Brett and Tom and I had been playing tunes, Brett on drums even though he’s not a drummer, Tom on bass even though he doesn’t play bass. I felt guilty playing guitar. Brett had a room in a storage facility in Chelsea where he rehearsed with his band. Climate controlled and powered. I didn’t know such a thing existed. I thought storage rooms were dark, dusty and cramped, a place for things not people. In this building the hallways were bright and clean and the spaces big enough to live in.
Brett had made a carpeted space for a set of drums, two amps, and a mic stand, ringed by miscellaneous belongings, furniture maybe, some clothes, appliances. Maybe they were his. Maybe not. Maybe this was all his bandmate’s shit, his bandmate’s space. I took advantage unthinkingly, ungratefully. Here we were. We could plug right in and play.
We played weirdo covers, a hard rock version of “Chim Chim Cher-ee.” We played one or two of my tunes and Tom’s. Was there a point? We had fun. One time we thought, we have enough to play a set somewhere. We should play a show, one show only, start and end in a blaze of glory. But we never did.
After playing we’d go to a bar. Maybe that was the point.
We drove to Baltimore one weekend to see their friend Jim, the drummer in their old band, play a gig. It rained hard on the way and Brett was driving fast, peering below the windshield fog. This was DC Sniper time and we were heading into his territory. He’d shot eight people already, or was it nine, and six had died, or was it seven. I imagined him laying in wait in a perch overlooking the freeway. Maybe we’d be next.
We stopped at a rest stop just over the border in Maryland. There were teenagers hanging out, like this was the place to be in whatever fucking town this was. Racing through the main hall, twisting the knobs of gumball machines for something to come out. Two boys wrestled as they walked, smirking insolently, getting in people’s way and not caring. This is how they interacted, with arms and hands. How they communicated.
At the table next to us a girl gushed to her friends, “I heard he shot five people in a single day!”
We went out in the streets of Baltimore, bar to bar and down some ruined streets with the houses boarded up. Slept on a couch in Jim’s house. On Saturday night we watched his band play fusiony prog rock at a hipster bar crowded with young guys in beards. A confederate flag hung on the wall with no apparent irony.