“My Veronica’s in love with a mutant./ He is a Harvard MBA student,” Walter sang quietly to himself, struggling with the meter and its impact on possible melodies.
It was 3:47 a.m. and Walter had written these words on the back of a crumpled take-out menu that had been sitting on his hotel room floor for days. He declared that this was the start of what would become the band’s first song. He couldn’t be certain, but he thought that perhaps these lines would be the first part of the song’s chorus.
But this was as far as he could get right now.
And depending on the hour, he kept remembering the melody of the two lines entirely differently. He assumed there must be some way to write down a melody, but he didn’t know how to read or write music. So he tried to sing it in his head over and over, hoping that it would stick.
He told himself that this was what had kept him up all night. In truth, however, the cause and effect were reversed. He was writing lyrics and attempting to remember melodies because he could not sleep in the first place, his mind mercilessly clutching and leaping and churning through the previous day’s events every time he closed his eyes. But after nearly four hours of writing two lines of a song, Walter’s mental faculties were wiped.
There was never much to do at 3:47 a.m. when the mind was mush. It was too late or too early to call any friends. Even Beau Chalmers was likely slumbering quite contentedly right now.
There was nowhere to go, either. Everything was closed.
He was way too tired to put on his headphones and think about music.
So he turned on the TV and flipped through the channels to find nothing of interest. But the sounds and the flickering light were just enough to serve as a distraction. So he left a sports news show on and he closed his eyes.
He found his brain muttering through random potential band names, most of which were awful.
TV Sleepy Mind. We Sleep Alone. Oh, Eleanor. Not Tuesday. No Sound. Braum. This Isn’t Me. No Coasts. Willis Shipley and The No Coasts. Sheprick Consolidated. Hotel Fillers. The Amenity Good Time Band. I Remember Veronica. Rather This. Astronaut Boner. With Fries. For 25 Cents More. Pants Shopping. No Donuts. Spit Campfire. She Said No. Old Shoes. Casual Sunday. Sunday Best. Sunday Average. Sunday Worst. Walter Payton. Sweetness. This Side of Greatness. Dad’s Generation. Grandpa’s Heroes. Is This Culture? This Is Culture. Latest Greatest. Market Research. Vector Clear. My My. Belt Buckle Broken. You’ll Forget and We’ll Forgive. The New Poetry. Dollars Mean. Let’s Get Rich. Inkblot City. Inkblot Kitty. Inkblot Universe. Not Good. Did it. Wally. Unlove You. Unsay. Unawake. Not Gandhi. My Free Whore. Prostitute Money. TV Sleepy Mind…
Walter woke up three hours later, pulled himself over to the nightstand and checked the time. He forced himself from bed and into the shower before he remembered that just yesterday he had quit his job. So he turned off the shower and, still wet, climbed back into bed. He fell right back to sleep, slumbering right through Wallace’s gentle morning rap at the door.
“Now what?” Walter wondered upon waking up again, well into the afternoon and still feeling a persistent, underlying tremor of anxiety.
Walter dragged himself over to the blackout curtains and pulled them open.
Even the hot, angry sunlight that commandeered the room was not enough to sterilize Walter of his meandering unease.
He sat back down on the edge of the now bright bed.
He slouched his head into his hands and took several breaths.
“Now what?” he asked himself again. Only this time he asked it of his larger life, not just this afternoon.
One hour later, Walter was still sitting on that same edge of that same bright bed. Although he was acclimated to the brightness by now, so the bed didn’t seem bright anymore as much as it just seemed normal.
One hour after that, Walter got up from the bed and left the room. He had no clue where he was headed, other than a not insignificant distance away from the bed.
“Now’s the time,” Walter explained to Beau Chalmers on the man’s early evening doorstep.
“Where were you today, Walter?” Beau replied. “Mr. Sheprick was worried. Something about a contract.”
“I quit.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Yesterday. In front of everyone.”
“Then why was Mr. Sheprick looking for you? He was calling you all day.”
“No, I…” Walter clenched his teeth a moment. “If you hadn’t all been too busy with that little…”
Had Walter been closer to his normal self, he would have puzzled over how Beau Chalmers could possibly afford such a lovely, probably three-bedroom home when he could not possibly earn more than Walter did.
“I want to get out there,” Walter returned to his original reason for showing up on this fucking elegant doorstep. “On the road. I want to start this thing.”
“There’s planning first. And development. And we don’t even know how to play yet,” Beau replied, starting to swell with nervous energy.
“Excuses, Beau.”
“These things are important, Walter. We really need more time.”
“The time is right now!”
“Just slow down a second, Walter. You want some dinner? We made ribs.”
“We?”
“Yes.”
“Are you married, Beau?”
“Not yet. We had been waiting for the law to change. But now I guess we have no excuse…”
“You’re gay, Beau?” Walter more told Beau than asked him.
“You didn’t know that?”
“Why would I know that?”
“I don’t know,” Beau shrugged. “Because I’m gay.”
“Why would you assume I know that?” Walter pressed, to no real end.
“Does it matter?”
“No,” answered Walter, thinking a moment before… “Life on the road is going to be a bit more difficult now.”
“Because I’m gay?”
“What? No. Because you have attachments. We could be on the road for months at a time.”
“You have Veronica.”
“No. I don’t. I left Veronica.”
“What? When? For the band?”
“I don’t know. In some ways. Maybe.”
“Well you shouldn’t have done that.”
“Why not?”
“And don’t quit your job. That’s a bad idea, too.”
“I already did.”
“No. You didn’t. And there are a lot of variables yet…” Beau said, backing off his typically dogged resolve when it came to the topic of the band.
“No,” Walter insisted plainly, “there are no variables. There’s just the band.”
“We don’t even have a name yet.”
“I’ve been doing that. I’ve got options. Pants Shopping. This is Culture. Dollars Mean. Poems About The Economy. We Sleep Alone. This Isn’t Me. Sunday Average. Sunday Worst. Belt Buckle Broken. Walter Payton. This Side of Greatness. Sheprick Consolidated. I’ve got more, too. That’s just some.”
“Those are terrible.”
“I know, but we’ll get to something good.”
“How are we going to perform when we can’t play yet?”
“We’ll figure it out with our passion.”
“Our passion?” Beau scoffed.
“I feel this! Huge and massive and electric, I feel this!”
As Walter finished up his little tirade, Beau stepped out onto his porch and pulled the door almost all the way closed behind him. Beau wasn’t really following Walter anymore, but he was fairly suspicious that whatever this was all about, it wasn’t really about the band.
Beau took a moment to consider his words before explaining…
“We have responsibilities, Walter.”
“Like our responsibility to this band and what it means to each of us as individuals,” Walter counter-punched.
“Well…” Beau replied, before taking another moment to consider his response. “Our friendship means a lot to me, Walter.”
“I knew better,” Walter coughed, excoriating himself for not having listened to his instincts that Beau would amount to precisely only this much of an actual friend.
“We’re just not ready yet.”
“You just don’t believe.”
“You’re being rash, Walter.”
“You’re being a cock, Beau.”
Beau sighed deeply and sympathetically, carefully considering his words one last time.
“I truly hope that our friendship will endure this,” Beau said gently before stepping back inside his house and turning back to close the door behind him.
Walter took a breath as the door glided ever closer to the frame, shaking his head slightly and muttering…
“Rock and roll.”
…as the door clicked shut.
Walter wasn’t sure what, exactly, this phrase was intended to mean, but it felt great just to say it and to throw his hands up not only at the whole situation but also at his life in general. So good, in fact, that he decided to do it again, looking up this time and staring holes through the closed front door… “Rock and fucking roll, man!” Walter called out, in full voice, as he flipped double birds at the door where Beau had just been standing. Out of the corner of his eye, Walter noticed a sliver of curtain draw slightly back in a window adjacent to the entryway as Beau peered out, his jaw falling slack at the sight he found. Walter suspected that he would, at some point down the road, regret this petulant and obnoxious gesture of his. But right now, it felt like the only thing he was capable of doing. It also felt kind of incredible.
So Walter started walking. First along Beau’s front walk, then down his beautiful neighborhood street. Then he turned onto the sidewalk along a main thoroughfare. He had no sense at all for where he might be headed.
Walter stopped walking at the edge of town.
He thought about all of the other cities out there, any of which he could claim as his own. But he decided that he did not want to go to those cities. This city was his home. Even if here on its outskirts it was just open and grassy and more or less just like any other outskirt might be.
The sun was setting.
And Walter’s feet were tired.
He turned to find a large box elder tree a hundred or so feet from the road. So he walked through the grass and over to the tree where he sprawled out in its fading shade. He closed his eyes.
Walter woke with the sunrise.
There must have been a lifetime’s worth of possibilities in the open space between him and the blue-gray sky that domed the morning.
Walter felt an itch on the back of his shoulder. And another behind his ear.
He felt the earth underneath him.
He remembered where he was. And he remembered that he did not know where he was going.
He wanted to take a shower.
He remembered a truck stop a mile or so back.
So Walter got up and started to walk.
He had to admit that it was a beautifully calm morning.
He wondered how many other equally lovely mornings he had missed in his former life.
Walter paid two bucks for a hot shower at the truck stop. This included soap and a towel and a shower stall of dubious cleanliness.
Back out in the lobby of the truck stop, Walter picked up a few free local rags, bought a twenty-five cent cup of coffee, and took a table in the corner by the window.
He watched the trucks pull in and out for a few minutes. Then he started flipping through the classified ads, past the cars, clothes, cookware, housing, and finally to the miscellaneous section. He skimmed and scanned and, sure enough, he found one. And then another. And another…
Walter met up with Klaus Klein at what appeared to be both his rehearsal space and his living quarters.
Klaus was thin.
Probably six feet tall with sinewy limbs jutting out from a ratty black tee-shirt with sleeves aggressively and carelessly removed. His hair was long and greasy. His blue jeans were probably more expensive than he wanted them to look. His face was sunken a bit, with too-round eyes somehow fighting with the more angular aspects of his visage. In fact, Walter could not help but be the tiniest bit saddened that Klaus might actually be quite handsome were it not for the incongruence of his eyes with his other features.
By way of several ill-conceived and even iller-constructed walls, Klaus’ dual-purpose space appeared to have been carved out of what had clearly once been a larger warehouse. Off-kilter panels of drywall in varying states of finish hung about the space. Into and out of these walls, pipes stabbed from almost happenstance places. A toilet and a sink sat halfway along the middle of the far wall of the room underneath slats of massive, industrial windows. There did not seem, at first glance, to be a shower. The rest of the space was fairly open, except for the type of strewn clutter that accumulates when someone lives on their own and without many visitors.
“Do you write?” Klaus asked Walter.
“Yes,” Walter said, reasoning that two lines of a lyric satisfied such a question in the affirmative.
“Are you trained, though?” Klaus asked.
“No,” Walter insisted, deciding to employ a mildly snide tone.
“Great,” Klaus fired back. “We want passion over precision. That’s what the greats are all about.”
“Of course,” Walter managed, though he wasn’t sure where any of this was going or who these greats actually were.
“You want to play, then?” Klaus asked.
“I don’t have anything prepared,” Walter demurred, his chest tightening with anxiety.
“What’s a song you sing?”
“Um.”
“Or a band you like?”
“Um.”
Walter took a breath and thought.
“Neil Young,” he offered, before scrambling to add, “Elliott Smith, The Magnetic Fields, Leonard Cohen, Yo La Tengo.”
“I might know Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere,” Klaus offered, grabbing his guitar from the corner that seemed to pass for the bedroom. As Walter further considered the apartment’s furnishings, it dawned on him that maybe he was thinking about Klaus’ apartment in the wrong manner. The two clashing, threadbare thrift-store couches. The stained, tattered, chipped coffee table propped up two legs with a stack of books and papers. The remnants of daily life scattered and collecting in ancillary spaces. The mattress, strewn with books and papers and semi-covered with a crumpled sheet, bunched in the corner of the room where Klaus’ well-worn guitar had been resting silently. Klaus’ apartment might not be poorly put together at all. To the contrary, it might just be totally rock ’n’ roll.
“I like Tom Waits, too,” Walter added. “And Jens Lekman. And Jonathan Richman. And Kid Cudi. And Neil Diamond. And Johnny Cash.”
“I love Neil Diamond,” Klaus offered. And then added, “Not ironically.”
“Yes,” Walter insisted. “Right.”
“Do you know ‘Cracklin’ Rosie?’”
“Sure. Most of it. Probably.”
“Just hum what you don’t know,” said Klaus as he started strumming.
His guitar made a sloppy but nevertheless expressive sound that somehow managed to both sound nothing at all like Cracklin’ Rosie and simultaneously capture its essential melodic essence. Walter wasn’t sure whether this sound was good or bad. In the classified ad, Klaus had dubbed his style of music “Smart Rock ’N’ Roll.” This did not sound smart, but whatever it did sound like, it certainly fell well within the broader umbrella of rock ’n’ roll. And it was certainly enough for Walter Braum right now in his suddenly wide open life.
Before Walter knew it, he was singing.
Sounds forming words were spilling out of him.
It was exhilarating.
It was uncharted.
He had no sense at all of how the noises coming out of him actually sounded.
But even this uncertainty felt vital, felt expansive, felt great.
It almost didn’t even matter if it was good or bad.
Walter just sang.
And the singing created a moment all its own.
Unlike anything that anyone anywhere else had ever made precisely like this. For better or worse, not just exactly like this. He could not help but suspect that maybe—probably not, but just maybe—the crooked sum of his lackluster life thus far might actually enable him to articulate something through this song and these sounds that no one else’s life the whole universe over could ever capture quite like this.
But Walter couldn’t really get caught up in these heavy, tangled kinds of thoughts right now. The song was moving on and he had to stay with it or the whole moment would disappear.
He focused on the sound of his voice.
He knew it wasn’t perfect. But maybe it was good. Or good enough, even. That would be just fine. Or maybe it would even get gradually better with practice. Maybe it would become good enough over time. It almost didn’t matter to him because this sound was his sound. Authentic and from his deepest heart. Or from whatever he knew to be his deepest heart, anyway. Maybe his heart went deeper. Maybe this was just its most superficial surface that he was only now touching after thirty-five years of living. He didn’t know. He didn’t know how to know something like that. Especially when he had to keep up with the song. It was the song that touched and opened this otherwise inaccessible part of his heart no matter how deep. It was making this music. Not just hearing it loud and through large headphones.
As they turned the corner from the final verse into the bah-bah-bahs, Walter could see the end of the song coming. He wanted so badly to stay right there, in the sounds. He wished, impossible though he knew it to be, that he could somehow simply be music.