Short Story: if we grew up

It's 2 a.m. on a Friday night. Well, Saturday morning, really. And I've got the house to myself, and I'm playing a lot of old songs from when I was young. True story: before I ever wrote a novel I was in a couple of bands. I was a "useless frontman," zero ability to play an instrument. Just sing. It was a million years ago, before we had cell phones, before you went viral on TikTok, when you'd play bars with sticky floors and people could still smoke inside and I was catastrophically depressed but also probably the happiest I've ever been in my life. Which is a very strange thing to say, but that's the truth of it - I was on this razor's edge of self-destruction, but I was making music with my friends, and there is something in the creation of music that makes you think the world is worth living in. 

Anyway. I started writing short stories then, flash fiction, and a lot of it centered around what I'd experienced in those bands. Music is a young person's game, I think, and you feel time move with distinct cruelty as a musician, even as a useless frontman. But time also stands still, in those smokey rooms, the sound of your own voice reverberating off exposed ceilings, the taste of cheap beer in the air as you rip your soul out and give it to a room full of strangers. 

This was my first flash fiction story about being a singer. Everyone in it is a real person. Some of the events are not specifically real, but they are close enough that this is a ghost story just for me. It's a specter of who I was, and of people I knew and loved. It was supposed to appear in a book PFP Publishing was going to produce, an anthology of stories like it called Preludes & Codas (see the musical theme there? The owner of PFP was a music journalist when he was young), but they instead bought the rights to the Indestructibles, and instead of stories about musicians, I wrote stories about superheroes. Life is strange and full of wonder. 

Content warning: Talk of self-harm. That's a conversation for another time, and one I'm happy to chat about if you ask. 

if we grew up 

"Mia's pregnant," Will said, setting his bass guitar aside.
 
Behind him, Billy drummed a rim shot. Andrew and I just stared. "I think I gotta quit the band."

Andrew, his guitar dangling suggestively on his hip, looked at me. I looked at him, and then to Billy, and then we all looked back at Will.

"What?" Will said.

"Three?" I said, finally. "Three? A little selfish in this economy, huh? And you know it's gonna be a—"

"We thought we'd give it one more shot for a son."

"It's gonna be a girl, Will,” I said.

Billy performed another rim shot. Ba-dum-ching...

"If it's a girl, you need to name her Yoko," Andrew said.

"Aw, that’s just tacky, dude..."

"Whatever, man," I said, winding the microphone's cord gently around my arm. "Had to happen eventually."

"Seriously, Parker, I can't keep this up anymore. I can't be on the road all the time... we're getting old. We're never going to make much more money at this. Three. I'm going to have three kids."
 
He paused, looking at me, like I was going to try to convince him to stay. Another day, another time, I might have tried, but I wasn't in the mood. I looked away and kept collecting stray cords.

I sat down on the piano bench in the corner of the studio and crossed my arms. We had played together for fifteen years now, Tilting Windmills, but fifteen years to them was longer than ten years to me. Billy, Andrew, and Will were all at least four years older than me, veteran musicians who had scooped me up at eighteen and made me their frontman. Fifteen years of living broke, three indie records to our name, including a concept album retelling the story of Don Quixote. Stupid fucking concept album, the hubris of a twenty-year-old songwriter who thought he was ten times cleverer than he was. Ironically, when we didn't tell people what the album was about, it sold better.

"We never got to play North Dakota, Willie," I said.

"Got to play everywhere else, though." He smiled a little, his face blurred by his grey-flecked goatee. "It was a good run, kid."

"Yeah," I said. I heard footsteps climbing the stairs to the studio. I hoped it was Katie Jane. I needed a little Katie Jane right now.

"Well, shit, if it isn't the dream queen," Billy said when Katie walked in.
 
I wondered, as I always do when I see her, if anyone else in the world has a girl like her, who took his breath away every single time she walked in the room. Dark hair worn simply and to her shoulders, grey eyes spilling wisdom like tears, those quirky, endless lips holding back white, imperfect teeth.

"You look like someone ran over your cat," Andrew said.
 
He said this almost without fail whenever he laid eyes on Katie Jane, and it was not far from the truth. Katie Jane was the princess in the tower, beautiful and timeless and bathed in an endless haze of perpetual sadness. Over the years I learned to read her happiness, in the arch of her eyebrows or the corner of her mouth, but if you were not a student in her shrine finding her joy was near impossible.

"Speak for yourself," she snapped at Andrew, flashing him a wink and one of her pretty little smiles, the ones that never, ever touch her eyes. In anyone else it would have looked mournful, but I'd been watching that smile since we were teenagers, and it was the best she could muster. A soft twitch of her lips was worth more than a glittering white grin. "It looks like a massacre in here. Did someone quit?"

Met by silence, she looked at me, eyes widening. She mouthed the word "shit." I shrugged. Katie crossed the room and sat beside me on the piano bench, setting the guitar case she had slung across her back on the floor and lacing her fingers through mine. She bumped her head against my shoulder softly.

I met Katie Jane in high school, the year we both tried to kill ourselves, running into each other in Harvard Square for the first time while both wearing matching bandages on our wrists. Two weeks later people took to calling us Hansel and Gretel on Prozac, and, honestly, we never quite left that way of living. It took us eight years to realize we were in love, eight years, two music careers—hers so much better than mine—three songs and two more suicide attempts. Her folk career and Tilting Windmills' prog-rock foolishness took us separate ways, and we left breadcrumbs in our wake, breadcrumbs and songs. She wrote a ditty called boy in a coffin for me and played it at her shows a hundred times before telling me it was mine; I gave her katie jane you promised me morning, which could never be hidden, and i know where you've gone now, which we never talked about, not once. One of the breadcrumbs we left for each other was to never use capital letters in our song titles. It was a stupid conceit, but nobody seemed bothered by it.

Should have named the second song serendipity. I called her in her hotel in Austin the night she tried to die again, and for whatever reasons she might have had, she couldn't resist answering, which gave me enough time to call 911. She stumbled into mine, in a studio apartment in Medford, Massachusetts eighteen months later, back from a tour with a bottle of whiskey under one arm. It was that moment we gave up being Hansel and Gretel and became something more, mostly because in my blood-loss I'd begun to hallucinate while she was calling for an ambulance, and everything I'd never told her came tumbling out. She put them in a song. "I loved you in every life I've ever had / I climbed a grey tower in Arizona / just to touch your hair," she wrote, telling me these were the words she thought would be the last things I ever said. "I only have tomorrow / because of you." I've asked her a dozen times if she would have let me die if I hadn't told her I loved her just then. Each time, she kisses me, deep enough to bite my lower lip, and clings to me like a life raft at sea.

Will and Andrew thought, when Katie and I moved in together, that she would be the one to Yoko the band. It was Billy, of all people, who explained to them what was really happening. I wouldn't expect such insights from Billy, but then again he'd known me the longest, and remembered where I got my scars. He’d caught me singing in the walk-in cooler at a pizza joint we both worked at as kids and recruited me all those years ago.

"She's not going to Yoko the band," he told them, drunk after the first performance following my razor-juggling accident. "She's going to keep us from being Nirvana without the fame."

From the mouths of babes and drummers.

"So who's going to play bass?" Katie said, breaking our sullen silence. Will's jaw dropped, as if he were offended we'd carry on without him. Looking at Billy and Andrew, I knew they were thinking the same thing—there's no new bass player. Just a bunch of guys who were a band ten minutes ago.

"I can learn," I offered.

"Parker..." Andrew this time.

"Seriously. How hard can it be? There's only four strings. I can play rhythm."

"No you can't," said Andrew.

"You can't even play the fucking tambourine," Billy said. "And... Andrew's been unplugging your amp since we did that last tour out west. You're really not good at the guitar. At all. Mediocre doesn’t even cover it."

"If Will can play bass, I can play bass," I said.

"I can play," Katie added. Billy tapped out another rim shot. "Oh, suck mine, Billy Cerullo, I'm a better guitar player than any of you guys."

"She's right," Will said.

Andrew stood there, looking hurt. That's what he did best, though, looking hurt. It was what he’d do any time we cut his guitar solos short.

"That settles it. She plays bass. Just call us the Smashing Pumpkins." I squeezed Katie's hand once, quickly, stood up, and threw my arms around Will in a hug. "Fuck it. Congratulations, you fertile motherfucker."

"You'll figure something out? Without me? I don't want you guys to stop..."

"We'll figure something out," I said. The boys nodded in agreement. We all knew we were lying, because never, not once in a decade, had we all agreed on anything. We couldn’t even agree on a case of beer at the liquor store together.

Ten minutes later, Will was leaving, headed home to tuck his girls in for the night. The door wasn't closed but ten seconds before Andrew spoke.

"Fuck me. It's over," he said.

Billy stomped on his bass drum three times and then wrapped the cymbal with his fist. Katie helped him break down his kit. I watched them talk softly as I unplugged the amps and gathered up the monitors.

"Good thing we didn't finalize that fucking tour," Andrew said, zipping the Fender in its case.

"Maybe we can get him out on the road one more time," Billy said. "That'd be..."

"Yeah," I mumbled.

In the parking lot outside, I watched the boys drive off, arguing. I had spent my entire adult life watching Billy and Andrew fight like an old married couple. I half-expected that one would whither away without the other. When they turned the corner and out of sight, Katie Jane bumped into me and pushed me up against her car. She buried her face in my chest. I could feel her breath through my shirt.

"It'll all work out," she said, voice muffled against my chest.

"I know."

She looked up at me, grey eyes twinkling. "I was serious about playing bass for you guys."

"I know. That's why I love you."

"Really?"

"Well, that and some other stuff. There's other stuff."

"One would hope." She paused. "Ever think about having kids?"

"Me and you?"

"Again, one would hope." She smiled. This one almost touched her eyes. "Yes, me and you."

"Would they let people like us have kids?"

"Nothing years of therapy and tons of medication can't fix for us."

"Therapy never worked for me," I said.

"Me neither. Or the drugs."

"Nope." Beat. "You helped a lot."

"Mm-hm. You too," she said.

We got into her car, and she took out a Patty Griffin album in favor of one of ours. I tried to filter out the sound of my own voice, to listen to Will's sound, but it was difficult to separate him from everything else. We'd been together too damned long.

"If things don't work out, I'll take you on tour with me," Katie Jane said.

"I don't think the folkies will like my music."

"Nah," she said, brushing a strand of hair from her face. "But I think they might like you."