It was hard to discern the color with the sun down and the security lamps in the parking lot throwing a sodium-yellow glow, but she was confident she’d found the right place. Other people arrived on bicycles and on foot from other directions, most in twos and threes. The parking lot was weedy and overgrown, every inch of the chain-link fence hosting a locked bicycle. As she passed under a security camera, she noticed it was aimed at the sky instead of the entrance, if it was on at all.
She followed the others to a door on the building’s far side and into a low-ceilinged office. Passed her invitation chip to the Door Alice, played in this instance by a fit and pox-scarred boy in his late teens. He gave her a curious look.
“Sadie invited me.” She waited for him to say, “Go back to wherever you came from,” or “I don’t know who that is, Officer.”
“Welcome to my shitty warehouse,” he said.
“Yours?”
“Yep. Hey, don’t look so surprised. Brown people can own warehouses.”
“Sorry! It’s because you look so young, not because you’re brown…” She started to explain, but he’d already moved on to the next person waiting to enter. Her record for insulting gatekeepers she should befriend was now two for two.
She walked through the next door, and the office gave way to a warehouse. The space had been divided at some point; it was nowhere near as large as the building’s footprint, though still bigger than anyplace she’d ever been other than the SHL hangar. She made out two orange Exit signs along the opposite wall from where she’d entered; nice to know there were other ways out. There were probably fewer people inside than had crowded into the 2020, dispersed over a larger area. She still felt more comfortable on the fringe and didn’t see a strong reason to press forward toward the low stage on the interior wall.
It reminded her of the hoodspace club where she’d seen Patent Medicine, the Bloom Bar. There was even a bar along the side, or at least an old conveyor belt studded with a dozen picnic coolers. People shoved their hands into the ice for drinks, then tossed cash into fishbowls interspersed between the coolers. An honor system. She glanced at the bills in the fishbowls and tossed a five into the nearest one, choosing an icy cider from among the beers and soft drinks.
She spotted Sadie at the same time Sadie spotted her. “You came! Do you hug?”
Rosemary nodded, still pushing her own limits. Sadie was a big woman, even bigger without the coffee counter in between them. The hug was strong and solid, and not long enough for her to get uncomfortable with the contact. She managed to return a one-armed squeeze with the hand that wasn’t holding a drink.
“Did you have trouble finding it?”
“You were right about the color.”
“Ha!” Sadie had great dimples, but Rosemary was Not Getting Involved. “True, but that doesn’t make it any easier to find.”
“Your directions were fine, thanks. Um, what’s the order?”
“We play first, then a duo from Charlotte, then the Simrats. You’ll like them.”
“Oh! I’ve listened to one of their songs! I can’t wait to hear you all,” Rosemary said in all sincerity. She was curious what to expect. She’d found the Simrats on the same underground site where Joni’s band had a page; they had a trippy sound, with better production than a lot of the other stuff she’d heard. They’d been on her maybe list, depending on how they came across live, if she could find them playing somewhere, which she finally had.
She had another thought. “Do bands from other cities play here often?”
“Not very. Lucien used to live here before he moved to Charlotte for love”—she elongated the last word, bringing her hands up under her chin in a mock swoon—“so when he wants to visit we build a show for him.”
Sadie excused herself to get ready, and Rosemary was alone again. All around her, people chatted with each other. She still envied the ease with which they navigated the space. Did anybody else here feel as awkward as she did? She scanned the room’s edges, looking for someone else hugging the wall, and was surprised to find several. One corner held an entire herd of office chairs gone feral. Three people raced chairs down the far side of the room, leaning over the seatbacks like jockeys, with their friends cheering them on.
Sadie’s band started playing. The chair racers kept racing, and a few others continued chatting near the drinks. Rosemary triangulated between the stage and the emergency exits.
She hadn’t asked Sadie her band’s name or their genre, and now that she heard it she had no category for it. Sadie played bass, and Nolan James played fiddle, with a guy she’d never seen before on guitar, and a woman she recognized as one of the coffee shop Hoodie-workers on drums. Despite the acoustic instruments, they had a looping, funky groove, and harmonies that reminded her more of R & B than rock or pop or folk. An intriguing sound, and they had a good interplay onstage, and most of the audience was up and dancing. Even though she had told herself to stay analytical, to hold herself back from feeling anything for these bands, she couldn’t help moving with the music. Forget analytics; they were fun.
The second group turned out to be a married couple, two handsome trans cowboys from Charlotte. Both guys played acoustic guitar, and their songs were catchy and clever. She filed them into her mental maybe box. She sometimes thought she was too easy to please, but she recognized the difference between liking a band and thinking they were SHL material. Two different things, especially when a definite yes came along to recalibrate her.
The last band took a little longer to set up than the others had. The guy who owned the place stood watching from the doorway, so Rosemary walked over to talk. If she was going to practice chatting with strangers, it made sense to start with the ones she had questions for. “So, uh, I didn’t mean to doubt this was your place. I just didn’t figure the owner was involved. I thought maybe an employee was letting people in, or it was an abandoned building.”
He smiled back. “It’s not abandoned. My mom has a bunch of empties, though this is the only one with power. She’s been trying to get Superwally to buy it for a distribution center, but they say it isn’t quite large enough, and it costs too much to bring up to code. It’s been years now. She said I could skate in here in the meantime, so here I am, ‘skating.’ You’re friends with Sadie?”
“Yeah.” Better not to say new friends. “Rosemary. Nice to meet you. Do you do this a lot?”
“Tomás. Twice a month.”
“Are there other places doing this, too?”
“Acoustic rooms, yeah, people’s living rooms, but as far as I know, this is the only one big enough for bands. I’ve got the space, why not use it?”
“You’re not worried about getting raided?”
“Dude, I’m terrified of getting raided, but if we all live the way they want us to, all scared and alone, nobody would ever hear a band like the Simrats.” He nodded toward the stage and grinned at his timing.
“Friends, Romans, Countrymice,” whispered the lead singer. “Lend me your ears.”
The lights went out at the moment they hit their first chord. The band’s clothing glowed under black light. Their instruments, too, painted to shine, and streaks on their faces. It reminded Rosemary of phosphorescent underwater habitats in aquarium vids. The band had at least ten members; it was hard to tell exactly how many in the mass of glowing limbs and instruments. Drums, two guitars, samples, a horn section. Their sound filled every corner of the room. The singer had a voice as good as any Rosemary had ever heard, slippery and strong, twining around and over the instruments without ever getting lost behind them.