'd be there by 3:30, but somehow once I sat down behind the desk I didn't want to get up. I changed into my sneakers and laid my head carefully on top of Candy's many notes.

Digger could be kind of hostile to anyone who crossed him--Claire, his cronies, gas station attendants--depending on his mood. Sometimes he was hostile when he was drunk, sometimes only until he got drunk. Sitting there, I started to feel angry again.

The day I'd left home had been one of those television-in-a-tie kind of days, when something Claire had said when he got home, or maybe even something grandad had said at the store, had set him off. He was drinking in the house, which was rare, sitting on the couch with a bottle of Scotch on the coffee table and a juice tumbler, leaning forward every now and then to pour a measure of Scotch into the glass in this very deliberate way. Then he'd sit back and sip and watch, his eyes never leaving the TV screen like the thing he was watching was so important to him that he couldn't bear to look away from it. I don't think he even changed the channel: commercials, news, sitcoms, he sat through it all. Claire had long ago given up trying to penetrate his resolve once he got like that. She was in the kitchen cooking something I wanted no part of eating. If I remember it all correctly, my goal was to start walking to the bus station before Janine came home from her job. My other older sister, Lilibeth, was already at college. I don't know where Courtney was. Maybe Claire had signed her up for some class or something. I don't know. I put my stuff together, the Strat in its case, clothes and some of the stuff I wanted to keep crammed into a duffel bag, and piled them by the front door.

Digger never looked up once. I stood by the couch, waiting for him to look up. I pretended to be watching the show with him for a few minutes. When a commercial came on, I turned to say something, but he was staring with a clenched-jaw intensity that made me not. I went to the kitchen.

I said to Claire, "I'm going."

"What do you mean, you're going? We don't eat for another half an hour." She had her long chestnut hair in a tight bun at the back of her head. I'd seen her hair down maybe twice since I was ten years old.

"Mom, I told you, I'm going on a bus at 6:15."

"Don't be ridiculous. You can't leave without sitting down to a meal with the family." Claire had this way of ignoring reality she didn't like, like the fact that none of my sisters were home, or there was no way Digger was sitting down to eat with any of us that night, or the fact that I was not going to, at the last second, turn into a dutiful son that she could love instead of treating like a tenant. (Did I mention she'd tried to charge me rent that summer?) "What will people _say_."

"They won't say a damn thing if you don't tell them." This was as close to a conversation as she and I had come in months. "Really, Mom, it's time for me to go. So you can quit worrying about what the neighbors think of me."

"Well, thank goodness for that," she said, her face pinched. "Maybe with only one of you around here there'll finally be some peace."

I sagged. There was something unfair about the fact that just when I'd stopped getting along with Digger, Claire had decided that I was "turning out just like him" and had considered us partners in crime from then on. "Whatever you say, Ma. So glad I could do you a favor."

She muttered something I couldn't hear and couldn't guess and turned her back to me, ostensibly to stir something on the stove.

I went back to Digger. The muttering was contagious, I guess, because he had started muttering at the television. The news was on, which meant I really had to get moving to catch that bus. He was watching one of the local cable stations, channel 68 or something, local news. I recognized a shot of my high school. "Hey man, I'm outta here," I ventured.

A TV news announcer was describing something about funding cuts in the local school systems, as they showed footage of two school teams I didn't recognize playing soccer. "Aw shit," Digger said to himself, or to the television, "stupid fucking faggots can you believe that."

"I gotta go."

"What are you, stupid? You can't cut sports programs, end up with a bunch of nervous nellies."

This was a pretty weird thing to hear Digger, whose only sport was poker, say. "Dad," I finally said, "I gotta say goodbye."

He usually yelled at me for calling him Dad. This time he didn't even look up. The next news story was about a local fire fighter who was forced to resign when they learned he was gay. I did not stay around to hear what Digger had to say about that. I picked up my bags and I was gone.

And I guess eventually he had done the same, if what Remo said was true. I sat up because I was starting to laugh and I was afraid to mess up Candy's papers. At that moment it struck me funny that I might, really and truly, never hear from him again. I was pissed at him but laughing at the same time. Maybe he had finally pulled off a con that was big, maybe he'd finally cleaned up in poker, maybe he'd finally had enough and took off without a penny. I didn't care, and it felt good not to care. I moved from the desk chair to the couch and sat there staring at the dark ceiling instead of going home to sleep. In two weeks I'd be on a plane to Los Angeles. _And we'll move to the city and go out every night of the week...._ It sounded like a line from a song.

#  Jet Airliner

If I thought everything would be smooth sailing, or flying, from that point on, I was wrong. Bart and I had a hell of a time pulling up to the terminal because of the weird clusterfuck of road and driveway at TF Green airport, but I hadn't even begun to realize the hassles that awaited a nineteen year old with overlong hair and no driver's license or passport trying to travel. Maybe it was just something about me, but the airline folks decided they wanted proof that I was who was named on the ticket, and were unable to comprehend that not everyone takes Driver Ed when they're sixteen. And besides, I'd grown my hair since then and if I'd had time that week I would have changed my fucking name, anyway.

Eventually a supervisor's supervisor decided my expired RIMCon student ID was good enough and gave me a boarding pass. I went and sat down in the waiting area, at the end of a row of weirdly colored seats, waiting for my flight to take me to LA. A big man in business suit and cowboy hat squeezed by me, his garment bag hanging over his back like a tortoise's shell. Two adults with two children attached stopped in front of me, then circled back the way they came. A loudspeaker overhead called out a string of names, numbers, and cities, all meaningless.

I have dreams sometimes that I am in an airport, or is it a shopping mall? I'm a small child, lost, looking at everyone's knees. It's never the same place twice. Maybe that's why I hate airports. No, that's not why. A uniformed airline employee made an unintelligible announcement into the microphone at the counter. I looked up to see her changing the departure time on the board under 'Flight 235: Los Angeles' from 9:20 to 10:30. I sank down lower in my chair.

I hadn't even reached my seat yet before I got into an argument with a flight attendant over the guitar. His gold name tag read 'Carl' and from his tan skin and blond hair I guessed he must be from Los Angeles. Mr. Neatly Groomed insisted I send it down to be checked with the rest of the luggage. I insisted that it be placed into a compartment in the cabin. "Look, this plane is a DC-10, isn't it?" People were beginning to back up in the aisle while we argued, and I glanced back to see a lot of eyes searching ahead for row numbers and rolling up in heads.

"Yes. But I don't..."

I put on my best grownup voice, my best I'm-not-a-total-idiot voice. "Then I know you have a compartment this will fit in. I booked onto this flight because of that." He pursed his lips at me. Helpless, I resorted to joking. Being aggressive has never gotten me very far. "Look, Carl," I resisted the urge to touch him on the sleeve. "I'm sorry I'm not a trumpet player."

He put both hands around the black case, and gave me half a smile, half a wink, and a motherly pat on the shoulder. "Alright. But let's not have any more trouble out of you, young man."

I sat down hard in my seat. Did I imagine that, or was that a come on? I watched him maneuvering away down the aisle, the black bulk pressed between his hands. I gnawed my thumbnail and tasted salt. I pulled an undersized airline blanket around me and let my hair fall over my face. With my head against the oval window shade, I feigned sleep.

I was not good at ascertaining a man's interest of level in me. Maybe it was a skill that would come with practice. It had been a couple of weeks since I'd last tried to get laid, a difficult affair that involved a tricky bus excursion to Providence's one and only gay bar, a hopeful but fruitless trip to a Brown University dorm, and a long walk alone from College Hill down to where I lived. I'd leave it up to Carl and his suntanned smile, I decided, as the plane moved toward takeoff and I drifted into real sleep.

#  I Love L.A.

Someone once told me everyone is friendlier in warmer climates, and they might have been right. At the terminal Carl pshawed my idea of taking a cab into LA, and told me I was riding with him into town. He drove a white convertible VW bug and lovingly strapped the Strat into the back seat.

With the top down it was impossible to talk so I just soaked up the sun, palm trees, a lot of stuff I'd seen on MTV. I couldn't believe Remo lived in this town and I found it weird that Los Angeles really did look the way it did in movies. Maybe Carl was taking me a particularly scenic route, but I didn't know. When we got to Carl's place he invited me in. His apartment was nowhere near as anally neat as I'd feared it would be. Still, besides a few scattered magazines and unfolded laundry it lacked the clutter of a bachelor pad, as if here on the Left Coast everything had less substance and would evaporate when left unattended. He hung his uniform duds in the closet, and pulled me onto the bed.

If this all seems sudden, that's because it was. I didn't really give myself time to think about fucking it up and for once, let it happen. He didn't want to chit chat once I got my shirt off, things went really fast after that. Or maybe I lost track of time. It wasn't until after we were done that I realized Remo might be wondering where I was. I told Carl I had to get going and he didn't seem surprised or dismayed by my hurry to leave.

A little ways down the street I found a phone on the outside wall of a bar. The sun was setting somewhere on the other side of the building, and I pumped change into the phone and waited. Remo picked it up on the third ring and heard the hum of something in the background like a vaccuum cleaner.

"Hey, Reem, it's me."

"Hey 'me,' how was your flight?"

"A little delayed, but I'm here now."

"Didn't I give you the address? Just catch a cab and I'll pay him when you get here."

"What if they won't take me?"

"What, do you look homeless or something? Call me if there's problem." The machine sound got louder.

"Right." When I hung up, I noticed a sticker for a cab company half-peeled from the phone and dialed them next. All around the bar, separating the parking lot from the walkway, were round concrete posts. I sat on one and watched the sky turn purple, and for a few minutes, I was satisfied.

#  Look At Little Sister

I spent most of the next two weeks in and around Nomad's rehearsal studio, getting reacquainted with the music, learning their set up, and getting to know the guys all over again. Years had passed since I'd last seen any of them, so I wasn't sure what to expect when I saw them again, or more precisely, when they saw me, I should say. I shouldn't have worried. Martin, the drummer, with his giant hands and deep set eyes had wrapped his long arms around me, crushing me tight like I was a long lost cousin rescued from a shipwreck. The Mazel brothers, Alex and Alan, settled for a handshake apiece. By the third or fourth day, when Remo brought in two backup singers to flesh out the lineup, I felt almost like we'd never been apart.

The only person I wasn't sure about was Waldo, the road manager. Waldo was a heavy man with uneven sideburns whose constant vice was chewing gum. Remo had introduced me to him with the vague title of "the new guy." Waldo took him aside, like I wasn't standing right there listening.

"He's how old? Nineteen? Jeezus, Remo, has he got insurance? And I don't suppose he's union, no of course not. What do I look like, a babysitter?"

Remo put a firm hand on his shoulder. "Waldo, he's on my payroll. My payroll. Just see to it he gets a per diem and that you've got room for one extra covered in all the reservations." I didn't believe for a second that they hadn't discussed this ten times before. Waldo nodded, but that suspicious look crept into his eye whenever he looked at me.

The hardest part about being with them was knowing what to do when. Matthew, as it turned out, was Remo's full-time guitar tech, and until we got on the road there wasn't a lot I could do to assist him but once in a while wind strings or tune. Remo arranged the set with me playing on three songs near the end, and the encore pieces. He said there wasn't time to learn more. But he was wrong. I could have learned the whole set in two weeks without straining myself. But it was Remo's show and I was grateful for what chance I was given. So, I spent a lot of time sitting on my ass, not sure what to do with myself. I ended up hanging around a lot with Waldo's assistant and niece, Carynne.

She had wire-straight red hair and cultivated this sort of hippie look with long strings of beads and vests. She latched onto me the first day Waldo had brought her up to rehearsal. Nomad rehearsed in a gigantic studio tucked in the back of an industrial park outside the city. (Actually, I was never sure where the city began and ended; it was kind of all one big sprawl.) The place was like a home away from home for the band, complete with kitchenette, fold-out couches, and an armed guard at the door. Carynne showed me around the building while she told me about other bands she and Waldo had toured with.

"All those bands from the seventies that are trying to make big comebacks now, they're all pigs. Rowdy, obnoxious, and smelly. Although I hear Aerosmith are really nice, now." The guard at the main door waved as we went out into the parking lot. "Robert Plant was okay, too. British guys are very polite and all. He always said 'thank you.'"

I didn't know whether to believe her and I wasn't that interested. I wanted to know what day to day on the road was going to be like. But Carynne didn't want to talk about the work. She wanted to know all about me. We were sitting in the grass outside, enjoying the sun. The sky here was a different kind of blue than we get in the northeast, more uniform. She leaned back on her elbows and squinted. "So how did you get hooked up with Nomad?"

I thought about that. I didn't want to bring up Digger so I settled for, "Remo and me used to play together, before he got famous."

"Cool. Are you going to join Nomad after the tour's done?"

"I doubt it!" I hadn't even considered it. "I've got to go back to school in September."

"Oh. What are you studying?"

"Music." I rested my elbows on my knees.

"Oh, right. Wow, that's great." She rolled onto her side to face me. "You're pretty talented, then."

I shrugged. Her ability to state the obvious and to hold a conversation without any real content amazed me. She put her white arms behind her head and smiled.

"You know who I like? Steve Vai. I'd really love to work with him someday." She nudged me. "Wouldn't you?"

"Yeah, I guess." I lied. I didn't really have a burning desire to work with anyone legendary, except maybe Remo. What would they need me around for? "Maybe Robert Fripp," I added.

She gave me a blank look. When I didn't offer any explanation she nudged me again, then said in a low voice. "I'm really glad you're coming along on this trip." She moved on the grass so when I looked down her face was upside down. "Those old guys can get kind of boring. Waldo never gets jobs with cool bands like REM or Depeche Mode."

I shrugged again, looking out over the parking lot. In the distance I could see the yellow haze of Los Angeles proper.

She touched my chin.

"You look a little like Paul Simon." She turned my face to hers. "No, no you don't. He's short like you, though. You look more like..." Her voice became breathy. "Oh, I don't know." She leaned forward to kiss me, her eyes half-closed, her lips parted.

I pulled back. "Carynne..." What was I supposed to say? I stood up. "I think we better go back inside."

She stayed on the ground. "They don't need us. I've got the keys to Waldo's van."

I searched for any excuse and blurted out a safe truth. "This is kind of sudden."

She smiled, glancing down at my feet. "I knew you were the gentlemanly type," she drawled, her cheeks coloring. She got up, her smile getting wider as she rubbed her neck. "We'll have plenty of time later." Her hand brushed under my chin as she stepped back from me.

I pushed my hands into my pockets.

"Daron!" Martin shouted from the doorway. "We want to run through that blues thing! You want to join in?"

I was already running for the door.

#  More Than A Feeling

Opening night we played to a packed house of 7500 people at a music hall in San Diego. Remo told me we would be playing mostly venues that size or smaller. This was what they called a "warm up tour," to let the band break in new material in front of smaller audiences. In a few months, after the new album was released, they would hit the road again to play major arenas. This tour was ten cities in all, starting in LA and working through the Midwest to finish in Boston. With so many miles between cities and some shows on consecutive days, we would be flying to all but the last three dates. That night, we went straight from the stage to catch the air shuttle to San Francisco.

When we arrived at the airport hotel I was still crusted with sweat and shaking with the aftereffects of an adrenalin high like no other--playing in the clubs was one thing, and this was similar, and yet, so much more. I'd felt the same click as I let the music take over and the energy from the crowd carry me, but man, what energy. I lay my head against the window of the airport van and smiled, thinking I wouldn't mind feeling this way every night for the rest of my life. Martin rubbed me on the shoulder. "Have a good time tonight?"

"The best." The first hour of the set had been sheer hell, as I waited backstage for my cue to come on. But the last half hour more than made up for it. I looked out the window at the hotel entrance. "What are we sitting here for?"

"What do you think this is, a family vacation? We'll go in when we're sure they're ready for us." He rubbed his hands and bugged his eyes like a maniac. "Waldo's getting the keys now." Martin, at ten years older than me, was the youngest in Nomad and had always liked having me around back in Jersey. Some of the times I'd decided not to go home I'd ended up crashed on his couch and most of what I knew about drums I knew from him.

Waldo and Remo emerged from the revolving doors and hurried over to us. Waldo stuck his head in the driver's door window and cracked his gum. "They've mixed up our reservations. Everyone head for the third floor and we'll pass out keys there."

We piled out of the hired vans, shaking and stretching like cats. A few bellmen handled the bags, while Matthew supervised the two man road crew moving the instruments. Carynne crowded me into the elevator. Waldo was arguing with Remo when the doors opened. They were knee-deep in luggage.

Waldo was shaking his hands like they were wet. "I just don't get it. We confirmed the rooms this morning and now, this."

"What's the big deal?" Remo said. "We've got an even number, six double rooms should be enough for tonight. I don't mind doubling up."

Waldo shook his head and stuffed a bunch of plastic keycards into Remo's hands. "Well, then you figure out how to pair it. They promised me at least three singles, and a suite..."

Remo took stock of the crowd that had formed in front of the elevators. "OK, Alex and Alan."

Alan took the key from him. "Check."

"Dolette and Janice." He handed one to the backup singers. I still didn't know which one was which. "Martin, you're with me. And John and Dave, you guys okay?"

"Sure, road crew ought to stick together." Dave took a key.

That left me, Waldo, Matthew and Carynne.

Carynne plucked a key out of Remo's hand. "Daron can stay with me."

Waldo grabbed her hand, pulling the key free. "Pick up your bags," he growled, glaring. "You stay with me." He began dragging her down the hall.

"But you snore! And you always leave the seat up..." She complained all the way to the room and then Waldo shut the door behind them.

Matthew took the last key from Remo. "That leaves you and me kid."

"See you in the morning," Remo said as he picked up his bag from the pile the bellhops had left.

The room was typical: two double beds, TV, postcards. The fact that it was my first time staying in a hotel without my family didn't make the room any more exciting, though I did sort of have an urge to look through all the drawers in the place--for what, I don't know. Matthew lay his jacket onto the bed near the window and immediately lay down next to it. He took a paperback out of the breast pocket and started to read. I sat on the edge of the other bed and took off my shoes. Earlier that day, while we were laying out cables during soundcheck, I had noticed how long his hands were. They looked dignified to me, like they should be holding a pipe and a cane. His mustache, trimmed and sandy, lined his dry, thin lips. His hair was short, but a little overgrown in the back, stray wisps of it curling over his collar. I realized I was staring at him.

He looked up from the book.

I folded my hands in my lap and looked at them instead. "Is it always like this?"

"Like what?" He rolled onto his stomach and propped himself up on his elbows. I watched the arch of his back. "This confused?"

I shrugged. "Remo and Waldo seem to argue about everything."

He smiled, tiny crow's feet creasing the edges of his eyes. "Remo likes to feel that everything is under control. And he's a fanatic about keeping expenses down. I wouldn't be surprised if Remo changed the reservations himself and just didn't tell Waldo about it." He indicated the room with a nod. "Nomad is the lightest traveling band I've ever worked with. And Remo, he just doesn't trust managers. He'd do everything himself, if he could. But he can't."

"He used to," I said. "But it was a lot less to deal with."

Matthew sat up, interested. "Was he always like this?"

"I guess." I shrugged again, shaken by his sudden attention. "He was always laid back on the outside but kind of frantic underneath. He just wanted to make it so badly. I'd think that now he could relax a little."

He nodded. "Do you have recordings of when you played with him?"

"No." I regretted it. "But Remo must. He may travel light, but he never throws anything away."

We both smiled and were quiet for a while. I wanted to hear him talk more, but I couldn't get myself started again. He looked at the book in his hand, and opened his mouth to speak. He hesitated a moment before saying "I get a lot of reading done on these trips." I just watched as he scratched his short sandy hair. "I'm just not the rowdy type." I still hadn't thought of anything to say, so he went on. "Do you want to watch some TV?"

I shook my head.

"Do you want to borrow a book?"

The offer was too generous for me to refuse. "Sure." He went to his bag and pulled out a murder mystery called Death for Credit. I lay down with it and he returned to his bed. But after a chapter or two I was looking at him again. His socks made his feet into sculpted curves. I guessed he must be around thirty-five, but it was hard to tell. Eventually, I interrupted him again. "Matthew?"

"Yes?"

"Can I room with you again tomorrow?"

He graced me with another crinkled, mustache-y smile. "Sure. Sleepy?"

I was. He put down his book and went into the bathroom. I could hear the water running. I hurried to undress and slid under the covers. I was asleep before he came back out.

#  I Ran

Nighttimes were settled then, Matthew and I roomed together most of the time. Everything about it worked out great, at first. I learned a lot about stage tech, and I read a lot of books, and it kept Carynne at a safe distance. Matthew always answered my questions, and kept passing down mysteries he picked up by the armload in every airport we passed through. But after a while I started getting restless. I wanted to go out and look for someone to scratch my itch. But being underage, in an unfamiliar city, traveling with so many people, it was impossible. When I felt courageous, I would masturbate in the bathroom after Matthew had fallen asleep and fantasize about running into another Mr. Neatly Groomed.

Daytimes would have been easier if not for Carynne. Things would be going along great and then she'd switch into flirt mode, giving me a coy smile as she doled out my per diem or trapping me in the window seat of the plane. I tried to act cool. The last thing I wanted was for the others to see me upset. I could picture Remo, shaken with concern, prying into "the problem." And worse, if my resolve was weak enough, I might even tell him. Sometimes when she would start in, if I was on the ball I'd send her off to do some vital errand for me. Gee, Carynne, I'm so glad you're here, would you fetch me another pack of gaffer's tape? When she'd come back to the stage I'd be gone. I felt like such a shit.

In Seattle she tried telling me her "intimate" secrets, to whet my appetite, I suppose, or make me jealous. After she recounted the tale of how she had taken on the whole rhythm section of Battleaxe simultaneously, I began some hard thinking. Suppose I told her the truth? It would save her from being offended and she'd get off my case. But I'd have to make her promise not to tell anyone. That would never work. After all the things she'd told me, I knew no secret would last. And who's to say it would work? Would she take it upon herself to "convert" me? That might be even worse.

In Chicago, she changed her tack, trying to get me alone whenever possible. I tried to be as nice as I could, and still say no. This only encouraged her. She wasn't going to take no for an answer, unless I got nasty about it. I considered it. And what then? She could make life very hard for me, now and in the future. For all I knew, she might spread the rumor that I was queer out of spite. I got tongue-tied when she stood too close, and there was no way I could tell her it wasn't for the reason she thought it was.

In Madison, where we played a summer festival show on the University of Wisconsin campus, Carynne got her chance.

When we arrived at the building it was noon and none of the student crew were ready for us yet. They were still hanging lights and building a drum riser, laying down cables and setting up the monitor board. A small platoon of students in matching t-shirts took our personal gear backstage. Remo suggested we all get something to eat. One of the students directed us to a street nearby where pizza shops and record stores abounded. Everyone scattered.

Carynne, of course, stuck by me. Don't get me wrong, it was sometimes fun to hang around with her. She knew every trivial fact about every rock musician who had ever lived or died. Especially the ones that had died, whom she always referred to by first name, Jimi, Janis, Buddy, Richie, Keith, all except for Lennon. I don't know why. I got a chill thinking about him; was there a psychopathic killer in my future? And would I be remembered by my first name or my last name? I wasn't 100% sure what to do about the last name issue, now that I'd decided to change it. I wanted to owe Digger nothing, not even that.

She and I sat in a little formica square of a restaurant where the air conditioner above the door hummed loud enough to drown out the tinny transistor radio that sat on the service counter. I ate pizza while Carynne poked at a bowl of lettuce they called a salad. She looked around the empty restaurant, then leaned across the table to me. "Did you see the backstage setup?"

"No, I just looked around the hall."

"It's wild, all these little rooms, like little dressing rooms or unused dorm rooms or something. I'll show you when we get back."

"Okay." As soon as I had said it, her smile fixed on me hard, and I knew I'd made a mistake. Dread churned my stomach. But maybe I could still get out of it, maybe the crew would be done by the time we arrived; then we'd have soundcheck, I might be able to keep myself busy until showtime. She was talking now but I wasn't listening.

I could just try to sleep with her, I realized. I tried to rationalize it. What would the harm be? She'd be happy and I'd be off the hook, my secret would be safe, and maybe she'd lose interest in me. I certainly wasn't going to be the technicolor fuck she claimed certain other touring musicians were... I fought back nausea, the pizza heavy in my stomach. If I hated myself for leading her on, I was sure I'd hate myself even more if I went ahead with it. What frightened me most about the thought of it was not that I couldn't go through with it, but realizing that I probably could.

Digger would have. I'd have to think of something else.

"Are you listening to me? I said we should get back." Carynne was tapping her watch.

As we were leaving the restaurant, she slipped her arm around my waist.

Two or three students were lounging at the sound board when we arrived at the hall. There was no sign of anyone else. She pulled me by the hand into the wings and led me up a steep set of winding stairs. Off the narrow corridor there must have been a dozen small rooms, each equipped with a makeup mirror, costume stand, and a low bedframe holding a striped institutional mattress. "Isn't this wild?" she said as she sat down on the cot, shaking her shoulders.

Stalling, I peered out the window and looked into the closet, found it empty. Panic was setting in and it was becoming harder to think. My heart raced. I flipped the light switch on the wall and the ring of lightbulbs around the mirror came on.

She stood up, and kissed me. I froze there, my arms at my sides, but she didn't seem to notice, holding my head by my hair. It disturbed me how soft her lips were. She pulled back and looked at me, smiling. "You don't know how long I've been waiting to do that," she breathed.

Actually, I think I do, I thought, but didn't say. My mouth and brain were still numb. I just stared at her while my mind sank into confusion.

Our heads turned as the door creaked. It was Matthew to my rescue. He poked his sandy head in and looked around, his laminate swinging from his neck on a lanyard. "Hey, I see you found the maze back here, pretty neat, eh?" His T-shirt was worn thin and showed the curve of his chest.

"Yeah," I croaked. "Pretty neat."

He winked. "Well, you two hurry up. We want to start soundcheck in a couple of minutes and I want you," he nodded at me, "doing monitors with the kid they've got here." He looked at Carynne. "Don't worry, I won't tell Waldo." And he backed out the door and shut it before I could say anything more.

Carynne pushed me toward the bed. "I'll just have to give you a blow job, okay?" I sat down hard as she was already yanking on the button of my jeans. "We haven't got time for anything else." Her fingers were cool and smooth against my balls as she pulled my underwear down. I gasped as she took me in her mouth. I clenched my eyes shut and pressed the back of my head against the wall. I was still soft but she was sucking and moving at a furious pace. With my eyes still closed, I imagined it was Matthew kneeling between my legs. She made a little sound in her throat as I got hard. I pretended that her hair on my stomach was Matthew's mustache, bristly and neat. And right up until the moment that I came I kept telling myself I hadn't done anything to deserve this, I hadn't asked her for it and I hadn't agreed to it. But my body said otherwise, need overtook reason, and I came so hard my foot cramped.

I kept my eyes shut, unable to face her. We were both panting. She put a tissue in my hand. At least, I thought, it was over.

I looked up to see her wiping her mouth with another tissue. "We can come back up here during the first half of the set," she said. "I won't make you late."

#  I Fought The Law (And the Law Won)

There was only one way to get out of it, I knew. I had to get away from her. After soundcheck I slipped out the back of the hall, out onto the campus. I wandered around for hours, summer school students and local kids crossing my path where the walkways intersected. I could have been one of them, a kid in a jean-jacket on my way to the library or dining hall or wherever college students went. After dark, I started heading back for the concert hall. Sitting on top of a brick wall outside, I could hear things starting. The muffled sound of drums and bass pulsed through the night air. I hoped no one was worrying about me. If I waited another forty-five minutes, I'd be safe. When I made out the pattern of the drum solo in "May Day," I decided to go back.

I was somewhere below the back wall of the hall. The backstage doors were locked and no one answered my knocking. I had to go around another building to get up to the front. A single student stood in the lobby, his back to the closed double doors. With his crewcut and at-ease stance he looked like a junior soldier boy. Or maybe a football player. I admired his wide shoulders.

"Excuse me," I said as I tried to go past him.

"No admittance." He put a hand on my shoulder.

"Look, the backstage door was locked. I need to get in there."

He looked down at me like he couldn't understand a word I had said. "Look, there's no admittance after the show starts."

I pulled the laminated tag I wore around my neck from under my shirt. It said NOMAD in their signature style, ALL AREAS. "I'm on the crew."

He seemed to think that was funny. "Where's your entertainment committee pass?"

"My what?"

He pointed to a patch of cloth adhered to his pant leg with the university logo on it. "These were passed out after soundcheck to all band, crew, and entourage." SECURITY was handwritten in black magic marker on his.

"Well, I missed that." It was getting late. "Look, I need to get in there, now. I'm supposed to be onstage in ten minutes."

"Yeah, I believe that, too. Get out of here." He moved from foot to foot, as if moving his bulk alone should intimidate me. It did, a little.

The only thing I had to heft was the fact that I was right. "Get me the stage manager."

"I told you I can't open these doors."

"Fuck that! I told you..." I took a step back as he took a step forward.

He flicked my hair off my shoulder with the back of one hand. "Townie punk, you can just get off the campus before I call the campus police."

I backed away from him. He was probably going to grow up to be a very mean and stupid rent-a-cop and I hoped it got him killed someday. But that didn't help me, now.

I went back around to the stage door. There was still no answer. I circled around the building, looking for the door I had slipped out before. Every door was locked. I was pulling and kicking it, trying to force it open when a flashlight interrupted me.

"Hey, there, hold up." The voice came from behind the light. A uniformed man took the beam out of my eyes and stepped forward. "What are you trying to do there?"

He was campus police. I started talking. "I came out this door and it locked behind me. I'm on the stage crew. They need me in there."

He muttered to himself. "Five and a half feet, long brown hair. You're coming with me."

"No! I have to get in there!" Have cops ever been reasonable? "I have a crew pass, see? Just talk to the stage manager and you'll find out. The head technician's name is Matthew..."

He wasn't listening. "Are you going to come along, or do I have to get rough?"

"Somebody's going to be really pissed if you don't let me in there. They're paying me to do a job, here." But he was poking me with the flashlight, herding me toward his car.

"Can I see some I.D."

I produced my RIMCon I.D. from my back pocket.

"Got anything else? Driver's license?"

I shook my head, familiar with this particular problem already. It didn't make a difference. He patted me down for weapons or drugs or something that he didn't find, and put me in the back of his car, talking into his handheld radio. All he'd found in my pockets was a few dollar bills. Then he got in and drove me to a local police station. I guess in the state of Wisconsin it's a crime not to have a driver's license.

He handed me over to a real cop in the lobby and I learned the charge. Vagrancy. The cop made me sit down in a little room with a window and closed the door. I felt like I was an extra in a film and someone had changed all the sets while I wasn't looking. I tried to think back to the exact moment when everything had gone weird on me. But it made me think of Carynne. I had sunk so low I couldn't even have that sinking feeling anymore.

Mr. Uniformed Officer came in and sat down. He didn't even look that old, like he could have been twenty-two or -three if he'd been in civvies. But the uniform changes everything. He was smiling and shaking his head, looking at a paper in his hand. "So, you're the vagrant the CPs dumped on us. Daron Marks."

The sound of my name, my former name, gave me a jolt. I looked at my hands, wondering what they were going to do to me next. "I guess so. What a mess."

"You want to tell me what you were doing on the campus?"

"I'll tell you what I told them and see if it makes more sense to you, okay? Because it's the truth." I forced myself to make eye contact with him. I remember hearing somewhere that people will believe you more readily if you make eye contact. (But I think a politician said it, or maybe it was Digger, so who are you going to believe?) "I'm a member of the traveling stage crew for that band they've got playing on the campus. They didn't give me one of those stupid campus passes. This," I held up the laminate, trying to keep my voice down but only partly succeeding, "is good enough for any professional arena in the States, but some buttheaded student bully..." Cool down, kiddo, I told myself, "wouldn't let me back into the hall once I'd left. I was trying to get back in some other door when the campus cop stopped me."

He shrugged. "You've got less than $20 on you, no identification, and you look, well, you look," he shrugged again, "like a vagrant."

"Since when is it a crime to have less than $20? I've got five bucks worth of pizza in my stomach that I bought just down the street." I felt angry, but he didn't seem to be taking it personally. "Do you believe me?"

"I believe you." He stood up. "The CPs are always dumping people off here. You haven't been arrested. You don't appear intoxicated, armed, mentally unstable, or otherwise dangerous. I'm going to let you go."

"Thanks." It was good news, but relieved as I was I couldn't act happy about it. "How the hell do I get back to the campus?"

He called me a cab and held the door open for me as I got in. "Get yourself a state liquor ID if you don't learn to drive by the time you're twenty-one," he said. "And don't take any wooden nickels."

"Yeah, thanks." I decided I didn't like friendly cops all that much, either.

The cab let me out by the front doors of the concert hall. The doors were wide open, students milling all around. I walked straight through the lobby and no one even looked up to challenge me. Mr. Muscle Brain was gone.

So was almost everyone else. The only person I saw was Matthew, standing by the sound board. I ran up to him.

"Daron! Holy shit, where have you been?" He sounded more relieved than angry and I relaxed a little.

"The damn police picked me up and charged me with vagrancy. I've been all over the fuckin' place." As the knot in my stomach loosened, I realized I was hungry. "They wouldn't let me in the goddam door!"

Matthew put his arm around my shoulders. "Pinheads. Well, Remo just carried on the set without you. It was okay."

"Remo. Oh fuck." I could imagine what Waldo must be saying right now.

Matthew steered me toward backstage. The equipment was already packed. Matthew pointed his nose toward the students lugging cases. "This is great. We have like thirty kids helping out. I haven't had to lift a finger."

"Was Remo worried?"

"About you?" Matthew shrugged. "I guess you better talk to him."

"He's pissed, isn't he."

"He's at the hotel. You and me are the only ones left here. You can talk to him when we get back." He dug in his pockets. "I'll go call us a cab. You keep an eye on these kids." Oh yeah, like any one of them would even listen to me.

#  Message In A Bottle

It was a different cab. This one had that stale, wet smell, like the inside of a shoe. Matthew and I climbed into the cavernous back seat. I put my feet on the seat and hugged my knees. "Is it far?"

"It's a little ways. We're staying by the airport." Matthew pulled on his mustache, smoothing it with one finger. "You know, we wouldn't have even noticed you were gone at first if Carynne hadn't made a big deal out of it. She was pretty upset."

"Oh, no." I wondered what she could have said. I rested my head on my arms. As the cab jostled down the road, my skull felt heavy against them. Too much on my mind.

"Everything alright between you two?" Matthew's eyes were turned toward the window, watching the streetlights go by, but I felt like he was watching me, looking at my insides.

"No." It would have been an obvious lie to say otherwise. "I, she just..." I left it at that.

He continued smoothing his mustache with little downward strokes of his finger. His voice was calm, like a public radio announcer's. "You don't like her much?"

"That's not it. She's great, a lot of fun. But.."

"But...?"

"Is she always like this?" Let's talk about her, I thought, and get the subject off me.

"Like what?"

"So, persistent."

Matthew smiled out of one corner of his mouth. "Sort of. She only comes on tour during the summer--I think she goes to school. Last summer we did that big thing, all those outdoor arenas with opening acts and all. I always thought her thing was to play hard to get, and then lose." He looked at me, now, letting his shoulders curve back against the seat. "She must really have something for you."

"Ah." I buried my face again. I thought all those hours of wandering might have dulled the image in my mind. But no, I could still see her coming toward me, still feel her hands on my thigh.

"Too deep?"

"What?" I looked through my hair to see his lips move.

"Is it too deep for you."

"You mean, am I in the shit too deep?"

"Well, that too. I mean, are you afraid her feelings for you are more than you can handle."

"Well, that's one way to put it." I wondered if Matthew could help me. If he would help me. I might be able to avoid the whole thing if he could keep me busy enough. "I never wanted to get deeply involved. No, that isn't even it. I never even wanted to... to anything! But she sticks to me like a leech! Matthew, what am I going to do?"

The cab turned onto the highway and it became harder to see Matthew's face. But his voice was the same, quiet and calm. "This is a first."

"What do you mean?"

"Just that most guys want to get in bed with her, that's all."

"Well, I guess I'm just not like most guys." That was too close to the truth. I clenched my eyes shut as if that might shut my mouth, too. In the dark, with the hum of the tires and the creak of the seat, it was impossible not to think about Matthew sitting there. My fantasy played inside my eyelids.

His hand touched my shoulder. "Are you alright?"

I wanted to fall over and cry. I wanted him to reach over and hug me and tell me everything was okay. But I said "Yeah, just stressed out is all."

"You could tell her you're not interested." He stopped himself and thought. "But I guess it's too late for that. If I can make that assumption?"

He knew what he'd seen. "I've tried. She seems to like it."

"It's the hard-to-get mentality. She thinks she's playing the other side of the game this time, that's all."

"You sound like you know a lot about her."

"I've been watching." He gave me another half-smile in the light of a passing car. "I have a degree in human behavior."

"Oh." I felt as if his X-ray on me just intensified. "Do you like her?"

His hand went to his face as he smoothed his mustache yet again. His voice dropped low. "She's, you know, not my type."

"She's not my type, either." I felt my jaw go loose then, a silent gasp as the fuller significance of what he'd said sank into my brain. And I'd said the same back to him, already. It wasn't possible. But through the rush of blood in my ears, through the tangle of thoughts trying to figure out where I'd betrayed myself, I thought I heard him whisper "I know."

Frozen, I tried to pretend I wasn't there. Like a deer in the woods, I could be invisible when I wasn't moving. Matthew had folded his hands in his lap. Neither of us moved. The cab driver must have thought we went to sleep.

_She's, you know, not my type._ I could hear him saying it. It could have been my imagination. But I looked at him still as a statue like me and I knew something secret and private had passed between us. We had exchanged hostages and we were both safe.

I uncurled my legs and my breath came out slow and even. "Do you... have a new book for me to read tonight?"

His head twitched toward me like I had hit an ON switch. "I might."

You can't have Matthew, I told myself. If you can't have her, you can't have him either. But I wasn't listening. I stretched in the cab, hearing my shoulders pop. Matthew's finger went to his mustache. I ached for an excuse to touch him.

"Were you scared?" he asked. "When they arrested you, I mean."

"No." I wondered how far the hotel could be. "They didn't really arrest me. They just, detained me, I guess." I leaned my head against the high back of the seat. "Shit. I hope Remo's not too bent out of shape about it."

Matthew watched me stretch. "He'll get over it." He let his voice drop again. "You really are an amazing player. He should be proud of you."

"Thanks."

"I hope we get there soon," he said, and I felt I had him, uncertainty ebbing away as I listened to him talk. "It's late."

We arrived to find the hotel quiet. Matthew got our keys from the desk. I had forgotten my empty stomach, but it growled in reminder. "Think Remo will be asleep?"

"I doubt it. Maybe we'll find him in the bar." Matthew pointed his chin toward the far end of the lobby.

I stopped. "I'll see you upstairs."

"I'll come with you if you want."

"Nah, that's okay. You go on up." I felt myself blush as if it were too bold of me to say it out loud. But he gave me a half-lidded smile and squeezed my hand. I sucked down the adrenalin, watching him saunter away. Yes.

#  Old Man Down the Road

I went into the bar to find Remo and the bartender watching the news on the overhead TV. I pulled up a stool and leaned on the polished counter. "What a disaster tonight was," I said. At first, I hoped I sounded dejected, but buoyed by Matthew's attention it was hard to. I used to do that with Claire sometimes. If I started first and sounded bad enough, sometimes she'd skip the morality speech. But now the words had a falser ring. Somehow putting on an act for my mother seemed right, but for Remo it was wrong.

Remo turned and put an arm on my shoulder. "I hear the police picked you up."

"Yeah, for having less than twenty dollars."

He shook his head.

"I'm sorry, Remo, I'll be more careful next time."

"The next time you do what?" He sounded too tired to accuse me.

"Get separated from the group. It was stupid of me and I'm sorry." I looked at my feet wrapped around the rungs of the stool.

Remo finished the last flat swig of his beer. "You don't have to apologize to me. I don't own you, I never said don't go wandering off by yourself. But what were you doing, anyway?"

"Nothing." I looked around the empty bar, filled with the sudden fear I had felt in Providence, fear of something like his disapproval. My tongue tasted sour and I didn't want to answer any more questions.

Remo signed his tab. "Come on upstairs for a bit."

"Sure." I swayed off the stool.

"Are you alright?" He reached out a hand to steady me.

"I never got any dinner, what with being locked out of the damn hall by security."

"I could use something, too." He turned to the bartender. "Can we still get room service?"

The bartender switched off the TV. "Til midnight. Just dial four-seven."

So we went up to Remo's room and ordered some sandwiches. I could picture Matthew at that moment, reading a mystery, his stocking feet stretched out on the bed. But I couldn't rush away from Remo without it seeming weird. We sat on the beds waiting for the food while Remo told me how the set went without me.

"I kept looking over at Matt by the monitors to see if you had shown up yet. He kept giving me the thumbs down."

I didn't want to say any more about it, I wanted to forget that whole stupid incident. I flexed my fingers. I was probably going crazy on the doors or in the squad car around that time. "It sucked."

He was being too sympathetic, I thought. Maybe I just didn't understand him. After the hard time he gave me over the Tygerz gig I didn't expect such quick forgiveness for what felt to me like a mortal sin, missing a gig.

He was looking at me the way he had back at The Cage, like he was trying to read what my shirt said but couldn't make out the letters. His face turned serious. "Just, just watch yourself, will you?" he said. His hair was almost the same color as Matthew's, a little sandier and shot through with some gray.

"I will."

"No I mean it. You've got that thing about you. Well, you know."

"No. What the hell are you talking about?"

He knitted his eyebrows. "I mean, that's just the sort of thing that would have happened to your Dad."

I said nothing.

"Something about him just attracted cops like flies."

"Yeah, the smell of bullshit." I laughed in spite of myself. I'd never said anything like that about Digger before, well, not to Remo anyway.

Remo laughed too. "He was a wild one." He looked at me close again. "I don't know if you inherited that, though. The wild streak."

I waited to hear what else he was going to say about me.

"Daron," he went on, "you seem to see things a little deeper than your Dad ever did." He leaned back against the headboard. "Then again, maybe you did get the wild streak. You bottle up that wildness and let it go when you get the guitar in your hands." He seemed pleased with this conclusion.

I wasn't any happier with this pop psychology than I had been back in Providence. But I kept a smile on my face so he wouldn't think I was angry. "You're full of shit."

"Yeah, you're probably right." He laughed again and I wondered how many he'd had down in that bar. "Where the hell's that food?"

I wondered the same thing, wondered how much longer I could keep up talking to him without mentioning Carynne, my father, or any other subject I wanted to avoid. I wondered what Matthew was doing now.

"So how'd Matthew become a guitar techie?" I asked.

The phone rang. Remo picked it up. "Yeah? This is me. Who do you have on the line?" He looked at me, then.

I stood up, motioning toward the door. "Business?" I mouthed.

He shook his head and I stayed there, but his eyes never left me.

"Son of a bitch," he said to himself in surprise. "Yeah, yeah put the call through."

I moved toward the door. If it was an old flame or some such, I wanted to leave him alone.

He opened his mouth to say something to me but then someone came onto the line. "Yeah, hey! Where the hell are you?" He motioned for me to come back, but put a finger to his lips. I moved as silently as I could.

"Las Vegas! How the hell did you find me in cheese country?"

I sat down across from him, trying to hear what the voice on the other end was saying, but I could only make out a garbled male buzz. Until I heard my name.

Remo twitched a little, too, as if a shock had come from the receiver. "No, I haven't. I don't have it. But what about you?"

Remo nodded as the voice went on for a while. There was a knock at the door.

I answered it. The damn sandwiches. I took the tray and sat back down on the bed. Remo was saying "Yeah, will do. Let me know when you get settled. You know the LA office number. Take care." And then he hung up the phone.

I knew what he was going to say before he said it, but I still didn't want to hear it. I'd begun to have this fantasy that Digger had, oh, made some con man deal with the wrong mobster and had skipped the country, or, living it up with no wife or kids to weigh him down he'd cracked up his car in a drunken accident and was in a coma somewhere. But it was neither.

"That was Digger," Remo confirmed. He was staring at the carpet and shaking his head like he wasn't sure the phone call had really happened. I handed him a plate and he set the cover aside and ate a potato chip. "He's in Las Vegas."

"I heard." I wasn't hungry anymore.

"He wanted to know where you were and if I had your address. He said the school doesn't have it and that you've got no phone."

I nodded. "The school won't show me until I pay the bill. And the phone is in my roommate's name." I ate a potato chip, too. "But you have my address."

"I know." He looked at me. "But something told me maybe if he hadn't gotten your address before he dropped out of sight, maybe you didn't want it known." I couldn't meet his eyes. He went on. "I hate to say it, I mean, I've known Digger for years, but..."

"But what?"

"He's been a good friend. But I never know if I can trust him."

I said the second thing that night I'd never dared to admit about Digger out loud. "Me either. Thanks, Remo, you did the right thing."

He grimaced. "I had this feeling about it. I guess it's a good thing we're not playing Vegas."

I nodded, setting the cover of my own plate aside and then examining the underside of my sandwich bread.

He started eating. "But you can't hide from him forever."

"Why not?" I felt dizzy. "Why should I ever see him again? You know what I thought that night you told me he'd gone? I thought 'good riddance.'" I put the cover back on the plate. "If he wants to go his own way, then I'm pretty fucking well going to go mine."

"Don't be too hard on him, Daron. He's proud of you."

I couldn't stop myself. "Like fucking hell he is. The only thing he liked about me going into music was that he didn't have to pay for it. He never lifted a goddamn finger, not even when Claire refused to take me to lessons, even to the fucking audition...! Fuck him." Shit, I was crying. "Fuck him."

"Jeezus, Daron, it wasn't that..." He reversed quickly when he realized what he was saying. "Was it that bad?"

"I don't know. I don't fucking know. It's not like I have anything to compare it to."

"It's not like he beat you or something."

I laughed, but not because I was happy. "You should have seen the shiner he gave me on my fourteenth birthday."

"What do you mean? I was there for your fourteenth birthday."

"Not all of it," I said. Not when we got home and found Claire waiting up for us. But then I'd gone out of my way to hide the bruise from everybody, so what did I expect from Remo now? The only person who'd seen me was Martin, because I'd ended up at his house that night, and I'd sworn him to silence. "I don't want to dig up all that old shit, Reem." More tears were threatening to spill and felt like a, well, like a fucking sissy about it.

"That was the night he took you to the club, wasn't it."

"Uh huh." I pressed my lips into a line like I wasn't going to say anything more.

Neither was Remo. He put his sandwich down and looked at it while I composed myself. I got up to leave and he said, "Take your sandwich for later."

I did.

#  Heart of Glass

The first time I sang on stage was one night at Maddie's in 1980, when I was thirteen. Let me revise that. First time I sang _lead_ on stage. This was before Remo had put me into the regular gig; I was just getting up there once in a while for a thrill. At the time there were maybe two dozen songs on the radio that I could sing and play note for note, not all of them strictly rock. I had learned "Another Brick in the Wall" and "Rock and Roll Fantasy," but also "The Pina Colada Song." (I don't know why that one, don't hold it against me.) At home I had a transistor radio that only got AM stations so I listened to a lot of hit radio, which was all there was left on AM by that time besides all talk stations and one or two oldies stations. So I was hearing Blondie and The Police and The Cars, the Knack and Billy Joel. At Remo's I tuned to FM and picked up Styx, Aerosmith, Supertramp, and ZZ Top. They claimed disco was dead but you could still hear Anita Ward's "Ring My Bell" every place you went, and "Funkytown."

Somehow it was decided that that night I'd do this thing I'd arranged that was a cross between "It's Still Rock and Roll to Me" and Queen's "Crazy Little Thing Called Love." I was sort of secretly hooked on Buddy Holly at the time--I'm not sure why it was a secret--and the medley was my way of doing a kind of '50s thing without ever saying that was so. I remember having to adjust the mic way down to my height and all the regulars at Maddie's clapping and whistling for me as I stepped up with my guitar. I don't remember most of the performance--it was a long fucking time ago--but I do remember what it felt like to really lead the band, determine the changes, play some tricks. I remember running the ending off into a long jam session and no one seemed to mind, and at the end, control switched back to Remo and we went on with the set. I was feeling pretty good about myself.

I suppose I'll never know what made Digger angry that night, but at the time I thought it was something I'd done. He had been drinking with some guys he was trying to get to go in with him on buying a stake in an ostrich farm or something. I could never remember exactly what get-rich-quick scheme he was on at any given time. Anyway, those guys had left. I was helping the band to pack up when he whistled from the doorway, "Come on, kiddo, let's get a move on."

Remo said something to him like "What's the rush? We can drop you guys off."

"Gotta get going, sorry." He shot me an impatient look and I hesitated a little before going over to him. "Catch you on Tuesday?"

Remo gave him a goodbye shrug and we turned away.

It was maybe a forty-five-minute walk from Maddie's to our house, so it really did seem sort of dumb not to take the ride if he was in some kind of a hurry. But he wasn't in a hurry to get home, he had just been in a hurry to leave. He didn't speak for a long time and we walked in silence, our breaths fogging a little in the air.

At the time he and I were still pretty chummy and eventually I asked him if everything was okay. He didn't answer. What I really wanted to ask was what he'd thought of my song, of course. But if the answer was going to be worse than the smoldering silence, I didn't want to hear it. Why did I think he hadn't liked it? Why did I think his moods were all my fault?

I didn't bring it up, and when Remo asked me to do it again I said no.

Shortly thereafter the AM radio station I liked went all talk and John Lennon was killed. All a coincidence, I'm sure.

#  One Thing Leads to Another

Matthew was under the covers reading when I came into the room. I rushed toward the bathroom to wash the salt off my face before he could see me, but I was still carrying the sandwich. I put the plate on the dresser and turned back to the bathroom as fast as I could. But before I could shut the door, Matthew was out of bed.

"Are you all right?" He was coming toward me to put his hands on my shoulders. I backed away, sure my distress showed on my face.

"I'm fine." Suddenly I didn't have to force myself to smile. The whole thing struck me funny. "My dad's a shit, did I ever tell you that?"

He stopped short of touching me, unsure how to reply to that.

"It's okay," I said, wiping my face. I should have let him hold me. I should have cried on his shoulder and told him about all the times Digger had screwed with me. But I didn't. I noticed he was still wearing socks, though nothing else. "If my father wasn't such a shit Remo and I wouldn't be friends and I'd probably be a shoe salesman right now." I laughed and Matthew laughed with me. The certainty of what we were about to do clashed with a sudden squirt of fear in my stomach. My voice became hesitant. "Matthew..."

This time I let him put his hands on my shoulders. "Yes."

"You have to promise me you'll never tell another living soul about me." I shook under his touch. His socks were wearing thin in the toes.

He forced me to look at him. "I promise."

I had never really looked into his stone grey eyes before. I pulled the denim jacket from my shoulders, turned away from him to hang it up. I let it fall to the floor as he pressed up behind me. There would be no more waiting. I turned and he kissed me, with the bristles of his mustache on my cheek and the scratch of stubble as his chin touched my chin.

As I felt my hands travel over his back, I said, "And you have to promise me something else, too."

"What's that?"

"The next time you catch me and Carynne alone, don't back out the door." I stripped down to my socks and he smiled.

In the morning, our automated wake up call jangled me right out of bed. I slid out from under Matthew's arm and went to take my morning piss. The other bed, I realized, looked like it hadn't been slept in. Well, it hadn't. As Matthew struggled to sit up, I tore back the bed spread and crumpled the sheets. Then I went into the bathroom.

I was brushing my teeth when he stumbled in. He turned on the shower and sat on the toilet seat while he waited for the water to get warm. I rinsed out my mouth and spat into the sink.

His hand was warm against my ass. I got a rush as I leaned forward onto the sink and thought how easy it was to get hard in the morning. I reached down and touched his nipple with my wet hand and watched it contract against the cold water.

"Let's get in the shower," he said.

By the time we climbed, dripping, out of the shower, we had to hurry to dress. I was just throwing the pile of yesterday's clothes into my bag when Waldo pounded on the door. "Let's move!" he bellowed.

I opened the door. Carynne was standing next to him, her ankles crossed under the umbrella of her short dress. "We're coming," I said.

"We'll do morning paperwork on the way," he said, his eyes flickering over me. He nodded as if saying I-told-you-so to himself. I'm sure he'd said it to Remo already. I wondered if he was going to repeat the babysitter comment or mention the vagrancy to me, but he didn't. "That flight won't wait for a bunch of derelict burnouts such as yourselves." He cracked his gum and moved on to the next door. Carynne lingered a moment, then hugged her clipboard tight to her chest and followed him.

I closed the door. "Ready?"

Matthew hefted his bag and put on a pair of sunglassses with round lenses. "I can't see a damn thing." He took them off and stuck them on my face. "You wear them. I'll lead the way." I followed him to the elevator.

Everyone was hungry by the time we arrived at the airport. The gear had gone ahead of us the night before, it would be waiting for us in DC. After check-in, we descended on a coffee shop that had a kind of Amelia Earhart motif, propellers on the walls and stuff like that. Matthew sat with our dedicated roadies, at a comfortable distance from me.

I sat between Martin and Carynne. Martin stared at the bottom of his coffee cup.

"There's something seriously wrong here," he said.

"What?" I looked into the cup.

"There's no coffee in this cup."

Carynne put hers down in front of him. "Here, drink mine."

Martin made a face. "Yuck. Half and half."

She shrugged. "Ingrate."

I stood up. "I'll get some more. I could use a refill, too." I took his cup.

As I made my way toward the counter I heard him shouting "Black! Black coffee, man! Black coffee for manly men!" and beating his chest. I turned back to see Carynne rolling her eyes in mock disgust. I paid the cashier. When I looked over the sunglasses I could see the whole group, spread out over a few tables. Such an unlikely bunch of people, I thought. No one would mistake us for a family group on vacation. Three women and eight men in the trappings of our trade, satin jackets, promotional t-shirts, laminated tags around our necks, sunglasses. Like a circus troupe who missed their train. Matthew was laughing about something. He was keeping his promise--he'd hardly spoken to me since we'd left the room. I pushed the sunglasses up on my nose again, glad they were there. I emulated his act of indifference.

Remo stood up. "Let's get back to the gate." Leading us, he walked this cowboy walk, slow and bowlegged, back to the waiting area. We made a new clump among the rows of seats.

The flight was delayed.

#  It's Only A Northern Song

I slept most of the way to DC and woke up on the East Coast. We were trucked straight from the plane to a soundcheck. Before I knew it, I was pacing around backstage, waiting for the lights to dim. It didn't seem possible that just this morning we'd been halfway across the country. As I sat down to check my tuning again, I realized that the performances were beginning to blend together in my mind--this was the fourth show in as many days. I remembered moments, catching the eye of someone in the audience, feeling a new lick come crawling up out of my fingers, everything working good, making eye contact with Martin behind the drum kit. The flashes had pasted themselves together into one long concert in my head.

But that night things were a little different. Matthew was working the backstage monitors in the wings. If I turned my head I could see him behind the black console, one earphone pressed to his head, the other dangling. He looked up at me once, nodding his head in time. And in that moment I felt a surge of electricity go through me. From then on, I wasn't playing just for me, to hear the notes going around in my head and coming out through the PA and off into the air like some soap bubbles, pretty but then gone. Music was coming up through me and going straight to him, because he could let me under his skin. I played that show for Matthew and it wasn't like any show I've ever played before.

When we were lying in bed later, I tried to say something about it, but I can't talk about music any more than I can hear smells or taste colors. I said, "Matthew, what do you hear when you're listening from backstage?"

"A little bit of everything," he answered. "I vary the output so I can get everybody at different times."

"No, I don't mean technically, I mean, what do you 'get' out of it?"

He sat up on one elbow, looking down at me and my tangle of hair. "This sounds deep."

"It is." I was losing the thread of what I wanted to say. "I mean, when I play, I know what I mean by it, but how can I know if anyone else does?"

He smiled. "You can't. Not for sure. But you can make some good guesses." His hand crawled across my belly.

"What do you mean?"

"You can only guess, like you can guess what I'm doing now."

"I see your point," I said, although I wasn't sure that I did. I shut my mouth and let him touch me wherever he wanted. I was sure about that; I do some of my best talking without words.

#  Owner of a Lonely Heart

We were done with airplanes now and travelled to New York in an honest-to-god tour bus, with a giant mural of some tropical island painted on its side. Inside were bizarre little berths adorned with stickers warning "Do Not Sleep With Head Toward Front of Bus." I was sure Carynne could tell me all the rock stars who'd ever died from broken necks and concussions when their bus slammed on the brakes or into something else. We weren't sleeping in this bus, though. It was taking us through the last leg of the trip, New York, New Haven, and Boston, but we would be sleeping in hotels. Remo convened a meeting in the hotel suite as soon as we arrived in the city.

"We're going to be in New York three days, hit New Haven on Wednesday night and go straight to Boston from there, where we'll be for another two days before the last show." He looked into a notebook on the table in front of him. "I'm meeting with some East coast record reps and doing a lot of publicity interviews. There'll be press in Boston, too."

Martin laughed. "Think we'll get the cover of MUSICIAN this time?"

Remo smirked. "Maybe. Sting doesn't have a new album coming out so maybe we have a shot. Martin, I think you ought to come along on that one." He looked around for any more comments, then went on. "If anyone else wants to tag along with me to these things, feel free. I've got the full schedule right here, and the promo people may be setting up even more. Other than that, you're all on your own until soundcheck, four o'clock on Tuesday. Matthew, you staying with us?"

Matthew shook his head. "No, I'm going to stay with family."

I blinked and forced myself not to look at him over the tops of the sunglasses. I'd heard the microsecond of hesitation before the word "family." Or I'd imagined it. It didn't matter. I knew it wasn't blood relatives he was going to stay with. I felt myself sinking into the chair, absorbing without listening what else was being said.

A few others also had people to visit. It wasn't so many years ago that most of us lived in the same little town about fifty miles south. Remo passed out room keys. With all the absentees it worked out that I was alone. Matthew left right after the meeting without looking at me or speaking to me, still true to his word. No one would ever detect what passed between us. I didn't want to think about why he hadn't told me about this when he had the chance. So I didn't.

I went to my room, threw off the sunglasses and got in bed for a nap. When I got bored of tossing and turning I went down to the lobby and loitered. I watched dark-suited security men watch me without looking at me. I went back upstairs. I picked up the phone and dialed my old phone number. A recording told me it was disconnected. I dialed up New Jersey directory assistance. A woman told me that there was no Claire Marks listed in my hometown. I racked my brains for her maiden name. No, there was no Claire Underwood, either. "Well, good for you, Mom."

"Excuse me, sir?" the operator buzzed.

"Nothing. Thanks." I hung up the phone. There wasn't anything I wanted to say to my mother, anyway. Even if I had gotten the number, I doubted I would have called it. I lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling, not feeling anything, thinking anything.

Someone knocked at the door. I opened it without looking through the peep hole.

It was Carynne.

#  Moody Blues

I left her standing in the open doorway as I turned back to the window, looking down onto the busy street. The afternoon sun glared off the windshields of passing taxis.

"What are you doing?" she shut the door and sat on the edge of the bed.

"Nothing." That was true.

She sat there waiting for something, for me, but I didn't move. She straightened her dress. It looked like a doll's dress or maybe a maternity dress from the sixties, covered with a dizzy paisley swirl of olive green and orange. It was the ugliest thing I'd seen her in yet. She batted her thick eyelashes in a sort of matter-of-fact rather than flirty way and said "I'm going to go out clubbing tonight. You wanna come?"

I shrugged like my arms were too dead to do anything else.

"You okay?" She stood up and touched my shoulders. I was too numb to throw her off. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing," I said again. "I feel terrible."

She tapped her chin. "It's all the traveling. Jet lag. You want to get something to eat?" She made a vague toward-the-outside gesture with one hand. "I've got it covered. I'm sick of hotels. And they don't need me for anything right now."

"Yeah." I turned away from the window and looked at her. She was being too nice, it ruined my bad mood. Maybe my disappearance in Madison had given her the hint, too. I could hope.

She took me out the back way from the hotel, through the alley where the tour bus was parked. I followed her into the subway. It was too noisy in the train to talk so it wasn't until we came to a station and she stood up that I asked "Where are we going?"

"I dunno," she answered, pulling me along, up the stairs and across the street by the hand. "Someplace that'll cheer you up." We stepped between street vendors' blankets covered with used books and records on the sidewalk. We crossed another wide street and I began to recognize where we were: The East Village. Carynne stopped to examine the concert bootlegs sharing a table with sunglasses in front of a used clothing store. Two men with identically sheared hair and leather jackets that still smelled new brushed past me, pausing to embrace at the bottom of the next steps. One went into the building, the other continued up the street without looking back. A dog barked at me from the terrace of a cafe. The sun was behind the buildings now, and the day's heat was beginning to rise up out of the streets, stewing up the evening. I watched two more men cross the street, hand in hand. I tied my denim jacket around my waist and waded through the heat, gripped by the feeling that if I stayed too still, I'd solidify where I was. You don't belong on this ground, I thought to myself, get away while you still can.

Carynne was following me now, I could feel her eyes searching my back for clues. I kept my own eyes ahead, trying not to stare at the graffiti splashed across the steps ("Queer By Choice") trying not to hear the conversation of the two men coming the other way, trying to shut it all out. My hands felt damp as they brushed against my jeans. Everything here was a signal, a secret handshake, a subliminal image, and I wondered how long it would take Carynne to see right through me. What would I do that would give myself away? Even I had no way of knowing.

"Hey, where are you going?" She plucked at my arm.

I forced a smile. "Italian place this way, good pasta, didn't you say you wanted something to eat?"

"Yeah, but..."

"We can shop later."

"Okay, but are you sure it's this way?"

I let her catch up to me, I let her hold my damp fingers in hers. "I've been here a couple of times." Maybe three, four times, on the train into Penn Station, underage, looking for trouble or something of that nature. Not that different now, I guess.

We ate and she talked, and sometimes I listened. Wherever Matthew was, I was sure he wasn't playing this masquerade like me. A few hours later we were working our way west past NYU. Carynne went into a clothing shop on 8th Street and I told her I'd meet her in the record store, but I didn't. I went back east and down where no one knew me.

I lost myself in the sea of people crisscrossing the park, stopping to listen to two guys busking with a guitar and a tambourine before I hurried on. I tossed a loose dollar into the open guitar case. They weren't that good, but maybe someday that dollar would come back to me. I drifted back toward the East side, the night crowd flowing around me like I wasn't even there. I walked until my feet were tired of doing it and started looking for a place to go. I followed three outlandishly dressed men up one street and down another. They disappeared through the darkened doorway of a club on Avenue A. Through the walls I could make out a pulsing beat. There was no sign indicating the club's name on the door, nothing painted overhead. I pushed the heavy wooden door open and stepped into an even darker space, walled in by looming mannequins on one side and the door person's station on the other. The door person, I couldn't tell if it was male or female, nodded to me.

"What's the cover?" I put one hand into my pocket.

A throaty male voice replied from under a Barbizon model's face, "No cover tonight."

I nodded and stepped forward toward the main room.

"Not so fast, sugarbuns." An enameled fingernail snagged me. "ID?"

I smiled back. "You really don't want to see it."

Rosy lips returned the smile. "Why would that be, sweetmeat?"

My heart skipped a beat as I let my voice go soft. "Because I'm jailbait and I'm vain," I said. I could not work up the nerve to toss my hair.

Painted lids half-closed as the perfect head shook slowly so as not to dislodge the curls piled high atop it. "Spare me the sob story, Miss Lonelyhearts. Let me stamp your hand." I held it out. "Just don't get into any trouble and promise me your daddy won't come through here with a shotgun looking for you."

I froze for just an instant as the unlikely but ugly image flashed through my mind. "Thanks."

The place was just as small as it looked from the outside, a main room that was smaller than my hotel room with a bar along one side, and one dance floor room out of which wild lights and heavy beats spilled. I stood in the doorway between the two rooms, watching the tightly packed passel of half-naked dancers glisten with sweat and groove to the music. The song wasn't anything I recognized. No one paid me any mind while I stood there watching. I picked out a few women from the drag queens, but most of the crowd were disco boys of one kind or another.

A handful of the dancers crowded onto a riser in the middle of the room, gyrating wildly, but not wildly enough that any of them were knocked off. The one nearest to me wore only combat boots and tight black short-shorts, his black hair shaking in sweaty spikes. His bare back undulated. The dancers in front of him shifted then and he turned to face me. A purple diagonal stripe crossed his face, enveloping one eye and his lips. He shook his chest at me, and winked before he turned back around. My heart caught in my throat.

I couldn't dance over to him without looking like a fool. I rolled up the sleeves of my t-shirt and leaned back in the doorway, trying to keep an eye on him. He'd have to come up for air sometime.

I don't know how long I stood there before the music faded and a voice announced a special performer. I hadn't realized there was a small stage at the far end of the room until a tall, gaunt man wrapped in white cloth stepped onto it. He did some sort of lip-synch performance art -- I wasn't really watching as I realized my black-haired punk boy had slipped out of my view. I pressed forward into the crowd, trying to peer around shoulders, looking for him. I was in the midst of a knot of drag queens in spike heels when the room went dark and the music started again. I watched from the side for a long time, but he never reappeared. The next thing I remember is the lights came up and they started throwing people out.

As I passed by the door again, I asked for the time. The door person looked at one gilded wrist and proclaimed "Three AM, honey. Past your bedtime?"

Something like that. At this point I wasn't sure what to do other than hang around in front of the building, trying to look casual. A bunch of the dancing crowd was out there, milling around in the still-hot night air, flagging down cabs and talking animatedly with one another. I was jailbait and I was vain, and none of these guys would have anything to do with me, it seemed.

I saw them coming before anyone, maybe because I was the only one in the crowd not engaged in conversation or at least some heavy eye contact: three men walking in that rangy-tough territory-marking way. My guess was they were Puerto Rican, or some flavor of hispanic, with bandanas tied around their heads and basketball shoes on their feet. I pressed back against the wall of the club and watched the trio of them spearhead through the crowd on the sidewalk, but not everyone noticed them, or cared. Two bare-chested club boys who were leaning on each other and laughing stepped back at the wrong moment and caught the leader's foot. There were shouts: "Fuckin' faggots!" "Don't you touch me...!" and something in Spanish, and one of the two guys from the crowd went down with his hand on one side of his face, while the other took a swing at one of the guys in bandanas. Then the three of them were running away, not stupid enough to get caught in the middle of a hostile crowd, I guess.

I started walking the other way before I could find out if the guy who went down had been hit or knifed or what. Everyone else had clustered around him, and noises were made about the police being called, and I knew that wasn't anywhere I wanted to be just then. My heart was up in my throat and swallowing wouldn't make it go back down. I caught a taxi as soon as I thought I could give the name of the hotel.

Back in my room I lay awake for a long time. I watched a square of light on my ceiling from the street lamps below flicker as cabs went by and listened to the sound of old hotel plumbing occasionally whooshing.

I could not sleep. Jet lag. All the traveling, you know.

#  The Logical Song

I was in a pretty foul mood when Remo knocked on the door the next day. I had been awake for hours, watching TV and staring out the window.

"Want to sit in on the Musician interview?" he hollered through the door.

I went and sat in the suite and kept my mouth shut while Remo and some guy with elbow patches talked into a tape recorder. I listened to it all, listened to Remo try to explain music, things about style, his playing, all kinds of bullshit. It went on for hours and he never repeated himself. If it had been me, the interview would have been a lot shorter. That night we went to some music business reception at the Hard Rock Cafe. We returned to the hotel around ten pm and I paced around my too empty room until I was giving myself static shocks on everything I touched. I opened the window to let in some noise but it came from so far away I felt more isolated than before.

I went into the hallway and stood there for a moment, my mind blanking. I went to Carynne's door. I stood there for a while, trying to get up the nerve to knock.

Then I heard her laughing, giggling, that special high-pitched laugh reserved for flirting. She wasn't alone. I retreated to my room again. I thought about going back to the place I had been last night, but even if I hadn't been afraid of getting fag-bashed, I didn't have the stamina to spend another night alone in a crowd, pretending to be someone for the sake of sex, always under the shadow of rejection and disappointment. I thought about going down to the hotel bar and getting smashed, but I didn't want to make trouble for the entourage, their underage pet roadie running up a huge tab and then probably doing something stupid. This crew was too clean for my own good--even Martin had given up pot. I needed to soak my head in something, though, I needed something bad.

I knocked on the door to the suite. Waldo pulled it open like he was getting ready to slam it. "Remo here?" I said.

"Naw. Try again later." And he started to close it.

I put a hand on the door. "Where's his Ovation."

"His what?"

I pushed past him and searched the floor for the telltale curved outline of the acoustic guitar's case. It was at the foot of Remo's bed. He always kept it handy in case he got an idea. I hefted it in my left hand and went toward the door.

"Where you going with that?" Waldo stood in front of me, his jaw mashing his gum like an industrial piston, never stopping, never breaking rhythm.

"Matt's gone, that leaves me in charge of the guitars."

Waldo didn't look like he bought that, but his brain wasn't giving him a way to stop me. I brushed past his pot-belly through the still open door and went back to my room.

This was not just any guitar. Ovation makes a bunch of different models, but the primo tasty ones they had just come out with were a roundback acoustic with the electronics for live sound wired in. They sound bright like a polished knife blade, and it sinks into your gut and sticks there. And talk about fucking beautiful, instead of one round soundhole in the center, these have a series of small holes in the sound board along the top curves of the guitar, flanked by sweetly carved wood of varying browns in the shape of leaves. Remo played this one through most of the show. In the encore he often played this one and I played a twelve string version, similar model but with a traditional round sound hole.

I let my fingers fly up the neck and back down, the fingerboard silky to the touch and the strings so close to the frets that it was easier than falling down stairs. I started to play.

I wrote a song without any verses, just a fragment of a chorus about fire and flight, and I played it over and over until I couldn't sing anymore and I fell asleep with the guitar still in my hands.

#  You Gotta Look Sharp

I came to life about an hour before soundcheck, soaked myself in the shower and went down to the suite to see who was around.

Carynne was there, the per diem book in her lap while she took notes from someone on the phone. I heard her give some complex-sounding details about tour logistics. She jotted something down. After a few mintes of listening I figured out she was double-checking stuff with the Boston promoter, including details about our accomodations, the concert hall, even some kind of promotional party. She finished the call with the words "I'll take care of it." I'd heard her use a pseudo-professional voice a bunch of times on the tour, but this was the first time I'd heard it for such a sustained period of time. She put down the phone, looked up at me, and smiled a professional smile. She tapped the book. "Need your allowance?"

"Sure."

She counted out some cash for me and made a note. "You and Martin are the only two not over there, yet," she said as she picked up the phone again.

"Who are you calling now?"

"Bunch more reservations to confirm," she said as her eyes scanned the page in front of her. "I'll be down there soon. You guys should catch a cab together, probably."

Martin was in his room caught up in some sporting event or other on television. "Hey buddy." He snapped it off with a theatrical sigh and a doorman got us a cab at the lobby.

We arrived at the venue to find Matthew and Remo on their hands and knees under the stage. Remo crawled out and brushed himself off. He shouted to John behind the PA board, "Try that!"

A nasty buzz filled the room. Remo threw up his hands. "Kill it!" A loud pop crackled through the PA and the noise stopped. "I haven't got time for this."

Waldo muttered from the stage. "I'll say you don't. They want you down at the radio station in fifteen minutes." He exchanged glances with a guy I'd never seen before. "Ain't you got enough roadies to handle this without you?"

Remo nodded and the guy looked relieved. Remo handed me a screwdriver. "Here, I might miss the check, don't wait for me. After all, this is why I hired you, right? Find that hum and kill it." He left with the stranger.

Matthew beckoned for me to come up to the stage. He was standing there with two more guys I didn't know but from the look of them I assumed they were the in-house tech crew. The stage looked permanent but the sound set-up didn't, and I guessed the place was more used for dancing than for live music. The room was one open square of scuffed wood with ice rink type railings along the sides demarking the dance floor.

I handed Matthew the screwdriver and he put it in his belt. "Where do we start?"

"It's got to be something we brought in because it wasn't here when we started."

I hoisted myself onto the stage and looked at the crisscrosses of black cables fixed to the floor with swatches of gray tape. "So let's start unplugging things and see when it quits." Matthew waved to John who cranked the volume of the buzz up so we could hear it was still there.

I started with the drum microphones, but they checked out fine. I moved on to the keyboard setup while Matthew followed behind me, reconnecting what we could rule out. He ducked his head under Martin's china cymbal and said "How've you been enjoying New York?"

I shrugged, then realized he wasn't looking at me as he spoke. "I haven't been out much."

"Oh, you feeling alright?"

All I could say was "No." He didn't ask me any more questions after that. We didn't find the source of the hum either. It just went away sometime between 6 o'clock, when we gave up, and 7:30, when Remo returned. He had the Musician reporter in tow, and someone else I didn't recognize. I went through the preshow setup like a sleepwalker.

The only thing that broke my reverie was when Remo introduced me to the man I hadn't recognized earlier. "Daron, you remember Artie Hansen? From Wenco A&R?"

"Nice to see you again," Artie said, shaking my hand.

"Yeah, likewise." It hit me suddenly who this guy was. This was the guy who discovered Nomad all those years ago. He'd seen one of the shows I played in, and Remo and Martin and me had made a demo tape for him to bring back to his company. It hadn't been the first time Remo had made a tape for someone and we'd all thought nothing would come of it... and were wrong. Five years ago? "You look different," I said, for lack of anything else to say.

"So do you." He gave me a business card. "Remo tells me you have a band of your own now. Give me a ring if you ever play in town."

"Yeah, I will." I tucked the card into the breast pocket of my denim jacket. Then, even more dazed than before, I went back to sitting around doing a lot of nothing and staring at the tops of my sneakers.

The next thing I remember was stepping onto the stage into lights and waves of sound and energy. The lights swirled and it was impossible to make out any faces in the crowd; the audience existed as a wall of approving noise. There I was with all the people I had barely spoken to for two days, really there, like I woke up from a dream. The stage was a little small so I was right in front of Alan's keyboard rig, Remo next to me with Alex on the other side. We clicked so well I forgot to worry about all the press there covering the event. I played so hard I didn't have any trouble getting to sleep that night.

#  That's What Friends Are For

The show in New Haven was nothing special, good, but not special. Everyone seemed to have blown out so much extra energy in New York that there wasn't much left for this one. Backstage, when the packing was done, Martin was the only one with any pep. He drummed out a pattern on my shoulder. "Hey, I know this bar, wanna go?"

"Long as you realize I'm still underage."

He gasped with maniacal glee. "Wonder what the Connecticut penalty for corrupting a minor is?"

"I think you're too late, " Remo cut in. "We beat you to it." He didn't say who the 'we' was, but I knew he was thinking of Digger and himself. "Going to the Bullfrog?"

"Yeah, you coming?" Martin ushered us both toward the exit.

"No, I'm heading to Boston tonight. Publicity," he growled. "I'll see you in a couple of days." He dropped behind us and put a hand on my shoulder. "You take care of yourself."

It wasn't a long walk to the place, and New Haven reminded me a lot of Newark, which gave me the urge to walk faster. Sketchy, to say the least. The real reason Martin wanted to go to the Bullfrog Bar and Grille, I discovered, was to scope for Yale co-eds. But with classes out of session, the place was almost empty. He settled for the world's largest margarita and flirting with the blonde bartender. She brought us round after round of exotic drinks until I couldn't tell what they were anymore. The light was dim at the bar--bright behind it where the bartender walked back and forth in her white Reeboks, but murky at the actual seats. I told Martin about music school, he told me about how he was buying a house.

"Somewhere to go when all the traveling's done?" I asked between frothy gulps of something that wasn't as sweet as it looked.

"No, no, man. You gotta learn this now: once your bank account hits a certain size, you have to start buying things like houses, collecting cars, that kind of stuff. So when your career goes down the tubes later, you have all this shit to sell off for much more than you paid for it. The word for it is: Equity."

I laughed. "Are you serious?"

"Yes." He balanced a wet straw on his nose, or tried to. "You gotta learn all this shit now, you know."

"What do you mean?"

"Before you get too famous and have a lot of accountants and investors trying to get at your money. Your liquid assets," he drawled and shook his longstemmed glass at me.

"It's going to be a long time before I have to worry about that, if ever."

"Don't kid yourself." He leaned closer to me and his cowlick flipped into his eyes. "You've already played in front of what, twenty thousand, thirty thousand people in the past month? And you got mentioned in a review. And you're the hottest thing since Hendrix. And," he paused to drain his glass, "you've got connections."

I sat back. "Maybe."

"Come on!" Martin hit me a little too hard on the shoulder. "You're made for the big time, Daron! You think Remo's dragging you around just for a favor?"

"Well, yeah..."

"Bullshit!"

Suddenly, I was angry. "Bullshit, yourself! What do you know!" I banged my fist on the bar and it hurt. The bartender raised an eyebrow but I looked away and lowered my voice. "Remo's giving me a handout because he feels too guilty to let me end up busking for loose change in the subway."

"Fuck you, this ain't charity." He knit his eyebrows in confusion. "He was bitching for a month before he called you that he couldn't play these parts. We had a guy rehearsing with us for a while, but Remo fired him, said he just didn't 'mesh.' But you, man, you mesh. You mesh like you never left."

Remo had said something similar about charity or lack thereof. And I was either too drunk or too sober to say anything beyond that. Martin went on. "Like _we_ never left, I mean. Did I ever tell you I thought it was stupid?"

"What was stupid?"

"Moving us all to LA." Martin motioned to the bartender. "I mean, I didn't argue of course. I was like twenty two, right? And I wanted to get away from my parents, so it was like 'Bye Mom! We're off to get famous!' And it worked, you know. But I think we would have done just as well if we hadn't switched coasts."

"How do you know?" I smiled at the bartender as she brought us two more drinks. Mine had a tiny plastic monkey hanging by its curved tail from the edge of the glass.

"It's just what I think. I mean, Artie was our main record man and he was from the New York office, the media behind us were from all over, they could have been anywhere, why did we have to be in LA?"

I returned his shrug. "Maybe Remo always wanted to move there."

"I doubt it." He took a swig of the drink. "Yow! What is this stuff!" He made a horrible grimace. "I like it!"

I couldn't really taste what I was drinking, most of me felt wrapped in a soft haze, warm and numb.

"So tell me more about Boozeville or wherever the hell it is you live now."

"Providence?" I thought about it. "It's small. But Boston's only an hour, New York is like three. I can live with that."

"You looking forward to going back?"

"Maybe." Yes and no.

"Missing someone? Got a girlfriend?"

I forced my eyes to stay on my drink. "No."

Martin laughed, there was no malice in it. "You're just like Remo, married to his music. So let me rephrase, missing someone? Your band?"

"A little." I felt the corners of my mouth jerk upwards. "I don't think they're going to last, though."

"Why not?"

"Singer's a flake and my roommate, not dependable, bass player's excellent but has classical aspirations, and we haven't been able to keep a drummer longer than two months yet."

"Sounds great. I liked your demo tape, by the way."

"You heard it?"

"Yeah, I stole it out of Remo's tapedeck when he wasn't paying attention. So I can ransom it for megabucks when you're rich and famous."

The bartender wiped down the dim spot of bar in front of us. "Last call, guys," she said. "Any last requests?"

"Yes! I'd like a last cigarette and send a note to my wife saying I died happy." He looked at his glass, still half full. "Stick a fork in me, I think I'm done." He hit the bar with a dramatic slump. Then he jerked upright, "Oh wait, I don't have a wife."

I nodded at her. She smiled at us both and went away.

#  I Know What Boys Like

When we finally arrived in Boston the next day, after some mishaps with bad roadsigns, or maybe just bad roads, Remo was waiting for us in the lobby. He was talking to the Musician reporter again, a hand-size tape recorder on the table between their chairs. They stood up when they saw us coming. Waldo burst out with a tirade, spit flying. I hardly understood a word he said but I knew it was about the directions. Remo handed him the keys and that shut him up.

Waldo fanned the keys like playing cards. "We only got one for each room right now, you can get dupes at the desk. Up for grabs..."

I took one and hooked Martin by the arm. "You and me, man." He gave a groggy nod and came with me. I didn't see who Matthew went with.

The first thing I did after putting my stuff down in the room was to call Bart. I hadn't talked to him since the day he'd left me at TF Green. Martin crashed like a rotten tree and started snoring.

"Hello?" A woman's voice answered.

"Hi, I'm looking for Bart, is he around?"

"No, I'm sorry, he's at the summer house on the Vineyard. Would you like the number there?"

"Yes, please."

She read me a number in another area code. I dialed it and listened to the interchange click and beep distantly before it rang, making me wonder if maybe I had the wrong notion of how far away Martha's Vineyard was, like maybe it was actually part of Canada. I let it ring ten times before I hung up.

I wanted Bart to come up and see the show, to hang out with the band and see how things were. Bart was maybe the best bass player I'd ever met, but he'd spent most of his life in practice rooms and recital halls. I hoped my impression that the Vineyard was like an hour or two drive was right.

I took a nap. It was dinnertime when I woke up and I dialed the number again. Still nothing. And Martin was still sleeping.

There was a knock at the door. I opened it to find Matthew standing there. "I wondered if anyone here was conscious for dinner...?" His gaze slid past me to Martin's still snoring figure.

"No, I don't think so. Thanks." I stepped back to close the door.

"Daron..." His hand twitched and I fixed my eyes on it. "I'd like you to come and eat with me."

I held my eyes on his fingertips, their slight curl, as I said "I'm sorry, I'm not hungry."

I knew he was searching my face but I didn't move a muscle. "Won't you at least come along?"

"No, I'm sorry." I pushed the lie one step further. "I have plans."

His foot moved forward just a tad. "Then I'll have to say what I have to say to you right here." His eyes flicked toward Martin again.

I leaned my head on the door. "I don't think we have anything to discuss." My heart was getting loud.

"Daron," he began but didn't finish. He ran a hand through his hair, then shoved it into his front pocket.

I made the mistake of looking at his face. The lines there were deeper when he frowned. And in his eyes I saw something honest and sad.

"Don't give me that pitying look," I said. It was the sort of thing Digger would have said to Claire and I regretted it immediately.

"I just really think we should talk," he said, without sounding like either one of my parents.

"Okay." I stood there, waiting to hear what he was going to say.

"It's been really great having you along this trip," he said, and it sounded sort-of rehearsed. "I mean, I usually spend my of hours by myself."

Except when you're in New York, I thought, and surprised myself that I was gritting my teeth. It made me even more angry that as I sat there, feeling angry, I was still wanting him, still wanting to taste him, to feel that rush. And I was angry because I didn't know why I was angry. I didn't have any right to be angry with him and that made it worse. "Me too," I managed.

"Daron, I just want to be clear about a few things."

"Okay." Martin snored behind me and Matthew lowered his voice even more.

"I know you're anxious about a lot of things. That's natural. You need to take your time..."

"Take my time doing what?"

He sighed and looked up and down the hall. "Let's just say I know things aren't always easy. In this business..." He stroked his mustache in a worried way. "What I really wanted to say was, I didn't want you to go away hurt or angry."

"And why..." I started, but I couldn't finish. I felt dizzy. He started to answer but I stopped him. "You promised. You made me a promise you wouldn't say a word about..." Us? "... _it_ to any living soul. That includes me."

He stood back an inch, unhappiness aging his face. "Maybe you're right. Maybe we don't have anything to discuss."

"Of course not." There was no it. No us. But if that was true, why did I feel exactly the way he'd described me? Maybe it was nothing to do with him, and everything to do with me. "So will you quit with the mother hen act?"

He pressed his hands together and I had the feeling he wished he were holding my hands. "I just worry about you, that's all. I want to be sure you'll be okay."

I stood up. "Don't worry about me," I said. The bubble of anger that I'd been carrying around since New York began to sag and I wanted to leave before it burst and left me empty. "Just don't worry, Matthew. There's nothing you can do anyway. Forget about it." I don't even know what I meant by that, but I left him there with it, and tried to follow my own advice. Forget about it.

We shook hands then, which felt even more ridiculous than the handshake Remo'd given me back at the Cage. And then I closed the door.

I resolved to wait a few minutes until I was sure he was gone, and then slip out and get something to eat by myself. The only drawback to this plan was it meant sitting in the dark for several minutes with nothing to do but think about things like why I felt hurt. Especially since I didn't know why the fuck I felt hurt. I didn't figure it out while sitting there, either.

I got sick of that pretty quickly and closed the door behind me with a soft click. From the lobby I picked a direction to walk at random. The hotel was in a downtown-ish area, most of which seemed to have closed up at five pm. I wandered around darkened storefronts and closed cafes until I got tired and sat down on a bench under some thoroughly city-made trees, thin maples growing out of brick-edged squares of dirt.

I watched a car pull up across the street and a James Dean look-a-like in a bomber jacket and crew cut climbed out. The car drove away and Mr. Dean struck a pose against the walls of a posh but closed jewelry store, lighting a cigarette. I watched him take a drag, then lean his head against the window as he exhaled, then take anther drag, and do it again. I couldn't take my eyes off him. A brown hatchback drove past. His chin turned slightly as he tracked it around the corner. I wondered if he was hot in that jacket. The sun was going down but the heat rose up out of the concrete. Another guy, black hair, also smoking, came around the corner and they nodded to one another. The guy kept going. Then the brown hatchback drove past again. Mr. Dean watched it again. Then he took a drag on his cigarette and leaned his head back. I began to feel like I was caught in a film loop.

When the brown hatchback came around the third time, it slowed to a stop. Mr. Dean walked up to the passenger window, then got in. I watched them drive away, rooted there by the realization of what was happening. I wondered if James Dean was just cruising, or if he was tricking for money.

A car pulled up in front of me, the driver's side window beginning to slide down. I twisted off the bench and ran. I went back to the hotel, back up to the room, and was suprised to find Martin was gone. My hands shook as I picked up the phone. The hotel operator patched me through to Carynne's room.

#  The Cure

She was at my door within minutes, her hair still wet from a shower with some flowery shampoo.

"You okay?" she said, and I wished she hadn't. "You seem really jittery."

"Anxiety is my normal state," I said, which came out sounding serious rather than a joke. "Let's go out somewhere, see some bands or something."

She eyed me with a crooked eyebrow. "And you're not going to disappear on me when I turn around?"

I blushed. I suppressed the urge to stammer something stupid and untrue. "I promise I won't," I said. "Let's go down to Landsdowne Street and see what's up." It was the one part of Boston I knew.

We took the subway there, coming up in the middle of an area busy with pizza shops and convenience stores. We could have been any one of the college-age couples walking around on their first date. I led her over the highway to where a string of clubs inhabited the block opposite the big green wall of Fenway Park. In Boston, the same real estate mogul owns almost all the clubs. On Landsdowne Street there were half a dozen places, some large, some small, changing names every few months as fads allowed, but remaining basically the same. I knew what we'd find there -- some places where no matter what was going on it would be too loud to talk. If I could, I'd get too drunk to do anything later but pass out. I was glad she was with me, it made me feel safe, somehow. But I dreaded what might come later if I didn't play my cards right.

"How about here?" I stopped in front of a place with psychedelic murals on the walls. A sign read "Tonite, 18+" so I knew the door wouldn't be a hassle. We showed our IDs and they fastened a plastic bracelet around Carynne's wrist. They stamped the back of my hand with a smudge of ink. "I guess this means you're buying," I said, once we had cleared the entryway.

I don't really remember what bands we saw. I mostly remember circulating from one bar to another inside the club so we wouldn't seem like total lushes, posing ourselves under black lights as we watched the crowd go by, and nodding and smiling at each other a lot in the din. By midnight I thought I should have been good and buzzed, but mostly I just felt edgy and nervous.

Carynne was trying to say something to me.

"What?"

She put her mouth against my ear. "Hungry! Want to get some pizza?"

"Not really," I said, but she acted like she didn't hear me and started for the door. I held my ground. She turned back. I saw her mouth You-Promised. I followed her.

We went back to one of the pizzerias near the subway stop and had slices. We sat in a formica booth next to the window. "I think I could live here," I said, watching people coming out of the pub next door.

"Are you going to move here when you finish school?"

I shrugged. "It seems better than New York, and there's lots of clubs. Maybe I will."

She chewed on the ice from her soda and watched me watching the people. "Well, if your band ever needs a road manager, give me a call."

The neon sign made crazy stripes in her shiny red hair. "I'll do that," I said, surprised by my own sincerity. I did like her, I realized, I just didn't want to sleep with her. "Thanks, by the way, for trying to cheer me up the other day." I liked her smile. "I'm really sorry about... losing you in New York."

She smiled. "That's okay." She offered me some ice, I shook my head. "But you have been acting really weird the past couple of days."

I shook my head. "Wait, how do you know what's weird and what's normal for me? I mean, I might be like this all the time for all you know."

She chewed on that for a minute. "So, what's your point?"

"My point is..." I didn't know what my point was. "Just, how do you know what's weird."

"So you're saying weird is normal for you."

"Yeah. No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm just saying suppose that were true." I stood up, feeling irked but still smiling. "Look, this is dumb, we'd better try and get the train." I walked out of the restaurant without looking to see if she followed.

She did. She was saying, "I think we've missed the last one already."

She was right. When we got down to the turnstiles the gates had already been closed. We went back up to the street and looked around. "We could get a taxi," I said.

"Nah," she pointed at the skyline. "Boston's not that big. We only rode three or four stops on the green line."

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah." She started up the street. "If we get tired, then we can always call a cab. But really, it's not that far."

"How do you know?" I followed her.

She smiled and wiggled her head at me. "I go to B.U."

"You're kidding." I knew she went to school but I hadn't thought about where. "I thought you were from L.A."

"I am." Her step got a little more smug and we walked in silence for a while, but only for a while.

"So, why have you been acting so weird?" she asked.

"What do you mean?"

"I dunno, just, you seem real quiet."

"Haven't I always been kinda quiet?"

"Yeah, but... well, how about you tell me why you ditched me in New York."

I walked a little faster. "I don't know. I just couldn't deal."

"With what? Me? Or yourself?" She was looking more at me than at where we were going. I hoped we were going the right way.

"When did you become my analyst?"

"I just want to know, that's all. Naturally curious."

"Nosy, you mean."

The banter dropped out of her tone, her face serious. "Look, you're the one who disappeared in the middle of the fuckin' murder capital of the East Coast." Her cheeks got red and I looked away from her face.

"I said I was sorry."

She gave an angry snort, and then went on more calm. "What did you do while you were missing?"

I had forgotten she was Ms. Persistence. "I wandered around a lot. I went to a dance club in Alphabet City. I came home and wrote a song. I went to sleep. Story of my life, you know." Something clicked--all of a sudden I had the lyrics to the song, or most of them, anyway. I started humming to myself. _Story of my life, you know._

"Is that the song?"

"Yeah."

"What's it about?"

I smiled. "Well, now it's about wandering around, going home lonely, and writing a song." I could hear it as Janis Joplin would have sung it. "Sort of."

She listened to me hum for a minute before she said in a small voice, "Will you sing me some of it?"

I almost took a wrong step. "I don't sing."

"Sure you do. If you can hum and you can write lyrics you can sing."

"Well, maybe I can. But I just, don't." Not in front of other people, anyway.

"You mean you won't," she said, looking at the sidewalk under her feet.

"No." It was my turn to insist. "There are some things that I just don't do."

She nodded to herself and we were both quiet again for several blocks. Eventually my paranoia crept up. "Are we getting close, yet?"

"What? Oh yeah, another couple blocks." She looked at me like she had forgotten I was walking with her. We came around the corner and I saw the hotel.

"Daron," she said, slowing her pace without warning, "can I ask you something?"

"Yeah, what?"

"Are you going to sleep with me tonight? Or are you going to blow me off again?" My tongue froze up. She waited a few moments before going on. "I figured I should ask you now before we're whispering in some hallway about it."

"I," I began, but couldn't think of what to say after that. The aftereffects of all the drinking seemed to hit me in a rush.

"Normally I wouldn't just come out and say something like this," she went on, "but after New York I think the direct approach is best." She stopped walking, then, and held me by the arm. "So, do we fuck or not? I figure if you're going to get all freaked out I may as well have some warning."

"Carynne." It was hard to look at her, hard to start a sentence. "I wish," No that wasn't it. I tried another. "I mean, there are some things..." I faltered again.

"... that you just don't do," she finished for me. She hooked an arm in mine and started us for the hotel doors again. "It's okay, Daron," she said as we crossed the street. "I understand."

I wasn't sure that she did. But I wasn't sure that she didn't either. And I wasn't sure which possibility worried me more.

#  All The Young Dudes

In the morning I got through to Bart and asked him if he wanted to see a show at the Orpheum.

"Why, whose playing?"

"Duh, I am."

He showed up at the hotel the morning of the show. He'd cut his hair again, so short in places that it almost looked straight. My own head had a full year's worth of uncut growth on it. In the back it spilled over my shoulder and now it was long enough that sometimes it got in my mouth. I knew as soon as Bart got away from his parents he'd let it go and soon have the mop of black curls I was used to, but I still gave him no end of shit about it.

Martin took a liking to him right away. We chased down Remo and Waldo and got him a laminated pass, and then everyone got in the bus for the short trip to the concert hall.

The Orpheum was in an unlikely seeming place in Boston, sandwiched between a shopping mall and a beauty school. It was an old building that modern downtown had sprung up around. It was a bitch to find, its marquee all the way at the end of the alley formed by two modern buildings. We entered through another alley so narrow the tour bus had to pull up two blocks away.

As we went into the auditorium, Bart went and sat in the front row of seats. "Come here."

I sat next to him. "Why?"

"Because it's probably one of the only chances we'll ever get to sit here. Unless we win some radio station contest." He cracked a too-sober grin. "Remember this."

"You're weird." I stood and motioned for him to follow. "Let's see what backstage is like."

This was more like a theater than any other hall we'd played in that tour, with curtains separating the wings from the stage. We passed Waldo growling at one of the in-house technicians. "Why isn't this stuff set up already? This equipment has been here for days."

"Look," the guy said. "Squeeze didn't get their shit out of here until this morning. We couldn't move until they did." When Waldo started to sputter the guy went on. "Talk to the union if you have a problem."

We nosed around the backstage rooms for a while, until enough stuff was unpacked that I could start lending a hand. Once that was done, we lounged around backstage. Bart and Alex were talking about bass playing when Carynne came in and sat down next to me. "Hi," I said.

"What's going on?" She settled back in the couch.

"The usual nothing." I drummed my fingers on my knees. Remo's Ovation was sitting in the case next to us. "Do you want to hear the song, that song I was, I mean..."

"You'll sing it?"

"No, but I'll play it." I was already reaching for the guitar. I plucked at the strings--it was well enough in tune. I strummed through the first verse and then went into the chorus. She started humming then and I had a crazy idea. "Carynne, would you sing it?"

"Me?"

"Yeah, I keep imagining this Janis-Joplin-type voice doing it."

She gave me a crooked smirk. "Yeah, so? I don't know the words."

I took a piece of staff paper and a pencil out of the case and started writing. "There are a couple of places I haven't filled in yet." I sketched out the words and the tune on the lines.

"Great." She eyed Alex and Bart who had quit their conversation to watch us. "I don't read music."

"Here," I showed her the paper. "The opening melody goes like this." I picked it out on the top string and she hummed it. "Yeah. That's it." I went back and started the chords again, nodding my head when she should come in.

"People, keep walking in time..." She began, then faltered. "I can't keep the melody in my head and listen to you play at the same time."

Bart sat up. "I'll hum the melody, you keep the words going. Daron?" He indicated I should start again.

"People, keep walking in time, walking in line, walking right into my life."

Alex began patting out a rhythm on his thigh.

"Again," I said between strums, "Keep it going, back to the first verse." The second time through was stronger. "Now the chorus, 3, 2, 1," I came in with a soft harmony, "Story of my life..."

Carynne giggled but I kept playing. "You lied," she said, "You do sing."

I didn't let the rhythm break. "Let's do the second verse."

She was nodding her head in time. Alex pulled out another guitar and plucked out a bass part on it and Bart started tapping his fingers. Carynne came right in with it. "Sister, don't you know it's true, you got the groove..."

When we came around to the chorus, we all sang. We went around again, Carynne started on the third verse, "Brother, give me a sign, I got the time..." She was putting a little raunchy punch into her voice, now, and it sounded great. We went through the chorus again, and again. And back to the verses.

She started on the fourth and final one. "Father, don't say it's true..." She squinted at the paper. "You didn't finish this one."

"Yeah, I know." My rhythm broke, then and I had to start over. "What do you want," I said. "I got distracted."

She smiled a private smile at me. "This is cool."

Bart laid his hands on the strings to quiet them. "Yeah, I didn't even know you wrote lyrics."

"Sometimes." I felt all their eyes on me at once, then. "Maybe I'll finish it."

Remo spoke from behind me. "If you don't, I will. I'm going to have that damn tune stuck in my head for weeks, now." He came around and sat down in the half circle of couches. "I just came down to make sure you were taking good care of that thing. And to tell you all it's twenty minutes to places."

Carynne took Bart by the hand and led him toward the auditorium, leaving me alone.

#  No Time Left For You

After the show, Bart's face had the glow I'd hoped to see.

"What did you think?" I asked as we headed back to the hotel suite where the party was beginning.

He thought for a second and then said "I think I was right about you all along."

I didn't ask what he meant by that.

Remo was struggling with a champagne bottle when we came in. It blew with a loud pop, the foam spilling into plastic cups held by people around him. He licked the side of the bottle. "Good job folks!" A cheer went up. I got a cup for me and one for Bart and the bubbles made me sneeze.

Alex Mazel came and shook my hand. "I think Remo has something for you," he said.

"Yeah, a paycheck," I laughed. But then Remo came up behind me, his hand heavy on my shoulder.

"I thought you could use this." He was holding the Ovation's case in the other hand.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean I'm giving you this. Here." He handed it to me.

"No shit?" I wondered if it was possible to sound grateful enough. "Oh my god. Thank you." Oh man, sincere thanks always sound false to me. "Are you sure? I mean, can I, like...?"

"I got another one at home." He shrugged like it was nothing. "This'll keep your Yamaha from getting beat up."

At some point I noticed Carynne and Bart were missing. I don't know if anyone else did, and I didn't care. I let myself float in a champagne haze, thinking, tomorrow I'll be on my way back to Providence, the City With No Nickname. I'd go on the train. I'd go to the bursar's office in person and pay off my bill. Then I'd spend the afternoon with Roger, my roommate, and maybe teach him the new song. Or maybe not. It was hard to picture him and his honeyed drone singing it. Well whatever.

The phone next to me rang. Remo waved his hand at it. "Who is it?"

"I'll get it." I picked it up. We both sounded kind of slurred. "Hello, Nomad Central, can I take your order?"

"Hey, yeah, Remo there?" The voice was nasal and familiar.

I thrust the receiver at Remo, panicky, not wanting my voice to give me away.

"Who is it?" he repeated as he staggered toward me. "Daron, what's wrong?"

I put my finger up to my lips too late. Remo grabbed the receiver. "Yeah, this is Remo. What the hell ya want?" He sat down hard, mimed hitting himself in the forehead as he looked at me. "Where are you now? Chicago? That's great."

The liquor in my stomach was turning sour.

"Yeah, he's right here. He brought a friend up to see the show." Well, that was true. "Me? I'm heading back to LA tomorrow." He listened a few more moments. "Yeah, here. Hang on." He shrugged apologeticially at me and handed me the phone.

I put it up to my ear. "Hey."

The connection was good--he sounded like he was in the next room over. Which for a second I worried he was. "Daron! How you doing, kiddo? I thought I'd catch up with you and see if you're alright."

"Yeah, everything's fine, Digger." Here I was, reading another line out of a script. "Classes start again in two weeks, I'm doing good. I've been playing some gigs and working part time in a recording studio. Uh, how about you?"

"Don't you worry about me," he said. "I'm working for a promoter, can you believe that? Hey listen, what's your number? I'll probably be taking some business trips out that way."

"Really?" I let my panic sound like enthusiasm. Now I had a choice. Give him the number or tell him a bold-faced lie. "When?"

"I dunno. Maybe in a couple of months. All depends." He didn't say on what. "I've got a pen and paper right here."

I rattled off the number. Well, Roger and I were planning to move on September 1. When our lease was up, we'd probably get a new phone, in his name. Or maybe he'd never call. Maybe this was all an act, too, of fatherly concern, something society expected that Digger would never follow through on. I still didn't like it.

"Well," he said. "I'm on a pay phone. I gotta run."

"Yeah," I couldn't bring myself to say thanks for calling. "Bye." I hung up without listening to hear if he had anything else to add. I let my head fall back on the couch, my hands fall to my sides, like some puppet whose strings have been cut. "Oh, man."

Remo yawned. "I told you you can't hide from him forever."

"Thanks for the advice."

"Now, get out of here and get some sleep. We've gotta check out by eleven." He looked about ready to sleep right where he was. I stumbled back to my own room. Martin was nowhere to be found. Bart was snoring in my bed.

#  Suddenly, Last Summer

Bart had to be on the Vineyard early the next day for some family get-together so I took Amtrak back to Providence. From the train I could see a lot of the green nothing between cities, ragged thunderclouds trailing gray rain in the sunny July sky. When I arrived the pavement was wet but the sky was clearing. I discovered I couldn't really carry two guitars and the heavy duffel and my backpack without being horribly lopsided or giving myself a wicked hand cramp. So I caught a cab.

The driver took me straight up the hill, through the heart of RIMCon, and then down the other side toward the student ghetto where Roger and I lived. On Thayer Street people were out walking their dogs, jogging, buying frozen lemonade from vendors in yellow trucks, overdressed musicians were putting posters onto telephone poles and skate punks were hopping the curb.

"Let me out here."

The cabbie didn't even look at me funny in the mirror, just swerved toward a fire hydrant and jerked to a stop. "Five fifty."

I paid him in cash and then dragged my crap half a block down. I opened the Ovation's case and set myself up in front of the entrance to the ATM machines, across from the Copa and the ice cream parlor. The clock on the bank said it was two o'clock, and if I had any plan in mind it was to just play for an hour, then get some frozen lemonade for myself and go on home. After all, there were no street musicians in Providence. But I didn't go home at three, or at four. I stood in the cool concrete shadow of the building and played until the dinner crowd was milling around and the lemonade vendors had long since left. I played songs people knew and I played things I made up on the very spot. The bright jangle of the Ovation bounced off the sidewalk like bells ringing and I could almost hear a kind of joyous music, like something coming from a church just over the hill, that I could snatch the bare gist of and run with. A song full of heart and meaning, but I couldn't catch the words. And I made twenty one and change, to boot.

#  Part Two: December 1986
#  Life In A Northern Town

Roger hung his head, bumping it against the mic stand and muttering to himself, his short hair shining golden under the track lights of the studio. He couldn't hear me swearing on the other side of the soundproof glass. I punched a button on the console and backed up the tape for what seemed like the millionth time. I spoke then so he could hear me in his headphones. "Rog, do you want to take a break?"

He didn't move and I thought maybe the signal hadn't gone through, but then he ripped the headphones off his ears and stood clutching them. Then he said something I couldn't hear--I had turned the microphone off when he'd started banging on it. I potted the monitors back up.

"...hopeless." I think he was saying something about the song. "This just isn't going to work."

I was having the same thoughts, not about the song, but about Roger. "Dammit, Rog--"

The door to the control room swung open and Bart came in, carrying a grocery sack. "What's up? Did I miss anything?"

"No." I flicked a glance at the forlorn figure standing behind the glass. I spoke into my mic again. "Rog, let's take a break." The digital clock read 3:00 A.M.

Rog pushed through the heavy silent door that separated the recording chamber from the control room. "Hi," he said to Bart.

"Hey, Roger Dodger, have something to drink." Bart slid down the wall next to the groceries and tossed him a can of Yoo Hoo.

Roger tossed it back, speaking slowly as if we might not understand him. "This has milk and chocolate in it."

Bart looked up from under unruly bangs. "I know. That's why I buy it."

"It'll ruin my voice." Roger sat down in the rolling chair next to me, his face glum. "No thanks."

Another look flickered between me and Bart, one of many that seemed to be coming with greater and greater frequency these days. I suppressed a sigh. "Why don't we call it quits for tonight."

"Fine with me." Roger didn't meet my eyes. "See you at home." And he left.

Bart sighed with relief. "Gods, Daron, what are we gonna do with him?"

I chewed on one loose fingernail. "You think he's hopeless."

"Yeah, I do." He climbed up into the empty chair, cracking open a can of Yoo Hoo for himself. "I don't think we're going to be able to get his head out of his ass with a crowbar. He's so stuck on his precious voice that he doesn't even want to use it to sing, forgodsake. If you think we're having problems in here, just wait until he's out in a smoke-filled room with a bad sound system."

"You're right." But I held back my comments.

Bart didn't. "And let me guess what was just going on in here, he was having trouble 'interpreting' your lyrics, right? Couldn't 'get the feel' for them. Fuckin' artsy artist-y art art art-out-the-ass." It was rare to see Bart so pissed he got vulgar. "It's such bullshit. I mean, he never had this kind of constipation back when he was writing all the words himself."

When I'd first met Roger, I'd liked his pretension, that black-beret aura he cultivated, so different from the workaday guys I knew outside school and so seemingly rebellious compared to the other conservatory students. I thought he was serious about his own music. As I was learning, it meant that he was serious about himself and little else. Bart was still talking.

About me. "If you don't make some more money soon, you're going to be in deep shit. Aren't you."

The semester ended in two weeks and the bill for the next one was about to hit. I wasn't doing too bad, though; I had enough saved up to go part time, then maybe I could catch up in the summer. "Roger isn't about to become a cash cow, head in ass or no," I said. "You and me can make more playing acoustic at the coffeehouse than the three of us could doing club gigs. So don't even start talking about him being a, a... financial liability."

"I still say we might be doing bigger, better gigs with someone else. We're going nowhere, bwana."

"I can't fire him."

"Why not?"

"I can't." I thought about why. First off, he was my roommate and my life would get real difficult if he didn't want me around anymore. Secondly, we'd have to start from scratch with someone new. Third, I couldn't figure out how to tell him. "I just can't."

Bart exhaled in disgust. "Daron, just what kind of control freak are you?"

"Not a very good one, I guess."

"I'm serious, you insist on having control over these things, and then you don't exercise it." He swiveled the chair to face me. "To hell with the contracts. If you want, I'll do the firing."

"No." I was beginning to hate those contracts. I'd been going on Remo's model, no manager, one member of the band holding managerial control, that is to say, me. "How about we dissolve the band?"

"Why?"

I stood up. "I'm going to say to Roger, 'Rog, we've decided to break up the band. It's been great but...'" Bart was staring at me. "See, then you and I can start a new band, and I think Roger's ego will be less bruised."

"Why are you so worried about how Roger feels about this? It's his fault." Well, at least Bart's taking this stuff seriously now, I thought. He no longer thought of the band as a hobby. Usually, that thought made me happy.

I dimmed the lights in the studio until it was completely dark on the other side of the glass. Now I was looking at my own reflection. I was keeping my hair at shoulder length until it all grew out. Roger had been trimming it for me.

"It's what I've decided," I said. "And we're starting a new band. And we're going to call it..." I flailed for something that was at the tip of my tongue. "...Moondog Three."

Bart digested that. "Sounds as good as anything."

"Yeah, did I tell you I changed my name?"

"No."

"Or, I'm about to." I went through the control room shutting things off, rewinding our tape and stowing it in my bag.

"That's ambitious." Bart picked up the groceries. "To what?"

"I'm keeping my first name but chucking Marks. Moondog works as well as anything." I shut off the lights as we backed out the door into the lobby. I clicked off the lights on the Christmas tree in the waiting room and on the obligatory fish tank. Candy had set that up after the owner had changed the name of the studio to The Aquarium. The name fit, what with all the big glass windows separating rooms. I locked the outside door behind us and armed the burglar alarm. Using the studio in the middle of the night when it wasn't booked was worth more than what they paid me.

"So, when are you going to tell him?"

"Tonight if he isn't asleep. Tomorrow, otherwise. You want to meet back here tomorrow, anyway?"

"Sure." He hefted the electric bass in its case. "We'll both be there. You want a ride home?"

"Sure." That was another good thing about Bart. He had a car.

#  Don't Do Me Like That

Bart dropped me off in front of a gray three-storey house on the East side. Once upon a time it had been one huge house, but now it was divvied up into apartments, two on the first floor, one on each of the top two. Roger and I had been roommates for eighteen months, now, ever since I'd moved off campus to spare the dorm expense. The bedroom was his, I slept in the living room and paid only half rent. We'd been in this place three months now and I liked it. It was larger than our old place in Fox Point and closer to the campus. In the old apartment there hadn't even been a door between the bedroom and the living room, but I'd moved in with him anyway, the rent was so cheap. When it came time to quit the old place, I sometimes felt Roger had brought me along with his furniture. Roger liked to pretend that he didn't need anything but his music, only sometimes requiring food, sleep, and sex. With me in the house, Roger had discovered that to have all his needs met, all he had to do was go out for food.

I put my guitar down at the foot of the mattress I slept on and shrugged off my coat. It was too cold out for just the thin overcoat, time to start wearing a heavy sweatshirt, too. I could hear him moving around in the bedroom. I threw the coat over a chair and poked my head through the open door.

He was sitting on the edge of the bed, a magazine open in his hands, but as I watched him I realized he wasn't reading the magazine. He was just sitting there, staring, seething. I opened my mouth to say something trivial and then his eyes locked on me.

I forced myself ahead. "Hey, Rog, how's that music history class going?"

"I'm sick to death of school. I'm sick of it!" Roger picked up the magazine and threw it at me. I ducked back out of the way. If he'd thrown it any other direction it would have hit some expensive equipment. "I hate this place. I'm never going to start my career by wasting my time in a library somewhere. It's just not fair!"

Sigh. I'd heard this rant before in several different forms, and didn't have anything new to add to the debate. I backed out of the room and closed the door. A while later as I lay awake on the mattress I heard the whine of a tape recorder and he started singing. The drum machine began to pulse. Some time around dawn I was just falling asleep when he came into the living room and sat down.

"What were you going to tell me?" he said, nudging me awake.

I yawned. "What?"

"When you came in, you didn't really want to know about my music history class. You were going to tell me something."

The band breaking up. "I don't remember," I mumbled. "Nothing important."

He nodded and went back into his room. I didn't hear any more sound so I assumed he went to sleep. I turned over and tried to do the same, but I couldn't. I kept thinking about what Bart said about wasting time. I thought about how long Remo waited for his chance at success. I thought about finding a new singer. The winter sun was bright in the windows by the time I slept.

When I woke up, Roger was playing something at full volume with the door open. He only did that when he had finished something he wanted me to hear. It was dancey, with a throbbing techno-beat, his clear tenor distorted on one end into an industrial growl, into a soprano aria on the other. I went and stuck my groggy head into the room.

"OK, you got my attention," I shouted over the beat.

He was perched in the middle of the bed, shaking his shoulders. "This is the new me, Daron, Roger Dodger -- Disco Diva!" He threw up his hands and froze in a fashion model pose. "What do you think?"

I rubbed my eyes. "I think it's loud. Don't you ever sleep?"

He killed the sound with the flick of a switch. "You hate it."

"No, that's not it." Roger Devon -- Sonic Psychodrama, I thought. It was perfectly serviceable disco, though. I wondered if that meant his prog rock phase was over. From Jon Anderson to Jimmy Somerville overnight. "That's good stuff, Rog."

"I need to invest in a better sampler," he said, running a finger along the edge of one black component. "Then I'll be all set. I'll never even have to leave this room if I don't want. No outside musicians, no outside interference." He hugged himself. "Life is full of possibilities!"

"Yeah." I looked at the time, noon. "Is it Wednesday?"

"Yeah, why?"

"Just making sure I wasn't supposed to be somewhere else right now." I turned away from him, thinking about food. I crossed my room to the kitchen.

"Daron." His voice was soft, beckoning me. I knew what he wanted; he always did after finishing a new song, a new tape.

"Not now, let me eat something."

He came up behind me, circling my waist with his hands. He could kiss me on the top of the head if he wanted, he was that much taller. He leaned over to breathe in my ear. "I promise I'll cook you a fantastic breakfast."

"No, I have things to do." I tried to take a step forward. He held me fast. As soon as I felt his erection pressing into my spine, I felt my own start to rise.

"Come on, Daron, it's been weeks."

"That never bothered you before," I said. I never should have slept with him that first time, I thought. I had been crashing in his living room for two weeks and we had just written our first song together. We were sitting on the futon and I was playing the guitar, and he was belting out the words like a gospel preacher. His voice was amazing, always would be. I let it happen, let the sex flow out of the music like it was one thing. I told myself that's what it was, the creative urge blossoming, uncontrollable, spilling into whatever receptacles would accept it, in this case each other. I didn't think it would happen again, I shrugged it off, forgot about it. But after a few months the pattern became obvious. Roger hit one of these highs every couple of weeks, and sometimes I was there when he did. It didn't mean anything to either of us.

"Go on, Rog, lay off. I'm hungry." But the fight had gone out of my voice.

"So am I." He nibbled my neck and I felt adrenalin rush through my legs and my groin. It had been weeks, and I'd been too wrapped up in extra hours at the studio and the practice hall to do anything about it. Cruising took time, sometimes a lot of it, especially when they wouldn't let me into the one bar downtown. But I could only have Roger when Roger wanted it. I wasn't sure if the rest of the time he had no interest at all in sex, or just no interest in me.

He pressed me down against the mattress, rubbing against my back, pressing my erection down into the firmness of the bed. He pulled off my shorts and licked the base of my spine, pressed his dick against my tail bone. He rocked his hips, rubbing himself on my back, his rhythm rubbing me in turn against the sheets. I lost myself between the roughness of the sheets and the heat and weight of his body. I came, shuddering against the mattress, while he redoubled his efforts until he squirted hot and wet onto my back. I lay there, limp and panting, while he stood up and got into the shower. It was time to wash the sheets again. I went back to sleep next to the wet spot. When I woke up, Roger was nowhere in the house.

#  Tell The Moon-Dog

I made myself some lunch when I woke up again at one, and started looking through the phone book. It took me a few phone calls, but I eventually talked to a lawyer about changing my name. She told me that it was a much simpler legal procedure to give myself an additional name than it was to get the old one taken away. She tried to convince me that for $250 per hour she could handle the more complicated procedure. I decided to add the new name and bury the old one my own way, and to worry about paying someone to finish the job someday when I had money to spend on it. I took the bus down to city hall, and filled out some papers. The clerk gave me shit about not having a driver's license, and I told him it'd be pretty stupid for them to give a license to someone who couldn't drive. He didn't find that funny, but I filled out the papers and he didn't tear them up or have me arrested. At least I accomplished one of the things I had told Bart I'd do. I called him and told him to meet me at the coffee house, and blow off the studio tonight. I left Roger a note telling him we weren't recording.

#  Tell the March Hare

The Copa was a coffeehouse on the corner of Angell Street two blocks from where Roger and I lived. One of these places with ceiling fans turning all the time, summer or winter, all kinds of coffee and baked goods and even pretty cheap sandwiches, people's stuff dumped all around the edges of the place, the windowsill full of backpacks and bookbags and the cases of the more cavalier violinists. There were seats for about forty. Me and Bart played an acoustic set there every third Thursday night under the name the Right-Ass Brothers (don't ask), and on the other nights we often hung around and listened to whoever they had. I arrived early and sat at a table against the wall.

Bart threw the classified ads down on the table.

"What's this for?" I moved my coffee to the side to get a better look at the paper.

"For us. To start looking for a 'Lead Vocalist' ad or 'Musicians Wanted.'" He sat down with a muffin on a saucer. "Got a pen?"

"No."

"Well, here..." He held out a pen. "Take it."

"No," I said again, trying to kickstart my sentence. "I mean, no, I'm not looking at any ads."

"Why not?"

I slurped the coffee. I'd put so much sugar in most of it was piled in the bottom of the cup, undissolved. "I'm not interested in joining someone else's band, I want someone to join my band."

"What's the difference?"

"There's a big difference!" I looked at him. "And those Lead Vocalist types are going to give us the same prima donna shit Roger's giving us."

"Yeah, but we've got to do something." His frustration echoed my own. "Maybe we should take out our own ad. It might be better than nothing. And that way you can make it clear it's your band."

"No." I snorted. "It's the principle of the thing. I don't want to meet my next bandmember through the ads anymore than I want to meet my future wife through the personals." That sounded so weird as I said it. "I mean, we're talking about a deep, meaningful, lifelong relationship, and these ads are like the Dating Service for Unemployed Musicians." I picked up the paper and began reading from the 'Musicians Wanted' column. "'Working Band seeks male vocalist, have gigs and rehearsal space, bring your own tux.'"

"Wedding band."

"'Keyboards and drums seeks singer influenced by Cure, REM, Siouxsie, New Order, better to look like Robert Smith than sound like him.' Ugh. Or how about this one, 'Hard-working guitar band needs front man for covers and originals, long hair and transportation a must. No drugs, No egos.'" I dropped the paper. "This is bullshit. We've got to ask around ourselves, see who we know."

"Great. Just sit on your ass, why don't you." And he walked away, leaving the paper and the muffin with me. He got in the coffee line.

I studied the paper again as I finished the last dregs of sugar from the bottom of my cup. There were pencil marks in the margin I hadn't noticed before, just check marks, and each one was next to a "Bassist Wanted" ad.

Bart came back balancing a cappuccino or espresso or some such. He was still pissed when he sat down. "I bet you didn't even do it, yet."

"Do what?"

"Tell Roger we're giving him the boot." He blew on the tiny cup.

"He was asleep," I said. "I'll tell him."

"You're wasting time!"

"I--!" I didn't know what I wanted to say. "You're just having withdrawal symptoms from not playing out enough."

"Ha! Thank you Doctor Music. Okay, fine, I'm sick of sitting around. You're the one who can do something about it." I'd never heard him so accusatory. His voice cracked on "So go do it!"

"You're right, you're right." I passed the paper back to him. "I'm a wimp, I'm lame."

"Have fun, Manager," Bart said, his coffee finally cool enough to sip. I put my coat on and stood there for a minute, trying to think of one more thing I could say. But there wasn't anything. As I made my way out the door, I saw a girl with long, dark curls take my place at the table.

I went home to find Roger still missing. When he came in around midnight, I pretended to be sleeping. He closed his door. He had an early class, so by the time I got up for ear training he was long gone. I stayed out all day. When I came home, he was in his room, playing something very loud with the door shut. I picked up the phone. There was no answer at Bart's.

It went on like that for several days. I passed my finals without really trying. Bart had dropped off the face of the earth, and Roger and I hardly said two words to each other. Then one morning when I hadn't yet slept that night, I tried Bart's number. And I finally caught him at home.

"Bart, Daron. Can you come down to the studio tonight?"

Bart's voice had an even higher pitch on the phone. "Did you tell him?"

"Eleven o'clock. Bring your stuff."

I heard his voice waver. "I can't make it until midnight."

"Midnight, then."

"And I've got to get up early, too. Maybe we should make it another night."

I let his hesitation fuel my suspicion. "OK, how about tomorrow."

"Great. Tomorrow's all clear, I think. Midnight."

"Yeah, Bye." I hung up the phone, gnawed on a hang nail starting on my left thumb. He was going somewhere tonight and he didn't want me to know where. To audition, maybe, for some other band. Why not? Bart didn't think of himself as a songwriter; he was a player, a hired hand. He liked that image: Bass for Hire. One day, I thought, it'd probably make him one of the most sought after studio musicians in the hemisphere. But that didn't help me right now. And nothing in the contract could stop him.

Without him, I'd go from having half a band to being a solo artist starting from scratch, and I didn't want that. But even if I found another bass player...? I still didn't want it. Bart was the closest thing to a friend my own age I'd had since before junior high school. I wasn't looking forward to losing that.

The future became too heavy to contemplate without help. I took the last beer out of the fridge and popped it, carrying it cold-steaming and sweating back to the mattress. I probably never would have spoken to Bart if he hadn't befriended me first.

My first semester at school, I lived on campus, in a dorm, and so did he. But he wasn't a first year student like me, he was a transfer from one of the schools in Boston, with a couple of years up on me. I was the only other person on that hall who dared play anything other than an orchestra instrument and we stuck together, us versus them. Bart was supposed to be there because the best bassoon teacher on the East Coast had transferred down from the BSO, and Bart was supposed to be on some kind of career track into the orchestra world. But his secret love was electric bass, a love affair which, once I heard him play, I encouraged. And he hung on my every word, my every critique. No one had ever talked about his bass playing before--no one who played rock or blues, anyway.

It took him a while to get comfortable in the rock world. But now Bart was so comfortable with it, he didn't need me to walk him through it any more. I'd given him that little taste of the big time, too. I decided the beer was making me maudlin, not relaxed. I put on my sweatshirt, then my coat, and went out into the morning.

#  You Got Another Thing Coming

By noon I had worked my way over to Bart's house and knocked on the door. After a few minutes his roommate whose name I could never remember opened it.

"Bart here?" I realized then that I didn't see his car.

"Nah, he took off for Boston with Michelle." Like it was the most natural thing in the world.

"Yeah, right, of course." I wondered who Michelle was.

"You wanna leave him a note?"

I didn't--I'd see him tonight, I hoped. I thanked the roomie and went back down the steps. I climbed back over College Hill to where all the used record stores, used clothing, used books, and fast food stands were. With four dollars in my pocket I could get a pretty decent meal if I doled it out right. But I wasn't hungry. Lack of sleep was turning my blood to mud. I went through the motions of looking through the record stores and got real depressed looking through the dollar-bin. Band after band I'd never even heard of, the cover photos on their albums seeming utterly ludicrous in the face of their failure. It was time to go home.

When I stumbled in the door, Roger was sitting in a chair in the living room, reading a magazine, the same one as the other night. I let my coat fall on the floor and let myself crumple onto the futon. Roger spoke up. "So are we rehearsing tonight?"

He sounded too smug for his own good, or maybe I was just getting paranoid from lack of sleep. "What?" I said from the pillow. "I thought you were going solo with your disco project."

He huffed and crossed his wrists over his knee. "As far as I know, I still work for you. Unless you're prepared to release me from my contract."

I ignored him. "Midnight. We're supposed to meet at midnight."

I went to the studio around four in the afternoon, to do an engineering shift for the guys in Tygerz Claw--they'd asked for me which was cool since it meant I'd almost surely get paid. They were trying to do some original material again, none of it brilliant, but I did my best to make it sound better. They turned in when their five hours were up. Roger brought me some dinner around 10 and I let him watch the boards while I laid down a few tracks I had going around in my head. I was psyched to play; it had been too long and we were all itching, I was sure.

I looked at the clock around ten after midnight. Bart still wasn't there. "Is that clock right?" I said to Roger.

Roger looked at his bare wrist. "I have no idea."

We sat there in the control room like toys with no batteries, Roger not voicing his annoyance, me not voicing my fears.

At 12:30 am I heard the outer door open. Bart came into the room, empty handed, brushing cold off his sleeves. He didn't take off his jacket. "Just got back," he said, his eyes sliding in annoyance onto Roger.

"You're late," Roger said, his lips pursed.

"Well, that doesn't matter now," Bart sing-songed. He looked from Roger to me. "I'm going to have to quit."

"Why?" I wasn't taking this news sitting down. I stood up, the chair rolling out from under me and hitting the edge of the console.

"I'm moving." He shrugged. He directed some venom at Roger. "I obviously can't make it here on time for rehearsals."

I almost laughed. "So screw that, we can go back to rehearsing in the recital hall. We can work around your class schedule."

"I'm not taking any more classes. I am out of the conservatory." His voice didn't betray any emotion at all, but he made a little boot-kicking motion when he said the word 'out.' "I'm going back to Boston. I thought I should come and tell you in person."

I tried to say "Well, thanks," but I choked on it.

Bart clapped me on the shoulder. "See you around."

"Yeah." I watched him go back the way he came, my brain doing a little flip that was the start of a panic. Like a little voice trying to say "do something!" in my head, but stuttering instead.

Roger spun his seat around in a full 360. "Well, let's get to work."

I shook my head again. "No. That's it. Consider this band gone." I turned around as if I might see something in the studio that might answer my questions and solve my problems, but there was nothing. What now?

Roger stood up next to me, watching me stare into the empty studio. "Look, there's no reason you and me can't pair up, just the two of us."

"No," I said without really hearing him.

"Why not? It makes more sense this way. You and I have so much more in common, Daron." He turned my head so I was looking at him. "You know what I mean."

"No, I don't." I wondered what Roger-nonsense he was speaking now.

"You and me, living together, recording together, it makes sense. I'm gay, and you're gay..."

"No." I took a step back and bruised my thigh on the corner of the console. The stutter of unfinished thoughts crescendoed in my head. "No."

He folded his arms. "When are you going to grow up? Wake up and smell the cappuccino, Daron, you're as queer as a three dollar bill."

I shook my head. "You're wrong." I tried to rationalize while I still could. "I've slept with women." Well, that wasn't exactly true, but it was the one coherent thought I was having at that moment.

"Yeah, and you've slept with me." He closed the physical distance between us, his height looming. "How many times have you slept with me? Ten? Twelve? Twenty? How many..." he breathed in my ear.

I pushed him away. "Don't talk shit. I didn't..." My mouth and my brain weren't working together. I could have said so much about why I moved in with him, there were all kinds of reasons, dammit, I didn't even know that he liked me, or other men, when we met. Actually, despite what he was saying, I wasn't sure he _liked_ me _now._

And he was saying all kinds of melodramatic things, about how I didn't have to be afraid, about how he had ben afraid until that time he'd tried to kill himself, but now he realized... I was shutting down the equipment and pulling my sweatshirt over my head, not hearing him. It was unfortunate that I couldn't just storm out, since I was the one who had to lock up the place. Roger seemed to be talking to hear himself talk, and as he neared the door in his coat, I pushed him out and locked it behind him. Then I sat in the dark for I don't know how long.

After maybe an hour, I went to Candy's Post-It-Noted desk and picked up her phone. Yeah, it was late. But I called Bart.

He answered, still awake.

"Why are you moving to Boston?" I asked him. "Are you doing it just to get away from Roger and me?" I hated myself a lot just then.

He actually laughed. "No, it's nothing like that. Can you meet me at the coffeehouse tomorrow? I've got a lot to tell you."

He sounded so normal and happy, it didn't seem real. "Sure, what time?"

"Two PM. Don't be late."

"Ha. I'll be there." I hung up the phone unsatisfied, but less angry. I slept in my clothes on the couch in the reception area.

#  Goody Two Shoes

I arrived at the Copa at 1:30 and sat there staring at strangers for a half an hour, Brown students talking Derrida and Freud, some Rimconners discussing their recital, a few townie kids trying to be artsy, some part of me thinking that Bart wasn't going to show. But he walked in the door at two o'clock sharp and pulled a stray chair up to the table. What he said caught me by surprise. "Daron," he said, "You must be the sanest person I know."

I laughed in spite of how miserable I felt. "What?"

"No, seriously." He took his coat off. "At least I have a 99% chance of having a coherent conversation with you." He grinned expectantly.

"Jeez, how am I supposed to answer that?" I turned my empty coffee cup around in my hands. "Okay, how about this one, what's the deal with you leaving school?"

"I couldn't tell you this with Roger the Walking Gossip Machine there. I'm getting out of town to avoid a scandal." His eyes shone.

"What kind of a scandal?"

"The Dean's Daughter kind of a scandal." He kept his voice low. "I'm sorry I wasn't totally straight with you. You know I've always hated music school."

"I made some guesses."

"Well, I never told you the whole story of why I left Boston. I got myself kicked out there, too, thought that would be the end of it. But my father pulled some strings, got me sent down here, and I went 'cause I didn't have anything else to do. But now," he spread his arms. "I have reached the proverbial point of no return. I'll never be able to show my face around here again. I'm sorry I never told you all this before."

"We," I let myself smile as I said it, "We all have our little secrets to keep."

"Cool." He jittered in his seat. "At least I know you can keep one."

I thought about that for a moment. "Won't your running to Boston make it look kind of suspicious?"

"Of course not." He tapped the table. "The official story is obvious. I'm throwing away a brilliant career in the symphony to start a rock band with my best friend. That'll be scandal enough for my parents."

"Wait," Too many things were trying to sink in at once. "You're not going to live with your parents?"

"No, I'm moving in with my girlfriend, Michelle."

"Aha." I sat back. "And what's this band you're starting?"

He smiled. "I'm not. You are. It's called Moondog Three, and you're going up there during the break to look for a singer, right?"

I smiled back. "I'll do you one better. I'm quitting school, too."

"Why?"

I let my tongue roll out the words. "Roger convinced me."

#  Welcome to the Machine

It was a long, dull winter in Boston. Bart and Michelle moved into a nice one bedroom in Allston, right on the T line, while I got myself a cheap studio sublet in the Fenway from a Berklee student who was abroad until September. Michelle worked at Tower and got me a job there as a clerk by telling them I knew something about jazz. As it turned out, I did know more than most of the other clerks. Bart spent much of the winter doing some studio backing musician type gigs while I worked six days a week. Most days I punched in at 1pm and worked until 9pm, others I worked 4pm to store closing at midnight. It took me exactly eleven minutes to walk from my apartment to the store, unless my clock at home was wrong, which was always a possibility. A bus ran from the corner of Queensberry right to Newbury Street, but because of the weird fucked up way that Boston's streets run, it sometimes took longer to ride the bus than to walk. Besides, I could never get a bus that got me there exactly at 1pm, which meant I walked in the snow and winter rain and other weather-type crap, but this was not a big deal compared to the amount of walking I did in Providence. My walk took me right past Jack's Drum Shop, where despite the name they also sell guitars and other instruments, and the Berklee Performance Center.

Technically I worked in the jazz department, on the third floor separated from the classical music section by glass partitions which are meant to be soundproof but really aren't. Thing is, there wasn't always that much to do in jazz, other than stand at the cash register. The questions people tended to ask me fell into one of two categories, those that showed how very little the customer knew about jazz (like "Do you have a trumpet section? I'm looking for a really famous trumpet player." Me: "Do you remember the name?" Them: "Oh, let me see, it was... wait, I got it. Benny Goodman.") and those that showed how very little _I_ knew about jazz. (I'll never again send someone to the hip hop section looking for Herbie Hancock. Promise.) Lucky for me, all the time I spent in school ignoring what was being said had made tons of room for the memorization of the smallest trivial details about pretty much every recording artist I cared to read the liner notes on. Management let me play what I wanted out of the new releases, and with all the classic rereleases coming out on CD, I got a pretty good jazz education pretty fast.

But when things were especially slow in jazz, which was about every other day, they pulled me or the other guy who sometimes worked with me (an art school student named Jay) down to the second floor for various dumb retail duties. The dumbest of these was rack combing. People have this tendency to browse and pick up things, and carry them around the store. Then when they find something better/cheaper, they abandon the first thing at whatever bin or shelf the second thing is found in. By the end of a week of rabid browsing, the racks would be full of misplaced crapola, hence the task of rack combing. For some reason, the jazz department didn't get as shuffled as the pop and rock sections, and this annoyed me, and the fact that it annoyed me also annoyed me.

I generally started an afternoon's combing with the bargain bins. People left a lot of junk there, which always caused aggravation for the cashiers, because people would find stuff there that wasn't on sale, but then try to get it for a sale price because it was in the bin. (We'd never give it to them.)

Here was a stack of like twenty or so copies of a record by what looked from their album photo to be a kind of cross between Duran Duran and Psychedelic Furs. Their name was Platinum Blonde and there were three of them, sneering in parachute pants, on the cover. A Sade album was visible in the middle of the stack, obvious by the dark blue edge of the album cover. I pulled the Sade out--it wasn't even her new one--and fingerflipped through the bin a bit more. My god, there was another Platinum Blonde album, four copies. I had to guess that their distributor or record company or someone just decided to sell off their overstock. I got a sad feeling in my stomach thinking about it.

Bart thought he was sneaking up on me but I actually saw him out of the corner of my eye when he was on the elevator. For politeness' (?) sake I pretended to be engrossed in the W-Z bin until he said "Boo."

"Boo yourself."

"Chipper this morning, aren't you."

"Bart, it's like three."

"Did you eat yet today?"

"Course not. I get a dinner break at four, though." Though I was thinking I only had the cash in my pocket for a bagel. And bagels in Boston are really not worth the money you pay for them at any price.

"Cool. Let me buy."

"Either you read my mind or you're not telling me something." I started the combing the A-D bin now. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were next to a recent really-not-that-great album from Heart, which was kind of a funny coincidence. The Petty would go back to the regular racks--the Heart stayed in Bargain but I moved it to the E-H slot.

"I'm on a buying spree, too." Bart had some CDs in his hand.

"You must be if you're spending fourteen bucks a piece on those things." He had a Jean-Michel Jarre in there and I wasn't sure what else. "The Jarre on vinyl's only eight-ninety-nine. So, did you win the lottery?"

"No, but I got forgiven."

"What do you mean?"

"Remember the wicked witch of the west?"

"You mean your step mom?"

"Yeah. Well, she turns out to have a fairy godmother side, too."

Bob Marley was in with overstock of a Ziggy Marley 12 inch single. "Do tell."

"She convinced Dad that just because I was throwing my life away and wasting every cent they ever spent on my education was no reason to let me starve."

"You weren't starving."

"They don't know that. They think all musicians are starving. Which isn't that far from the truth in some orchestras, let me tell you. Anyway, I'm flush once again."

"Flushed is more like it." He was blushing. I guess everyone has something fundamental to be embarrassed about. "Okay, buy me dinner. I only get a half hour though."

"No problemo." He nodded to Jay who was coming down the aisle toward us.

"I'm going on break," Jay announced. "Can you cover the register?"

I gave him a little salute and he sauntered away, the laminated tags around his neck rattling. At Tower they made us wear these neck lanyards with laminates on them, like backstage passes or something, in some kind of weird attempt to seem insider-ish to the music industry, I guess. They're kind of stupid, but better than a Formica engraved name tag that says "Hello My Name is..."

I carried my stray albums up to jazz and laid them behind the counter. A small line of three people stood at the register, waiting for me. I don't know if people just don't realize they can go to any register in the store, or if they're just stubborn and want to torture me. None of them had questions or made small talk, they each handed me their purchases with a kind of resentful stare. I handed them back their bagged stuff and change with the same look in my eye.

Bart was still hanging around, waiting for it to be my turn for a break. "Daron," he said, his elbows on the counter, "are you as bored and antsy and tired as me?"

"What the hell kind of question is that?"

"I mean, come on, how long are we going to fart around?"

"You're not going to bring up the want ads again, are you."

"No, you won that argument. But man, let's get us some kind of gig, even if it's not _the_ one..."

"Hang on, wait a minute. When we were playing with someone we didn't like, you said we were wasting our time. Now you want to find something else that isn't 'it' either?"

He pursed his lips. I put a John Zorn CD into the section's player and let it rip. The few customers in the section betrayed no reaction to the sax screeches and cut and paste tempo changes, but I noticed that within a few minutes the floor was empty. Man, I liked Zorn. "Bart, I think what you're trying to say is that you are bored and antsy. I assure you I'd much rather be doing something else."

"You seem okay."

"Ha. It's just my implacable exterior." I blew stray hair out of my eyes. "Maybe we should go to more shows. Try to steal someone."

"Maybe."

The door between jazz and classical opened and Michelle swing her head in, her laminate swinging. "I thought that was you."

"Hey." Bart went and gave her a kiss on the cheek. "We're having a bitch session."

"I actually came to make sure you," she said, meaning me, "were up here. Jay's out back."

"Yeah, he got me." Jay was probably out back smoking a joint--in fact I wasn't really sure Jay was his name and not a nickname he'd picked up for his habit of choice. "So what do you think we should do?"

Michelle gave me a look. "What, on the singer problem?"

I touched my finger to my nose.

"Good luck," she said, and swung back out.

I looked at Bart. "Does Michelle sing?"

He snorted. "Not even in the shower. Don't even think it."

"Why not? I mean, what if she could sing?"

"No way. I don't want to be in a relationship with someone in the band. Bad karma, man. Bad idea. Plus, I don't see us as working well with a ... oh man, this is going to sound sexist, but... with a chick singer."

He was right, it did sound sexist, even if I agreed. "I won't bring up Carynne, then."

"I think she's a little too shy. About her singing, I mean." Bart squinted at me a second and searched the inside of his cheek with his tongue. "You're always looking for someone you know already, aren't you..."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, you won't go to the personals because they're too impersonal, as it were. You want someone we know already. Like Roger, you were already rooming with him. And when we used to play with Mitch, when I was rooming with him. Even that girl with the flute we used to do the Copa with, you asked her in when I was sleeping with her."

"I waited until after you quit sleeping with her."

"I never really quit." He was not blushing now, I noticed. "But you see what I mean."

"I guess so."

"So maybe you're going to have to either accept the fact that maybe, as professionals or career musicians or whatever, that we're going to have to maybe work with some people we just plain don't know and get to know them as we go along. Or, maybe, that we're going to have to expand our circle of friends. Isn't there anyone here who sings?"

I shrugged. "Everyone who works here's a wannabe of some kind. Except Michelle."

An exceedingly tall, thin guy, bald, with a goatee and biker jacket came in and started bopping his head in time with the arhythmic Zorn.

"Well?"

"Well what?" I watched the guy make his way to the back of the section. It seemed unlikely to me that he'd shoplift so I looked back at Bart. "Am I supposed to explain something?"

"Yeah. Explain this it's-got-to-be-someone-we-know thing."

"I don't know, that's just the way the world works. The Police didn't find Andy Summers with a general audition. That's just the way it is. Someone knows someone who knows someone, and things either fit together or they don't."

"That sounds pretty fatalistic, man."

"We'll find someone."

"I guess."

I yawned. "Quit bitching. At least you have a gig for now. Me, I go home and play with myself." Ouch, now I was the one blushing.

Bart laughed. "Yeah, if you can call jingles a gig."

"You sure they don't need any guitar?"

"You'll be the first person they bring in if Jeff breaks a finger or dies in his sleep or something." Bart was still laughing while talking and it made him sound sort of out of breath. "I swear to God."

The customer came up to us with a Zorn album--a different one from the one I was playing--and laid it on the counter. I rang him up, bagged him, and handed him his change. He gave a little thumbs up and a tall-person hunching nod as he went out the door.

"Did I tell you I'm twenty now?"

"Fuck no you did not," Bart said, his face set with a frown that made me think he might have been genuinely affronted that I hadn't told him.

"Last week." I pulled out the misfile pile and started alphabetizing it. "I'm not getting younger either, Bart. I want to get on with it as much as you do."

I could see Jay coming through the glass doors. He was blinking his eyes like he'd used too much Visine, which maybe he had. "Hey."

"Hey." He took a step up onto the riser behind the counter and I stepped down. "You want to ring Bart up? I'll meet you outside after I get my coat and punch out."

There wasn't anything else to say after that and I went through the doors from the land of screeching atonal saxophone into yet another rendition of Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. I took the elevator to the basement where my coat was in a locker, and punched my time card through the clock. The sturdy gray metal box of a clock ticked rapidly like some kind of bomb. I'll avoid any references now about biding our time, running out of time, or time being of the essence. I was two decades old now and had to believe I still had plenty of time to do what I needed to do in my life. It was that or give up, and there's no way I was going to do that.

#  Let's Dance

By April it got warm enough that I started convincing Bart to come out and busk with me, to relieve some of the itch to play and boredom. But he was afraid to bring any of his good basses outside, so he bought a set of bongos and beat on them sometimes, and he had a second hand Takamine I liked to play that was nice but not too-nice-to-play-outdoors. We rigged it with a microphone just inside the soundhole and I blew a small chunk of my salary on a little battery-powered amp (and a warmer trenchcoat, one that wasn't almost gray from age and worn-thinness) and we started getting better tips after that. We played everything we could fake, from Dylan to Boiled in Lead to The Cure. Neither of us sang, though.

One day, we were in the park outside the subway station, on one of those sunny days that tell you summer is about to arrive. A roasted nut vendor was somewhere downwind of us making the afternoon smell marijuana sweet. The sky was blue with just a slight nip in the wind. A semi-circle of people had gathered around us to listen. If I'm remembering it right, we were playing something upbeat, "Just Like Heaven," I think. I wasn't paying much attention at that moment, just kind of grooving on the afternoon and looking at Bart without really making eye contact with him.

Then someone jumped out of the crowd, dancing, an orphan vampire child, dressed in layer upon layer of ancient clothing straight from the rummage bins at Salvation Army and his eyes ringed with heavy black liner. He had on at least three different patterns of plaid. His fingers pointing from fingerless gloves, he waved his hands over our eyes. He struck cat-like poses, sprang into the air, and laughed. He danced around passers-by, miming undecipherable stories, and then, sometimes, singing.

He jigged over to Bart and said something in his ear. I couldn't hear what, but I saw Bart shrug. The stranger pointed to the amp on the ground and said something more, a wicked smile on his face, and Bart looked bemused. Bart shared a look with me then and started the chorus again.

The stranger dropped to his knees in front of me, cupped his hands to his mouth and began singing into the soundhole of the guitar. Bart watched, incredulous, but never missed a beat, and I never missed a note--not then, not ever. The hollow body picked up his voice, gave it an eerie wooden tone, and pumped it through the amp. He bounced on his knees, keeping his mouth trained on the hole. I wondered when he would stop. We did the whole song like that, with him hollering into my crotch, until his knees gave out.

I stopped playing and gave him a hand up, my eyes on him and not the dispersing crowd. I had made up my mind. We shook hands.

"I'm Daron," I said, "and this is Bart."

"Ziggy. Hi, Bart." He smiled. "You don't remember me."

Bart did a double-take. "No, I don't."

"The party at Susanna's. My hair was blond, then. At the end of the summer? At the loft by The Channel. And this must be the guy you were talking about." Ziggy turned his dark eyes on me, appraising something, I wasn't sure what. "The bigshot guy from Nomad." He smiled at me from under his mop of jet black hair. "I thought you'd be taller." We saw eye to eye.

I smiled back. "Well, I'm not."

Bart shook his head. "I still don't remember you, sorry. There were a lot of people at that party."

"It's okay."

"Do you sing a lot?" I put in, trying to keep the subject on him.

"In the shower," he said. He had to be underexaggerating. He'd known all the words and hadn't flubbed any.

Bart was looking at me like he wanted my attention, but I kept my eyes fixed on Ziggy. "I mention it for a reason."

"Daron," Bart began.

"We're looking for a singer," I went ahead, "And I think you're it."

Ziggy's smile never wavered. "So call it a cosmic coincidence, huh? Do you want me to audition," he spat the word out, "or something like that?"

"I think you just did." I locked eyes with Bart now, and he nodded.

Ziggy clapped his hands. "Cool. What do you call this band, anyway, Short Guy Trio?" He laughed, and we laughed and I set my mind on getting the particulars straight. Someday, if things happened the way I wanted them to, I'd be telling this story like it was part of some legend, and I wanted to remember it right. I've of course botched it by now, but that's the gist of it, anyway.

#  Electric Light Orchestra

We had our first rehearsal as a threesome late one night at a practice room somewhere on the Emerson campus, where I guess theater arts majors could come to write show tunes if they wanted or something. Michelle still had friends there who signed us in and we settled ourselves into a cramped room with a small chalk board and upright piano. Crumbly white acoustic tile, the kind gridded with tiny holes, covered the walls, a few fluorescent flyers for campus concerts and events thumbtacked to it. We had carted with us two milkcrate-sized amps, two guitars, one electric bass and a table top drum machine, just in case.

The Ovation would have been friendlier to the little room, but I could still play much more fluidly on the Strat, so I started with that. I plugged the guitar in and started to warm my fingers up. Bart did the same aross from me, while Ziggy sat on the piano stool and looked a little lost in the crossfire of notes. We were dressed almost alike--jeans, T-shirt, flannel long sleeve shirt--but what looked mundane on me looked hip on him. He had tightly laced Doc Martens on his feet, fashionably scuffed. He had lost the eyeliner since the last time we'd seen him. While Bart and I ran through a few riffs, he began to spin on the stool slowly, like a doll in a music box.

"What do you want to start with?" I said to Bart.

Bart shrugged. "You're the boss."

"How about 'Welcome.'"

Ziggy giggled. "Seems appropriate."

"Welcome" had a very straight-forward pop song structure and we'd even written out all the words, so it was a good one to begin with. I pulled a staff book out of the Strat case and flipped to the right page. I had written the lyrics on one page, a sketch of the chord pattern on the other. Up until then I hadn't needed to record things on paper in more detail. The melody was in my head. "Here are the words, anyway."

"Just play me how it goes," Ziggy said, his eyes fixed hard on the paper in front of him.

Bart and I played through the intro and then the first few verses, before I went back to play him the melody. "Your part sounds like this."

He hummed it through once with me and I wondered where he'd learned to sing. "Let's try that first verse slow." We went through it with Bart playing his part and me playing the melody for the first few lines, the chords for the next. Ziggy sang a little quietly, shyly, but kept up in a nice lock-step with us. "A little faster," I said.

He was a quick study and within a half an hour we were playing pretty much the whole thing straight through. Bart gave me the eyebrows-up from across the room several times to say he was impressed.

"Let me try it once without the paper," Ziggy said, shutting the staff book and holding it to his chest, his eyes closed.

"Sure thing." Bart started the intro and Ziggy came in on cue. His earlier shyness was gone and he began to put some inflection into the words. When it came to the chorus, which was anthemic and large, Bart and I sang backup. Halfway through the last verse Ziggy stumbled on the words, though, and opened his eyes, one hand over his mouth. "Oops. Well, other than the crash and burn at the end there, how was that?" He looked at me.

"Pretty good," I said in a voice cooler than I felt. "Pretty damn good. But you swapped some of the words around in the bridge."

"Oh, you mean from 'Leave the door open' to 'Leave open the door'?"

"Yeah."

He wrinkled his eyebrows and his eyes drifted aside. "It felt better to me to finish with it like that," he said. "I didn't really think about it; it just made sense." He clapped his hands and recited "Leave the door open," and then "Leave open the door." He nodded where the stress of the words fell.

"So, keep it as is until the last one, which ends with the stress on the last beat," Bart said.

"Yeah, I guess."

He was right, it did have a nice sound to it. "There's a slight echo of a Pete Townshend song in it if you do it that way," I said, "but I like it anyway."

"Let's do it like this," Bart went to the chalk board and wrote out the pieces of the song. "After the last chorus, instead of fading out on the chorus, let's go back to the bridge and riff on that. We can keep going and keep going until the one time Ziggy does it the other way."

"That works for me." We tried it that way, through the whole song then to the bridge a second time, Bart and I trading solos until Ziggy brought it to a close. What was an almost martial and robust bridge in the center of the song became sort of melancholy and intense at the end. "Hot damn." I said into the ringing quiet. I let my fingers rip through the melody again, up the neck, trailing off with a few loose harmonics.

"Jeezuschrist you make that look easy," Ziggy said to me, his lips hanging open a little in silent wow.

The words in my mouth were "same to you," but I couldn't quite say them. I settled on: "I guess."

#  Everybody Wants to Rule the World

We knocked off a little after midnight and Ziggy left us standing on Beacon Street with our heap of equipment, giving us a little salute with one finger as he crossed at a break in the traffic. Then Bart left me to watch the stuff while he retrieved the car from a nearby side street. A summery night breeze was blowing humid and I could still hear familiar riffs and choruses in the sound of the cars driving by. Bart pulled up at the hydrant and we loaded the car without saying anything.

Once we were rolling he asked, "You want to get something to eat?"

"Sure."

He started listing our options for food at this hour. "Chinatown, pizza, the Deli Haus, IHOP, Dolly's..."

He said this last with a hopeful note in his voice.

"Dolly's is such a fucking hike." I closed the air vent that was blowing on me. "What about Charlie's?"

"Yeah sure. We're going that way anyway. But I kind of worry about the equipment."

"Shit, you're right. Maybe we should hit the IHOP on Soldier's Field road, at least they have a parking lot and we can sit where we can see the car."

"Right."

The one problem with that IHOP was it was possibly the worst ventilated building in Boston. Don't get me wrong, we were used to--and resigned to being in--a lot of smoky places. Most of the clubs and bars where we played and hung around were full of cigarette smoke, and Bart and I kind of hung on to our non-smoking-ness as a badge of eccentricity. This IHOP though, was even worse in the smoke-to-air quotient than most of the bars. The fact that we would be trying to eat in there, too, made it seem worse. But, on the other hand, it wasn't the sort of thing either of us would make a big deal of.

Once inside, Bart negotiated with the hostess to put us in the window by the car. The place was crowded and noisy, but she took us into the supposed No Smoking section and put us in a booth. This was the only IHOP I'd ever been in that wasn't shaped like a swiss chalet, with the peaked roof. We speculated that it used to be something else before IHOP took it over, like a Denny's or something. We sat in a booth with our laminated menus and suddenly I felt sleepy.

"So I take it you're happy with our new singer," Bart said then, just as I was about to lay my head on the table.

"What makes you say that?"

"Because I haven't heard you complain or analyze or say much of anything since we left." Bart took a sip of water out of the amber glass in front of him. "Am I right?"

"I'd be lying if I said he didn't seem like exactly what we want and need."

"So say it." He smirked.

"I would, but I don't quite believe it myself."

"Believe it," Bart said, leaning forward conspiratorially. "I think we're seriously, seriously onto something here."

The mental recording of 'Welcome' played through my head again. "I think you are seriously right, my friend." I couldn't help but smile.

Bart whooped and banged the flats of his hands on the table. A waitress appeared then, and took our order. When she was gone he went on. "Still need a drummer, though."

"Yeah." I felt like finding a drummer would be a piece of cake in comparison. "So, are you glad we waited?"

He wrinkled his nose. "Well, I concede the point. Seems unlikely we'd find someone like Ziggy through the 'musician wanted' ads."

I voiced my concern. "You think he'll stay serious about it though?"

Bart shrugged. "What else has he got to do?"

I shrugged back. "I don't know, I didn't ask."

"I get the feeling he's an art school dropout," Bart said, accepting a mug of coffee from the waitress. She put a glass of tomato juice down in front of me and I drank it in one long series of gulps. "That party where he met me, it was an artist's loft in Southie." Then he chuckled. "You were right. We ended up without someone we knew, sort of."

"Do you think he works?"

"What do you mean?" Bart stirred half-and-half into his coffee and stacked the emtpy containers one inside the other. "You mean, does he have a job?"

"Yeah."

"Why don't you ask him? You're the manager."

"I guess I am."

"You know what your problem is, Daron?" Bart said, his voice quiet but audible through the background noise of other conversations and kitchen clatter, "You just want everything to work out. You never want to have to push things, you just want them to fall into place."

"And they damn well better," I said, my fingers around my sweating water glass. "They damn well better."

I think it was April 25th we all got together at Bart and Michelle's and Ziggy signed the contracts, and so I learned his last name, Farias. I didn't even know what kind of name that was. We made plans to cut a demo and find a decent rehearsal space. Then he took off and I sat around and the three of us watched a depressing Australian film about heroin-addicted punks in the late 70s that starred Michael Hutchence, the lead singer of INXS. Something of a downer of a film and I felt a little lonely after I left, as I caught the last trolley back in to Kenmore.

I usually masturbated in the morning when I first woke up, before a shower or coffee or anything. But that night I lay in bed and fantasized, trying to imagine someone there with me, not Matthew, not Roger, someone I couldn't quite picture, someone who probably just did not exist. It had been a long time. I had once or twice been propositioned in the park across from my building, but the first week after I'd moved in someone had posted a flyer in the building foyer about a brutal attack in the gardens. A man walking home from a gay bar nearby had, apparently, been approached by someone who appeared to be cruising, but who actually had a lead pipe in his hand. I didn't even walk through the fucking park at night if I could help it--on my way home from work I stuck to the sidewalk on the outside. My stomach clenched to think about it.

The thought that the last person who'd touched my cock in a loving way was Matthew seemed suddenly unbearable and I choked back the urge to cry. I beat my fist into the pillow and beat myself off and if the pillow was wet with tears later, I didn't notice.

#  Unguarded Minute

It didn't take long to get our first gig as a threesome--in early summer I sent out the demo tapes and had booked the gig within a week. So it was that a few weeks later we had our debut at this hole in the wall place in Jamaica Plain, one of those places whose legend is larger than the dance floor. It was a weeknight, maybe fifty people scattered themselves around the place. I barely noticed them. It was almost as if there were just the three of us, and yet it was nothing like a rehearsal. Ziggy came to life, howling and leaping off the low stage, then climbing back up like a four-legged spider, and never missed a note. I got so caught up in watching him that I almost missed hitting my footpedal before the solo in our third song. I closed my eyes, then, letting the solo carry me through to the other side where I passed the strand of melody back to his voice. I opened my eyes. He was lying on the floor between my legs, making like the microphone was an ice cream cone. Or something else. I felt my breath go ragged as I closed my eyes again, felt him brush my calf as he crawled away.

"Love's never what it seems to be," he sang. At that moment I couldn't remember if I'd written that lyric or if he had. He might've. But at that moment my brain was so full of noise and music and lust I couldn't think straight. I felt like my arms and fingers were part of some perfect machine, creating and recreating the music from the set list without my being involved. My eyes followed Ziggy around Bart, down into the crowd, back to center stage. If charisma was a magic spell, Ziggy was casting it far and wide. I could see a woman on the dance floor, swaying, her eyes on him like she was hypnotized. Other people nodded their heads in time and were caught up in it. I wasn't the only one, I told myself.

Bart came as close as his cord would allow and I realized he had been trying to get my attention. His eyebrows pointed toward the clock on the wall. He mouthed something I couldn't make out, but I saw his meaning, we were going to come up short. A set that had always taken us an hour in rehearsal was about to expire at 50 minutes.

We finished the last song on the list, a fast, hard bang of a song called "Desire." People were clapping like they meant it. Ziggy turned to face us. "More?" he said, his eyes glassy and his face shining with sweat.

Both their eyes turned to me. "No, that's enough. They liked it, let's not give them some half-assed unrehearsed bullshit."

"Okay." Bart unplugged his bass.

"Why?" Ziggy frowned at me.

"I just said, we've done enough, alright? They're impressed, let's get while the getting is good." I unplugged the guitar, turning away from his dark, intent eyes.

He spoke into the microphone. "Thank you folks, we're Moondog Three," but the life had gone out of his voice. I rolled up my cord, took a step toward him, but he turned away, toward the edge of the stage. He jumped down into the arms of a blond woman I'd never seen before. That was the last I saw of him that night and as I went through the motions of packing up I felt like there was an empty space next to me where he had been. I kept looking for him, hoping he'd come back, thinking we could grab a bite at Charlie's, maybe, but he was gone.

#  Sweet Hitchhiker

I picked up our pay in cash from the club owner. Seventy five bucks. Michelle helped us load our stuff into Bart's car. "Good thing you guys don't have a drummer," she said, looking at the packed back seat. "How are we going to unpack when we get home?"

"What do you mean?" Bart said. "We'll just go dump everything at the rehearsal space."

Michelle crossed her arms. "All three of us? I guess I can sit on your lap if Daron drives."

Bart nudged me. "Hey, Earth to Daron, are you in there?"

"What?" I didn't feel like I was all there. Part of me was still on the stage, frozen in a moment in time. The other part was wondering where he was now. My mouth went on. "I can't drive."

"What do you mean, you can't drive? You never told me that." Michelle looked at me like I just said I came from another planet.

"You never asked." I'd never seen Bart let anyone drive his car before, not even Michelle, anyway. "I don't have a license, I never learned."

Michelle raised an eyebrow and shrugged, "That must've been hell growing up in New Jersey."

"I didn't go out much." I pointed at the front seat. "Well, you can sit in my lap if you want."

Once we had settled in, I sank back down into my daze. Michelle was curvy and good-smelling in my arms and I waited for the ride to be over with an anxious stomach. Loading in was easier than getting out of the club. Our rehearsal place had ramps instead of stairs and we rolled the amps right on up. When our cubicle was padlocked, Michelle bumped me in the arm. "Good thing you guys have insurance, huh?"

"Yeah."

"So, aren't you going to ask me how it sounded?" She steered me back to the car where Bart was waiting. I got into the back seat.

"Sorry," I said, "I'm kind of out of it, now."

"I guess that means it was a good show for you," she said, rolling her window down a crack.

"You could say that." I leaned back in the seat. "Bart, how 'bout you?"

Bart gave us a short technical rant about monitors and not being able to hear me all the time and other things that had bugged him. Some part of my brain was taking it all in, storing it for future use, maybe, but I wasn't processing any of it as it went in. "Yeah," I said at the end. Boston was going by outside the car windows. "Hey, you can leave me off right here."

"Here?" We were at the edge of downtown, nowhere near where I lived.

"Yeah, I'm going to get something in Chinatown." I guess I would have usually asked them to come along. I guess they knew that because they exchanged glances in silence. "Right up here's fine."

Bart pulled the car over at the corner of the theatre district, all two blocks of it. He looked like he was about to ask if I was okay, but then switched to: "See you tomorrow for rehearsal?"

"Yeah." I waved to them. "See you." I felt their eyes on my back as I made my way down into Chinatown.

All the neighborhoods in Boston are small, much smaller than New York, for example. Chinatown is maybe four short blocks on either side. On one edge is the red light district, which is all of two and a half blocks on Washington Street, with one XXX theater, two or three adult bookstores, and one peepshow. I ended up in one of the bookstores, wandering up and down the aisles. They had almost as many books, magazines and videos for gay men as they had for straight men. I'd been in this place before, never bought anything; everyone in there always looked furtive and nervous. Including me. My eyes flickered over photo after photo of gigantic erections, Rock Hard! one title proclaimed. I reached out to touch the shrinkwrap, then pulled back as if it might burn me. I felt nauseous, then, like it was too hot in the store, like I was carsick, like my own erection was twisting my guts into knots.

I walked. I walked back through the theatre district, passed hotels and dark shops, across empty streets. I came to a familiar bench facing a closed jewelry store, and there I waited. Come on, I thought, Mister Bomber Jacket, where are you tonight?

#  You're All I've Got Tonight

My butt was numb against the bench by the time a punk in blue combat boots took up a position across the street. I crossed to his side, and walked up next to him. There was probably some elaborate ritual we were supposed to go through, like in a bar but more complex. I didn't know how to ask for what I wanted or how much to pay for it. But I had seventy five dollars in cash, I figured that was good for something.

"You're just a kid," I said.

He looked at me like he'd just seen me now, like he hadn't watched me cross the way. His eyes were blue, but I could see the burnt strawberry tinge to his hair -- bad bleach job. "Yeah, so are you," he said back, tapping a cigarette against his leg.

"Don't light that." I leaned against the smooth stone of the building. He looked annoyed. "Tell me what you're worth."

He folded one leg under him like a flamingo, pressing his back into the wall. His answer was long in coming. "Depends on what you want."

I took hold of the collar of his leather jacket. "I want to take you into the bushes in the park and fuck you until I can't stand up."

He let out a little laugh, tight, nervous, his hands shook as he twiddled the unlit cigarette. "Um."

I pressed my advantage. "You new at this?"

"Yeah," he admitted, and I felt relief flood out of him. "Trying to work my way through school," he added.

I had to smile at that, whether it was true or not, but I kept my hand on his collar. "Alright then, seventy five dollars. Nothing fancy."

He hesitated.

"And I'll let you smoke the cigarette."

He pulled a condom out of his pocket and raised an eyebrow.

I let the collar go. "Sure."

"Then it's a deal." He held out his hand. "Give me the money."

I jerked my head toward the Public Gardens. The voice that came out of my mouth hardly sounded like me. "I'll give it to you when your pants are down and I know you won't run away."

I took him deep into the gardens, to where ten foot tall evergreen hedges stayed thick and full all year round. He turned his back on me and dropped his jeans to his ankles, I stuffed the wad of money into one of his jacket pockets. He seemed to relax a little and, inexplicably, I wanted to smack his face. But I took the condom and a little tube of lube out of his hand, and bent him over.

He gave a little grunt as I entered him. I held tight to his hips and pulled him all the way onto me. And then my arms were working like pistons, pumping him as the sensation burned hotter in my groin. I fucked him so hard my balls began to smart as they slapped against him, but the pain seemed like nothing. I needed to fuck this punk stranger like I was going to die if I didn't.

It was over pretty quick. We were both panting. I tossed the condom into the bushes and wiped my fingers on my shirt. By the time I finished zipping up my jeans, he was gone.

I sat on a rock in the park, shivering like a junkie, for a long time after that. I didn't feel angry, I didn't feel sick, I didn't feel anything, like my body shut down in protest. I wanted to cut myself, I wanted to play until my fingers bled, I wanted to do anything but sit there and hate myself. I couldn't stop my brain from going off. I kept thinking about castration, flagellation, being burned alive, as if the Saints had all the fun. Eventually, I made myself feel sick again. I wanted to claw the skin off my body, but instead I walked home. To that nice quiet apartment where that nice Daron boy lives, keeps to himself, and doesn't bother anyone. I imagined tying my cock up with rope, mummifying it in tight cords, keeping it in check all the time. I threw down my coat. I was getting hard, again. I lay down in my clothes, pushing my underwear down and pulling my erection out over my zipper like I'd done with the hustler boy. My fingers were still a little sticky from the lube. I licked them and stroked myself hard, until my palm had almost gone dry and I was making myself sore. I kept on like that, rubbing and squeezing as hard as I could, feeling my skin burn with friction until precome started leaking out of me. I came onto my stomach, semen making the sorer spots sting. I fell asleep thinking _so this is what they call self-abuse._

#  Bring Me Some Water

The next day was a gray wash from the moment I crawled into the shower onward. I stood there with the water running down around the my ears and swore myself to celibacy. It seemed the only sensible option, the only possible way to avoid the self-loathing, the anxiety, the worst of the loneliness. I declared myself at the moment to be separate from, above, and beyond sex. It was the only way to divert the freight train of badness bearing down on me and the band if I even contemplated the incestuous act I wanted to. I wasn't even going to fantasize about it. Even thinking about not thinking about it produced nightmarish flashes of blackmail, tabloid headlines, bitter midnight arguments, other vague shit I couldn't even picture but knew would be horrible.

I got out of the shower and concentrated on getting to work. I was passably on time. At four pm, I was taking a break in the coat room when Michelle came in and greeted me with a sleepy smile and a peck on the cheek. "How are you?"

I resisted the urge to reach up and touch where she'd kissed me. "Uh, fine."

"You look kind of tired."

I gave back an automatic, neutral answer. "So do you."

She just kept smiling and went on through to the office, and I breathed a sigh of relief. She was only being friendly, I told myself, and I knew it was true, but I still felt a little prick of worry--the last thing I needed to make my life even more complicated was a come-on from Bart's girlfriend. I reminded myself I was celibate now, not a sexual creature at all, not even for a nice, normal pretty girl like Michelle.

And what was I going to do about Ziggy? Nothing, I wasn't going to do a thing. Nothing had changed, and nothing would, either. Now I just had to prove it. I had to prove to myself that my hands weren't going to shake when he came near, that my tongue wasn't going to go silent at the wrong moment, and that those feelings weren't going to get the best of me again. He'd never know. I both hoped and dreaded that he would come into the store.

He came in often, to browse both the albums and the customers. Last week he'd sidled up to a red-haired girl and picked up a tape. Within minutes they moved out of my sight together, his smile now on her face. God he works fast, I had thought. And thinking about it now made me wonder if anyone would ever sweep me off my feet that way, with such utter surety that they wanted me. But then I thought of Carynne and something in me shivered. Ziggy did not come into the store that day.

I spent the afternoon working the cash register. Michelle did not pass by again. I wandered through Kenmore Square with the idea of getting something to eat on the way home, but I didn't feel like stopping, like sitting alone, like eating.

From the door of the apartment I saw my answering machine's message light blinking. As it was rewinding, I wondered if it could be Remo, but I hadn't left him a message, had I? The machine clacked as the tape reversed to play.

"Daron, this is Artie in New York." Artie. That A&R guy Remo had introduced me to. "I received your demo and would like very much to speak with you about it right away. Give me a call on my direct line tomorrow, or leave me a message when you get in." I scrambled to copy down the numbers he gave, as if they were the words of a magic spell that would disappear with the dawn.

(End of Volume One!)

#  Want more of Daron's Guitar Chronicles?

Volumes 2, 3, and 4 are available from your favorite ebook sellers now! But you can also check out the...

ONLINE SERIAL!

Check out the DGC website at http://daron.ceciliatan.com to read the full serialized Chronicles for free! In addition to many chapters beyond where Volume 1 ends, readers will also find "liner notes" explaining cool stuff about the story, links to cool music and videos, and Daron answers comments that are left for him.

AUDIO BOOKS!

There are also now audio versions of volumes 1-3 of the Chronicles available on Audible.com, narrated by actor Teddy Hamilton! Download the MP3s from Audible.ᅠ

MERCH!

Over on the DGC website we also have various forms of band "merch" for sale, including varying inventory of tour T-shirts, stickers, tote bags, and the like! You can also get the paperback omnibus of volumes 1-3 that we printed with Kickstarter! Come see what Moondog 3 have for you on the DGC Merch Page.

Or keep reading for a Preview of VOLUME TWO!

#  Preview of Volume Two: Summer 1987

Town Called Malice

As soon as I could, I booked us a gig in New York, _anywhere,_ so we could showcase for Artie. This was not a simple feat, even for a band willing to play for basically nothing. NYC is crawling with underworked bands and the club owners don't even have to give you the time of day, much less return your phone calls. But I eventually landed something, at a place I'd never heard of and never seen.

The Pool Bar was possibly one of the tiniest rock clubs I'd ever been in. It was so small that if there'd been a pool table (as the name implied) there wouldn't have been room for anyone to walk from one side of the room to the other. To call it a hole in the wall was almost accurate. Artie wouldn't mind that—after all, the place he'd "discovered" Nomad, Maddie's, was something of a dump (if a bit larger). And it was Artie's opinion that counted—this show was intended for an audience of one. But after the months of trying to set up this gig, I couldn't help but look at the size of the place and feel low. The stage was little more than a riser a few inches off the floor, and it was set partly under the stairs that lead down into the club from the street level. If we'd had a drummer I don't know where we would have put him. I'd been in recording studios bigger than this. Not to harp on the size of the place, but, somehow I had this thought that in a bigger city the clubs would be bigger, too. Maybe the only thing that got bigger was the attitudes.

We arrived around five in the afternoon and I came down the stairs blinking into the small dark space. The only person in the place looked like he'd walked off of the Sunset Strip, in skin-tight purple pants, cowboy boots, with a long mane of wavy, teased black hair. I said, "Excuse me, I'm looking for Jeremy?"

He turned around to show me a hairy chest and a hand heavy with rings. "I'm him," he said and we shook hands. I could feel the hardness of the rings in his grip.

I set down my guitar case and told him we were double parked. "Can we load in, now?"

He had an easy smile. "So, are you Mr. Moondog?" There was a twinge of California in his accent when he said it. I almost felt like I must have met him before, that time in LA.

"It's just Daron."

"Sure, bring your stuff in. Let me give you a hand with the door." He led me back up the stairs to where Bart's car was sitting, blinkers on, in the street. "This it?"

"That's it." I'd switched to playing the Ovation mostly, and had bought an amp that took up less space, so now we could pack the car to the roof with gear and still leave room for three people. Not having a drummer had that advantage, too. Bart climbed out of the driver's seat and stretched. Ziggy jumped out the passenger side and almost got clipped by a passing taxi. He flipped a friendly bird to the driver who didn't even bother to honk. I opened the hatch and started to move the bass amp.

"Hi, fellas." Jeremy shook Bart's hand. "You better keep an eye on the car up here. A ticket'll cost you more than what I'm paying you." He took the other handle of the amp and we hefted it onto the curb together. "Give us a hand with the door," he called to Ziggy, who held the glass door at the top of the stairs open while Jeremy and I eased the amp down, one step at a time.

"Thanks," I said when we reached the bottom. "But you really don't have to."

He held up a hand. "The day I can't move an amp is the day I get out of rock and roll," he said, and it sounded like something he'd said before. "Besides, usually I have one tech guy here to help out and he's running late. Most of the bands that play here don't have road crews."

"We'd have to get another car for them," Ziggy put in as he came down the stairs.

"We're something of do it yourselfers," I added.

"I know. No booking agent, no manager." Jeremy nodded and started back up the stairs. I followed. "So am I. I'm everything from owner to booker to bartender. Suits me. I moved out here from LA just to start this place."

"Oh really," I said, trying not to act like I had guessed. I never did ask him why he called it the Pool Bar.

Waiting for the Man

By eleven o'clock, when we were supposed to play, Artie still hadn't showed. About a dozen or so disinterested-looking New Yorkers had and the room looked a little bigger with people in it. Jeremy shrugged, indicating the empty stage with a jerk of his head. I held off until 11:15 when Ziggy stepped up on the stage and began to sing an a capella version of "Candlelight." For one rare moment I was on the other side of the invisible wall that separates performer from audience, watching him, soaking up his stage presence. He was on tonight, even the heads of the gossipers at the bar were beginning to turn. And then I stepped up beside him and into the world on that side. Bart followed my lead.

He circled around the chorus again, and I joined in with a twangy riff. It was a sweet interpretation of the song, and I had visions of us doing it this way in front of thousands of people, with lit candles in their hands, singing in one voice, "Candlelight, candlelight..." It was joyous and mournful at the same time.

I let a note trail off and a smattering of polite claps brought me back to the room, but I kept seeing it with a double-vision of my dream of someday's success. I hoped it was a good omen and not a delusion. Ziggy introduced the first song in the set list. I kicked on the drum machine with a foot pedal and we got down to business, revving the volume up with "Welcome" and not letting it back down.

I didn't even notice Artie had come in until we were nearing the end. He and a few other people, some in businesswear, were shuffling their feet in front of the bar. I had no idea how long they had been there, or if they had just come in. I forced myself to take my eyes off of them. We finished "Walking" and the other two looked at me. "Go straight to the encore" I said, not sure if they heard me. I riffed out the opening of "Desire" so it didn't matter. I felt suddenly as if every note I played had to be imbued with some extra significance. What that could be, though, I didn't know: what did they want? What could they be listening for? I closed my eyes but that scared me, so instead I looked at Ziggy.

He had put the mic into the stand and was singing with both hands at his throat in a sensuous hold, his eyes half-lidded, then closed as he slid down deep into the bottom of his range. My hands kept playing but the sense that I was in the audience returned. I did not take my eyes off of him until he opened his and was saying "Thanks for coming, this is our last song." I played the opening note without realizing it, and then looked back at the gaggle of execs Artie had brought in. Some of them were nodding their heads in time. I hoped that was a sign they were into it, not that they were trying to look like they were into it.

And then it was over. Jeremy applauded loudly, shouting "Alright!" Then he switched the tape player on and went back to tending bar.

Listen Like Thieves

I unplugged from my amp and started rolling the cord in my hands, concentrating on doing it, making each loop of uniform size, keeping my fingers from trembling. I didn't know if I should be going to talk to Artie, if I should ask what he thought, or if I even wanted to know. I spared a glance back into the club.

Ziggy was planting himself on a bar stool next to a woman with big hair and a yellow miniskirt. Artie was deep in conversation in the circle of execs. I knelt to open my guitar case and stashed the cord in it. Then, instead of putting the Ovation away, I sat down on a milk crate and cradled it in my lap. Should I have brought the Strat instead? Artie was coming this way.

He shook my hand and I didn't hear at all the first few words out of his mouth.

"Thanks," I said, anyway.

"We would have been here sooner but Angie insisted we check out some show in Midtown." He shrugged. He looked older than I remembered, starting to bald.

I should have said something like, "Really? Who?" or something equally schmoozy, but I just nodded.

"Anyway, I want to talk to you in the morning, if that's possible. Can you come up to my office?"

"Sure." I said immediately, even though my brain had already come up with numerous reasons why I couldn't, chief among them that I wouldn't be in NYC in the morning. I took his card from him with the address. "What time?"

"Not too early. Let's say 11?"

"Sure," I repeated. We shook hands again and he took the rest of them in tow and left.

Bart touched me on the shoulder. He must have been standing next to me most of the conversation. "What did he mean by that?"

"By what?" I unhooked the shoulder strap and let the guitar slide down between my legs until the peg touched the floor.

"Why didn't he just tell you what he thought right now?"

"I haven't the slightest." Ziggy was putting his arm around Ms. Miniskirt. "But I guess I have an appointment to keep."

Bart shook his head. "How are you planning to do it? Are we driving back tonight, or not?"

I rubbed my eyes. "We'd never make it back in one piece. Didn't Michelle say we could stay with her parents in Connecticut?"

Bart was watching Ziggy now, too. "Yeah, that was if we were planning to stay over. I don't know how kindly they'd take me calling them up now. And they haven't even met you or," he jerked his head toward our illustrious singer.

"Well, they'd take you, wouldn't they?"

He didn't look happy. "If it came to that."

"It looks like Ziggy is going to find his own place to sleep tonight," I pointed out. The guitar felt strange and unbalanced now that its weight was on the floor.

"And what about you?"

"I'll take care of myself," I said, turning away from him to slip the guitar into the velvet of the case.

A bit later Bart and I and Jeremy loaded the stuff back into Bart's car. I was making a last sweep of the stage for anything of ours when Ziggy hissed from behind me.

He was grinning, his hands behind his back. "Hey, boss."

I was too tired for witty repartee, so I just turned around and waited for him to say what he had to say.

"You guys mind if I don't go back with you?"

I mustered part of a smile. "Go on. But how are you going to get back?" I was asking myself that question at the same moment.

"Bus? Train? Either one," he finished. "I have some cash." Sometimes Ziggy was part of our threesome and other times he was like he was that day in the park, an outsider along the ride. This felt like one of the latter.

"Have fun," I said and watched him cross the room, take her under his arm, and disappear. Bus, train, either one. I guess it was a good thing I was obsessing over what Artie was going to say since I probably did enough worrying for both of us.

I didn't feel guilty about leaving Bart to do all the driving, since I know he would have done it all anyway. I got my bag of dry clothes out of the trunk, and Jeremy and I watched him pull away from the curb. I resisted the urge to wave.

"So, what are you up for now?" Jeremy lit a cigarette while he talked, his purple pants garish under the streetlamp. I was glad I didn't find him attractive. I was celibate, anyway, right?

I shrugged. "I guess I'm on my own."

Jeremy clubbed my shoulder with a soft fist. "You want to get stoned?"

It was as good an idea as any, so I waited on the street while Jeremy locked up the club. I was still jangly from the show and I wanted nothing more than to get laid, but I would settle for stoned. That was a nice, normal thing to do.

We went on foot to his fourth floor walkup. He had last week's Headbanger's Ball on VHS and we watched it while we smoked and he told me dirt about Riki Rachtman and miscellaneous other LA metal scene people and I wondered maybe what had happened to him out there. I didn't say much. Mostly I let each sweet puff unknot me a little more, until I almost felt relaxed. By the time I did feel relaxed, we had both fallen asleep in our clothes on the floor.

Maybe I'm Amazed

I was late to the Wenco office. I could probably have been on time, but when I woke up and felt my head and tasted my mouth, I knew I had to have a shower. Jeremy had every shampoo known to man in his bathroom and offered me the use of his hair dryer, gel, conditioner, and so on. I just borrowed shampoo and left my hair wet. He told me we could come back and play the Pool Bar anytime we wanted, and I thanked him for the floor and the weed and then headed for the subway.

My stomach was in knots, churning alternately with fear and hope. If Artie'd wanted to sign us I'd have known it, he would have said something, I thought. He would have asked all three of us to come down to the office. But then, he couldn't be meeting me just to tell me to get lost, you suck, he wouldn't waste his time with that. As the subway car rattled its way uptown I let these two thoughts chase each other back and forth through my brain until I thought I would be sick. I shivered a little, thinking, this is what managers worry about. Ziggy hadn't even given it a first, much less a second thought, or so it seemed. And I began to wonder where he'd spent the night and almost missed my stop.

Wenco's offices were in midtown, near Radio City and Rockefeller Center. They didn't challenge me in the lobby, I went straight to the elevators and up to the eighth floor. There a big-haired receptionist stopped me and asked me to sit in a chair by a potted plant. A glass coffee table was littered with promo material for some bands, press releases, photos, and a copy of _Billboard_ magazine open to the Top 100 with some of the titles highlighted with marker. "I'm a little bit late," I told the receptionist—Judy, it said on her desk plate—as she reached for her intercom.

Artie came out a few minutes later, looking the same as he always did, faded jeans, cotton button-down shirt tucked in. I followed him through a narrow hallway to his office, a crowded affair that was larger than it looked crammed with demo tapes, press packages, and the like. He cleared a pile of magazines from a chair and indicated I should sit before he went behind his own desk. He moved a pair of headphones from the blotter and put his feet up. I felt for a moment like I was visiting the principal's office, but only for a moment. I forced myself to lean back in the chair and say something, while looking over the piles of stuff. "Nice office."

He smiled. "Yeah, when I used to do a lot of traveling, it was neater. My assistant would take care of it while I was gone. But the past two years, well, now she's afraid to even come near it." He shrugged. "Heard from Remo lately?"

"I was going to ask you the same thing." Which was true.

He pulled on his lip. "He's been out of touch for the past two months or so, working on things. I'll hear from him as soon as he needs something."

"I haven't really heard from him, either." This was also true. I leaned on one armrest, but then Artie put his feet down so I sat up a little straighter. I guess the small-talk part of the meeting was over.

"That was a pretty good show you put on last night." I kept quiet, waiting for him to go on. "It's a fresh sound, lot of creative energy. Where'd you find that singer?"

"On the street." I let myself smile a little, a wet strand of my hair falling across my eyes as I did.

"Good potential. He never gets dull."

"That's what we like about him."

He looked away from me for a moment and I knew what came next would be important. "I'm a little concerned, though, about the band's focus. The guitar work is great, but I'm afraid with the drum machine you'll get lumped into the dance music category, and that's obviously not right. I mean, what bands have drum machines that are taken seriously as rock?"

"Sisters of Mercy?" I suggested, not sure if the question was rhetorical. "And Echo and the Bunnymen..."

"British gloom and doom bands." His eyes flicked toward the posters on the wall behind him. "That's not the audience I see for you."

Now I felt more like I was talking to a guidance counselor. "What audience do you see for us?"

He gave that shrug again. "That's the difficulty. I don't see any one category, any one hook, any one market."

"So you're saying we have broad appeal." I knew he wasn't, but I clutched at the chance to cast this into a positive light.

He grimaced. "Broad appeal, accessible, these are words I used to equate with boring, middle of the road, middle age, dull." He leaned forward and whispered, "And I still do." He shook his head. "You're more exciting than that."

"Thanks."

We were both quiet for a moment. He exhaled through his nose and looked serious. "It comes down to this. I liked what I saw, my interest has only gotten more intense. But we have two problems." It sounded like he included me in the "we." He picked up a pair of sunglasses with some band's logo emblazoned on them and fiddled with them as he spoke. "Being good isn't enough. I need some kind of focused image I can sell to the higher ups. Which they'll need when they sell you to the public. That's problem number one. Problem number two is, you're young. Band-wise, I mean. As a band, you're young. No one, including you three, knows what kind of staying power you will or won't have."

I nodded, more to keep him talking than because I agreed.

"Fortunately, I think these are the only problems you have. You have talent, originality, ambition, business sense, even some experience. These things will all help you in the long run. And your songs are good."

I wanted to know where all this was leading. "So, what now?"

He put down the sunglasses. "There's some chance that as the band matures a natural focus will come about for you. That would solve both problems. So, for now, I have to say I'm not ready to sign you, yet. But I'm also not ready to leave you out in the cold, either." He smiled and it looked less like he was passing judgment. "See, here's my dilemma, the classic A&R dilemma. If I sign you now and you go nowhere, it looks bad. On the other hand, if I don't sign you, and you become a mega-hot property next year, then either we lose you to another company, or we have to pay a very high price to get you when we could have got you cheaper before."

"Which means?"

"Which means I wish I could sign you now, but can't risk the 'I told you so' if you flop because of reason one or two. But I want to keep you in the loop. Do you have a publisher?"

"A who?" The question popped out before I could keep myself from showing my ignorance.

"A music publisher." He opened a drawer and rummaged while he talked. "Most artists don't, until they get a record contract. But these days publishers are doing more A&R, putting up money for recording, creative development, stuff like that." He fished out a card and passed it to me. "I'm going to tell this guy you're calling, and you tell him I sent you. He's brought me some 'discoveries' in the past, the higher ups trust him. I figure with his help, you can get an indie EP or LP off the ground, establish some track record, get some good reviews, maybe a little notoriety, give yourselves time to grow." He stood up and I figured that meant this was the end of the meeting. I stood up and shook his hand. "But please, keep me informed."

I shook his hand, not quite sure what to say.

He sighed a little. "I'm sorry I don't have better news. In a perfect world I would have signed you last night. But it isn't so simple, Daron."

"I know," I said, though until he'd said it I hadn't.

"It's not my decision alone. We had a meeting this morning and I'll just tell you there's more people here than me who believe in you."

That explained why he'd wanted to see me today, why he couldn't tell me last night what he thought. Because what Artie thought and what Wenco thought were two different things.

"I wouldn't blame you at all if you did sign on with another company, so don't feel obligated to me. But nonetheless, I'd like a crack at signing Moondog Three." He ushered me toward the door with a hooked arm. "If you get some other major label interest, let me know, maybe I can drum up a counter-offer, at least give us the chance to make a bid." That made it sound almost like I was the one in control.

I shook his hand again. "I'll let you know when we'll be playing in town, again," I said, in a neutral voice Digger would have described as "not showing any cards." Not that I had any to show. "And tell Remo I said hi if you talk to him."

"I will, I will," he was saying as I went down the hall, back to Judy's desk, retracing my steps to the elevator, the lobby, the subway.

Love Is The Drug

I fumbled as I put the token in the turnstile. The meeting had shaken me, not just because of what Artie had said, but because I realized I'd had some illusions about how much power Artie himself had, illusions that were shattered now. I remembered Artie from a few years ago as a kind of hero, who rode in one a white horse and rescued Nomad from a lifetime of obscurity. Now that I thought about it, I knew my memories were simplified. The night he'd met Remo and me and the band, he'd had to make a tape of us to bring back to the city with him, for approval. I'd always thought that some kind of formality, but I guess not. Success seemed suddenly more remote and unattainable than before.

Some things Artie had said kept echoing in my head like some horror movie soundtrack. Two problems. Originality, ambition. I liked what I saw. Two problems. Time to grow. I felt like it hadn't even been me sitting in that chair, it was some phantom in my shape. I sat in a far corner of the train car, letting the roar obliterate the sound of my shaky breathing. Is this who I am? Pathetic, scared and lonely? The only time that had seemed real in the past few days had been those moments on the stage when I had forgotten all the reasons and business and worry. I wondered if that was what it was like for Remo, or if he enjoyed the worrying a little more. My fingers clawed at my jeans. I felt hollow. I wanted to play, to bask on the stage, to make eye contact with someone, to lose myself in playing, to fill up on it. To live.

I got out of the train a block west of the Village. There were only two things that came close to the need I had, and one of them was expensive and difficult to find for someone who didn't know the turf, besides, I'd already had my fill of drugs with Jeremy and I needed my cash for getting home. The other thing, I thought, I'm not supposed to have because I've sworn off it. But I was thinking about that dance club where I'd gone the night I ditched Carynne; it had to be near here somewhere. But it would be closed in the middle of the day.

I reasoned with myself. No one knew me here, I might meet someone that I'd really never see again. In Boston, everyone knew everyone, it was just too small, but here... I felt that tightness in my gut, tugging at me. It had been three months. I knew I was justifying wildly, but by then I thought I'd do anything to shake the feelings of guilt and emptiness, even for just a little while. Once every three months, I thought. That's only four times a year. Surely you can't blame yourself for this once. The rationales began to play over again like a brainwashing tape. No one knows you here... and it'll cost you nothing more than forgetting for a while...

Alright. I combed out my hair with my fingers, swept it to one side, turned up the collar of my denim jacket, and struck a pose in a store window. Not enough. I really needed to attract someone's attention. I took off the jacket, and then my t-shirt, and put the jacket back on. I stuffed the shirt into my backpack and slung that over my shoulder and checked my reflection again. It would have to do. I wanted to fish out my sunglasses, but I needed to make eye contact for this to work. This wasn't the time to hide. The afternoon was just beginning.

I sailed through the streets working my way east, hoping to stumble on a bar where making a connection would be easy, expected. I followed my dick like a divining rod, until I realized I was right behind a brawny crew-cut type. He went into a bookstore on St. Marks and I went after him.

Mr. Crew Cut went toward the back of the store. I pretended to browse along the way, feeling too much like a lost puppy for my own taste. Another thing Digger used to say: when you're hungry the first thing you swallow is pride. I stood next to him as he picked a book from the shelf and opened it. We were standing in the mystery section and I thought of Matthew.

I looked over the titles, absorbed none of them. He stood there, close enough that I imagined I could feel the warmth from his bare forearms. I waved my hand at the books and he looked up. "What do you recommend?"

"Hm?" He looked half at me, half at the shelf.

I let my hair fall back, and threw out my real opening line. "I'm stuck in town until this evening with nothing to do." I raised an eyebrow at the books. "What would you recommend?" A woman brushed past us in the aisle and was gone.

A half-smile spread across his face as he began to comprehend my meaning. At least, I think he did, as his eyes also traveled the length of my chest where it showed between the open slit of the jacket. My heart was pounding hard, as if he had touched me along that strip of exposed skin. I hoped my nervousness didn't show, or if it did, that he found it sexy. I kept my eyes on the books now, but I could see the tapered outline of his forearm as he put the book in his hand back on the shelf. His hands were large and there was golden hair on the back of them.

"Mysteries are okay," he said. He took a step back. "But I tend to stick with the ones I know, you know, I'm leery of trying something new."

Such as me. "Well, you never know what you might find." I wracked my brains for something to say, something that would make it irrefutable that this was a come on, something that if he shrugged off I would be sure it was out of lack of interest, not misunderstanding. But I couldn't say something like "I want to fuck your brains out." I looked him in the eye now, hoping it was the right thing to do.

This time the half-smile came with a little setting of the jaw and he shook his head in a quick no. "I usually find I'm disappointed. So I stick with the old-standbys." He gave a little shrug as if to say "no offense." "Good luck finding what you want, though." He waved as he walked away from me.

I stood there staring at the books until my heart had slowed to normal. Then I went and loitered outside the bookstore for a while, the midday sun heating me up until I took off the jacket. I slung it over my shoulder with the knapsack and tried to think of what to do next. Maybe I should give up and get back on the wagon.

"Hey."

I looked up and Mr. Crew Cut was standing there. He took a half step toward me. "You might try Number One-eleven."

I cocked my head and narrowed my eyes— _where?_

He jerked his head east. "About two blocks that way."

"Thanks." I shoved one hand into the pocket of my jeans. I stood there, giving him one last chance to change his mind. He repeated the little wave and walked on.

I went past the Italian restaurant where Carynne and I had eaten dinner a million years before. And came upon a wooden door in a white storefront, no windows, no sign, just white raised numbers that read "111." A speakeasy couldn't have been more subtle.

Inside I was contrast-blind as I stood blinking and waiting for my eyes to adjust. I hoped I looked like a desirable piece of fresh meat, not some slumming tourist or hustler. I could see bar stools, the old soda-fountain kind anchored into the floor, the kind that spun around. I took the one nearest the door. Some kind of techno-disco music throbbed quietly in the background.

The bartender came down to me. He had a trim build and a mustache, the kind of impeccable neat that I was coming to associate with older gay men.

"Give me a club soda." I set the bag down at my feet, left my jacket across my legs.

"Drinkin' heavy today, eh?" he joked, shoveling the ice with the glass and then filling it from a gun-dispenser.

"It's too early for me," I said, and added a little too loudly, "I'm just trying to kill an afternoon."

Now I could see the other patrons a little better. The man several stools down, the closest to me, wore a white undershirt with a leather vest. Nearer the back, two men were playing pool without speaking. Two or three others drifted. Mr. Crew Cut had definitely understood what I was looking for.

People Are Strange When You're A Stranger

Another shiver ran through my shoulders, and I wondered if I should put my jacket back on. I wondered if I should just sit here and see what attention I might snare, or if I should be out hunting more aggressively.

I had stumbled my way through the bar ritual before in Providence. The last time had been one night I had talked my way into the No Name. I ended up at a dorm room at Brown University, where my pickup convinced his roommate to go to his girlfriend's room while I hid my face in the bathroom. We used condoms he'd gotten out of a candy dish in the bar. An hour later I was on my way home, all the while worrying his roommate recognized me from the two gigs we'd done on the campus. As I was leaving I saw two people I knew from the Copa in the hallway and never went back there again.

The man in the leather vest stood up, putting down his beer glass with a loud thump. His eyes passed over me like searchlights. He had the same mustache as the bartender. A pair of mirrored sunglasses rested at the center of his shirt collar, dragging it down to show a tuft of chest hair. He circled around behind me and I shivered again, feeling like a diver in a shark cage.

He looked rough, gruff, and tough, like a drill sargent or a prison guard. If he touched me or spoke to me I wondered what I would say, or if I would just flee like the prey his attention made me feel like I was. Perhaps I would merely be transfixed by him, unable to refuse. The very thought made me want to get up and leave, but I didn't.

Mr. Leather Vest passed back behind me again, his heavy boots sounding on the wooden floor. He gave a wave to the bartender and with a flash of blinding sunlight, was gone.

Unobserved, I put my denim jacket back on. I finished the club soda, put the glass down with a thunk, and stood up. I made a guess that the restroom would be in the back, and strode that way, letting my feet fall with the rhythm of the music. I felt the heads of the two pool players swivel as I went past. This early in the day, it seemed, the pickings were slim. I should be getting on a train, I thought, not hanging around hoping something will happen that probably won't.

In the men's room there were three cramped stalls, no urinals, which seemed odd. I went into the middle one and shut the door. It had no latch but stuck shut. There was someone in the stall on the right. I unzipped my fly.

"You gonna piss?" His voice came through a hole bored in the stall wall, about the size of the soundhole of the guitar.

"Excuse me?" My hand was on my dick and I was trying to figure out how I felt about some pervert watching me when he said:

"Put it through after you're done."

My hand trembled a little as I turned my attention back to the toilet. He was watching me through the hole; I could hear him breathing. I wasn't having any luck getting started.

"You look nice," he went on. "I like cut men."

I wanted to say "excuse me?" again, because I wasn't sure what he meant. Circumcised, I realized then, not sure where I'd heard it before. Maybe I'd seen something in that porno shop in Boston.

He kept talking like that, and I started to get hard as the first drops of piss began to fall. He was telling me about my dick, and about what he was going to do with it. I couldn't piss much as I got harder. "Best blow in town," he said. I could smell my own piss and knew he could, too. "Don't shake it out! Give it here."

I felt a drop fall from the tip. I was harder than I thought I could be from just listening to a stranger in a men's room.

"Come on, man, you're letting it get cold! Put it through!"

I felt then like an actor in a play, with no will to go against the stage direction, and I "put it through." I had to stand on tiptoe to clear the hole, and there was his mouth, hot and wet. My bare stomach pressed against the cold metal of the prefab wall as he sucked the rest of the piss out of me in expert fashion. For a while I wondered how he did what he did, but I began to lose my train of thought as the sensation built. My calves began to ache from holding myself up, and I gripped the top of the stall wall with both hands and moaned as he increased his pace. And then I stopped feeling my hands or feet as the heat spread through me from my cock on outward. I hung there, emptying into him, gasping, shuddering, and for a moment forgetting who I was, where I was.

By the time I had collected myself enough to say "thanks" he had gone. I wasn't sure who I thought was more pathetic, me for being desperate enough to stick my dick through a hole in a bathroom stall, or him, who sat there on the john waiting for someone like me to come along. Maybe the guys out there took turns in here. I didn't want to know—the whole thing now seemed sick and twisted to me. Well, I thought, at least he sure as hell isn't going to recognize me again someday. I sat there on the lid for a few minutes, catching my breath before I tucked myself back in and decided it was time to head home.

Never Mind the Bollocks

The name on the card Artie had given me was Michael Knight. I had figured he'd be a guy a lot like Artie, but he wasn't really. We played phone tag for about two weeks and then one day his secretary caught me at home and told me Mister Knight was on the line—after which she put me on hold for a few minutes. When he did come on he sounded incredibly uncomfortable that I didn't have a last name.

I was even more uncomfortable with the deal he wanted to make, in which he would put up seed money for us to produce an album which he would then essentially own. He would then shop the product around to different labels. When I pushed him on the details, eventually his strategy came out—make a band big in the "underground" music scene, and then when the big labels start to show interest, auction them off to the highest bidder. I was cringing when I asked, "Is this what a music publisher does?"

He went on to describe other benefits he could provide, like contract negotiating and in-house producers, while I was thinking: isn't that what a manager is supposed to do? I'd already heard more than enough but I let him go on until the clock read 6:15. "Look, I have a rehearsal to get to."

"That's fine, my boy. Send your demo tape around to me and I'll send you a contract."

_My boy._ Jeezus. Downstairs Bart was waiting in a no-parking zone, leaning on the horn.

"Oversleep?" he said as I slid into the passenger seat.

"Nah, talking to some dickhead on the phone." I recounted the conversation.

"Shit, this is the guy Artie pawned us off to?"

"Let's talk about it later. If we're going to talk business, let's have everyone here."

"Like Ziggy'll give a shit." Bart said and then put a hand over his mouth mockingly. "Oh, I'm sorry, that was an uncharitable thing for me to say."

Ziggy often acted blasé or disinterested over business concerns, but technically, I had all the control and decision-making power, so why should he get involved, right? I shrugged.

A few blocks later we picked Ziggy up and I started the story over again of Michael Knight and his "my boy" attitude. "Anyway," I finished, "the guy sounds like a dickhead and I don't think I want his money."

"Sheez." Ziggy said.

"Damn straight," Bart pounded on the steering wheel for effect. "But what do we do now?"

"Why not do exactly what he was gonna do?" Ziggy sat forward and hung on the back of my seat, and I was a little surprised to hear him speak. "Cut a record with an independent label and become college rock legends. Bank on that infamy to major label stardom."

I was about to object, like where were we going to get the money and how were we going to promote the thing and so on... but we were pulling into the parking lot by the rehearsal studio and I wanted to be playing rather than talking business. "Why the hell not," I said as Bart jerked the car to a stop. "What the fuck."

"Awright!" Ziggy jumped out of the car. "Let's get cracking boys, my public awaits."

Bart and I went about the business of getting our guitars out of the car and locking it up. When we walked into the studio, Ziggy was already standing in front of the center mic waiting for us.

Blinded By The Light

A lot of the time when I play, it's like my brain shuts off. Later, I kind of wake up in the middle of a song and I can remember everything that has been going on, but it's almost like someone else was doing it. I don't realize it when I'm slipping into that state, but when I come up sometimes it's a cold shock and I hate it. This rehearsal was a lot like that. We got grooving right away, everything so bright and real while it went on, but then I was coming up to a solo, and there was Ziggy with this crazy maniac's grin on his face, like he was waiting for me to deliver the note that would drive him over the edge, and as I started that first pick up note, I came to. I was walking toward him at the time, like I was going to do something, but what I don't know since suddenly real life flooded back and I not only flubbed the note, I physically stumbled.

I went down on one knee and kept my eyes on the ground. Bart had stopped playing but the drum machine droned on. Ziggy took a step toward me— _are you okay?_ —but I pulled away, getting to my feet and stamping on the pedal that shut the drum machine up. It was quiet now, but my head continued to pound. The other two were staring at me.

"Are you okay?" Ziggy repeated.

"Head rush," I said, my voice almost too quiet to be heard. I'm not trying to brag when I say I couldn't remember the last time I'd missed a note. That was probably why Bart was staring at me like I had two heads. "I'm fine, really." Ziggy was coming toward me again. "No really." I looked him in the eye. What was he coming toward me to do? What had I been going toward him to do? Maybe I did feel a little rush-y; maybe I really wasn't okay. Everything seemed cloudy and confused.

Bart swung his bass of his shoulder and said "Let's take five. I could use some fresh air, too."

I guess it was hot in there, the little concrete room with no windows, and I was watching a bead of sweat travel down Ziggy's forehead. "You need to relax," he said to me.

Yeah. Could be. I slung the Strat off my shoulder and laid it into its stand. Ziggy was watching me. I stuck the guitar pick into my back pocket and brushed my hair out of my eyes, trying not to watch him watch me. He was between me and the door. I resisted the urge to pace and almost wished for a cigarette to light. He took another step toward me and I brushed past him and out the door.

I went to the loading dock and sat with my legs hanging over the edge. This was definitely why people smoked, to have something to do at times like this. I looked at my hands while I tried to take deep breaths. _Relax,_ I told myself. _He's right, relax._

But when I wasn't thinking about Ziggy I was thinking about the dickhead music publisher, and I knew if I wasn't thinking about that I'd be chewing on my calluses while I tried to line up gigs for next month and trading nights working with people so I'd have off, and ...

Ziggy coughed quietly behind me. I jumped a little but didn't turn around. He sat down next to me, bouncing his heels off the concrete wall under us. "What's eating you?"

"Nothing." The automatic answer, could mean anything. I cleared my throat a little while I worked up something better. "It's this whole music publishing thing, I guess."

"Forget it," he said, his voice low, serious. "Just worry about what we're doing, not what we're not doing."

"What do you mean?" I looked at him sidelong through my hair.

"I mean, we're a band, right?" He cocked a Mr. Spock eyebrow. "What were we put on God's green Earth to do? Play music, right?"

"Yeah, I guess. But—"

He cut me off with a hand held palm-out like a crossing guard. "But nothing."

"No, Zig, listen to me, the business is important..."

"Not as important as the music. The creative satisfaction."

I didn't want to tell him how naive that sounded coming from someone who wasn't even a professional until he'd thrown in with us. "Dammit, I don't want to work in a record store the rest of my life." I still didn't know what he did for money. I'd never thought it polite to ask if he didn't offer the information, and thinking about it now I couldn't picture him working retail, delivering newspapers, bartending... He wasn't a trust fund case like Bart, but I couldn't quite make it all add up. "And what is this 'creative satisfaction' bullshit?" It sounded creepily like something Roger would have said. "Before I met you you'd never even written a song..."

That was a mistake. He was glaring at me now while I tried to think of something else to say. He spoke first. "Who made you such a self-righteous asshole?"

Fuck, I'm sorry, I wanted to say. But although I was sorry, I still thought I was right. "No, seriously. When have you ever really thought about what we need to do to make it? Maybe if you concerned yourself with it a little more, I wouldn't have to worry about it so much." He opened his mouth to speak but I didn't let him. I guess maybe his attitude about business did bother me. "Maybe this is just a fun trip for you, but it's my fucking life, and I'm sick of your whither-it-comes attitude..."

"Well if I'm such a fucking burden why don't you fire me, boss!" He made like he was about to get up and before I could think I grabbed him by the wrist.

"Look." I didn't face him, but I held him there and spoke. "I don't want another singer, I want you." I even said that without stumbling. "I want to make this work. I want us to make it. That's all." He relaxed a little and I let go of his arm. "If you don't know it by now, I happen to think you're a fucking genius, okay? I just wish, sometimes..." I had to stop before I said anything else too stupid. "I wish you'd be a little more responsible."

"Hey, I've been good," he said. It was almost true. He hadn't missed a rehearsal or been late to a soundcheck in a while. The last thing was when he didn't come back from New York for like a week and had us wondering what had happened to him. "Give me a break."

_OK, say it now, you stupid ass._ "You're right, I'm sorry." I rubbed my face. "I'm just kind of stressed out. I didn't mean to take it out on you."

"That's okay, boss." He cuffed me on the shoulder and gave a little laugh. "'Whither-it-comes...'?"

"You know what I mean." I couldn't quite manage a smile. "Come on." I went back to the rehearsal room with him in tow. Bart was noodling around waiting and drinking Yoo Hoo out of a carton with a straw. I guess he'd been to the convenience store. He gave me a quizzical glance as we came in but I didn't acknowledge it. "Candlelight," I said, as I picked up the guitar. "No drums. One, two, three, four..."

Doo Wah Diddy

After Bart dropped Ziggy off, he turned the car toward Cambridge. We parked behind the McDonalds, but crossed the street to the Middle East where greater quantities of food could be had, cheaper, if you didn't mind rude waitresses and a lot of spillover noise from the club room in the back. He wanted to know what had gone on between me and Zig on the loading dock. I told him how I came down on him for not being reliable and how he came down on me for being a self-righteous prick. In other words, everything was fine.

We talked about the indie label idea again, and about finding a drummer. I fretted. Bart suggested we not hold our audition in the park this time. "We must know someone," I said, again.

"How about Chris?"

"Chris...?"

"Christian. From Miracle Mile. Formerly Highway Death?"

"I thought their drummer's name was Mark or something."

"No, the keyboard player. But he's really a drummer, I remember him telling me. He wants to quit playing with the Mile. I think."

We settled on putting up some signs, me near Berklee, Bart at the studios where he'd been doing dubbing work. I said I'd call Carynne and ask her to ask around, too.

When Bart dropped me off at home I called her, figuring I'd get her machine. To my surprise, she picked up.

"It's Daron," I said. "Hey, how are you?"

"Oh my God you are so full of shit I can smell it through the phone," she said with a laugh. "What kind of favor do you need?"

"What, I'm not allowed to just call up to say high to an old friend, who by the way only lives half a mile from me but who I haven't seen in months?"

"Dude, live with it, I've got exams and stuff. Now seriously, of course you can call me up anytime, but I can tell you didn't call to say hi."

"Maybe I should be haranguing you to come see me play." I sat down on the futon and cradled the phone with my shoulder while I flipped open the Ovation's case with my foot.

"Daron..."

"Okay, okay. Do you know any drummers? We need one."

She laughed. "You're kidding, right? I thought drummers were a dime a dozen."

"A good one."

"Oh, well, that's different."

"Bart says Christian from Miracle Mile wants to quit playing keys for them and get a drumming gig. Do you know him?"

"As it so happens, I do."

"And?"

"And I've never seen him play drums, but he's good people, if that's what you're asking."

I supposed it was. "Cool. Bart's going to call him." I wondered if I could make things work out with Christian just by wishing it would all be fine. Right then it felt like I could. "Meanwhile, you should still come see us play sometime. We're working on new stuff all the time. We'll be at the Rat next week, oh no wait, that was last week... shit..." I couldn't reach the notebook with our upcoming gigs in it. It was usually by the phone, but apparently I'd carried it over to the card table. I needed to get a cordless phone.

"Well, how about telling me about a show before instead of after? Then I might actually show up, you doofus."

"Yeah, okay, I know we have some coming up..." We chatted a little more after than and when I hung up the phone I felt pretty good. She didn't make any weird come-ons and I hoped she really would come to a show and bring friends.

It was almost midnight by then. I couldn't stand the thought of lying in bed thinking about Ziggy sitting next to me and chewing me out, so I plugged in my four track recorder and headphones and started to play. I figured I'd just put down a few ideas that had been rattling loose in my skull for a while. It didn't work out that way. At some point I felt a crick in my neck and I raised my head to find the sun coming up over the skyline of Boston.

Rock and Roll High School

The next couple of weeks were uneventful. Bart and I took a few trips to Providence to do some sessions with someone he knew there, a violin player doing some kind of electric avant jazz, which was fun and paid okay, and Moondog Three played out about once a week. We opened for Dali's Express who had just made their "major label debut" and we got written up in one of the local music zines as "fun." I supposed I could live with that description. I accidentally missed an afternoon of work when I was putting lyrics to the new stuff I'd been working on and ended up completely hoarse and almost without a job, but Michelle covered for me and I worked overtime that weekend to make up for it. Living near Berklee, I browsed the used section of their bookstore a lot and picked up a bunch of textbooks on the music industry. _And_ read them.

Not being famous but working real hard at it seemed almost like a routine I could settle in to.

Until Remo called from the road. "Yeah, I'm traveling. New album's just about done and I have a bunch of obligations to fill. What are you up to?"

"Dunno. Maybe trying to record an indie album. But there's one snag in that plan."

"Which is?"

"Haven't found an indie label yet who likes us as much as we like them." That wasn't strictly true, I hadn't really looked yet. I wondered if he'd been in touch with Artie, or what. I didn't mention the publisher asshole. "I'm still looking."

"The Minor Leagues, huh?"

"Excuse me?"

"You know, you can't play in Yankee Stadium until you've been through Columbus. The indie labels are just strong enough now that the majors can use them as a training ground, a testing ground." He sounded very pleased with the comparison.

"I guess." I suppose that made me the equivalent of a bat boy or something. I must not have sounded enthused because he changed the subject, told me when he would be passing through, and wondered if we could get together for a drink or what have you. Two weeks. We were doing a show at the Cellar then. I hesitated to ask him to come see it, but as soon as I mentioned we were probably gigging that night he wouldn't hear otherwise. "I'll be there with bells on."

That day at work I restocked the Local Rock section and tried to see what labels were on the records. Throbbing Lobster. Rounder. Glitter Girl. Charles River. Panic Button. Some of them would have made okay band names, too. I wrote down the ones that looked well-produced, figuring that was a sign of money to be spent, and sent out flyers for our next two shows. I did not send demo tapes, I'm not sure why. Maybe because some of the new stuff I was working on made the demo feel old, or maybe I just wanted them to have to come to us.

It seemed like a long two weeks, with no other shows, just rehearsals. I was torn between wanting to really push on the new stuff, so we could record soon, and wanting to get the stuff in our live show up to another level. One night we were going over "Rush," one of the songs Ziggy had written almost all the lyrics to. We got to the end of the song about the fourth time and I said "Again."

It surprised me that Bart was the one who said "Why? What does it need?"

I couldn't give an adequate answer. "From the bridge, from 'falling away.'" I fumbled with the drum machine, trying to find the index in the sequence.

Bart hadn't given up. "It sounds fine to me."

"Well, it doesn't to me." The drum track was cued, and I kicked it in. He didn't argue while we played. When we hit the end, though, he wanted to know if that was good enough. "No, it wasn't."

He insisted it was and that we ought to move on. I couldn't come up with any concrete reason why we should do it again. So we moved on to Candlelight, which I made us run through five times, too. Some times we ran through our whole set, start to finish, without stopping, but this wasn't one of them.

When we were putting the gear away he complained. "What's gotten into you?"

I smirked. "Remind you too much of conservatory?"

"No," he said with enough force that I knew he meant yes.

When I looked up, Ziggy was watching us with a bemused expression. "Want to get something to eat?"

Bart looked at his watch. "I promised Michelle I'd meet her at JTs to see Atomic Lunchbox. But I could drop you two off somewhere."

Ziggy raised an eyebrow at me. I put a hand in my pocket. There was money there. "Sure."

Talk Talk

Bart left us off at a pizza joint near Berklee and Ziggy's apartment. I got myself a spinach pie that was too hot to eat without burning my fingers and Ziggy got a couple of slices of pizza that were too cold to let sit around for very long. When he was done inhaling them, though, he said "You know, for two guys who spend so much time together, I don't think I know you very well."

I was going to say "likewise" but didn't want to draw attention to any secretiveness there might have been on my own part, so I didn't want to imply it on his. "What do you want to know?"

"I dunno, where you're from, shit like that. You aren't originally from Providence, are you?"

"Fuck no. It's much worse. I'm from New Jersey."

"Get out!" He laughed.

"Yup. Home of Bruce Springsteen and Bon Jovi." And Nomad. "You?"

He shrugged. "Traveled around a lot, lived everywhere from Baltimore to here. Your parents split?"

"Yeah."

"Mine, too." He stated it like a common fact of life, which I suppose it was. I didn't bother to explain the exact circumstances of the two-bit con artist Digger and his estranged wife Claire, who by now was probably raising her daughters "in the proper manner" in some convent for all I knew. He didn't ask anything more about them, told me he had a lot of brothers he didn't see, either. "So you and Bart went to music school together." He was eyeing some of the Berklee regulars in the place.

"Yeah. And quit together, too."

"Why?"

"See, we wanted to start this band..." I smiled. "Actually, there was kind of a scandal with Bart and some high muckety-muck's daughter, so they made him leave. And I went along. It was getting dull."

"Bart? In a scandal?" His eyes were ablaze. "That is unbelievable."

"He's got very proper, stuffy, New England parents."

"The summer house on Nantucket kind of people."

"Martha's Vineyard." By now I knew where that was.

"Same thing." He pointed at my spinach pie. "You better eat that before it congeals."

I picked it open. Inside it was still steaming, but I started cutting it apart with a plastic knife and fork.

"So, tell me more about music school."

"What's to tell?" The pie was doughy and mushy, but as I swallowed it I realized how empty my stomach was.

"Like, how did you guys meet? Did you have classes together or what?"

I downed some more pie before I spoke. "Actually, he lived down the hall from me. In the dorm. The first semester I got there, I lived in the dorm. I didn't know what was what then, I'd just left home for the first time, and I arrive there a day late, frazzled as all hell, and I walk into my room and put down my stuff and decide to set up my equipment."

"Equipment?"

"I hadn't even bought my classical guitar, yet. I'd had to travel with what I could carry and had to save my money for the guitar. I'd taken the bus from New Jersey and it took fucking forever. Then the bus broke down in New Haven and I decided to just hitchhike from there."

"No!"

"Yes." That was a long time ago. "So I get there, late, and plug my guitar into my portable stereo figuring what the hell, I'll relax and unwind by playing a little music."

I paused to eat more, chewing over the memory like I'd never really thought about it before. Maybe I hadn't. Or maybe it's just that I was seeing it through Ziggy's eyes now. "Anyway, while I'm setting this up, the one bulb in the place, the overhead light, burns out. So I get out a flashlight and I've got it in my mouth while I feel around in the dark for stuff, and I bump the switch on the stereo and this screech comes out." Even now I was trying to remember the cause—volume knobs all the way up or something. "I'm fumbling around trying to make it stop, and it does, and then there's this knock on the door. I open it, and there's Bart, looking at me like ..."

"Like what?"

"Half like I'm crazy and half like I'm the best thing he's seen since sliced bread. I mean, there we were on a hall with a bunch of oboe players and what have you, and there I am with an electric guitar in my lap making an unholy noise and a flashlight in my mouth."

He laughed. He laughed until I began to wonder if maybe he needed a drink or something. Then he said "You guys are music geeks." He looked at the Berklee guys in the booth behind us. "But you're good music geeks."

"Thanks, I guess." He had this way of looking at me sometimes; I enjoyed it in spite of myself. His face showed an odd mixture of admiration, contentment, and I'm not sure what else, some of his usually indecipherable smugness, of course.

He put a hand on the table, looking at the fingers. "What was your old singer like?"

"He was a tenor, too. Great range, but..."

"See? Music geek."

"He was one of those, too."

"But what was he like? Did he write?"

I winced. "Sort of. He was a disco queen." I froze then, wondering how that sounded. "I mean..."

"You mean—" he completed the sentence with a dainty hand motion.

"Completely." Somehow my voice came out quieter than I intended.

He shook his head a little, which could have meant just about anything, condemnation, pity, understanding, alienation, dismissal. He didn't ask any more questions about Roger and I didn't tell him any more for fear of incriminating myself. "You got roommates?" I blurted out then.

"One," he said, and nothing more.

A sweaty guy in a stained white T-shirt shouted at us from behind the counter. "You guys still hungry or you gonna sit there all night or what?"

Ziggy gave me one of his patented sneers. "Let's blow this popsicle stand." He tugged on my sleeve as he slid out of the booth. I followed. Out on the street everything seemed normal. _I am normal,_ I thought, _there's nothing different about me. Except that I'm a music geek._ I found myself smiling.

We walked toward the Victory Gardens in silence. The air was cooling down enough that our breath began to fog. As we reached the gates on Park Drive, Ziggy peeled off toward his place on Westland Ave. with a little salute and a "Catch you later."

_See,_ I told myself, _normal. He suspects nothing because there's nothing to suspect. Life is so much easier when you aren't worrying every moment about where you're going to stick your dick next._ Tomorrow I was going to get up and go to my job, and mail out some more invites to our next show, and play some guitar in the privacy of my own headphones, and that would be that.

Who Can It Be Now

A few days later I was working the register in the record store when a gangly long-feathered-hair type in three quarter sleeves sauntered up. "Michelle said I might find you here."

"Yeah." _Do I know you?_ I didn't say that, though, kept my face blank.

"Bart talked to me about coming to a rehearsal, like maybe next week?"

This had to be Christian. He looked right at me when he talked without looking like he was staring. "Whenever you're free."

He shrugged. "Actually, I was thinking you guys might come over to my place to rehearse. I have a kit set up there, and deaf neighbors." He had a mild New England accent and wide fingers. His hair was a natural shade of dull brown and eased off his shoulders in soft wings. I decided to try liking him.

"How about next Wednesday? No wait," I had to think. "No we're playing out on Wednesday. How about the day after."

"Sounds good. Here. Bart knows how to get there." He slipped a business card out of his back pocket and handed it to me. We shook hands and it occurred to me that if I hadn't been up on the riser behind the register, he would have been at least half a foot taller than me, maybe more. The business card was slick, very pro, with his beeper number, fax number, address. It suddenly struck me that Christian might be quite a bit older than I was, too, even though he didn't really look it. (He was—he'd later tell me he was "twenty nine for the second time").

He showed up to load in that Wednesday at the Cellar and I talked to him more. He played in a lot of bands, he did a lot of session work on drums, keyboards, sometimes producing, arranging. The band he was currently in, Highway Death, had just changed their name to Miracle Mile, and he wasn't sure if he was going to stay with them. He threw around music biz jargon with an ease I didn't quite have, yet. "Cool guy," I said to Bart. "We might learn a lot from him." He was easy to be around, fun and laid back. I appreciated that although he knew more than me and had more experience, he didn't make me feel like an idiot.

At the club I called the number Remo had given me and they said he hadn't checked in yet. There were a couple of hours before our set anyway, though, so I tried not to worry. Christian knew the guy doing sound and they stood around shooting the shit while I hovered. There was still a huge amount about live sound I didn't know and I wanted to. I was just getting up the nerve to ask the sound guy something when someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned to see a woman with frizzy dark hair and very, very dark-lined eyes dangling a key from a paperclip between her fingers. "Hey," she said. "You see Ziggy, give him this." She pressed the key into my hand.

"Um, do I...?"

"I can't stick around right now. I'll try to catch the show later, though. Tell him." She had that wobbly-L sound to her voice that I thought of as Puerto Rican.

"Who should I...?" But she was already stalking out in her pointy-toed shoes.

Ziggy breezed in about twenty minutes later. "I have something for you," I said, knitting my eyebrows together.

"Oh fuck, did I miss her?"

"Miss who?"

"Miss Carmen DeSoto." He held out his hand while giving me a conspiratorial eyebrow double-raise. I handed him the key. "Thanks."

I didn't ask.

Around seven o'clock we got together with Christian and dicked with the set list like usual. Christian did the roadie thing, writing out copies to tape up on stage. I was digging a marker out of my case when I heard a heavy step behind me and a familiar chuckle. "There you are."

Remo took the tan cowboy hat off his head, then eyed Christian and put it back on and offered me a handshake instead. "Remo, this is Chris. Chris, Remo." They shook and then Christian went to get tape.

"New roadie?" Remo asked.

"Might be our new drummer," I said. "He's sure racked up a lot of brownie points tonight."

Remo nodded one of those knowing nods. "So, how the hell have you been?"

We sat on a couple of road cases backstage and I filled him in on our indie label plans, even though I'd told him most of it over the phone. "Figure if we're going to get a drummer we better get one now."

"Yeah, makes sense. But Daron, how are you?"

I shrugged. "What do you mean?"

He shrugged back. "I dunno. I mean, I came to visit you, not your band." His eyes were on the two bouncers handing out backstage passes to the headlining band, Gargantua, across the empty room.

"Is it too much of a cliche to say the band is my life?"

"Well, no, I guess not."

"Like, what else is there? You don't want to hear about how exciting restocking the shelves at Tower is. How the hell are you, Remo?"

He smiled a little. "Yeah, point taken. I guess, I dunno, what do other people talk about?"

"Families," I said, almost daring him to mention Digger.

He only nodded. "And girlfriends and things like that. It won't be long now before some supermodel and you are on some tabloid cover together."

"God, I hope not." I was sure my aversion sounded sincere, I just hoped it wasn't too vehement.

"Me, too."

I stood up as the security guy came toward me, saying "He with you?"

"Yeah." I took two passes from him. They were peel-off stickers with the club's logo on them and the date written in Sharpie. I stuck one to my leg and handed the other to Remo, who put it into the breast pocket of his beige denim jacket.

"Now that we're taken care of," he said, "got time to get some dinner? I'm famished."

"I..." Somehow I had gotten it into my head that I was going to sit here, waiting, until it was our turn to play, like if I went anywhere, something might happen while I was gone. Silly. "I guess. I don't usually eat before a show."

"Bring the boys, I'll pay. I myself could go for some of that eggplant parmesan they have around the corner."

"Yeah, alright." We scared Bart up from the men's room, and Chris, and left word for Ziggy with the sound guy if he wanted to catch up with us. No one knew where he'd gone, but that was the usual state of affairs.

I got talked into having some bread and soup, and everybody talked a lot but not much of anything was really said. We were back at the club at 9:30 and Toxic Topic was on. Then would be Bill and the Rockets, and then us. Typical Wednesday night bill. Gargantua wouldn't go on until after midnight.

The backstage area was too loud for conversation, so Remo and Christian went out into the club and I fiddled with my electric tuner and waited. Ziggy drifted in and out. Bart changed into an old mechanic's shirt that said "Joe's Garage" on the back and "Bart" on the breast pocket. Michelle showed up just before our set time and mentioned they'd given her a hassle at the door. "Gargantua have like twelve people on the list and they give you guys shit for having, like, _two_ ," she shouted into my ear.

I shrugged. "Long as we get paid!"

And then the din of Bill and the Rockets was replaced by the din of prerecorded music, and it was our turn.

Chris had the set lists taped down before I even reached the stage, and the sequencer blinked invitingly.

One wall of the Cellar ran along my right, Ziggy took center stage to my left. He had painted his face in a kind of weird kabuki/tribal pattern, but I got used to looking at it after a few minutes. The crowd was pretty thick out there. As I scanned through the glare I couldn't pick out Remo or Chris or anyone specific. They were probably in back.

The sound man waved his flashlight and faded out the taped music. While I waited for Ziggy to clear his throat I plunked out a couple of riffs, and then Ziggy stepped up to the mic, and introduced the first song as "a tender love ballad."

Which it wasn't. "Grenadier" was one of the roughest, most aggressive songs he and I had ever written, and we played it that way. There was a groove to it that made people grind their teeth while they bobbed their heads. I drove that riff right through my brain, right through Ziggy's brain, and he sang it raucous and desperate until by the end of the song he clutching at the mic stand for support. By the first note of the next song, of course, he was back on his feet and completely changed again, this time predatory, sinuous, for "Desire." I took his cat silk walk and wound it up into the solo, feeling the mutual tug of his performance and mine shifting back and forth. I was long gone, flying, living, breathing, and didn't come down until after we'd finished packing up and I was sitting backstage with a beer in my hand wondering where he'd gone. Oh, right. To Carmen's. I guess.

Remo said some nice things about the show and said he'd call me before he had to leave town, and Chris stayed until the very end to load out and remind us to be at his place tomorrow afternoon. Bart and I were about to get in the car and go when a maybe thirties-ish guy with a blonde ponytail and flannel shirt came up and shook hands and gave me his card and then kind of ran off before we could talk. He was from Charles River Records, one of the places I'd sent invitations to. The only name on the card was: Watt, and his title was: Janitor.

Bart gave me a ride home and then I lay there on my futon for too many hours, trying to figure out why I was so attracted to a guy I'd never be able to have, why I was so happy just to be _near_ him, why I could even _stand_ to be near him, and didn't come to any conclusions about any of it, at all.

Rock and Roll Part Two

My phone rang the next morning at noon. It was Andreas, the real tenant of my studio apartment calling to tell me he was coming back, finally, in six weeks. He was in Belgium. I left him on call waiting while I went to get a second call coming in. This one was Watt, wondering if I was free to have lunch. I told him to give me half an hour and we agreed to meet at the Chinese restaurant about two blocks from my place. He seemed instantly likable and we chatted a few minutes more. When I hung up with him Andreas was gone.

I don't have to spell out the fact that nothing happens in the music business without connections. No one gets anywhere without them. So of course I was going to meet Watt and not only make a connection with him, but find out what connections he had.

And boy did he have them. I listened to him talk for two hours in the restaurant, and then we walked out on the fens, around the rose garden and the basketball courts. Turned out this "Janitor" was a former big-time exec who'd got fed up a few years back and moved to Boston to start his own small-scale label. We sat on the war memorial and shared a joint and he told me how he hadn't really known that small labels were going to start peddling greater influence in the biz; he mostly got lucky. Right place at the right time. Charles River Records, although it was small, was distributed by one of the majors, and Watt had gone to school with a bunch of people who were now at MTV. He said all of this more or less like he might have told me about his family or his dog or something, part of getting to know one another, not like he was trying to convince me of anything or suck me in.

At some point he looked at his watch and seemed to remember he was supposed to be somewhere else. He loped off across the grass toward the street and I sat with my feet hanging over the edge of the marble watching him go. Bart would be there soon to pick me up and go over to Christian's, but I couldn't make myself get up right away. The breeze was warm and blew my hair up and down as it curled around the statues of the memorial. Ducks and geese and seagulls made bird noises from the waterway behind me and I took a deep breath of autumn air. My fingers tingled like something was about to change. Something big. Everything.

Roll With It

Skip forward to the early spring, then, to when things really began to happen. I was at work when the memo came around that Moondog Three's album was no longer supposed to be shelved in the Local Rock section but in the Indie section, which was right next to the Local section but was definitely a step up in the world. Melissa, the woman who'd replaced me in the jazz section when they'd moved me to rock, had come and given me a high five. Michelle kept a copy of the memo for posterity. I found it hard not to check the bin every day to see if the copies that were there had been sold. I guess it wasn't a random coincidence that this was when "Grenadier" went from being played on the "Local" rock shows to regular rotation on one of the commercial rock stations in town. We were getting some gigs in places like Syracuse and Troy, New York, and heard it on some of the college radio stations out that way. We were driving to one of those gigs the first time we heard it on the radio and Bart was screaming so much he almost drove off the road.

Christian took the whole thing a little more calmly—he'd been up this ladder once before with Highway Death/Miracle Mile and was cool about it. I started getting less sleep to work an earlier shift so we could rehearse almost every night. It was also a much longer commute to Newbury Street from Allston than it had been from the Fenway. On the other hand, it took a lot less time to get to rehearsal—in our own basement. When Andreas had come back from Belgium I'd moved in with Chris temporarily; he shared a big house with a couple other musicians. After I'd been there three weeks and they had found that I generally owned no clutter, didn't mess up the kitchen, and could contribute equally to the rent, they decided I should stay. I had a bedroom on the second floor that was about the same size as the studio apartment I had left, and now I had people to talk to for a change. And you know what? I even liked it.

Things were nice and cool between me and Ziggy, and I liked that, too. No weirdness.

One night Watt came around with a couple of pizzas and a six pack, and he and me and Bart and Chris (Ziggy didn't rehearse every night) sat down and chowed and talked. Watt and I could talk in a kind of shorthand that I liked. He didn't patronize us by explaining too much, but he didn't leave us in the dark either. That night, after we had slowed down eating a bit, he started by saying:

"What would you think about doing a real small tour of the West Coast?"

"How small is small?" I asked.

"I mean, not very many dates, but pretty big dates."

Bart put in, "Is there any reason not to?"

"I've kind of hooked up with this real buzz bin type band. Have you seen the video for 'Tear Down the Wall?'" Watt pointed his beer bottle in the vague direction of the TV screen when he said it.

"Yeah, M.N.B., isn't it?" I'd seen the video a bunch this week and was actually almost a little tired of it.

"Yeah, them. They're setting up dates for some amphitheaters on the West Coast and need an opening act. I said I'd ask you first."

"Fuck yeah, we'd open for them," I said. Even if I was sick of the song.

Watt took a pull off his bottle of beer. "Tour probably won't happen until the end of the summer, but I'll see what I can do. "

He went on to ask if we'd thought about making a video ourselves, the subject of the MNB tour closed for the moment. In Watt's style we'd have an in-depth conversation about that later, down to the minutest detail. He said some of his MTV pals had been making noises, and although it wasn't a sure thing, it might be a worthwhile investment. Making a video was expensive, but there was money coming in, and... Then he asked if we thought he should try to make "Candlelight" a huge fucking hit and I told him to go ahead, knock himself out.

Cruel Summer

Fast forward again and damn if Watt didn't come through, on both the tour and Candlelight. For several months we were just completely focused on fame-related logistics, rehearsal, and such. I was still working at Tower. With four of us, and the house to rehearse in, we got into a pretty steady routine and, although I saw a lot of Ziggy, we didn't really spend much time alone. Which didn't stop me from dreaming about him or from sitting next to him when I could. OK, call me pathetic, but it was possibly the happiest I'd ever been in my life, despite the fact I wasn't getting laid.

I was so busy with tour prep and industry stuff that we were already on the way to Los Angeles, in the plane, when I started to worry about Ziggy and Carmen. I hadn't really spent all that much time with her before the trip—she'd come to hang out a rehearsal now and then, and of course she came to shows, but we had never all sat down and been trapped like that for six hours before. There was nothing as obvious as the two of them bickering, but there seemed to be some kind of tension between them, in little things they said or in the way they said them. Then again, she was snuggled in tight against him, one arm tucked in his, and she rubbed his neck with her nose from time to time. He'd been seeing her for several months by then and I'd been ignoring her for equally long.

I tried to tell myself I had a case of sour grapes and was just nervous in general. Ziggy had brought her, and Bart had brought Michelle, but Chris and I hadn't brought anyone, so our entourage was a total of six even though they'd said we could bring more. I think they expected a manager, or at least a dedicated roadie, and we didn't have either. In LA we would meet the road manager, a guy named John Masters, and the road crew, and MNB. Watt had been his usual straightforward blasé self when he'd given me the details, including the fact that the LA show was going to be overrun by business execs, entertainment news types, and other muckety mucks. He suggested I make some business cards of my own and carry our press photos everywhere. With "Candlelight" making its crossover from the college charts into pop radio, I knew the major labels might be sniffing around for us. Artie knew all the details, and he'd called Remo to say he would try to get to the other coast to be there, but there were no guarantees. The whole trip was five dates, San Diego, LA, San Fran, Seattle and Portland, short and sweet, a hop on the coattails of another band who had just had their own crossover from the college and alternative market into MTV Top Ten. From what Watt had hinted, MNB's reputation was possibly mostly hype, and after their one big hit faded they were probably done, but hey, it had worked out for us, I guess.

The airplane felt to me like a giant seagull swooping and dipping as we crossed Colorado. As long as I kept breathing deeply I wouldn't get sick. Michelle held Bart's hand—he looked disturbed more than nauseous but I heard him mutter that it was probably a good thing he was sitting on the aisle. I turned my head to get a look at Ziggy and Carmen in the seats behind us. He was staring out the window while she slept on his shoulder. We hit another pocket of turbulence and the plane bounced down a few feet. She looked up then, yawned, and put her head back down. I looked out the window myself.

"Whatcha thinking about?" Michelle touched my hand with her finger.

"I dunno. Ritchie Valens."

She gave me a sideways look. "Died in the same plane crash as Buddy Holly, right?"

Bart moaned. "You guys are so cheerful."

"You want some gum? It'll help your stomach." Michelle was already digging in her purse. "Here, cinnamon."

He took it without complaining any more. She handed a piece to me and I unwrapped it, remembering Waldo and his nonstop gum-chewing. She was right, chewing it calmed my stomach, if not my nerves. My fingers tapped and fluttered on the armrest and she laid hers gently on top of them. "Nervous?"

"I hate to admit it, but yes."

"I thought you never got nervous before a show."

"It's not the show that's making me nervous. It's all the other..." The plane dipped and I broke off. I didn't have to say any more, so I didn't. The playing was, as usual, the easy part.

"So," Bart said, when he could. "Have you listened to the MNB album?"

I admitted that I hadn't, just seen the videos. "Zig?"

He shrugged. "I've heard it a few times."

"What's it like?" Bart asked.

Carmen sat up. "It's real good. Very dancey."

Bart rolled his eyes which only Michelle and I could see. I wasn't worried. The videos showed MNB to be a kind of new-era hippie bunch, mixing hip hop and reggae beats in with regular old peace-loving power pop. We weren't musically similar to them any more than say, R.E.M. or Joan Jett had been to the Police when they'd opened the Police show at Shea Stadium in 1984. I could imagine Michael Stipe and Bill Berry in some old plantation house in Georgia, paint peeling off the walls and instruments lying around a cluttered living room (kind of like the Allston house, actually) and then getting a phone call that they were going to play in front of 70,000 people. I imagined myself in their position, did they jump up and down and whoop? I remembered that show at Shea, the summer before my junior year of high school—a professional scalper Digger played cards with had anted up the tickets. I remembered him opening my bedroom door one night and waving them like a magic charm before I could even get angry with him for barging in like that. We weren't going out together anymore, by then, what with Nomad and Remo gone, and Maddie's turned into a fern bar, and me having a lot less interest in tagging along than I'd had when I was say eleven and sneaking out at night had been a big adventure to me. He smelled of booze and cigarettes, like always, and his smile was huge.

He didn't go with me to the show. He didn't even make me pay him for the tickets. I ended up giving the other one to a kind of burnout friend from school in exchange for him driving us all the way to Queens. I remember him getting stoned during the show and wondering if he'd be able to get us home. I remember Sting in a white cone of light, singing a capella with his arms spread out like a gospel singer, bigger than life on the Diamond Vision screen over center field. I remember getting stoned myself and worrying more about how we were going to get home.

I remember it rained through most of R.E.M.'s set and we heard it mostly from inside the concrete corridors of the stadium.

I don't know why, but it only occurred to me then, sitting in that plane, to wonder if Digger had really won those tickets in a poker game, or what.

Fall On Me

A van was waiting for us at LAX along with two guys to collect our luggage. With some reluctance I handed over the Ovation's case. The majority of our gear had been shipped already, including the Strat and my newer electric, an Ibanez, but this one I didn't trust to anyone, yet. Funny how I was less worried about the Strat these days and, expensive though it was, I wasn't attached to the Ibanez yet. I'm not the type to get all cutesy about my instruments, like naming them or something. They were more like extensions of myself and that'd be like, I don't know, giving nicknames to my hands. (Okay, let's just drop that line of thought right now.) I watched the man in a BNC T-shirt place the Ovation in the back of the van and shut the door.

We spent the next two days in and around the hotel. I'd heard the term "media circus" before and this fit it, with all manner of photographers and movie producers and MTV news folks and so on marching in and out of MNB's suite at the end of the hallway. We had rooms on the same floor, just the other side of the elevator bank from them, and so I got to see it like a parade. I took to leaving my door open sometimes, propped with a washcloth, and once or twice, when they had downtime but couldn't leave, the guys from MNB would saunter in, Pepsi in hand, and we'd chat or maybe jam a little. It was always Pepsi or some Pepsi-brand soda like Slice, because MNB had just done a Pepsi commercial and I was never sure if they were required to carry around ice chests full of the stuff all the time or if they automatically got a lifetime supply or what. Honestly, I'm a Coke person, myself, but when it's free, who's arguing? I drank a lot of fucking Pepsi that trip.

I was having trouble remembering all the names of all the people we met, between the other band, crew members, record company folks, and so on. MNB's bass player's name was Tread, and he hung out with us the most, so his name stuck first.

The show in San Diego finally arrived, my first outdoor gig unless you count busking in the street, and I found the feeling of the wind on my face while we played disconcerting. It reminded me of hanging my head out of a car window as a kid, going down a night time highway, slightly dangerous. This was good, too, in its way, and we played sharp and tight. The lights were so bright there was no seeing the stars or anything like that, but the other difference between this and the little clubs we'd been playing was that I could actually see the audience. It was a general admission crowd, pressed tight against the stage—I even saw two women in the front singing along to Candlelight. Watt's master plan was at work, clearly. I wanted to point the two of them out to the other guys, but there was no way that deep in the song to tell them. Not when the stage was that huge and there was so much else going on, with light cues and everything. I decided to save it for later.

Afterward there was a small party at the hotel, just bands and crew—the real party would be tomorrow night, after the LA show. We turned in early, remembering that 2am LA time was 5am for us, and knowing I had to be up at the crack of noon to meet some reporters that Charles River had set us up with. I noticed the discrepancy, of course, between the way it was with MNB and the way it was with us. It seemed like there were two levels of fame. At the lower level, you do all the work, begging and scraping to get mentioned in the media and so on. At the higher level, everything reverses, and the media come begging to you to get your picture, your life story, what have you, and then you have to resist. MNB were at the higher level and we weren't, and I lay there in my room that night wondering for a while what kind of strings Watt had had to pull and why it was us that was opening for them and not someone more famous than us. But then I thought about it more, and what Watt had said privately to me sank in; although MNB were shit hot at the moment, they only had two hit singles and could be gone by the end of the year. They needed someone not as famous to be their opening act, or they could get upstaged. There was something petty and sad about that. I thought about the Pepsi sponsorship and the small army of execs in and out of their suite and began to doubt my two-levels of fame theory. That kind of fame didn't just _happen_ to MNB, it was... manufactured. I suppose this was something I knew already, but it felt like I was realizing it for the first time, and I felt cold and paranoid about it for a while. I wanted to talk to Remo about it, he'd probably have something really down to earth and sensible to say about it. Then I thought about Watt, and his staff of _two_ , at Charles River, who were doing their darndest to manufacture exactly that kind of fame for _me_ , and I felt better, and slept.

It was a busy day, first two hours with the reporters, and then it was soundcheck and shake hands with some more people with suits and backstage passes, and smile for some more cameras and shake some more hands and all I wanted by then was to get on the fucking stage and get it over with. Remo was there, too, but I was too wound up to have a decent conversation. I think he knew, so he gave me a little clap on the back for good luck and left it at that. I'd have to try catching his thoughts on fame another time.

When we did take the stage I felt an odd kind of relief. Now it was just the four of us, exchanging looks, and doing what we knew how to do. We were on a wireless system to allow us to roam freely over the large stage, but Ziggy stuck close by me much of the show, and once or twice we got into a knot with Bart near the front. Later, while watching the videotape of it, I thought it obvious we were used to playing in a much smaller area, but at the time I wasn't bothered. It felt right to be there together, the music passing back and forth among us with little looks and smiles. Ziggy danced in circles around me and we leaned on one another, back to back, sweat and heat mixing. And then our short little opening set was over, and we trooped off backstage to get clapped on the back some more and shake more hands. The gladhanding was less painful this time. A driver took us to the hotel while MNB was onstage. The party hadn't started there yet.

When the party did start, it was mostly a blur to me. At first I had the tail end of my performance high, and then I had a little bit of shakes as I began to crash. Booze (and Pepsi) was flowing freely among a California-clad crowd of what might have been executives and fashion models and who knows what, or might have just been people who dressed and acted like them. Most of the attention was on MNB, so I just floated between the bar and the hors d'oeuvres, smiling at random people. Bart and Michelle had sat down in a corner and seemed content to stay there. I saw Michelle shake hands with someone and then nestle closer to Bart. That's when I thought to wonder where Ziggy had gotten himself off to. He was probably boffing Carmen in their hotel room, I decided, but then I saw Carmen in a group conversation with some of the guys from MNB. He was nowhere in sight.

That was when MNB's singer, a white guy with blond dread locks, put his arm around her. She rested her head on his shoulder. Then the two of them broke away from the group and were heading for the door. I followed them into the outer room of the suite, toward the hall, threading my way through clumps of people. I saw someone else doing the same thing, cutting a path through the laughing, talking crowd—Ziggy moving to intercept them.

By the time he caught up with them they were partway down the hall and around the first corner. I heard the shouts, Carmen's high-pitched nasal whine and Ziggy's easily distinguishable voice. My thought: oh god, if I could hear it, everyone in the room could. As I rounded the corner, Ziggy was pointing a finger at the other singer but still looking at Carmen, and yelling at her. She pulled the singer by the arm, took a few steps away, telling Ziggy to go fuck himself. He called her a lying whore, and then took a swing at the other guy. The fellow deflected the blow, a look on his face that showed he was more amused by this whole episode than threatened. He rolled his eyes at me like "can you believe this little soap opera?" He was quite tall and that gave me the feeling that he was, literally, above it all.

Ziggy didn't seem to care how tall the guy was, pushed Carmen aside and balled his hands into fists. Shit. As he was about to launch himself forward to tackle, I grabbed him from behind. Carmen pulled the other guy down the hall (saying "Come on, Jay, come on" and I remembered his name), a few more steps and they disappeared into her room. Ziggy's room, I realized as I struggled to hold him still.

"Jesus fucking Christ will you let go of me!" He thrashed and cursed in a stream, but I had my hands locked together in front of his chest. I didn't even try to argue—what was I going to say? I hung on until he stopped thrashing and then I let go.

"Lying fucking whore bitch," he said then, and pounded his fists on the hotel room door. Tears ran down his face and through the eyeliner he was still wearing from the stage. "You're dead!" I wasn't sure who he meant, Carmen or Jay, and didn't want to find out.

"Ziggy don't..." I tried.

He kicked the door once, hard, before turning his attention to the mirror and vase of silk flowers next to it. The whole floor was decorated this way, every couple of doors was an identical mirrored alcove with marble-topped table and vase of fake flowers. I knew what he was going to do the moment he looked at the mirror, which was not soon enough for me to stop him from kicking over the table and smashing his fist into the glass.

People were coming down the hall. I pulled my own room key from my pocket with one hand, and lacking any more elegant method, wrapped my free hand around his mouth and dragged him backward into my room.

(End sample of Volume 2!)

#  About DGC

_Daron's Guitar Chronicles_ received the inaugural Rose & Bay Award for Crowdfunded Fiction in 2010.

_Daron's Guitar Chronicles_ is by Cecilia Tan, the author of many books and short stories. She first began writing about him when she was 16 years old, in high school in suburban New Jersey in the early 1980s. Fragments of stories came and went, and Daron figured in several short stories she wrote for classes in college, though never as the central character. It seemed for many years like Daron's story was being told to her by the characters all around him. It wasn't until 1992, in graduate school for a masters degree in writing, that she buckled down and started writing from his point of view.

What followed was six years of work, as Cecilia worked on the tale on and off while finishing grad school and starting up Circlet Press. It had quickly become clear that the story was not a traditional 80,000 word novel in the same way that a road movie is not a traditional three-act film. The story was more of a _bildungsroman_. The original final draft was mammoth in size. Several editors and one agent persuaded Cecilia to cut material equal to the size of a whole novel from it, but what was left was still more than twice the size of a commercial fiction novel.

And so the material–much praised by editors who nonetheless rejected it as unsalable because of its size and scope–sat on Cecilia's hard drive for about ten years. Until November 2009, when web serialization became a viable reality. Daron's Guitar Chronicles began posting at the end of 2009 and by November 2010 had over a hundred chapters live, with many more to come.

The story was not written as a "period piece" of the late 80s/early 90s–that was when the bulk of it was conceived and written. That's how it was, then, before cell phones, before "alternative music" became hip, before there were out gay celebrities.

#  About the Author

Cecilia Tan has been writing professionally since she was Daron's age in the 1980s. She sold her first fiction in the early 90s, and her short stories have appeared in Nerve, Ms. Magazine, Strange Horizons, and Best American Erotica. She is the author of many books, most with fantasy and science fiction themes, including _Black Feathers, The Velderet, White Flames, Mind Games, The Siren and the Sword, The Hot Streak, The Tower and the Tears,_ and _Telepaths Don't Need Safewords._ She is also the founder and editorial director of Circlet Press. Find out more at http://blog.ceciliatan.com

