now I’m going to have to call Travis and ask him, and I don’t call Travis now. I make Cole or Joey do it. “Which one do you want?”
“Give me something new,” he says. “See you at eight.”
I hang up and take my guitar off the stand and hold on to it and realize that we don’t have any new songs. Soft hasn’t written anything new since all this shit between me and Travis happened, because writing songs is an altogether different kind of thing than just playing them. To write songs, you need to talk. You need to throw ideas out there for other people to potentially love or hate or even laugh at. You need to be able to argue and negotiate and generate ideas, and that’s pretty difficult to do with someone you’re barely speaking with because you’ve fucked with his heart so much.
I start to play my guitar and think of my father. I think of all those shows Len played with this very Gretsch, and I wonder what he’d say if he could see me now. Then I get mad at myself for caring what that asshole would say about anything about my life. He wouldn’t care, that’s the whole problem. If he’d cared, he wouldn’t have left, would he?
Now I think about Montana (the trucker, not the state). Montana says he’s coming to the Ag Field Day gig to see me play on his way back through from Maine. When Montana called to let me know he was okay, he said he wanted to take me and Travis out for a burger to thank us when he was next in town. That’s when I told him about the show. He said he wouldn’t miss it. I’m sure he’ll hate it.
I’m still playing my guitar as I think about all of this, my fingers finding all the notes without me having to think about them, just wandering along the fretboard like lost souls until a pattern emerges and soon I’m lost inside of some lilting, melancholy riff, wishing Travis was here to make it better. Aching that he’s not here to make it better. Travis makes everything I do better.
I have no idea how long I’m sitting there playing when Sonia comes in my room.
“That’s really pretty,” she says. “What’s it called?”
“It’s new,” I say. “I just made it up.”
“I love it,” she says. “You should finish it before Ag Field Day.”
She’s right. As usual.
I finally get up the nerve to call Travis. He’s surprised to hear from me, but not when I tell him about going on Overnight Sensations. He says that it’s fine with him. I mention maybe we should get together today and practice for it, and he says he’s working on a paper and we can play “Daylight” and it’ll be fine.
“Come on, Travis,” I say, and I know I sound a little pathetic but I can’t help myself. “Please? I’ll help you with your paper. Bring it with you.”
He’s quiet for a minute. I’m not sure what sways him, but he says fine. He’ll be there in an hour.
Now I’m really nervous, because he’s coming here and I’m definitely not his favorite person these days. I strum my guitar again, but my fingers slip up and fuck up the riff I’ve been playing perfectly for ninety minutes, because I’m even more nervous than I was the first time I stepped on stage at CBGB. Travis was there that night, too. I turned to him right before we were supposed to go on and I said, “I can’t do this, I’m going to throw up. I can’t get up there.”
He took me by the shoulders and said, “Yes you can. You’ve worked all year for this moment. Don’t think about it, just get your ass on stage and play.” And then he turned me around and gave me a supportive shove towards the stage.
And I did get on stage. And we played our asses off that night, too, and it was amazing, being on the stage of CBGB, even if it was half empty and Tuesday night and I had a paper due the next day. Because this was the same stage where I saw Sonic Youth play when I snuck in underaged, where Gibby from the Butthole Surfers stood right next to me and I felt like yeah, this is the world I want to be in. This is where I belong.
And I didn’t puke, either.
Travis shows up at my