Randy? stop playing their instruments one by one, until the lead singer croons a final, a cappella note. I wish for their sake I could say the club falls into silence at this, but in truth the air is one-half conversation. Still, that’s better than average, and the band gets a lunge of applause and cheers. I clap, too, and notice that the girl next to me puts two fingers in her mouth to whistle old-fashioned style. The sound is clear and spirited, and makes me think of Little League. The girl is dressed in a flannel shirt, and I can’t tell whether that’s because she’s trying to bring back the only fashion style of the past fifty years that hasn’t been brought back or whether it’s because the shirt is as damn comfortable as it looks. She has very pale skin and a haircut that reads private school even though she’s messed it up to try to hide it. The next band opened for Le Tigre on their last tour, and I figure this girl’s here to see them. If I was a different kind of guy, I might try to strike up a friendly conversation, just to be, I dunno, friends. But I feel that if I talk to someone else right now, all I’ll be able to do is unload.
Thom and Scot would probably be ready to go if I wanted them to, but I’m pretty sure Dev hasn’t figured out yet whether he’s coming back with us or not, and I’d be an asshole to put him on the spot and ask. So I’m stuck and I know it, and that’s when I look to my right and see Tris and her new guy approaching the beer-spilled bar to order another round of whatever I’m not having. It’s definitely her, and I’m definitely fucked, because the between-band rush is pressing toward me now and if I try to leave, I’ll have to push my way out, and if I have to push my way out, she’ll see me making an escape and she’ll know for sure that I can’t take it, and even if that’s the goddamn truth I don’t want her to have actual proof. She is looking so hot and I am feeling so cold and the guy she’s with has his hand on her arm in a way that a gay friend would never, ever think of, and I guess that’s my own proof. I am the old model and this is the new model and I could crash out a year’s worth of time on my bass and nothing, absolutely nothing, would change.
She sees me. She can’t fake surprise at seeing me here, because of course she fucking knew I’d be here. So she does a little smile thing and whispers something to the new model and I can tell just from her expression that after they get their now-being-poured drinks they are going to come over and say hello and good show and – could she be so stupid and cruel? – how are you doing? And I can’t stand the thought of it. I see it all unfolding and I know I have to do something – anything – to stop it.
So I, this random bassist in an average queercore band, turn to this girl in flannel who I don’t even know and say:
“I know this is going to sound strange, but would you mind being my girlfriend for the next five minutes?”
Randy from Are You Randy? insists the bassist from the queercore band is a ’mo, but I told him No, the guy is straight. Whether or not he’s responsible for his band’s shit lyrics (Fuck the Man / Fuck the Man – what’s that trite crap?), I have no idea, but he’s no ’mo. Trust me. There are certain things a girl just knows, like that a fourth minute on a punk song is a bad, bad idea, or that no way does a Jersey-boy bassist with Astor Place hair who wears torn-up, bleach-stained black jeans and a faded black T-shirt with orange lettering that says When I say Jesus, you say Christ, swing down boy-boy alley; he’s working the ironic punk boy–Johnny Cash angle too hard to be a ’mo. Maybe he’s a little emo, I told Randy, but just because he doesn’t look like a Whitesnake-relic-reject like all of your band, does not automatically mean the guy’s gay.
The incidental fact of his straightness doesn’t mean I want to be NoMo’s five-minute girlfriend, like I’m some 7-Eleven quick stop on his slut train. Only because I am the one loser here who hasn’t lost all her senses to beer, dope, or hormones do I have the sense to hold back my original instinct – to yell back “FUCK, NO!” in response to NoMo’s question.
I have to think about Caroline. I always have to think about Caroline.
I noticed NoMo loading equipment after his band’s set while his bandmates abandoned him to score some action. I understand that scene. I am that scene, cleaning up everyone else’s mess.
NoMo dresses so bad – he has to be from Jersey. And if Jersey Boy is equipment bitch, he has a van. The van’s probably a piece of scrap metal with a leaking carburetor that as likely as not will pop a tire or run out of gas in the middle of the Lincoln Tunnel, but it’s a risk I have to take. Somebody’s got to get Caroline home. She’s too drunk to risk taking her on the bus. She’s also so drunk she’ll go home with Randy if I’m not there to take her back to my house where she can sleep it off. Groupie bitch. If I didn’t love her so much, I’d kill her.
She’s lucky my parents love her just as much; her dad and stepmonster are away for the weekend, they don’t give a fuck what she does, so long as she doesn’t get pregnant or date any boy from a non-six-figure-plus-income household. Jerk-offs. My parents, they adore Caroline, beautiful Caroline with the long caramel hair, the big cherry Tootsie Pop lips, the juvenile delinquent arrest record. They won’t care if she stumbles from my room into the kitchen tomorrow afternoon all disheveled and hung over. She’s the one, not me, who meets their expectation of what the daughter of an Englewood Cliffs-livin’, fat-cat record company CEO should be: wild.
Caroline’s not a Big Disappointment like their Plain Jane, comfy-flannel-shirt-wearing, tousled bowl-head-haircut-courtesy-of-a-$300-salon-visit-with-Mom-(Bergdorf ’s)-and-a-$5-can-of-blue-spray-paint (Ricky’s), straight-edge, responsible valedictorian bitch daughter. I’ve chosen a gap year on a kibbutz in South Africa over Brown. WHY, Norah, WHY? I wrote my Brown admissions essay about all the music Dad appropriated from The Street then goddamned ruined to make profit for The Man. I am not a fuckin’ corporate hippie, Dad said, laughing, after he read the essay. Dad won’t deny that he’s responsible for giving Top 40 radio a disproportionate percentage of its suckiest hits, yet he’s proud he indoctrinated me from childhood in the sounds of every other kind of music out there so that now, at age eighteen, I can be a badass DJ when I want, but I am also an insufferable music snob. My parents have also done me the misfortune of being happily married for a quarter century, which no doubt dooms my own prospects of ever experiencing true love. Gold is not struck twice.
My parents would disown me if they knew I was in this club tonight. Hell, I could be scoring weed in Tompkins Square Park right now, on my way to a bondage bar on Avenue D, and my parents would only applaud. But this club, this is the one joint in all of Manhattan I’m supposedly forbidden from going to, owing to a long-simmering feud over a bad music deal between Dad and the club owner, Crazy Lou (who used to be my godfather, Uncle Lou, until all that business leading Lou to be rechristened Crazy). Lou’s such an old punk he was around when The Ramones were junkie hustlers first and musicians second, when punk meant something other than a mass-marketing concept designed to help the bridge-and-tunnel crowd feel cool.
But Mom and Dad would move past disowning me and outright kill me if they thought I wasn’t looking after their beloved Caroline. She inspires that kind of devotion in people. It’s nauseating, except I am totally under Caroline’s spell, too, her lead minion, have been since nursery school.
I look around the club as the between-set mass of people swarm past/through/into me like I’m a ghost with the inconvenience of malleable flesh getting in their way on the way to the beer. Damn, I’ve lost Caroline again. She is big on Randy tonight, which is cool – Are You Randy? don’t completely suck – but Randy himself is big on E tonight, and I gotta make sure he doesn’t get her alone in a corner. But I’m only 5-foot-4 on tippy toes, and 6-foot NoMo is standing in front of me,
