When the band was done I helped Reggie move his gear to the side while the next band came on. “Come on upstairs and have a beer,” he said.
I followed him to the crowded stairs, wondering if Bart was up there as we worked our way up between the people loitering there and the people trying to come down. I tripped on my own foot and fell hard into two people necking on the landing. One of them pushed me by the shoulder back into the person behind me.
That’s when I saw who it was on the landing, who had pushed me. Ziggy gave me a crooked smile and said “Watch where you’re going.”
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By eight pm Ziggy was still nowhere to be found, and I still hadn’t read the main part of the article. I sat in the basement with the Ovation in my lap noodling until Bart finally said “What’s wrong with you?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what’s going on in your head, Daron?” He put his bass down and sat on the rug across from me. “You’ve been totally moody this whole week. In fact, you’ve been like this ever since New York.”
“Like what?”
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Christian woke me up the next morning knocking on my door. I’d slept maybe four hours and sat up in bed with all my clothes on, wondering if the house was on fire. “The mail’s here,” he was saying.
I pulled open the door and he thrust an oversize envelope into my hands. “What is it?”
“That’s what I want to know, stud. It’s got your name on it personally so I didn’t open it.”
The address label said it came from an office in New York and was made out to “Daron M., Moondog Three HQ” and our Allston street address, not our PO Box. “It’s gotta be from Jonathan.” I tore open the envelope and four slick copies of Spin magazine spilled out into my hands.
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The next day went about the same, except we noodled around half the time with Windfall and half the time with another one that had no lyrics and no title. I’d latched onto a riff with a flamenco feel but Bart and I weren’t quite nailing it. And while my fingers were trying to do their dance right, in the back of my head I was starting to form a vague idea of what the song was about. I didn’t realize I was doing it, though, until Ziggy, getting a touch antsy and bored, said, “Why don’t you make me a tape of that one?”
I was looking at the strings and not at him when I said “Why?”
“So I can go home and write words for it, and then bring it back. Save a lot of time instead of me sitting here.”
I gave him a blank look. Of course that made perfect sense. But I resisted. “What if it changes?”
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Dim stars burned like distant pinpricks through a blacked out window. “If I had to put a label on it I’d guess… it’s yet another anti-establishment song about divorced parents fucking up your life.”
Bart drank some Yoo Hoo and looked at me. “I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.” He was still looking at me when he said “Do you think you’ll ever see your parents again?”
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The first day all four of us actually got together to begin working on new material wasn’t until several days later. At three o’clock in the afternoon we gathered in the basement with my stack of cassettes and scribbled lyrics. I don’t know why I was surprised to find Ziggy there with a notebook. He’d written occasional lyrics or choruses before, whenever Bart or I got stuck or when a song really needed something else. In my own stack I had the note he’d left me in New York, one verse of “Windfall” complete in it. What did I expect? I don’t know.
That first day was rough going. Something was changing and shifting right out from under my feet, I felt, and no one was on firm ground anymore. Even Bart and I were clashing rather than meshing, even when we had the chord progression set out. By dinner time Chris pointed out that maybe the three of us ought to work some things out first, and then bring him back in when we were really ready to go full volume. He went and got Vietnamese take out from the place down the street and after we had eaten, me and Bart and Ziggy sat on the matted, thick orange rug in the basement and tossed things back and forth. We put a couple of sketches onto cassette tape with Christian’s boom box and called it quits around midnight. I wasn’t sleepy, but I went to bed anyway, tired and sapped of energy.
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We played until about one in the morning when Colin came down and said he had to get up for a temp job at 8am. Bart and Michelle went home and Christian and I watched half of a late night movie before he fell unconscious on the couch. Of our other two housemates, there was no sign of Lars, and Mike was currently driving a van across the country with Miracle doing small dates. I shut the TV off, took a shower but didn’t bother to shave, and went up to my room.
I was only aware of having fallen asleep after I woke up–I opened my eyes to find the overhead light still on and my hair still damp. I got up from my mattress to shut the light off. Something tapped against the window like rain. My fogged brain had some recollection of that sound–the sound that woke me. I went to the window.
Now that I was listening for it, the noise was clearly driveway gravel hitting the glass. I turned off the light so I could see outside and there was Ziggy, about to lob another handful at me. Continue Reading »
When I looked up in the fluorescent tube lights Ziggy was still sitting there, the beer in one hand resting between his legs, his eyes fixed on me. He lifted the bottle to his lips and tipped it back, his eyes never leaving mine as he took a swallow and returned the bottle to its place.
“Do you think he’s right?” I asked.
Ziggy just kept staring. In the weeks since we’d come home I’d hardly seen him. Not that I’d expected to. Being home was a harsher reality. As he took another swig, I began to feel the throbbing low-level hunger I had for him, like some kind of nagging headache or injury that I couldn’t forget.
Could we really go back to the way we’d been? Ignoring each other?
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We had our next business meeting in the kitchen at six o’clock on a Tuesday night. I’d have done it in the living room, but the thing in the forefront of my mind was Christian signing his contract, and it seemed right to have an actual table for that. Our kitchen was not a room where we generally spent a lot of time, me or my housemates.
The others sat around the table while I sat on the counter and swung my legs against cabinet doors that had been repainted dozens of times. Christian signed and we celebrated with a case of beer Bart provided. Then I brought the rest of them up to date on our tour plans, or, as the case was, our lack of them.
“BNC don’t want us to tour.”
Bart frowned, Michelle looked puzzled, Chris looked non-plussed. Ziggy asked “Why?”
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A couple weeks later, Jonathan called one morning, early. “Did I wake you up?” he said.
“Oh, no,” I croaked, “I always get up ten hours before I have to do anything.” Fortunately, the phone was on a milk crate beside my bed and I lay down with the phone on my ear. Vague thoughts went through my mind like: maybe I should buy some furniture now while I had a little money in the bank.
“I thought you’d want to know,” Jonathan was saying, “that the issue hits the stands next week. You should be getting some copies in the mail soon. Maybe today or tomorrow.”
“Wow, so it’s really happening.” A feature article in Spin.
“Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. Merry Christmas.”
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