ball on my bed. I’m tired, I don’t want to do any schoolwork, I don’t even want to play my guitar because that makes me think about him and every time I think about him I just picture the moment he leaves, all pissed off at me again. I spend the day scribbling in my lyrics notebook, different crappy lines of songs I’ll never finish writing. I watch Raising Arizona and eat a bag of microwave popcorn. I look at the clock. It’s seven p.m. and I anxiously await the sound of van tires on my gravel driveway and get up to look out the window several times. Twenty-five minutes pass before Travis calls to say he’s still working on his paper so he’ll meet me at the studio at eight. Here we go, I think. Here it comes. He’s finally done.
I drive my CRX over the bridge into New Brunswick and park behind the Student Center. At a quarter to eight, Travis is there and he’s taken a shower and he’s in a black button-down over a Girls Against Boys T-shirt and jeans and Converse and his hair is wet and he’s got his acoustic guitar. He’s so cold to me that I feel frozen enough to crack. Billy has left the outside door propped open with a brick, so we go in up the stairs and Billy hands us each a beer (which is illegal, by the way) while Ween’s new single is playing. We drink them, and after the single, Billy interviews us on the air.
“Emmy and Travis Soft from New Brunswick’s very own Stars on the Floor are here tonight, and they’ll be opening up the Ag Field Day show,” Billy says into the microphone. “For those who are either dead or unconscious, Ween is coming home to headline, so it’s going to be mobbed. Congrats to you guys for nailing a sweet slot.”
“That sounds so wrong,” Travis says.
“It’s a gift. That’s why I’m the guy with the radio show,” Billy says. “So how’d you end up getting it? You deserve it, of course, but there were about twenty bands jockeying for it.”
“Well, after our last show at the Melody I barfed on Travis,” I say. “But the catch is, I was lucky enough to do it in front of Dean Ween.”
“Who could pass up a class act like that?” Travis says.
“Remember this is showbiz,” I say. “It’s not how good you are, it’s who you humiliate yourself in front of.”
“Everyone loves a spectacle,” Billy says.
He asks us to play our song, and I tell him the Overnight Sensations audience is getting to hear the debut of our latest tune, even before the rest of the band has heard it, which makes Billy super happy. He introduces us again and we start to play.
Even though we’ve played through “Loud” about four hundred times since last night, it’s not quite in my hands yet and Travis is mad at me so I’m distracted and nervous. The song is new enough that I still have to think about what I’m doing and what comes next. I worry if Travis has it down, but I shouldn’t because he obviously does. He glances up at me when we get to the chords and I start to sing. I close my eyes and try to lose that nervous wiggle in my voice, but I’m nervous, I can hear it. I hate that. We get to the chorus in one piece, though, and I sing it and it sounds even better than it did when I recorded it on the four-track. But the second verse comes, and as I’m about to sing the first line, I choke—I forget what the hell the words are, and for some stupid reason, I don’t have the lyrics out. I’m playing, so I can’t grab them from my guitar case at my feet. I just choke. And then I panic. I’m in the control room of WRSU and I’m dying up here.
I look at Travis with an apologetic look, and he just nods: It’s okay. When the riff comes back and I don’t sing, he starts singing the words for me and his voice is so good that even though I can remember the words now, I just play along and listen to him. He looks up at me, raises his eyebrows, and then I jump back in for the chorus, but he doesn’t drop out, he sings it along with me and breaks into this