The Leavers(6)
He gripped his empty cup. He’d torn it apart, bent the rim back and forth until the plastic split in a single line. The math rockers had been playing for forty minutes. Inside, he didn’t see any familiar faces, so he got a new cup and poured one last vodka. He found Roland standing against the wall in a black blazer, dark hair buzzed close to his scalp. From the neck up Roland reminded Daniel of a nineteenth-century mobster, with his furtive features and disarming smile. In high school, both of them had been too different to receive attention from girls (or boys, whom Roland also dated these days), though Daniel liked to think it didn’t matter now. Roland was still short, compact but hard, his pointy face hawkish, his movements clipped and sharp. His manic energy no longer seemed as freakish as it had been in Ridgeborough, nor did the deep croak that had been slightly spooky on a twelve-year-old.
“We’ve got this,” Roland said. “These guys are so derivative.”
Daniel laughed, letting the room blur at its corners. How great it was to be back in the city, playing music with Roland again. They had been playing together for nearly half their lives, Daniel on guitar and vocals, Roland on vocals and beats and production and sometimes bass, shows at Carlough College house parties or the Ridgeborough Elks Lodge or in a barn out in Littletown. In high school there’d been a thankfully brief electroclash experiment, a power trio with their friend Shawn as the drummer, and an art-punk duo called Wilkinson | Fuentes, in which Daniel had tried and spectacularly failed at playing his white Squier with his teeth, Hendrix-style.
“These guys sound like they’re jerking off to their dads’ Yes albums,” he said.
“Too many derivative acts,” Roland said. “Not like that set with the theremin.”
The truth was, Psychic Hearts was derivative, a nü-disco nightmare, like Roland was trying to mix hair metal and Dracula with a thinned-out noise pop sound, jacking the title from an obscure Thurston Moore album. All that fronting and polishing only to be purposely stripped down. It was over-manufactured lo-fi, not the kind of music Daniel would choose to play, not his own music. He found Roland’s drum-machine beats predictable, the lyrics vague and murky, the eighties stylings too self-conscious. There had always been something distasteful in Roland’s stage strutting, how naturally the performance came to him, how effortlessly the crowd ate it up. But if Roland wanted to make music like this, Daniel wouldn’t let him down.
Roland had called last month and said he needed a guitarist for a new project. “Our couch is yours as long as you need it. What’s the point in being all the way up there by Canada?” Roland had moved down to the city right after high school, worked until he could afford to go to college part-time, and Daniel hadn’t seen him, had barely talked to him, in over a year. “Nobody can do music with me like you can,” Roland said, and the next day Daniel charged a one-way ticket and rode down to the city on a bus that smelled like diapers. It wasn’t as if he had any plans after getting booted from Potsdam. Like his parents said—like they’d remind him again tomorrow—he had thrown his future away.
With gray curtains stapled crookedly to the walls and graffiti crayoned across the bathroom door, this was an invite-only party where the bookers of venues like Jupiter, where Roland longed to play, came to check out bands. Roland knew the girl who managed the secret e-mail list, who had booked them on the basis of his past projects. If the Jupiter guy was into Psychic Hearts, he might book Daniel’s solo act one day.
Daniel scanned the crowd. A man with a mustache and white baseball cap was in the back by himself, wearing enormous brown hiking boots with orange laces. Daniel looked again at his own shoes. “That him? The Jupiter booker?”
Roland rolled his eyes. The math rockers had stopped playing. Anemic applause rippled through the front of the room and one of Roland’s friends looked over, gave a thumbs up. “You ready for this?”
“Always,” Daniel said.
THE FOURTH VODKA HAD been the mistake. By the time they finished the sound check, Daniel felt like he was seeing the room through another person’s glasses. He blinked at a spray-painted drawing of a cat on the far wall and returned to tuning his guitar, plucking the same string over and over. He wished more people were scrolling through their phones rather than looking at him, waiting for him to screw up. Roland played the first notes of the first song, started a beat on his Akai MPC60. Daniel produced a chord, sleek and assertive, and the song began to leak its colors, dark blues and lighter browns, like gut notes being forced through a tube. The six-song set list, scribbled at his feet, drifted up at him. He played a C, an E minor. Roland sang the first line. The notes sounded sad and clashing, deeply wrong, like the time he bit into a yellow square he thought was pineapple but turned out to be a very sharp cheese.
Roland kept going. They’d screwed up plenty at shows, and whoever was at fault would eventually right himself. It was their unspoken pact, like what parents said to kids—in case we get separated, return to the place we started from. But this time, the notes did not return. They had only practiced a few times, cocky with their years of history, and when Daniel squinted at the set list none of the titles were familiar. It wasn’t nerves—despite his age, he was no amateur—but more self-sabotage. You mess everything up. He lunged for a chord, then another. A riff came to him and he played it. It was his melody, a melody, and he wanted to play it louder, so he did. Bright orange pinwheeled around him. Feedback squealed. He saw people grimace, cover their ears.