Sinner

I looked at the gathered crowd. “This is kind of old school.”

So we played music.

In a lot of ways, a block party takes a lot more work than a concert with a stage. At a big concert, you have a stage, you have lights, you have a way, and half the job of setting a mood is done for you. It’s a show before you ever step up to a microphone. But a block party — you’re just a bunch of kids in someone’s front lawn. There’s no difference between you and the audience except you hold a bass guitar or clutch a mic. Every bit of performance has to be won. Carved out of normalcy and chaos. You have to sing louder, jump higher, be crazier than anyone in the crowd.

This was the first lesson: Look like you are supposed to be there.

Fame follows the expectation of fame.

This was the second lesson: Never rush an entrance.

Jeremy took his time building us a tempo, stepping us up into a song, the bass leading into the music, not looking over its shoulder to make sure the others were coming. Leyla — damn her, I wanted Victor, I wanted Victor, I wanted Victor — came in then, tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap — and I let it go and let it go and let it go.

The tension built and built and built. And then, as I did a little twist with my hand so they were paying attention, I hit a single note on my synth:

BOOM.

The crowd went wild. And when I dragged the mic closer and sang the first word into it — In the beginning, there was the dark and there was the buzz.

No, let me start over.

In the beginning, there was the suburbs and the days that looked the same stacked on each other’s backs. Then there was me, and the angels fell.

No, let me start over again.

In the beginning, there was me on a high school stage with Jeremy and Victor, and I felt like I’d never known what I’d been made for before that moment. It was not one listener or two or twenty or fifty. There was no magic number. It was this: Me.

Them. It was the drums dropping out for my keyboard to tumble up an ascending bridge. It was the heads tilted back. It was the tug and push and pull and jerk of the bass. It was whatever you plugged into the equation to equal an electrical current between us and the audience. Sometimes it took one thousand people. Sometimes it took two.

In West Adams on that summer afternoon, I crooned and screamed the lyrics at them, and they howled and screamed them back at me. Jeremy’s bass picked relentlessly up the scale.

Leyla, face sheened with sweat, thundered in the background.

We were the living, the reborn.

People kept coming. The noise of us and the noise of them kept bringing them in, closer, closer, more and more.

This is why I did it, this is why I keep doing it, this is why I couldn’t stop.

Suddenly, in the midst of this perfection, there was the scratch of a random guitar chord. Guitar? Guitar.

You have got to be kidding me.

Some pale young creature had erupted from the crowd with his guitar. He leaped up and down beside Leyla’s kit, grinding away on his instrument like the world was about to end. All enthusiasm, no malice.

At a real concert, we had security and stage dudes who took care of this. Our job as the band was merely to keep the show going as the disruption was removed.

Here there was only us.

I left Jeremy thrubbing away on the bass and Leyla holding down the beat. My mic still in one hand, I used the other to grab the guy’s arms to stop the guitaring. And then I gripped him to me and danced him forcibly to the crowd. I wrapped my arm around him to hold the mic to my mouth.

“Take him!” I shouted gladly to the crowd. “He is one of yours!”

I released him. Arms seized him like zombies. He was smiling blissfully up at the sky as they took him. I was face-to-face with the others now. Us and them, and the them was right there.

And I saw a face from the past.

It was impossible; it was Victor’s eyes, Victor’s eyebrows. My stomach was falling from a very great height.

It wasn’t Victor. It was his sister, Angie.

I hadn’t even begun to parse what this might mean when she hit me.

It wasn’t the greatest punch, but it landed pretty well — I felt my teeth cut into my lip. My mouth felt warm. Adrenaline hurried to attend to my needs. A wolf stretched and curled inside me.

Angie snatched the microphone from me, and then she hit me with it. That I felt. It hit my cheekbone solidly, and then, as one hand went up, instinct, she smashed it into the back of my head.

Skill? Skill isn’t what hurts people. A lack of mercy is.

I deserved to be hit, too. I deserved everything she was giving me.

I killed him, I killed him, I killed him

“You ass**le!” Angie shouted at me, and she wasn’t wrong, even taking Victor out of the equation. She punched me again with the microphone.

T came in close, but not to help: to film.

Angie hurled her entire body at me. She wasn’t a very large person, but justice and physics were on her side. We careened back through Leyla’s kit, both of us falling. Above me was blue sky and the edge of Shayla’s roof and at least two cameras and now her face blocking everything — She still smelled like the same shampoo she’d used when I’d dated her, back when Victor was alive, and I had never hated myself as I did in that moment, not in the darkest and most disgusting holes I had lowered myself into on any of my tours.

“Angie,” Jeremy said, as urgent as I’d ever heard him. “Angie, come on.”

My back stung something fierce, like I’d been sliced in two with a cymbal. I tasted blood. She needed to hit me harder, because I could still feel everything.

I couldn’t stop seeing Victor’s face mirrored in Angie’s.

What I’d done to both of them would never go away.

“Angie,” Jeremy said again, out of my view. “Think about what you’re doing. This is TV. This is your record, forever. This isn’t the way.”

Leyla loomed over me. She gripped my hand and pulled me up. She didn’t say: This is the future growing the seeds you sowed in the past. She asked, “Are you okay, man?”

I stood there in the middle of Shayla’s flat lawn, and suddenly there was no stage. It was just a bunch of drunk people standing in front of an old house. It was an ex-girlfriend looking defeated, a bloody microphone hanging in one of her hands. I’d scuffed the hell out of my patch of grass by jumping up and down while I sang. I looked at it, and at Angie, and then at Shayla. My face still felt warm, and I suspected from both that and the way she was looking at me that I was bleeding a lot. I’d stopped feeling anything, though.