“I don’t want to go back to Superwally. What else am I supposed to do? I think I’m good at choosing bands—and yes, I understand not all of you want to be chosen—but I don’t want to shut places down. This isn’t what I thought I’d be doing at all.” She paused. “I’m so sorry, Joni. For everything.”
“You should be. Whatever you do right now isn’t going to make up for it. Remember that.”
Both of them were silent for a while, until Joni shook her head and walked out without saying another word. If Rosemary had known a single thing to say to make things better, she would have said it. She walked over to the window. It faced the wrong way for the sunrise, but the building across the street reflected it back at an angle, orange-gold on glass. Joni was ant-sized at ground level. An angry ant-sized woman. Rosemary followed her progress up the street until she disappeared from view.
PART THREE
25
LUCE
Are You Ready
Any note can be played over any chord and any chord can be played over any note. I read that in a book about jazz. It doesn’t quite jibe with the Neil Young solo theory; that one implies there is such thing as a wrong note, one you move through if you hit it: dissonant, discordant. A pebble, a splinter, something stuck between the song’s teeth. Yes, live songs have teeth, and teeth are messy things, tearing and rending and helping spit ideas into the world. A live song has notes that don’t want to be there, that call attention to themselves in their wrongness. A botched chord, a chorus taken too soon, a forgotten lyric. I love those moments.
Sometimes everything goes well, too. It doesn’t matter where you are, or how many people are in the room. The stars align, the band locks in, the audience gets what you’re trying to do, and you transcend bodies and bad days. The song is you, and you are more than yourself.
If I can only express myself in song (or in words that describe song) please take these notes as a eulogy for people and places I’ve lost or left behind: my family, and that entire community that I grew up in, which took care of everyone but had no space for me; April, whose friends never held a memorial; the basement in Baltimore where I rebuilt myself, where I redefined community for myself in a way that I actually felt included. They’re all gone now. They simmer under my surface, boil over as chords wrung with bleeding fingers from a battered old guitar.
When Rosemary came back for me the day after the raid, I didn’t answer the door.
I watched her from behind my curtains on the second floor, waited for her to pound harder, call attention, try going around the back again. She did none of those things. She knocked, then paused, then knocked again, three times, harder. She looked up once, and I recognized the look on her face, even if I hadn’t seen it on her before. She looked hopeful.
For a moment, just that moment, I hated her. What gave her the right to be hopeful, when she had so casually, so effortlessly, destroyed everything I’d created? She hadn’t meant to, I know; she thought she was helping. It was my fault for thinking I’d seen myself in her: the desire to exert some control over circumstances, to not be bound by a life planned by well-meaning others, to find community of her own choosing. I wasn’t sure how much of that was her, and how much I had overlaid.
I hadn’t hated many people in my life; even when I ran from my family, it hadn’t been hate that drove me; it had been the fear that I would never get to be myself if I stayed. Their refusal to talk to me afterward had been on them. Pain, not hate.
Hate was reserved for front-page villains. Abstractions: the pox, the bombers, the bombs, the gunmen, the guns, the chaos they sowed, the politicians who wielded restriction in the name of freedom and safety, or the ones who didn’t stop them, or the ones who were sure it would only be temporary. I could hate StageHolo and the other companies that sold the restriction back to people as convenience. I’d already been suspicious of their effect on our community, but now that I knew how they operated, I could spare some disgust, too.
The last time Rosemary knocked, her face changed. She didn’t look hopeful any longer; she looked lost. And I thought: maybe she had been right to hope. We’d had a connection. The offer she’d made me had been sincere and generous. She could recognize what she had done but still hope to make amends for some of it. By hiding, I was denying her that chance. Even seeing all that, I couldn’t call down. I recognized her desire to make amends without being ready to forgive.
She raised her arm to knock one more time, then looked down at her fist, unclenched it, and walked away. I thought of that often over the years that followed: the conscious letting-go. I wrote it into the song “Leaving Town” a few weeks later. I didn’t realize it would link me to her forever, but every time I sang that song there she was again, opening her hand, letting go. Letting me go. It was in that moment I knew I couldn’t stay.
What else do I love about live music? I love when a band segues from one song to another, blending the two, highlighting their similarities before breaking them apart. I love when a band throws a snippet of a cover into one of their own tunes, gives away a piece of their musical identity, shows they know that those chords—the I, the IV, the V—share an unbroken lineage with almost every rock song ever written. It says I dare you to call me derivative, when I know better than anyone that they are all one song. Pick a note, any note. Wear it out. Play it again.
I could have made a different choice. Opened the door for Rosemary. Offered myself to StageHolo in exchange for keeping my space. Started a new venue, improved security, developed new layers of Alice. Those options would have made more sense than leaving, but I couldn’t bear to see that basement sitting empty on a Saturday night or my own failures laid bare, and I couldn’t imagine ever saying yes to a company that had turned an enthusiastic kid into a weapon without her consent.
If I had it to do over, would I save the 2020? The space shuttering pushed me back out into the world, out of my comfort zone. I had become complacent. I’d hidden behind my conviction that keeping the 2020 going was a public service. I loved that room and everybody who played there. I was glad I’d had the opportunity to give that gift to my community—and to myself—for as long as it lasted.
I thought, too, of how Rosemary had come looking for music because she didn’t find it at home. I’d thought of myself as a vector for noise, and then I’d settled for being a vector for noise in one city, for the people who sought me out, for the people we trusted enough to let into the room. That was a slow way to pass a message, when there were kids like Rosemary out there waiting to receive it.
Once I had that idea, I realized the road made more sense. Time to unclench my fist and let go of the comforts I’d accumulated. If the only constant is change, why fight it? Embrace the change, outpace the change, be the change, change the lineup, change the locks, change the key, change everything but the melody and the message.
Daisy the Diesel Van was Alice’s discovery, at a city impound auction. Ten years old, with only three thousand miles on her, and not a dent or speck of rust; I guess nobody wanted to bid with the diesel price being what it was. What did anyone need with a fifteen-passenger van these days, anyway? I bought her on the spot. One of the kids who came to our shows worked at a garage that did biodiesel conversions. Some others helped pull out the middle seats and put in a bed, and then a cage at the back for my gear.