The sun lowered and the evening stayed sticky. Russell and I stood under a tree in a Jackson Ward backyard, thickening half-chugged sodas with pours from a bottle of cheap bourbon. Lucius had split off at the chain-link gate, saying, “I ain’t going in there so your nasty lil’ friends can bump into me.”
The punks arrived, white, at least two boys per girl, clutching twelve-packs and forties of beer and walking up the alley in small groups, or clamping lit smokes in their lips while they locked bikes to the fence along the side street.
Summertime Richmond’s a special thing. The steaming streets are empty of most college kids. The skeleton crew of friends who stick around pick a porch to drink on, talk about biking to the river more than they actually bike to the river, home in on a house full of girls who had just been freshmen, get buzzed with random hippies from work, and see the bands who come through on their own summer breaks. I’d been missing that, even if I knew I was getting too old for it.
I needed some of that comfort and wonder, but found myself staring at each kid, my usual excitement over another audience member erased by questions: Has this kid ever been stabbed? Raped? Said “nigger”? Had to move in with their grandparents?
Russell’s roommate, Clay, skulked up with a twelve-pack under one arm, free hand flapping the front of his loose black T-shirt for breeze.
“Anyone play?” he asked.
“Nope,” said Russell, sighing at the broken silence.
“Figures,” whined Clay.
Clay had a shrill voice, hunched shoulders, a permanent sneer, and BO that smelled like the bulk bins at a health food store. He was the type of person who’d say it’s typical that you’re there when you run into him in the beer aisle at cut-off time. I didn’t care for the guy, but I saw him all the time. That’s Richmond.
Clay hid his beers behind a tree root, lit a smoke, and said, “I heard Dog Day Afternoon asked for a hundred-dollar guarantee.” Paper Fire had averaged half that on tour, and that’s typical.
“They’ve got some nerve, trying to get back to Florida,” cracked Russell.
“It’s not about that. It’s not about money,” Clay shouted, dousing his smoke as he opened a shook-up beer. He had more ideas than follow-through. I’d seen him a couple weeks before, taking his bass to jam with some guy and get “the spirit of jazz and the drive of old-school hardcore . . . but with a drum machine.”
“What do you know about touring, Clay?” I asked.
“You’d be surprised,” he scoffed.
“Hey, now,” Russell cut him off. “We need to chill, especially after what happened to Mona.”
“That’s the girl from your job,” Clay stated.
“Yeah, duh,” I said.
“Chill,” said Russell. “Here.” He handed me the whiskey.
I sipped and blew the fumes out of my nose. It hit me that Russell was pretty shook up about Mona. The whole city seemed different. Like, inside each house or car could be a rapist, or one of their victims.
“You guys ever been broken in on?”
“Yeah, remember?” Russell said.
“Ohh.” I nodded.
We sipped our drinks and looked around while Clay told the story, again, about how he’d come home from a morning shift to find the front door ajar, no one home, and everyone’s VCRs and DVD players missing from their rooms.
“Some crackhead was probably a block away with a shopping cart full of our stuff.” Clay pushed an imaginary handle. “Can’t believe the cops didn’t get him.”
I was tired of the cops, and sometimes I think “crackhead” is another word for “nigger,” but I laughed along with Russell and let Clay ease the whiskey from my hand. Everyone in the Fan has a break-in story, but our brushes with violence tend to stop there.
“Y’all ever been stabbed, though?” I asked, feeling bolder.
Russell said, “Nah, of course not.”
“Anyone ever try to rape—” I said, and Clay cut me off, screeching something about, “One time during Dungeons and Dragons . . .”
Russell sensed my prickling annoyance and interrupted Clay, pointing at me and saying, “Ya know, he was the last one to see her. He had dinner at her place last night.”
“Well, her roommate—” I said.
Clay went, “Dinner end at six in the morning?”
“Huh?” Russell asked, pausing midway into reaching for Clay’s twelve-pack.
“That was you I saw on Floyd this morning, right?” Clay guffawed. “Sounds like dinner was pretty good.”
“Dinner was great,” I said, then looked at Russell. “But I left at ten.”
“He lives off Floyd,” Russell told Clay.
“Down by us?” Clay asked, and I wondered if he ever spent the night at a girl’s, then figured he hadn’t, because I would have heard all about it if he did.
“All right, look,” I said, and snatched back the whiskey. “I spent the night in the drunk tank down on Meadow.” Liquor immediately felt like the wrong thing to be holding.
Russell grimaced. “Whaaat?”
Clay perked up for the gossip. That’s all it was to him. Clay and Russell had never been arrested. They expected me to spin a tale that started with “It was ridiculous, dude. I had sixteen beers . . .”
I shrugged. “I just . . . ran a stop sign on my bike and got pulled over and they gave me a breathalyzer. It suck—”
“Did you drop the soap?” asked Clay.
“Fuck you, man,” I said with more force than planned, then looked over my shoulder at the house, hoping a band was starting.
“Saw-ree,” muttered Clay, like I was the prick.
Everyone sipped on something or other. A gaggle of black-clad crusty punks chased a dirty dog around the back porch, and one of them drunkenly slammed into the railing and shouted, “Sod off, Mossy!” in a fake English accent while her friends laughed and the dog licked her grimy face.
There was a peal of distorted guitar from the inside, then the idle punch of a bass string as someone adjusted an amp. We shuffled on our feet and I saw the people beyond us flicking their smokes aside and trudging indoors.
“Let’s go in, dudes,” said Russell.
The first band were all twentyish with long hair, proud of their van, just back from that first short tour down the coast, their music better than I wanted to admit.
They’d set up to play in a bedroom at the back of the first floor. I wedged behind the chest-high bass amp, nodded to the drummer, and the band roared to life without a hello to the crowd. Sweat flew as fuzzed-out guitars and thick snare hits ricocheted off the close walls. The handful of people crammed up front—transplants from a year or two ago who I never got to know—became an undulating blob of black T-shirts and silver beer cans. When I set my empty on the windowsill behind me, I saw a pile of faces watching through the glass and the hot room became a limbo. Each face was a blank that I couldn’t fill in. I felt like I was chasing a train.
We knew the last song was the last song because it started with a dramatic build of bass and drums. The topless, teenage-skinny singer boy pogoed to the beat with a mic cord for a tail, and I jumped too, joining the crowd’s “Go! Go! Go!” chant. The old house’s sodden floor buckled with each leap until the guitar elbowed its way in and everyone landed, arms waving.
This was the release that I’d wanted, but in that realization, I whisked myself back out of the moment and frowned at my hands, clapping stupidly in front of me.
Screaming the last verse, the singer appeared at my side, sea lion slick when he brushed my arm and threw open the window. The people on the back porch stepped back, raising beers in appreciation. The singer dove over the sill and onto the porch, kicking the bass amp. I clamped my hands onto the top to steady it. By the time I turned back, he was a flash of sweat-shiny back in the dusk, dragging the mic cord into the dark as displaced shouts exploded from the PA speaker to my left. The song ended with a crash of cymbals, the mic cord draped over the drum set like caution tape.
Through the applause, the room’s heat shifted from electric to oppressive. I said, “Nice show,” to the bassist. He smiled as I slipped out from behind the amp. The wall was wet to the touch. My head was a grinding gear, waiting to catch a cog.
I stepped onto the back deck, twenty degrees cooler but still hot. Multiply the front row by five. That’s how many people were standing in the grass below me, blowing cheap smokes over warm beer, the dark yard a ballet of glowing red dots.
Beyond was Jackson Ward, a black neighborhood that was nicknamed the Harlem of the South during the Jazz Age. Its wide streets are lined with beautiful brick row houses and ornate wrought-iron porches, salvaged when the city burned at the end of the Civil War. My father was born blocks from the show, and whenever I went to the neighborhood, I’d look at the street corners and imagine him younger, standing there with a hokey old rhythm ’n’ blues song in his head. But I’d always felt disconnected from the place. It didn’t feel right that my only reason for being in a black neighborhood was to hang out with white people.
“You think they put it outside because it’s too loud in there?” Russell was bent at the waist, whiskey bottle dangling from his right hand, peering into a hamster cage sitting on a plastic table along the railing to my left.
“I dunno, dude,” I said, and commandeered the whiskey. When I tipped the bottle to my mouth, the porchlight gleamed off an air bubble rising through the brown booze.
Russell was trying to poke his finger between the wires on the side of the cage. A girl in dark jeans and a tank top raised a super-sculpted eyebrow at Russell’s butt, then fixed her eyes on her friends in the yard. Walking down the steps, she dragged on her cigarette then blew out a haze of smoke as she passed Mason, Clay, and these nineteen-year-old dorm girls with matching bangs who Mason always talked to.
Somewhere in town, a dinner party was going on. Nothing fancy, but some interesting food with plenty of vegetables, a spice I’d never heard of, and an ingredient from the health food store. An evenly matched group of men and women—not all white—would be talking about books that aren’t about bands, music that doesn’t scream, and cultural stuff I wasn’t even up on because I was busy getting drunk and breaking into a hamster cage.
“Where is it?” grunted Russell, still poking.
I leaned in, a swell of whiskey crashing into my brain. “Maybe in the little house!”
“Dude.” Russell laughed. “He’s got a little house!”
Paper Fire was playing last because we didn’t want the show to get shut down before Dog Day Afternoon played. Deep down, below all the beer and the Mona and the drunk tank, something told me to slow down on the booze. But then I remembered the lurch as John Donahue floored it in the cop car, and the bottle angled up to my mouth again.
I swallowed, wiped my lips with the back of my hand, and shouted, “Where’s our hamster buddy?” loud enough that people in the yard looked our way and Mason made a disapproving “Heyyy” sound before turning to the dorm girls with his nose up and his voice down.
The rest of the night comes back in flashes. Here are a few that connect the hamster break-in to 5 a.m., when I woke up puking in bed, throbs rising through my skull like radio signals:
Me on the deck giving all the white people in the yard below a fisheye stare, imagining them doing top-secret white stuff, like spinning a globe with lacrosse sticks.
Russell asking, “You OK to play?”
Me doing some innovative shadowbox-to-twirl move that ended with a stagger-jog to the center of the yard.
Clay helping Mason carry my amp into the house.
Mason warming up with some slow, heavy stoner-rock riff. Russell joining in on the drums. The look they share when I try to play along.
Me playing bass, alone, like you could zoom out with a camera on a helicopter until you saw me as an ant, alone in the desert with my amp.
I raise the pick, ready for the F-sharp I’m about to hit to shift the tectonic plates. For the following G to summon light-skinned Marcus Garvey’s chariot from under the earth’s crust. For the C to earn me a ride to Halfrica.
There is a rumble. Worried that the pick will be struck by lightning, I send it howling down at the awaiting string.
Lightning crackles from my amp as my bass string breaks and hangs loose, part unraveled, not even cleanly snapped.
A roof grows over the desert. Two dozen people appear along with the taste of stale beer and sweet whiskey, the smell of floor dust and cigarette butts, the wash of cymbals without bass to connect them to the buzzing guitar, all aimed right at my gut full of alcohol. I go to hit the third fret. My pick pulls the broken string free from the bass.
Mason’s mouth is open, his chest puffed, his eyes bugged as he prepares to bellow the next line into the mic. He sees my broken string, and sings anyway. We can fix equipment mid-song. The most important part of a gig is not killing the momentum.
But I turn around and trip on my own guitar cord, then tumble into my amp. My face scratches across the speaker cover and onto the gritty floor, the amp topples backwards and props at an angle against the wall, where I’d been standing during the first band. The guitar and drums sputter out.
The room is pitching back and forth. The back of my tongue is tingling. I consider hopping out the window but turn, barrel through the crowd, and stumble out onto the deck, puking. My elbow skids across barf-slick wood. A handful of black-haired, highwater-wearing emo kids scatter.
My elbows are on the deck railing like it’s the side of a pool.
Russell is patting my back as I puke into the yard. He says, “Let it all out, buddy.”
It’s the most tender thing someone has done for me in a while. Real tears mix with the wetness of throwing up as I retch one last time and sigh before pushing off the railing.
As I search for balance, my sneaker hooks in a plastic table leg, upending it, catapulting the hamster cage toward the back door.
I fall as blond cedar shavings scatter across the deck. Some stick in my puke, others sift between the boards, then the cute little hamster house rolls out, followed by an oblong bundle, the size of two fingers. When I put a hand on the deck’s floorboards to stand again, I see that the bundle is the hamster. Dead. That’s why the cage was outside. Of course.
I lift my hand and wipe the shavings on the thigh of my jeans, look for Russell, then flinch at the porch light’s glare. After my eyes adjust, I see that every single one of the fifty people who had shown up are watching me, from the bedroom window, from the yard, from across the deck, from the kitchen door, and Russell is still in the same place, looking dismayed. I meet his eye, breaking some sort of fourth wall, and his mouth closes into a concerned smirk.
I point to the hamster. “It’s dead.”
“Do you wanna put your bike in the van, too?” Mason’s asking. It sounds like it’s not the first time he’s said it.
“I wish!”
I’m sitting on the bench seat in Paper Fire’s van, the backs of my thighs crinkling into a couple of plastic grocery bags. Lucius is next to me, smelling like powdery artificial strawberry and sick-sweet smoke. Mason and Russell are facing forward, grimly, in the front seat.