Loud is How I Love You (10 page)

The WJHU station manager greets us, and we get a nice little reminder, or a dressing-down, maybe, about how the show is being broadcast live, so to keep it clean, ha ha ha. Sure, dude. No worries. He’s in a bow tie and nothing at all like our folks at Rutgers, who know better than to even suggest such a thing because, derp, we’re professionals, we know this and we’re not idiots or lowlifes. But whatever. We’re not here to be a pain in anyone’s ass.

“So, I shouldn’t say, ‘Welcome all you motherfuckers’ on the air, then?” I ask.

“‘Where’s my cocksucking drink?’” Cole says. “Is that okay?”

“‘Any whores in the audience tonight?’” Joey says. “Is that FCC-approved?”

“Please forgive them,” Travis says. “They were raised in New Jersey.”

Now the guy laughs. Asshole.

We get our equipment set up on stage, and the place is already mobbed with people we’ve never seen who’ve been drinking all day at Spring Fair, and I always love and hate this feeling because I have no idea if they’re going to love us or boo us off the stage. It’s thrilling like a potentially very awesome ride at an amusement park, you know, like “Final Death Drop” or something, the new one that hasn’t been around long enough for you to feel confident nobody will die on it. That’s what playing a show like this, on the air, feels like. Except we probably won’t die doing it. I mean, Toby is in the back now passing a kidney stone so I guess you never know what can happen at these things.

With new crowds, especially college crowds, loud, fast rules apply—so the set we play would fit right in with anybody on Amphetamine Reptile. No quirky, ethereal, dark moments here, we’ve got drunk college radio people in the crowd. It
seems to be working, because even though we’re implementing our “no talking between songs” rule (made specially for me because I have a nervous tic of unintentionally insulting the crowd from the mic when I’m nervous), and we’re blasting through song after song, we can see they’re going nuts out there. I mean, there are a ton of frat brothers right up front dancing, jumping in the air, doing the drunk premed version of moshing (because these dudes in their pastel wifebeaters have no idea about punk rock, so when they mosh I sort of want to smack them between the eyes with my headstock). Now there’s even a sloppy-looking guy standing right in front of me on the floor mouthing “I LOVE YOU” about as subtly as a raging herpes cluster. Great.

I give Travis a look during a break between songs and he gives me the nod. He moves closer to me, steps right to the edge of the stage and levels a pretty menacing “fuck off” stare at the guy. Travis, as nice a guy as he is, has a fairly convincing “fuck off” stare, so the guy cools it, steps off to the side. But within two songs, he’s back. Now Cole has picked up on it and he’s eyeing the guy, too, but this guy is obviously toasted and not giving much of a fuck, and unless we want to make a big deal out of it (and I don’t), there’s not much more to do about it now.

Travis’s behavior isn’t possessiveness or jealousy, by the way, so don’t read that into it. This is a matter of respect and safety. I’m a female, I’m fairly young, and I’m singing in a club away from home. Some guys are assholes. This is a fact of being in a band, or a fact of being born with a vagina. While the vast majority of guys are totally respectful at shows, it’s still not uncommon enough to run into somebody who just isn’t. Who doesn’t get it. Who tells himself that if you have tits and you’re on a stage, you’re obviously there so he can try to fuck you. I know some folks think, hey, if you don’t want the attention, why do you do it? Because fuck them, that’s why. Nobody in the world gets up on a stage who doesn’t like attention. I’m up here because I wrote some music and I want to share it with you, and that is not the same at all as wanting to share my body or anything else I have, you dumb motherfuckers.

So this is why Cole, Travis, and Joey are fairly quick to intervene if somebody is getting too much in my face. They’re my pepper spray. And tonight when Vampires and Assassins are in the crowd and they see this going on, all three Johns and the two Brians move up and not so subtly crowd the dude right out of the front row so I can stop thinking about his ugly flapping lips in my face and worry about stomping on my Big Muff at the precise moment I need to bring the heavy riff out. I look up and Original Brian (the singer) gives me a nod that the douchebag has been flushed.

It’s all going great now, and I’m back into it. But just before the end of our set, to my and everyone’s great surprise, Toby comes wandering out into the crowd in nothing but his boxers and combat boots, holding a pint glass full of piss in the air.

“I FUCKING PASSED IT!” he yells to us right after we finish “My Yes My No.” He is so hopped up on natural endorphins, he jumps up on stage next to me, half naked, sweating, but grinning maniacally as he holds the glass up in the air and shows everyone the shards of the stone he just passed.

And I have never seen anything more badass in all of my rock career as that.

“You’re a hero, Toby Secret,” I say.

“Let’s rock, motherfuckers!” he cries (Live! On WJHU!), and we all pump our fists in the air and cheer, totally ignoring the meltdown the station manager is having at the bar.

“He’s not even from Jersey,” I point out.

***

The rest of this show is unreal. I can’t even tell you how hard the Corporate Secret rock tonight. They are off the fucking charts. If they’re not signed in a week, I will eat my Tube Screamer. Toby has stripped naked and is playing in nothing but his guitar and combat boots, and he’s covered with stickers (with a Stars on the Floor sticker prominently displayed across his ass, and if a photo of that isn’t our next single cover, then fuck, we’re doing it all wrong). Everybody is dancing, everybody is jumping up and down to every song. They are on fire. The endorphins must be fueling Toby’s playing, his singing, because he is a monster on stage tonight.

The show keeps this unrelenting pace of awesome when Vampires and Assassins take the stage. It’s like they just feed right off of the crazy energy from Toby’s kidney stone ordeal and I think, shit, we should just move to Baltimore after we graduate. Fuck New York, fuck Philadelphia. I know that the Baltimore scene has the same problem we have—they’re too close to DC for anyone else in the country to give much of a shit about what’s happening here—but there are so many good bands. It’s a treasure trove of heavy guitar angst down here.

I go to the bar for a drink and look at the clock. It’s midnight now, and Vampires and Assassins are near the tail end of their set and it’s so good I don’t want the night to end. But then I remember that I’ve got an exam in the morning, and I break out into a cold sweat. But hey, it’s only midnight. We’ll be packed up and on the road by one a.m. at the latest. I’ll be home by three thirty a.m., and if I sleep in the van, I’ll be able to do fine on the exam. No big deal.

I’ve forgotten all about the asshole from the audience until he spots me at the bar and stumbles over while I’m waiting to get change from the bartender. (Because this is a college bar that has no idea how to treat bands so they give us each only one drink ticket. One. And then they make us use it for bottled water. What even the fuck is that?) I haven’t had anything to drink since the one shot I had before massaging Toby’s kidney, I’m just ordering myself ginger ales. When the douchebag asks me what I’m drinking, I tell him I’m fine, thanks. Then he asks me my name and I tell him, reluctantly: Anaïs Nin. He tells me his and then proceeds to tell me that I’m really “hawt” and do I have a boyfriend? For fuck’s sake.

“I actually have three boyfriends,” I tell him as I see Travis making his way through the crowd to us. “Here comes one
now.”

“You’re . . . are you, you know, banging all those guys in your band?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I am. All at the same time, sometimes.”

“No way.” His face lights up in admiration.

“Get lost, asshole,” Travis says as he comes and drapes his arm around my shoulders. “I don’t like the way you were eyeing my girl up there.”

“We were just talking,” he says. “I swear, I didn’t realize.”

“Yeah, well now you know,” he says. “Don’t be such a creep with the ladies, they don’t like it. It makes them uncomfortable.”

“That’s crazy that she’s, you know, with all of you guys at the same time,” he says. “Is that even legal?”

“It is in Jersey,” I say.

“Emmylou, you’re not supposed to go around telling anyone and everyone about our polygamous love,” he says, wagging his finger in my face. “You’ll end up in
Rolling Stone
again and we’ll have to move back to Utah.”

“You were in
Rolling Stone
?” the guy asks. “Can I have your autograph?”

Why are guys so fucking dumb? I don’t know. It’s more proof of how public education is failing in this country.

I sign a bar napkin
Anaïs Nin
and the guy leaves, obviously impressed, and I notice that as he does, Travis doesn’t take his arm away from my shoulders. He keeps it there and twirls a strand of my hair around his finger and I don’t want to move because I don’t want him to stop doing that. It makes me feel safe. I didn’t really feel unsafe before, not with all my friends around here and hell, tonight’s asshole was just one more in the train of shitheads with bad boundaries that I have to deal with doing what I do. No real threat.

But there’s no denying my big relieved sigh when he’s gone and Travis is still there, holding on to me.

“Does dialing it back include kissing or not?” I ask Travis when we’re loading up the van.

It’s one a.m. now and the beat brothers are still inside the club, goofing off with Vampires and Assassins as John the Third has taken over the DJ booth and is spinning dance hits only from 1982. They’re going nuts rapping to “The Message,” and if you want to see something that defines awkward, go watch nine pasty white boys in rock bands try to rap. They think because the Beastie Boys made the jump from hardcore to hip-hop it’s easy, but it’s a relief when Kraftwerk’s “Tour de France” comes on and they start doing the robot instead, trust me.

Travis climbs out of the back of the van after arranging the cabinets in the cargo space. He stands there staring at me, hands on his hips as he thinks over his answer, which I thought would be much easier than this. Honestly? I expected him to give me a sexy little smile and to clandestinely make out in the back of the van for a few before everyone waltzes out here. But he doesn’t do that. You know that cringing, embarrassed feeling you get when you say something totally flirty like this and the guy just stares at you like you asked him for a loan? No? Well, you’re lucky because it’s awful. In the gaping maw of his non-reply, I turn red, then turn to escape back into the club when he catches me by the arm.

“Wait a minute¸” he says.

“What.” I try to sound all business, like no big deal, but this isn’t easy when you’re in the middle of a full-body cringe. “I’m sorry. I’m being stupid and contradictory. As usual.”

“I’m still trying to figure it out, that’s all,” he says. “I do want to kiss you, you know. All the fucking time.”

“You do?” I say. “Because you don’t act like it.”

“Yeah, well it’s not that simple,” he says.

“Why not?”

“Because,” he says and pauses. “Well, look,” he starts again and then stops. Then he just sort of gives up on words and instead manhandles me like I’m a piece of gear and sets me down on the tailgate of the van with my back against the bass cabinet. Steady Beth’s back doors are open but pulled in so it’s like a little private fortress around us. I suck air as he looms over me, because I know exactly what’s coming when he looks at me like that. I think I might even be trembling.

“Why don’t you tell me?” he says, leaning over me, bracing himself against the bass cabinet. “Can we kiss and still take it slow?”

“Well . . . I don’t know, I—” I’m in the middle of answering when he shuts me up with his mouth, tasting like ginger ale and everything I guess I ever wanted in a guy, because the moment his lips touch mine, my head empties of everything and anything else but him. He kisses me once and I turn all the way on from head to toe. I wake right the hell up out of some gray, foggy dream I’d been living, into this hyperspace of feeling, all of it focused directly on wherever his lips touch me. My brow, my nose, my temple. He holds my face in his hands and his lips are so soft and sweet as they move over mine, kissing my top lip, my bottom lip, and then there’s his tongue pushing inside of me and fucking hell, he’s so right. I want more. I want more now now now right now.

“Travis,” I whisper, panting like I just had a hard run.

“Yeah,” he whispers back, but I crush his lips with my own again before he can even say anything else, I can’t help it. I can’t keep my lips off of him. I kiss his chin, down his neck as he holds fistfuls of my hair in his hands.

“Emmy,” he groans.

“Stay with me tonight,” I say.

The back door of the club slams open and we hear the beat brothers still singing Soft Cell—
Don’t touch me please, I cannot stand the way you tease
—with the Corporate Secret guys as they make their way across the parking lot, over to the vans.

“Fuck,” Travis mutters and turns away and adjusts a very obvious boner. His face is so frustrated I feel guilty. He takes a deep breath and walks away from me, away from all of us down the block.

“What’s wrong with Trap?” Joey asks, all out of breath from dancing. “Aren’t we going?”

“Yeah,” I say, averting my eyes because I know they can’t see my boner, but I definitely still have one. If they were looking for it, they could probably see it all over my face but by some miracle they don’t seem to suspect a thing. “I’m going to use the bathroom and then let’s hit the road.”

“Homeward bound!” Cole yells, jumping into his seat up front. He starts rifling through the band CD collection. “We’ve got an English exam to kill!”

I come back out of the club and climb into the van, in the back behind Travis. I pick Travis’s jacket up off the floor and drape it over myself because now the band blanket is covered in bar-floor funk and I have no idea if there’s any Toby kidney-stone-passing residue on there, but I know at this point the van blanket should probably just be burned. Travis pops the Misfits CD out of the CD player over Cole’s protests.

“Driver picks the music,” he says.

“You always drive, though,” Cole argues.

“Yep,” he says as he pushes play and the sound of Mazzy Star’s “Fade into You” fills the van. He knows that I fucking love this song. I sing quietly along to it and catch him glimpsing up at me in the mirror, his eyes all happy.

“Come on, Trap, we’ll all be asleep before the slide guitar comes back around,” Joey complains and then yawns into his arm.

“Well then good night, sweetheart,” Travis says, but as he’s saying it, he looks up in the rearview mirror at me and smiles.

What I’d really like to do right now is curl up in Travis’s strong, amp-carrying arms and the end. That’s it. I could end this whole story right here if I could just figure out how to handle everything I’m feeling. But if I were good at handling powerful feelings, I’d be an accountant, not a musician. I’m good at feeling things like a hypodermic full of adrenaline to the heart, nice and strong and all at once and thrilling and painful, too. (I actually have no idea what a hypodermic needle to the heart would feel like. I just saw John Travolta stab Uma Thurman in the heart like that in
Pulp Fiction
like everyone else.) I can feel the big, overwhelming feelings, yes. But handling them? Not so much. This is what guitar is for, but guitar just gives you a place to put those things. To feel them without feeling like they’re going to break you. Writing an awesome riff is not really the same as making good decisions about how to treat other people.

We roll out of Baltimore, happy and high from another great night, and as I close my eyes I can still feel his lips on mine, the soft feel of his tongue in my mouth. Now my stomach is all fluttery and I can tell you exactly why they call that feeling butterflies: it’s because new love is a beautiful, wild thing and if you keep it trapped inside of you, it will rail at that imprisonment until you let it out there into the world. It feels a little like that out-of-control feeling you get right before you orgasm. Or vomit.

I pull Travis’s jacket tighter around myself even though it’s not cold. I just like breathing under it because it smells like him. I am in love with him, I know that I am. I’m feeling it, full fucking on.

And I am terrified about everything I am about to fuck up in my life because of it.

***

A loud clang jolts me out of an awkward sleep. I open my eyes and we’re not moving, and nobody else is in the van. I’m disoriented for a minute, like maybe I just woke up inside a space capsule and the guys are out spacewalking or something. I hear more clanging, so I squint and look out the windshield and all I can see is the raised hood of the van and oh fuck. Oh no. Oh fuck no. I look at my watch. It’s two a.m.—we can’t even be out of Maryland yet.

Van problems among bands are second only to drummer problems in terms of how common and what a royal pain in the ass they are, but among all the band vans in New Brunswick, Steady Beth is legendary for not giving us shit. Because Travis plans it that way. Travis works part-time at Jiffy Lube, so he always changes the oil, checks the belts, tweaks and tunes her so this won’t happen. She’s a 1986, so nine years old, but she’s got a hundred and forty-two thousand miles on her. But we’re not moving and I’ve got an exam at eight thirty in the morning, so I’m thinking the worst.

Maybe it’s something that’s not a big deal. Maybe somebody had to take a piss and Travis is just checking the oil. He is prone to neurotically checking the oil.

I climb out and learn that we’re just at the Chesapeake House, a rest area in the middle of I-95 at the north end of Maryland about two hours from home. And unfortunately, Travis isn’t just checking the oil, and nobody has to take a piss.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Travis is muttering. He looks pissed, and Joey and Cole are standing there looking grim. “It’s the alternator, I’m sure,” Travis says. “The battery is practically new.”

“What the hell are we going to do?” I say.

“I need to replace it,” he says. “I can get a tow from Triple A to a shop, but nobody will be able to work on it until tomorrow morning.”

“Not good enough,” I say. “That doesn’t work at all.”

“I know,” Travis says. “We still need to get you home tonight.”

“We’ll get you home, Emmy,” Joey says. “I’ll piggyback you there if I have to.”

“Nobody is going to piggyback anybody,” Travis says. “We’ll get her a taxi.”

“How much will all that cost?” I say. “If we need to buy an alternator, won’t that be more than our whole guarantee?”

“We’ll pool our money,” he says. “I’ve got thirty in cash on me aside from that. What do you guys have?”

“I’ve got ten,” Cole says.

“Five,” Joey says. “I’m sorry.”

“I’ve got four dollars,” I say.

“That won’t be enough,” Travis says. “But I’ve got enough for the alternator in savings. So we’ll use the guarantee to pay for a taxi.”

“You need that money to fly to Omaha for Easter,” I say.

“I’ll just have to cancel,” Travis says.

“No you won’t,” I argue. “Your parents hate the band enough as it is.”

“No they don’t,” he says. “Shit happens, they’ll understand.”

So we have a plan, it seems. That is, we have a plan until we can’t find a fucking cab company in the phone book that’s picking up the phone at two a.m. What is wrong with you, Maryland? We finally get hold of a car service down in Baltimore who will meet us out here on the interstate, but they can’t get here for an hour at least. But if they get here by three thirty, I can be home by five thirty. I’ll be exhausted, but I’ll make it to my Modern Novel exam. Joey will ride back with me, and Travis and Cole will wait with the van, get Triple A to tow it to a garage in the morning, and Travis will use his savings account to pay for the alternator, as much as I hate this. We’ll pay him back, of course. But it’ll take a few Friday nights at the Court Tavern to get there.

After we hit the bathrooms we head back out and climb back into Steady Beth and wait for the car service to come.

“Maybe if you tell your professor what happened, he’ll give you a makeup exam,” Cole says.

“Uh, no, he definitely will not,” I say. “And if I don’t get a 3.5 or above in this class, I’ll put my scholarship in jeopardy. And if that happens, well, my mother . . .”

“Say no more,” Joey says. “We don’t want your mom to get on your case.”

“I just don’t want to deal with the lecture about life choices,” I say. “You know how she hates this. Jesus, if she could see me right now she’d birth a chimp.”

“You’ll get back for the exam,” Travis says, looking at me in the rearview mirror. “Go on and sleep for a while until the cab gets here. I’ll stay up and wait.”

But none of us can sleep now, so we stay up talking instead. It’s funny how you can spend so much time with the same three people and still have so much to talk about. Travis is waxing poetic about the Internet and how it’s going to change everything for bands like us, and imagine the day when we can finally give up Kinko’s and mailing out all those postcards before shows, he says. As if! Those are like miniature works of art, even if stamping and labeling three hundred of those things every month is a pain in my ass (and not cheap, either).

We talk about our friends from Jersey City, Crown the Robin, who are planning to go out on the road for the summer and how awesome it would be to go out on tour with them. We’ve played Maxwell’s in Hoboken a few times together and the shows were almost always sold out because they’re doing so well. We talk about Ag Field Day and start throwing around what kind of set we should play. A more mellow vibe, to sort of match Ween? Or something more rockin’, like we played
tonight? We’re not used to playing in broad daylight, so this is going to take some thought. It’ll take me the next five weeks just to pick out the right T-shirt.

We gab like this for a while before I start to anxiously check my watch and now it’s three forty-five a.m. and there’s still no cab. What the fuck. Travis and I go inside to call again, and this time nobody answers.

I surprise myself and Travis when I start to cry. I feel like such a baby right now, I can’t even stand myself. But I’m tired and I’m angry that I have to worry so much about this exam when I don’t even really care about Modern Novel. I mean, it’s a great course, but I want to front a band for a living, not be an English professor and I’m sick of people telling me it’s not realistic, that I need a backup plan if the band doesn’t work out. I know that makes perfect sense, I’m not stupid. But the thing is, it’s not what I want and I don’t believe in planning for what you don’t want. So truthfully, I don’t feel bad that I made the choice to come down to Baltimore the night before a big exam. I feel bad that making these kinds of choices is a disappointment to my mother—the one woman I look up to more than anyone in the world.

Travis wraps his arms around me and I bury my face against his chest.

“Fuck,” I say. “Fucking God damn it.”

“I’ll call George,” Travis says. “He’ll come. That’s our best chance. You might still make it if we call right now.”

“I don’t want you to call George,” I say. “It’s not even four a.m.”

“He’ll do it,” Travis says. “He’ll bitch about it, but he’ll come.”

I hate this idea, but I don’t know what else to do now. So we call George, but there’s no answer. George is either so fast asleep he doesn’t hear the phone or he’s not even home.