ONE
The heat from the rig hits the top of my skull and spreads down to my temples. Sweat pebbles follow. Two hundred and forty watts of par can, close enough that I can smell the gel filters burning, that faint chemical sweetness that’s followed me through thirty years of stages. My boots vibrate against the monitor wedge. The kick drum punches through the floor in steady quarter notes, and I feel each one just below my sternum.
I hit the last chorus of “Ordinary Ruin” and open my eyes.
The balcony is dark. Not the good kind of dark, where a thousand phones scatter light across faces and you can’t tell where the crowd ends, and the room begins. This is the other kind. The empty kind. House lights are down, but I can see the outlines of folded seats in the mezzanine, row after row of them, catching the blue wash from the stage and holding nothing.
The floor is packed from the barricade to about forty rows back. After that, the bodies thin, and the last ten rows hold a few couples and a cluster of women in matching T-shirts near the far aisle.
Five thousand tickets in a room that holds nine.
I know because I asked Mira, 4225 West’s longtime manager, before the show and watched her rub the back of her neck before she answered. The neck rub is the only honest tell the woman has.
The crowd still sounds good. They know every word to this one, and I can hear them singing the bridge back to me, a low collective hum that rises when I pull the mic away from my mouth. But I remember what almost twenty thousand voices feel like. The air changes. The sound stops being individual throats and becomes a pressure wave that pushes against your ribs. Tonight it doesn’t get past my knees.
JD leans into his mic for the harmony, and his voice sits right where it always does, that clear tenor riding above my baritone, bright and precise where mine is rough. He hasn’t missed a note all night. He never does. JD is one of my best friends and a third of what makes 4225 West a band. Bass, piano, and the high harmonies I lost the range for years ago, and a British accent he’s never once let soften. He’s someone I can count on in life and in music.
I count the band out on the last bar, pivot, and nod at Harrison behind the kit.
Harrison grins and drives the crash cymbal with both sticks. Harrison’s the last third of us. He’s an original with me and before we added JD to the band.
The lights cut to white. The crowd roars, and for about three seconds the room sounds full.
Three seconds. I’ll take it.
“Thank you,” I yell into the mic. “We’re 4225 West and we appreciate you coming out tonight.”
I take one last look at the crowd and remember the earlier days. The days of drinking my way through the night with a nameless companion are long over. For that, I’m thankful. Tucking tail and heading home to face the music, so to speak,was the best decision I ever made. Unfortunately, the reason I even went home was because my childhood best friend had died and I needed to pay my respects. I hate thinking that Mason dying was what changed my life.
It also changed the lives of my bandmates.
We walk off stage left, single file through the wing, past the monitor engineer and two local stagehands in black polos. The concrete floor is cold after the stage, and I feel the temperature change right through my boot soles.
Harrison is behind me. I hear him before I turn around. A sharp inhale through his teeth, not loud, the kind of breath a man takes when he’s trying to keep a sound inside his mouth. I slow my pace and glance back.
He’s gripping the steel railing along the stairwell with his right hand. His knuckles are white, and the tendons along the back of his hand stand up, taut and visible under the skin. His left arm hangs at his side, and he rotates his shoulder in a slow circle, once, then twice. Each rotation smaller than the last. He pauses at the top of the three steps that lead down to the green room hallway, and I watch his jaw clench before he lifts his foot to the first step.
A month or so ago, he crashed hard into some jagged rocks while surfing. He swore his shoulder was fine, but clearly, he’s suffering.
I don’t say anything because I don’t want to embarrass him. Harrison doesn’t want me to. We’ve been in this band together since . . . hell, I don’t even remember how old he was when we started playing at Metro, a bar in Los Angeles that caters to up-and-coming musicians, but he’s like a brother to me. And over the years, I’ve learned exactly when he needs me to say something and when he needs me to silently curse injuries and old age.
JD is already ahead of us. He’s got his phone out before we clear the wing, the screen casting blue light up into the hollows under his eyes. His thumbs move fast, scrolling, pausing, scrolling again. He doesn’t look up when a stagehand opens the green room door. He walks through it with the screen three inches from his face, his body angled sideways, so he doesn’t clip the doorframe.
“Good crowd tonight,” he says, still scrolling.
“Half a crowd,” I say.
JD’s thumbs stop for a beat. He looks at me over the top of the screen, eyebrows lifting a fraction. Then he goes back to whatever’s got his attention.
The green room is a cinder block box painted the color of olive oil, with a brown leather couch that sags in the middle and a folding table covered in deli trays nobody touched. A case of Topo Chico sits on the floor by the door, half the bottles already open and warm. The AC unit in the ceiling rattles at a frequency that sits just below the ringing in my ears.
I drop onto the couch, and peel my shirt away from my chest. The cotton is soaked through, and the air raises goosebumps along my forearms. I crack a Topo Chico open and press the cold glass against the side of my neck. The carbonation hisses against my palm.
Mira walks in carrying a leather portfolio. She thinks it makes her look like a music executive instead of a woman from Texas who fell into management after she found an artist on the street corner. She made him a star by pestering the music executive who worked on the tenth floor of the building her secretarial job was in. Rumor has it, they were so annoyed with her, they gave her a job and expected her to fail.
She didn’t.
Mira came to us years ago after a tumultuous experience with another manager. She made promises, kept them, and has never let us down.
