Your Band Sucks by Jon Fine

Author:Jon Fine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-04-20T04:00:00+00:00

I Was Wrong

But I’m not telling the whole story. Because I missed so much of it while it happened.

I keep saying our world was ascetic, boring, so not-like-rock. So little sex. So few drugs harder than pot. Sometimes I saw this wasn’t quite true.

In the mid-nineties a friend who played in a band in Los Angeles visited New York every few months and we’d hit the bars. He liked to get losing-your-language drunk. After a certain hour, if you heard him on the phone, you’d think he was drooling. That drunk. But just before that he’d suggest, then demand, that we find some coke. I had no idea how, and always tried to change the subject, but even in a strange city he could parse any room within five minutes: I can’t get coke here, I can only get E, let’s go. Then he’d tell me about the threesome he had with an icy blonde and a male friend, whom, he insisted on assuring me, he did not touch at all, not even once, during said encounter. But that was L.A. Not New York. Here we dressed badly and burrowed inward. Here we so rarely acted on what we wanted. Our fuel was unfulfilled desire, channeled elsewhere. Right?

Or maybe I wasn’t understanding what was really going on around me. One night I was out late in the East Village, getting drunk with a woman who was also a musician. Pale-skinned, giant eyes, she was everyone’s crush, and I felt fortunate to be there with her and a woman she knew. After the bartender announced last call, we walked toward an apartment, tightly pressed together, with me in the middle. At least that’s how I remember it.

When we arrived, the musician—let’s call her Maroon—sent her friend upstairs and pulled me aside to chat on the street corner. The look on her face suggested she knew secrets and felt far more confident than I did. A confusing conversation, out there at a quarter to four. Confusing to me, at least. Maroon asked me, half-smiling and looking sideways, to come upstairs for a while and then leave. So she’s hitting on me, I thought. She recently broke up with her boyfriend—someone I knew, who was also in a band, of course—and I wanted to know if fooling around with me was some rebound or revenge move. I started in on Are you doing this because of him? Looking important and off into the distance, for effect. Taxis drowsed their way up First Avenue, beyond an overflowing orange garbage can. No one else was around.

Then her face rearranged into bewilderment and (I thought) a mocking grin. Maybe you saw this coming, but I didn’t: Maroon was after her friend, not me.

Then why did she want me upstairs at all? I didn’t ask, because I was humiliated that I had misunderstood her, and still felt like I misunderstood what might happen next. I followed her upstairs, gulped half a beer, ran out the door. She protested that I shouldn’t go, but it didn’t sound sincere.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.