Alice moved into 2022, one of the vacants I owned on either side of the performance space. I left a lawyer friend—his band was called Octopus Sex Arm—fighting to keep the 2020 from being seized, but he said I didn’t have to be there for that, and I didn’t think I could bear to be.
I left Baltimore with: two guitars, acoustic and electric; my old Marshall amp; a week’s worth of clothing, plus leather jacket and two sweaters; stage boots, snow boots, sneakers; four paperback books; my swag suitcases; a case of fresh strings for each guitar; a drive containing every song I could imagine wanting to listen to; my writing notebook; my bike; the ancient annotated Rand McNally USA atlas I had bought on the last tour Before. I sold or gave away the rest of the instruments and music gear, and boxed all my personal stuff to put in a friend’s garage. Not the first time I’d pared my life down to what I could carry.
How do you find a place to play in a new city when everything is underground? Rosemary never did have to figure that out. We were handed to her on a silver platter. If she had known where to look, she’d have found the others. Step one: You scope out all the coffeehouses. All the dive bars. The bike co-ops. You know the look when you see it, the kids who share a collective secret. Getting them to trust you is harder. It takes time, but once you’re in, you’re in.
The first destination I chose was Pittsburgh, Baltimore’s sister in rough-hewn beauty. Philadelphia or D.C. would’ve been closer, but I needed to feel like I’d gone somewhere I couldn’t turn around and head back from the same night. It had been so long since I’d been anywhere. I drove through Baltimore toward I-70 saying mental farewells: goodbye, 2020; goodbye, Heatwave; goodbye, adopted home. How many times had I left before? I could do it again. Reframe it to be about the place I was going, instead of the place I was leaving. Pittsburgh bands and clubs had always been unpretentiously fun. And all those rivers! I remembered driving through Pittsburgh on the last tour, seeing the venue from a bridge heading in the opposite direction, with no clue how to get turned around again. April drumming on the back of my seat, Hewitt repeating directions given by his phone as it rerouted us again and again. This time I couldn’t really get lost, since I didn’t have a set destination beyond the city itself.
I had been on I-70 for five miles when I saw flashing lights behind me in the side mirror. I pulled over with a sigh, unsure what I’d done wrong. Both hands on the wheel, mentally reviewing the locations of wallet, phone, registration.
After determining that my van was mine and I was me, the trooper returned to my window.
“Do you know why I pulled you over?” he asked.
I resisted the urge to catalog all the possible reasons. “No, sir.”
“Did you notice anything about the other cars around you?”
“No, sir. There’ve barely been any.”
“This highway is restricted to self-driving vehicles.”
“I had no idea,” I said, in all honesty.
“It’s been restricted for eight years.”
Oh. “Officer, I haven’t been anywhere in ten. You can see how new my registration is.”
He sighed. “I think I actually believe you, but I have to write this ticket.”
He took a few minutes writing it up, long enough that I worried that he might have seen something to do with the venue and decided to cause me more trouble, but eventually he returned to my window. I stuffed the ticket into the glove compartment; I wasn’t planning on returning to Maryland anytime soon.
The trooper thoughtfully provided me with a personal escort to the next exit. I waved him a cheery goodbye and pulled into the first parking lot to look at my ancient atlas. I drew several X marks on I-70. An updated online map would have been helpful in investigating alternate routes, but I was stubborn. Roads might change, but the basics of A to B were still the same.
The old pike that ran parallel still existed; maybe it was good for me to be on a smaller road. It would let me see how people like Rosemary lived, instead of bypassing the small towns. Prove that farms were still farms, fields were still fields. Until, near Frederick, an enormous building rose out of the flatness. The biggest building I’d ever seen. An airplane hangar? A server center? No: Superwally distribution. As I got closer, I saw that what I’d assumed were starlings or sparrows were in fact drones, rising in a stream, a flock, a cloud, to head to points unknown. Self-driving trucks, drone delivery. No jobs for the humans, other than consumption, which was itself a full-time occupation.
What a weird world we’d created. As I drove through Frederick’s empty downtown to pick up my next small road, I was struck by the reasonableness of it all. The transaction we’d made. Of course it made sense to trade company for safety. To trade jobs as makers for jobs as consumers, consuming from the comfort of our homes. We’d set ourselves up.
Maybe I was stupid for pushing back against this system, still looking for a place for myself. Stubborn in this, just as I was stubborn about my atlas or buying a van that needed a human behind the wheel. Left behind. Nothing to do for it now but keep going and get left behind somewhere new.
Pittsburgh welcomed me with signs saying to smile for the cameras. I slept in the van behind an abandoned-looking church, and spent the next few days haunting the streets. Took tiny notes in the tiny inset map in my atlas: this bar is smaller on the inside than the outside, maybe has a secret room; this place where I changed my bike chain has a raised platform in the back, for no discernible reason.
My third week of morning coffee at a coffeehouse playing the Shondes over speakers, I complimented the music. Was rewarded with, “Come back tonight after we close.” I returned that evening to blackout curtains and an unlocked side door and a succession of solo musicians. It was a weekly series.
On my second week in the audience, somebody asked me if I played. By the end of the night I had an invitation to do a set the following week. Nerves gnawed at me; I hadn’t played a solo show in years, not since that night with April in New York. I had always preferred the safety of numbers. Not just the actual physical security of having people on the road with me. With a band, if nobody came we’d still have a good time. We could treat it as a glorified practice; we still had each other. If someone messed up, they could hide behind the others. What I had forgotten: on your own, nobody needed to know you messed up. There’s no chord to make your note dissonant. Nobody to look askance when you forget a verse and go straight to chorus.
I told myself the Pittsburgh crowds were hungry for new music, the same as I’d been when I started the 2020, the same as I was playing in the same space with the same bands cycling through, week after week. I loved all my bands, don’t get me wrong. I loved the way they pushed themselves—the way we pushed ourselves—the way we pushed each other—to bring something fresh to each show. To make sure the audience had a reason to come and listen. Still, hearing a band you know and love play something new is not the same thrill as falling in love with a band you’ve never heard before. It’s a tamer joy.
I framed that from the audience’s perspective. The truth for me was that every time I stood in front of our 2020 crowd, I was challenged to dig deeper into myself, to find words I hadn’t already said in all the weeks and months and years before. That, too, provided a different challenge from the one of facing a new audience and knowing I had one song, at most two, to convince them I was worth their time. They didn’t know me; when I stood on the stage in Pittsburgh for the first time, I gave a chord-by-chord introduction.