Roy watches the smoke curl up toward that same blue sky he’s been thinking about all day.
Finally, it comes to him.
Easter! It’s Easter that the sky today reminds him of.
All of a sudden, he can even feel it: being a kid, the cold morning air, grass always wet and shimmery with dew, crumpled up napkins in the pocket of a kid-sized jacket he hadn’t worn since last Easter, navy blue or golf-course green.
These are memories he’s never told anyone. They live only inside of him. Like those kid-sized jackets, still hanging in the closet at his parents’ house, even though he could never wear them again.
Unless a wizard shrinks him or something. It wasn’t likely. But you never know. Weird things happen all the time.
Just now, for example, above his head his exhaled smoke is morphing into the misty lace of a spider web, transparent and floaty and hardly there. As it spreads wider, it begins to look like those holographic grids from 1980s sci-fi movies. He tries to think of what he even saw that in. The Last Starfighter? Babylon 5? Some long lost vision of an equally lost 21st century. This one looks different.
He puffs his joint and exhales again, then looks back down to earth.
Before him is the empty parking lot, mostly concrete. Load-in is done for the day, so now the vehicles sit like a family of ducks, vans nestled quietly alongside the one big red Prevost bus.
Stubbby are in the Sprinter, a rental. It’s sleek and black and new-looking. Each seat has a cup holder. There is rope lighting in the aisles, like a plane, and an Xbox 360 in the top compartment pre-loaded with a disc of Daytona USA.
The Econoline is Porcelain Prince’s. They own it themselves. It’s the punkest ride on the tour, dinged up and scratched in many places, and covered in other places with stickers that say things like “Keep honking, it gives me an erection (emotionally!)” and “My other car is your car, give it to me.”
Roy had rented the Sprinter because that was what his last band had done. But sitting next to Porcelain Prince’s Econoline, he again worries that they might think he’s been presumptuous. Stubbby should be in the old beater, he thinks, not Porcelain Prince. Porcelain Prince draw half the crowd every night, even though they’re the openers. They write songs with huge choruses and their audience knows every word. When they finish, a significant amount of the crowd leaves, meaning Stubbby’s first song is usually performed with a clear view of people walking out. Those who stay are all there for Toggle, the headliners, who have a song featuring Dot Matrixx currently on the radio.
Toggle are in the big red Prevost. They’ve been here all day, having pulled in at whatever ungodly hour Brimstone got them there after driving through the night from Chicago. Brimstone came with the bus, an inscrutable ex-Marine who speaks with an accent no one can place. On Brimstone’s bus, people follow Brimstone’s rules. No cigarettes. No shitting. Sleep with feet forward. And remember: at call time, Brimstone’s boot touches the gas. So your ass better be on board five minutes before.
Despite their famous lack of discipline (“America’s scamps” is what Nylon called them), Toggle respected Brimstone’s severity. Early in the tour, Roy spent a night in the bus’s empty bunk and saw firsthand how they spoke of him in reverent tones, all of them suddenly repeating his catchphrases and tiding up after themselves in strange, new ways, as if recently loaded with updated programming. It was a little weird. But weird things happen all the time.
While Toggle arrived here early enough to have a day in town, last night, Stubbby and P Princes (as he calls them) stayed at a Holiday Inn in Joliet, about forty five minutes outside Chicago. They only just rolled in here twenty minutes ago, to this concrete lot in an industrial block outside of downtown St. Louis.
The gig.
Night—which is it? Twelve? Thirteen? He’s pretty sure it’s the twelfth, but he found that after the tenth, they start to run together in unpredictable ways.
Whichever night of tour it is, night is still hours from now. When he checked his phone back in the green room it was only 1pm. Toggle’s soundcheck is at 2, and with all their backing tracks and lighting cues, they take a while. Stubbby’s check isn’t until after that. Which means: Roy doesn’t have shit to do. That’s why he’s out back in the parking lot smoking a fat joint and thinking about the color of the sky when he was six years old.
Above, another puff of smoke rises into that clear blue sky, like the sky from back then.
Not like it, he realizes. The same one. The only one.
Crazy, he thinks, that he’s lived his whole life under one sky. So much has changed down here. How is it still the same sky?
He’s changed in a thousand ways since those Easters, he thinks. In every possible way.
Even just as a musician, his whole life has changed and changed again. There was a time when he might have been skeptical to be opening for a band like Toggle, a band with such a huge audience because they were on the radio. But he and Reede went way back. He knows they’re legit. They worked for it, wrote good songs, and then they were poised right. It didn’t hurt that Luca, their singer, is tall and handsome. But it was mostly one of those right-place right-time things. One of those weird things that just happen sometimes.
Stubbby is nowhere near as popular as Toggle (and don’t sell half as much merch as Porcelain Prince), but there are some perks to playing main support. This, right now, he thinks, this is the real freedom of playing support: later load-in, later soundcheck, time to get stoned before the show. And then you’re done early! Sure, you’re on a lower rung of the ladder, but it isn’t so bad. By the time Toggle hit the first break in their set, he could already be on his third beer.
As long as it’s not his night to drive. Which it is, tonight.
He remembers the already-open beer he left by his messenger bag in the green room.
Inside the warehouse-like venue, a snare drum cracks, then cracks again. Jarvis is setting up Peter’s kit. It’ll only be a few seconds before the rack tom.
Doon doon.
There it is.
Doon doon.
Roy pictures Jarvis behind the kit and smiles.
Jarvis, he thinks, what a trip.
Pete had met Jarvis somewhere in Georgia, down by the state line. Not even at a show, at a BBQ restaurant or something. Now Jarvis sets up Pete’s kit every night. His routine includes use of a pure silver dowsing rod to measure optimal frequency path, and kit alignment according to sacred geometry. His drum tuner is made out of puma bone. Or maybe mountain lion?
Even outside the spiritualist drum tech stuff, Jarvis always has some crazy angle he’s working. Craziest of all, half of them work. His vending machine business is apparently doing numbers (at least, according to Jarvis), and that was after he sold Unter (the “anti-Uber”) to Yahoo or LinkedIn or Wyze or some tech company. Now Jarvis owns a house and spends most of his time tightening drumheads with his puma-bona tuner and telling America’s stagehands about the holy significance of the quincunx.
Must be nice! Roy thinks, puffing his joint again.
None of his own schemes ever work out. He’d even tried the small business thing, going in with Ingrid on all that karaoke equipment right before she had the baby and then decided that hanging out in bars with drunk men until 2:00am wasn’t really what she wanted to do anymore. Then he tried the PR route, which had some momentum up until the incident with Baby 9 Tails. He’d had to turn off comments on his Instagram after that one. Baby 9 Tails eventually apologized, saying he’d been on a manic episode during his posting spree, but it didn’t matter. Roy didn’t want to do it anymore.
All of that had been after Roy’s first life in music, his years in the Err-Heads, and then the big genre switch with Ptolemaic. They were very different bands, but people said they could hear Roy’s playing in both, which always made him happy. Both bands had been hometown favorites, though neither caught on nationally. Ptolemaic might have eventually, if they had ever finished their last album. But those songs had been scrapped partway through, and no one had ever heard them.
It was a few years later that Roy started Stubbby. It was supposed to be his little solo project—just a way to keep writing after Ptolemaic’s painful breakup. But the Stubbby LP received unexpectedly positive reviews in unexpectedly notable places. He threw together a three-piece, with Prin on bass and Louwes on drums, and started playing shows.
Which is how he ended up back on the road, this time in a support slot, taking $500 a day to warm up the crowd for a band with a hit on 103.9 KRIZ.
Last night in Chicago, Stubbby had their best merch night of tour. Almost $1,000. It was a significant jump from their next best night, which had been $420, a number which Roy had no trouble remembering since everyone in the band had each made a joke about it.
There was a time when $1,000 in merch sales would have seemed like winning the lottery (the most the Err-Heads ever sold was $116). But now, Roy understands that $1,000 goes fast. There was the gas and the rental fees, the printing costs and hotels, plus all that money he’s still paying back to Lisa.
He doesn’t like to do the math too exactly. X dollars divided by Y musicians across Z shows. It always equals a day rate that sounds small to begin with, and then microscopic when you expand it out to a yearly total. Math like that closed more doors than it opened. He never expects one tour to be some fatass payday, anyway, he reminds himself. He just hopes it gets the streaming up a bit.
Streaming is another kind of math he prefers not to calculate too exactly. However many thousand people he has to reach to make a single dollar...
Instead, he exhales again into the cloudless sky, imagining, briefly, the pot smoke forming happy little clouds above him.
No clouds today, huh Mr. Sky? he thinks. Don’t worry, I got you.
This joint is hitting nicely, he thinks. He rolled it himself this morning with one of the Christmas tree nugs the stagehand in Cincinnati gave them. Sure, Ohio isn’t renowned for its weed, but this is the best joint he’s had all tour. Toggle keep buying those dispensary prerolls that look like works of art in the tube but then get clogged on the second hit.
Not this one, he thinks. This one hits nice. If nothing else, he’s gotten better at rolling joints over the years.
In his periphery, he notices motion on the other end of the parking lot. Out on the sidewalk, a group of fans walks by, tinted green through the mesh netting zip-tied to the fence at the end of the lot. The show is still hours away but already they are gathering out front. They wear Toggle shirts and happily join the line to meet friends in other Toggle shirts, shirts purchased on previous Toggle tours. All of them are there to wait for the show to begin.
There aren’t many Stubbby shirts among the crowds. Or Ptolemaic. Definitely not many Err-Heads shirts. He tries not to take it personally. Instead, he thinks about the power of music.
It really is beautiful, he thinks, taking another puff on his joint, how music brings people together. All these people here now. It gives them an ecstatic experience that is non-judgmental, and non-teleological. Because a song can be played on repeat forever.
Maybe that’s exactly it, he thinks, his heart now starting to beat faster as he puffs again on the joint. Maybe it’s that it’s non-teleological, that music has no real ending. It is about the now, rather than some soul-based investment scheme, like religions often amounted to, promising infinite returns on a modest but committed investment today.
That’s it, he thinks, that’s America: an overlapping image of predatory religious debt (original sin) and predatory financial debt (medical bills, student loans, mortgage), the goal in either case to keep you in debt and pump you for passive income forever so that those at the top could have their yachts and their Versace and their injections and hair plugs.
Roy nods. He wishes he could share this observation with someone. But no one in his band really understands him when he gets on about stuff like this. They mostly seem confused by it.
Tealy-o-whatical? he can hear Prin saying.
Louwes would be more contrarian, pushing back against his argument on some arbitrary substantive ground. I don’t know if it’s like sin exactly, they’d say. I’m not sure I see the connection.
But Roy sees the connection precisely. It makes complete sense to him. Roy nods, as if seconding his own thought, thinking: yes, that’s America, hair plugs for the rich and medical debt for the poor.
He is nodding very vigorously now, almost in a cartoonish way, smiling with his joint in his mouth like Popeye with his pipe, possibly as a joke, though truthfully he cannot say why he has chosen to nod and smile so cartoonishly. However, it is during one of these nods, as his head bobs up and down in silent, vigorous self-agreement, that finally, and with no small surprise, he happens to notice the length of ash on the end of his joint.
What the!
He immediately stops nodding and locks his body into place.
He can’t believe it. How is this even possible? he wonders. It’s insane!
Maybe it’s just his perspective, but somehow, the ash looks even longer than the joint had been in the first place. Like, twice as long.
How is this happening?
What...What the?
“Dude!” he begins to say, spinning around, finger pointed at the many-inches-long stick of ash hanging from his lips.
But no one is there. The parking lot sits empty. Leaves and flattened paper soda cups mark its edge, where the nearby woodlands begin to regain control. Not even Brimstone is around. He’s already off to the hotel to sleep before the night’s drive down to Memphis.
Doon doon. The rack tom echoes inside the venue.
Roy turns around again, back towards the vans.
Shit, he thinks. How is there no one here to see this? This thing is, what? Almost a foot long? Louwes would love it. They were already giving Roy shit for the size of the joint when he was rolling it. Wait til they see this!
Roy feels his pockets for his phone. He remembers that he’s left it inside the green room to charge. It is one of those new flip phones, and the battery drains quickly. By the time they arrived at Outer Layer it was at 2%. That’s the whole reason why he’s been thinking about the sky instead of scrolling through some bullshit on his phone.
Now he can’t even take a photo.
But someone has to see this.
Maybe, he thinks, someone is at the back of the vans and he just didn’t notice. Maybe Kenni is restocking Toggle merch or one of the P Princes is on their phone or something. He hasn’t noticed anything like that while he’s been out here, but you never know. Weird things happen all the time.
Slowly, very slowly, he begins to walk towards the vans, hoping that his eyes and ears have been wrong and that someone is in fact back there, trying, as he goes, to monitor the lengthy ash-joint hanging from his mouth.
It’s still there, but it’s barely hanging on.
Easy, he thinks, putting his right foot softly before him. Nice and easy.
As he nears the Sprinter, he sees himself reflected dimly in its tinted window, arms sticking out for balance. He locks eyes with his reflection.
For a moment, he imagines this version of himself trapped in the negative image world of his reflection, flattened down to its dull confines. Help! he pictures this version of himself saying, get me outta here!
Roy wants to press his face to the glass and console his mirror-twin in the tinted-world, to tell him he’ll be free one day and that even in the tinted-world there must be love or at least its reflection. But he has to preserve the ash-joint. Right now, he can’t press his face to anything. They are destined to remain apart, he and his mirror-twin. They settle for a knowing wave.
Easy, he thinks, walking around the side of the van.
Now by the trunk door, he confirms that both vans are locked and that no one is at either of them. No weird surprises.
Damn.
He begins to walk back towards the stage door. But focused as he is on this unbelievable sight gag of a joint, he doesn’t notice where he is stepping and sets his foot down wrong, the ash wobbling as he staggers forward.
He stops.
Oh shit, he thinks. That was too close. Gotta be more careful.
Thank god there’s not much wind today. After a week of rain and many long stretches of overcast freeways, today is the best weather of the whole tour. Like those days near Easter when the sun clears away the clouds, and the air begins to speak of the future.
He wished anyone could see this thing. It really isn’t the kind of story you tell people about afterward. They have to be there.
Roy loves his new bandmates, but he can never tell what’s going on inside of them. They’re so quiet and reserved, they always seem miles away from the bottomless seas churning inside of him. Still, Prin would fucking die if she saw this. He can already hear her going: What the actual fuck?
I know! he’d say. Bonkers!
And they’d laugh.
But the loading dock is empty. Right now, Prin is probably sitting quietly in the green room.
You know who would really fucking love this is Reede, Roy thinks.
People act like Reede had become unapproachable ever since Toggle blew up, but to Roy he is the same as ever. He can already picture the look on Reede’s face, how it melts into a soft dough of surprise and happiness, the real Reede, the one they didn’t print in magazines or put in the promo stills after commercials on SNL.
He misses Reede. Even though they’re on tour together now, the situation is different. Expectations. Money. Still, they have their moments. Roy feels that Reede understands him in a way that others don’t. The Err-Heads used to play with Reede’s old band all the time. Reede had seen the thin, early days, long before the bus tours. He still knows how to make the most of a little. He’d go fucking nuts for the ash joint.
Roy wishes the stage door would open and Reede would walk out right now and see it.
As if answering his call, up on the gangway, the stage door opens. Instead of Reede, a stagehand walks out, wearing the stagehand’s customary black shirt and black hat. Happy to see anyone, Roy waves with one hand, pointing to the remains of the joint in his mouth with the other and making a series of mumbling sounds.
For a moment, the stagehand seems to glance towards him out by the vans. But then, very quickly, his eye moves towards the horizon, as though he’d always only been looking there, off at that same blue sky that had distracted Roy earlier.
The stagehand walks along the dock, past the rows of Toggle’s dead cases and amp caps, and disappears into the employee break room on the other side.
Once again, Roy is alone.
How? he thinks. How is there never any privacy when you need it on tour, and now the one time he needed someone—anyone—to be around, there’s no one?
From the center of his face comes a hissing crackle. Roy crosses his eyes and sees that the small burning ring on his joint has descended almost down to the very end. Soon, there would be no more paper for the ash to hold on to and the entire thing would disappear, as if never here at all.
Now he has to think quickly. Why is time always running out? Why isn’t there a mode of existence where time only increases, never gets smaller?
As best he can tell, there are only two options: go out towards the street and get a fan to see it (weird move, possibly taken the wrong way), or go back inside and hope the ash survives the whooshing blast of cool air that shoots down from the door upon entry.
The options were not ones he’d prefer. As always, his imagination could provide much better options than reality itself.
Another crackle comes from the joint.
In his mind, he can hear Prin’s laugh.
What the actual fuck?
Now there is a pain in his throat. It is a familiar hurt. It says: why? Why does it always feel like his finest moments, the things he wants most to share with others, were destined to be experienced entirely alone? His best songs went unheard, his best live sets performed to no one, his best orgasms delivered via masturbation, and his best years spent traveling away from anywhere. The pain in his throat said: why is there now a pull in his stomach, like a tug on a thread connected to somewhere else? And: why did his eyes seem now to be quivering, growing wet, the wetness tickling his cheeks as it dripped down in a slow, dreary decay towards the part of the joint still in his mouth?
He notices now that he has begun to walk towards the stage door and away from the street. Perhaps, he realizes, it is an unconscious impulse: when the world hurts you, you hide inside. Has the world hurt him? Here he is on tour, doing the thing he wants to do. Yet, the days are still punctuated by moments like this: moments when he feels more alone than ever before.
Roy’s joint is burning down to the very end of the paper.
With no time left, he makes a bold choice. He will enter the stage door despite both the blast of cold air at the threshold and the many signs posted everywhere warning against smoking anything inside the club. It doesn’t matter. This has to be seen. He realizes now there was never any choice at all. This is the only option.
He is already on the steel grated stairs, already climbing them to the stage door. All that matters is that he share this with someone, anyone, so that he can say that it is real, that it really happened, that it isn’t yet another thing that lives only inside his head, thoughts that will disappear with him once he is gone, never to be shared with another soul.
Now in a crucial moment, he grasps the door handle. The ash has already begun to buckle. A thin crack of light is glowing through the center as though it is somehow lit again. Roy’s stomach turns on itself as he pulls the handle.
When they arrived here a few hours earlier for load-in, the door had seemed particularly heavily, almost sealed shut with a suction force. But now, as Roy pulls on the handle, the door flies open, lighter than a sheet of paper. It swings so far so suddenly that it completely throws him off balance, pulling him along the grated gangway and tripping his feet over each other. As he falls heavily to the ground, he twists his wrist on the door handle, still not understanding where his center of gravity is until both he and it are already laying flat.
Still confused, he blinks. All he sees is that same blue sky, empty and bright, like the sky on Easter when he was just a child. Then, Luca enters his vision. Luca, who is tall and handsome and doesn’t sing very hard or move much on stage, yet has a fanclub with 15,000 members.
“What the hell?” Luca says, examining him on the ground as if he is a strange beetle. “You did like a ninja flip when I opened the door. What was that all about?”
Roy feels an itch along his face and neck. His nose twitches. Above him, a thin swirl of ash drifts towards Luca’s perfect eyebrows, then whips to the side, moving upward as if on a string, pulled up into that big blue sky.
