D. Pierson - The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To

I hang up. Eric now looks dumbfounded.

“That’s it?”

“All parents respect ‘college.’”

“I guess. How did you…?

“What?”

“How did you come from that?”

“I don’t know. How did you come from your parents?”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right.” We emerge from the darkness of the lemon tree and the whole lawn crackles underneath us as we go back into the house.

The weed-themed sandwiches turn out to be the only meat we see in the week or so we’re staying with Christopher and Randy and their friends. Most everybody else and all the bands that come through the house are vegans. At first I think this is annoying, and I hear my brother in the back of my head saying “I hate fucking hippies.” But everybody being vegan means everybody cooks, because I guess there’s not enough good vegan food around, so everybody, the girls and the guys, all cook for each other. Five twenty-year-old people use their tiny kitchen seven or eight more times in a week than me and my dad and my brother use our enormous one. Maybe this week is an anomaly and they don’t usually make this much food this often, but it doesn’t seem like it. They seem to have their routine down pretty well. Eric doesn’t complain or seem to notice one way or the other: he’s eating less and less.

It gets pretty okay. The girls are cute and they all have projects they’re working on. Sometimes the bands are here to play an actual gig at an actual venue but sometimes they’re just playing at the house, which they don’t seem to think is any less real than an actual gig, and none of the kids who come to the show do either. And they all talk like Randy and Christopher and some of them are actually being sarcastic but a lot of them aren’t, and the girls are really nice, which I guess doesn’t necessarily mean they like you, but it’s nice when a cute girl in glasses who writes a sex column for the college paper is nice to you either way.

And kids do come to these house shows. And Randy and Christopher and James just let them in, and I’m sure if Albert were here he wouldn’t mind either; in fact, he’s probably in somebody’s house in Tulsa or Washington State right now and kids are showing up to pay the band two dollars so they can buy gas. The most kids come for this guy Randall Coats’ show, he just stands in the middle of the room, everybody sitting or standing around, and just him and his guitar, and his songs are a little sincere and a little saccharine for me but Eric leans over and says, “This would be good for the soundtrack,” and I guess it would. I actually listen and it actually would.

All the kids know all the words to his songs and Randall Coats seems really happy, and you’d think it would be weird after the “show” is over, we’re all still just here in the house, but it isn’t, he just bows and takes his guitar off and hands it to a kid who wants to know about his tuning and he starts talking to kids.

Later I’m smoking weed in the backyard with some kids I’ve just met and granted sometimes this place seems like the scene of the crime but for a minute after passing the joint to the left everything loses its crime-scene aspect and these kids make absolute and total sense to me, and Eric and I, if we can help it, will return here one day and stay forever where Chelsea 2 makes journals she sells online and Larissa is getting her picture taken in a yellow raincoat underneath a streetlight and everybody can cook. Of course the show is in the living room and of course the bikes are in the garage and I will meet these girls and their friends and chase them through the bookstore. Eric and I will sit together in the back row of a class on poverty and if I miss a class to fool around in the top bunk of some girl’s bed in a dorm Eric will have the notes and we will spend the afternoon picking apart burritos. We’ll inherit this house and run a campus magazine out of it. Illustrated by Darren Bennett Written by Eric Lederer.

One day in the living room I get woken up by the drummer from Andre The Client talking on his cell phone to someone who I guess from his tone of voice is his girlfriend back home. The sliding glass patio door is a big square of light. I don’t see Eric anywhere. I get up and bum around the house looking for him. While stepping over sleeping band members I think that it has been the same day for Eric since he was born, the same day since we met, the same day since he and Christine got together, the same day since I called the guy who works for The Man or who The Man works for on him, and it will be the same day when this whole thing comes to an end, reaches whatever conclusion it’s going to. My phone vibrates in my pocket. I have a text from Eric reading DON’T WORRY. BAD DAY. GOING TO THE DESERT.

When he gets back I want to ask him if he can maybe see down the barrel of his one long day and tell me how this all works out. Not like I think he’s psychic, but for him it’s all one unbroken day, and while I couldn’t tell you what’s going to happen to me twenty years from now in a span of time all broken up by sleep, I could probably tell you, based on how my day is going, how my night’s going to be. And since for him it’s all one unbroken day I want to hear from him how he thinks it might end.

When I wake up from a nap that afternoon he’s there in the living room and everybody from the band is gone. I remember there was something I wanted to ask him this morning but I don’t remember what. On the coffee table, Eric has smoothed out the wrinkled picture of the Thragnacian Containment Pylon from my front yard. He’s staring at the picture until he notices I’m awake. He smiles and says, I guess about the drawing, “We did a really good job.”

I agree with him and before I can say anything else he’s gone to take a shower to wash the desert off.

Aside from all the living-room shows, there are real shows too. The actual shows at actual venues are not much different than the living-room shows, it’s the same kids and some of their friends, except now there’s a raised platform and sometimes amplified sound. And when there’s amplifiers there’s usually more dancing. These kids really like dancing, in this sort-of-ironic-but-not way which is the same way they talk, the same way they do everything, sincere like sincerity is new, as surprised as I am to find out that they really mean it.

I don’t dance. Eric I’ve never even seen in the same room as dancing, with the exception of the time we went to an arcade and tried Dance Dance Revolution and waited for each other to admit that we hated it and were exhausted so we could go play the zombie-killing games.

Even the real venues aren’t what you would consider big concert spaces. Mostly we end up at this art gallery place downtown that also has shows in the back. It’s called Circumference. And at Circumference on this particular night we’re watching The Achievables, who are from Olympia, Washington, but before that the opening act is up. They’re called Ten Who Dared, even though there are only eight of them. Eric has a good point when he says he could understand calling your band that if there were like, four or five of you, but eight is so close to ten all the irony is lost. This seems like a pretty good observation, and I’m repeating it to Chelsea 2, not necessarily giving Eric full credit, when she says, “Have you seen them?”

“No,” I say, “not yet,” because maybe that will make it seem like I’ve been meaning to see them, trying really hard to see them, it’s just circumstances that have stood in my way.

“They’re local,” she says, which, I have come to learn, is a good thing.

“Oh,” I say.

“Yeah, they’re really good,” she says. “You HAVE to dance.”

I am skeptical and sure that when they are done tuning up their instruments the six guys and two girls onstage will not be able to do what numerous DJs haven’t been able to make me do, which is dance. Well, okay, not numerous. That one DJ Mike at that one drama party that one time.