AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Do you still play?”
He got a dreamy smile.
“They have a Bösendorfer at the studio that I mess with sometimes. I thought about getting one for the apartment, but it just seems—” He shook his head.
“What? It seems what?”
“So extravagant or whatever. You know, just buying a piano.”
And that was another thing I liked about Theo. Aside from the fact that he lived in a very nice apartment (which, I’d learned, his manager had essentially bought with his money and shoved him into after learning he was living in a shithole walk-up in Queens that also housed an unofficial butcher who sold sides of meat off his balcony), he didn’t do anything…rock star-y. It was a natural outgrowth of the fact that he also didn’t really think of himself in that way except in the moments when he was forced to hide from the press or from being recognized.
The other thing I didn’t tell Rhys was that the more time I spent around Theo, the more bits of music were starting to fall back into my head. Slowly, at first—little two- and three-note clusters that hit like raindrops. Then in more familiar forms. A chorus that drifted up from the subway’s roar, the first line of a verse from misreading the billboard outside the country grocery store a few miles from my house.
Sometimes, we messed around on guitar while we were on the phone. One night, Theo switched to FaceTiming me, and we riffed off each other, each of us starting a song on the chord the other’s ended on. And it felt so fucking good to be making music again that I felt this surge of hope. Theo grinned at me like he could feel the change in my mood. He was wearing navy sweatpants and a gray T-shirt worn to holes, and his hair was a tangled mess around his face, and even on the tiny screen, propped askew on my coffee table, he was luminous.
I hadn’t been aware I was singing something when Rhys and I were in the garden, but once he’d mentioned it, I realized that at some point those bits and pieces had coalesced into something like the bones of a song. It was stark and clumsy—tottering on the weak springtime muscles of something just waking after a harsh winter—but it was there. Proof that I wasn’t useless. Proof that I wasn’t nothing. And, most important, proof that it hadn’t just been the drugs that had made me the musician I was.
I knew it wasn’t factually true. I’d been playing music and writing songs a long time before the drugs became a problem. But knowing it factually counted for very little against the fear that somewhere in there, I’d wiped out the part of me that could create without them.
It had crept in so slowly I’d hardly noticed it. Drugs, alcohol, partying—it was all part of being on tour, all part of playing in smoky bars, and finishing your day at one in the morning when the only thing to do was go to another bar, or hang out on someone’s tour bus, or in their dressing room, or hotel room. And everyone did it, so I thought nothing of it. It was as natural as picking up a guitar and starting a song, knowing everyone else would join in.
That was the part that was always hardest to take. That something others did casually and without thinking could have such a hold on me. It felt ridiculous at first, and I dismissed it. How could this thing suddenly be a problem? How had it happened? It felt unfair, silly, stupid. And I’d refused to accept that such a problem was suddenly my life.
I’d always been in control. Always made decisions, took responsibility. I was the one who calmed down musicians freaking out about going onstage, or soothed ruffled feathers when egos butted. I was the one who always remembered to budget food money and oil checks for our touring vehicles. I called my mother on her birthday and always mailed my rent on time.
It was absurd to imagine that I had woken up one day so far down that everyone had seen the crash but me.
* * *
—
Theo came bursting through the front door as I was pulling on clothes after a shower.
“Hey!” He was flushed and buzzy as he grabbed me. “Guess what?” He bounced in front of me. “So, I met with the band today to map out our studio time.”
Riven was ramping up to record material for their new album starting the next week.
“And we were talking and I was telling them about you, and I played them your stuff and they totally loved it, and we were going to get an acoustic on a bunch of tracks along with Coco’s electric anyway, and so everyone was totally jazzed for you to do it. And backing vocals, if you wanted? I would love it, I think they’d be so great. I fucking love your voice, as you know.”
