slightly dirty guitar tone and hooky bass lines throughout their set are right in there with bands like the Breeders or Throwing Muses.
The spinART guy is sitting on the bleachers digging it, and I’m standing in the thick of the crowd watching the band with Joey when Travis arrives downstairs with Cole right behind him. Everything scene-related that I’m mulling over crashes into the brick wall of my stilted joy the moment I see Bean and all that blond boy hair come bouncing down those concrete stairs.
I haven’t seen him since last night. We drove back to Maryland to pay for Steady Beth’s alternator and get the beat brothers, and when we finally got home again I asked him if he wanted to stay over and he said no. Can you believe that shit? No? Well, here’s a taste of Travis for you, then.
“So, um, do you want to stay over?” I asked him. We were half asleep on my couch watching Seinfeld.
“Yeah, I don’t think so,” he said, even as I was curled up against him and he had his arm draped around my shoulders, playing with a strand of my hair.
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t think I can sleep over and keep my dick out of you, that’s why.”
Romantic, I know. It sort of was, actually. I guess you had to be there.
“So?” I said.
“So?” he said. “Last time we did it, you flaked out in under six hours.”
“It was closer to eight hours.”
“Emmy.”
Frustrating, right?
Today he worked and I didn’t talk to him all day. Know what I did? I sat in my room listening to Soft rehearsal tapes and played my guitar. I sketched out plans for a summer tour proposal to bring up at our next rehearsal. I made a list of potential contacts in major music hubs from here to Seattle. I went through the Musician’s Guide to Touring and Travis’s copy of Book Your Own Fuckin’ Life (the premiere guide to the punk rock underground, from Maximum Rocknroll). I made a list of where to send demos and expanded the list of label reps we should send to. This is how I spend almost all of my free time, which is why I never have free time.
Then I went to the diner with Millie and I didn’t tell her what Sonia and Jeff and George and Molly and all of the Rutgers women’s rugby team already know—that even if I have no idea what I’m doing here, Travis and I are pretty much a thing now. And when Millie brought Travis up and asked me if I knew what his deal was, why he seems so disinterested in her, I just shrugged and said, “I don’t know, he’s just like that.” And when she asked me to find out if she has any kind of hope of getting anywhere with him, I didn’t say, “No, back the fuck off, he’s mine,” either.
“He’s just goofy about girls,” I said.
“Is he possibly gay?” she asked.
“Only for Henry Rollins.”
I didn’t show her my ass, either, and besides, most of that Sharpie tattoo is gone as much as I attempted to preserve it. Eventually you just have to wash your ass.
When Travis sees me in the crowd tonight he smiles, but his smile shifts to a slight grimace when he’s intercepted by Millie, who drags him over to the bar. She puts her hand on his arm, leans in closer to talk in his ear and I want to drag him away from her, drag him home like a cavewoman, strip him bare and ride him until the Renaissance comes. Millie whispers something in his ear. He’s watching me as I’m watching him and who the hell knows what she’s talking about now. He laughs though, so I guess it’s something funny, though I’m not real amused here.
Millie leaves him and comes sauntering her way through the crowd over to me with a fresh drink and I have no idea, none, what’s on her mind. She hands me the cocktail and drapes her arm around my neck and plants a big, sloppy strawberry kiss on my jaw.
“I really do think he’s gay,” she says. “And not just for Henry Rollins.”
There’s nothing I can say to this with a straight face.
It’s really fucking loud down here, so even though Joey is standing right next to me, he can’t hear a word Millie says. Instead, he just ogles us as she hangs all over me and he is dying, dead and