Сара Пинскер - A Song for a New Day

The whiteboard was impermanent, and some of the changes were clearly not going away. Plus, there were too many of them. They snowballed. We traded the dry-erase for permanent markers and expanded off the board and onto the kitchen wall, moving from generalities to specifics, good and bad. Pride parades, school assemblies, outdoor movies, outdoor concerts, baseball games, crowded trains, roller derby bouts, grocery store crowds before a snowstorm, and how the shelves emptied of bread and milk and bottled water and toilet paper. The “list” spread out of the kitchen and onto the dining room wall, black and blue and green and red against eggshell. We brought in a ladder.

With more room, it expanded into anecdotes, paragraphs, whole stories. Write it all down, we thought, so it would still exist somewhere. I found it safer to share there than to utter any of it out loud.

My first contributions were personal but distanced. We used to play this room that had been a strip club in its previous life, the Wrecking Bar. Every surface was mirrored, and the bands played around the poles, and the stage extended out onto the bar, which worked better for a strip club than a music venue, but made for some interesting and unsanitary shows.

I remember watching Patti Smith ride a bucking Stratocaster to a standstill, then rip the strings off one by one until she had nothing left to play.

The Patti Smith show had destroyed me in all the best ways, but I couldn’t explain. I tried again, another day. I remember Young Sport’s set at Bumbershoot. I saw them a few other times as well, unmemorable shows, but for some reason that performance in Seattle was transcendent: the band was so present they moved a seated audience of thousands to dance in the aisles. Will we have festivals again? I miss joy sweeping through a crowd. The good contagion.

I used to sneak into clubs without paying cover or showing ID by carrying my guitar in behind a band loading in. Some of them took pity on me and shared their fries and drinks. That was personal; so many kindnesses I’d never forget.

And finally, the most personal of all, though I wasn’t ready to expand on it: I wrote on another wall once, on the hardest night. I don’t know if anyone ever noticed.

Jaspreet photographed the whole thing and created an interactive online exhibit. She encouraged others to add to it, in comments or photos, which they did, by the thousands. We all felt our world slipping away, in cascades and cataracts, the promises of temporary change becoming less and less temporary. Didn’t we feel so much safer? Weren’t safe and healthy worth more to us than large weddings and overcrowded schools? Hadn’t the pox been spread by people working and attending school when they should have stayed home? Never mind that they didn’t stay home because they couldn’t afford to. The talking heads were in agreement that necessity would fuel innovation. Good things were coming fast, they promised; I stopped watching the news.

My money was running out equally fast. The royalty checks still came, but they got smaller and smaller. My roommate Lexa, a nurse, suggested I look into getting certified as a nursing assistant, and it seemed as good an idea as any. I started taking online courses. It made sense on several levels, beyond just making sure I had cash coming in. As Lexa pointed out, no matter what happened, we’d still need medical professionals. I hadn’t saved April, but maybe I could do some good for other people.

I threw myself into the nursing gig. If music wasn’t going to be my thing anymore, I had to have a different thing. My world turned gray and quiet. Even when the roommates had parties (small parties, nothing to scare the neighbors into calling the police), I stayed upstairs or scheduled shifts to coincide. Better to leave it all behind completely. People, parties, fun. When I played music for myself, all I could manage was deep noise, mournful chords, janky tone. Every wanting sound.

I wasn’t keeping track of time, so when Nora Bowles from Superwally’s Tuning Fork ezine contacted me, I had no idea why she’d sought me out. She offered me six different platforms to talk, including one of those new Hoodie things some of my patients wore to distance themselves from their current reality, before I gave up and agreed to a phone call.

“You’re hard to get hold of,” she said without preamble. “Your old label didn’t have any contact info for you.”

I still had the same phone number and email; I’d told them not to pass my info along to anybody.

She continued. “I finally got your phone number from your old guitarist. He said to say hi.”

Good old Hewitt. I’d never talked to him again, but he’d been a nice guy, when he wasn’t drunk or stupid.

“Why are you calling?” I could tell she wanted me to ask.

“Well, as you know, we’re coming up on the third anniversary of the Stadium Tragedy, and I pitched a story to my editors about finding the last musicians to play big live shows, and, well, as far as I can tell, you were the only one who actually played that night.”

I didn’t think that was true. She meant the only one who played a venue big enough to count by Superwally standards, and probably the smallest one of those. Surely there were others in living rooms and tiny clubs who’d had the same instinct as I’d had that night to push back against despair. Before I’d realized it was pointless. That I could make all the noise I wanted, and nobody would hear it anymore.

“Cool,” I said.

“So are you still playing?”

“For myself. Sometimes.”

“Writing new songs?”

“Yeah,” I lied.

“I’d love to hear them sometime. I really liked ‘Blood and Diamonds.’ You should get with StageHolo to do a show sometime.”

I remembered the name, but I hadn’t kept up with any of the new platforms, so I made a sound of noncommittal agreement instead. We chatted a little longer, and hung up.

A week later, I heard a low whistle from one of my roommates, then a door creaked open.

“Luce!” yelled Lexa. “You’re famous again!”

The article blew up. Tuning Fork had sold it to the other news outlets. The title was “The Last Power Chord,” and we were indeed the only band of any renown that had played that night, according to Nora Bowles’s research. The article linked readers to Superwally to buy the song, and the article went viral. I watched the song and the album climb their rankings. A couple of TV shows paid me to use it, then a movie. I even heard it playing in a car once as I biked to work. And still, I didn’t realize the extent of its reach until I was bathing a patient and she reached over and touched my name tag. “Luce,” she said. “Like the singer.”

“Kinda,” I said.

Leaving the highway for the county road, watching the county road roll into Jory’s Main Street, Rosemary was struck by the emptiness. She’d never noticed before, or else she’d assumed the mix of dead businesses and thriving ones was normal. Now that she was supposed to seek out secret places, she had no idea where to find them. Were they hiding in the back rooms of the open stores or the boarded-up ones? Were there dance parties in the old high school gym? Rap battles on the playground after dark? She still couldn’t figure out how to find what she’d been sent to look for.

Her mother was waiting for her in an isolation booth at Micky’s. She unlocked the door and grabbed the handle of the rolling bag, squeezing Rosemary’s hand for a moment before pulling the bag onto the seat beside her. Rosemary took the opposite bench. They both ordered the macaroni and cheese without even bothering to scroll through the menu screens, and she paid for both her own and her mother’s meal, with a smile into the camera; it was nice to feel known.