SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

Anyway. She was letting me have it, I was pretty much letting it slide right over me, and the cloak Song was still playing nice and smooth. Pretty standard Saturday, and if it’d stayed that way I wouldn’t be telling you any of this now.

That’s about when I saw this kid sitting on a pink grandma blanket at 7th and B, right outside Tompkins Square Park and maybe an hour or two out from emptying some poor yuppie’s apartment. You know the type—white-boy dreads, shirt for a band that broke up before his ass was even born, probably hasn’t showered in a year, and by the look of him I figured he’d either gone off his meds or got stoned out of his mind or both. He’s cross-legged in the middle of the usual crap—a coffee maker, sweaters, an iron, couple pairs of sneakers, whatever he’d been able to cram into his backpack and couldn’t swap for cash at a pawn shop. He looked maybe fifteen, and I was thinking he’s probably some kid from Long Island whose parents finally kicked him out for being a little shit.

On a normal day, I might’ve called him in and given a description, just in case the cops took a break from hassling brown folks to do their fucking jobs. But Lucille was nag-nattering on about sheet music and church was still a couple more avenues away, and I am telling you now, I swear I was gonna keep walking.

But then I spotted those fucking tapes on the blanket and I just could not help myself.

So I guess now’s the time for the urban Musician everyday-carry rundown, huh? We’re getting that out of the way?

Okay, look. I’ll make due with whatever Type One TDKs I can find for cheap on eBay in a pinch, you know, for ticky-tack household stuff. I’ve left a pest-control loop playing overnight on cheap tapes and it’s worked well enough. But for my cloak Song? Type Two BASF ferrochromes, from before they moved production to Korea when I can find them. AC biasing is fine, but no Dolby noise reduction, I don’t care if you think I’m crazy, the preemphasis weakens the range of the spell, everyone knows it, sometimes we’re snobs for a reason. I think I’ve laid down maybe ten, twelve different ward Songs on quarter-inch ATR master tape, you know, different variations for different seasons, a couple specialty tracks for when I’m gonna fly somewhere, all pretty standard stuff. Dub off a new copy whenever a cassette wears out.

So it’s not like I’m tearing through tapes but shit , they don’t make the Chrome Maximas anymore and this kid was selling brand new unopened tapes with the early nineties formulation and I’m not one of those superstitious audiophile assholes but like I keep saying, I’m not an idiot, either, and those tapes are amazing .

Of course there weren’t price tags on anything in this kid’s sidewalk felony sale, so I had to ask how much he wanted for the tapes. And he must’ve seen a hint of "oh fuck must have these" on my face, because he got this kind of desperate, hungry look and tells me they’re ten bucks each.

I just about kicked him in the head right then because seriously, he’s selling this shit off a blanket in the East Village, I should’ve been able to hand him a five and walk off with the tapes and a couple of Cosby sweaters, right?

I’m pretty far into the red on my dick-around-time at this point, and Lucille’s all like, “Lord, Cheryl, are you shopping ?” and my '83 Walkman-DD’s still cranking through cloak Song smooth as you please, so I yank out the other ear bud, cold drop Lucille in my purse and I tell this kid I don’t care if he built a time machine and brought these fuckers straight here from nineteen ninety-four, it’s twenty for all of them or nothing and he’s lucky I’m still standing there.

And that’s how I ended up haggling over tapes while my batteries ran out and my Song stuttered and stopped.

So look, I don’t know about your grandma, but mine loves to gripe about the old days, back when we had to keep a choir going up on the wall every damn second no matter the time and whatever the weather. Back when you’d either be stuck at home with the same jokers you’ve known since you were born, or out with the Tonedeaf Singing under your breath like a crazy person and hoping no one called the cops on you.

Hell, even if they did, you’d damn well keep Singing in jail, too. Keep that shit going every second, every day, or the Noise is gonna find your ass. And then your family gets to decide how long they’re gonna keep feeding what’s left over.

Kinda garbage situation, really, but that’s just how things are for the Musical, right? Even nowadays everything we do is all tangled up in the Noise. A whole auditory ecosystem of aging analog equipment and chrome tape hoards, all of it so we can snug up in our safe little Song blankets and hope the Noise doesn’t notice us. And normally it doesn’t. That’s civilization for you, right? That’s progress.

But it sure as shit noticed me that Saturday.

It came screaming down St. Marks like an angry cloud of every sound that sets your teeth on edge, the frothy boiling mess of it poured between the buildings in a raucous slop of toothpaste foam. It sloshed neck-deep around the normal folk out doing their weekend brunch crawl, and fuck is that creepy to see, their little heads sticking up above the mess, their sunny faces grinning through a sudsy swarm of murderous intentions.

Lucky them the Noise doesn’t give a shit about the Tonedeaf. But ooooh yes it cares about the Musical; cares about chewing you up and swallowing down your Songs forever.

By now that milkshake churn of soul-munching trash is about half a block away, I’m in heels and not really much up for running on a good day, and even if I could swap in new batteries and get the tape running again it’s a little late to keep the Noise from finding me, isn’t it? So I hunkered right down, back up against the kid’s ripoff miniature flea market, and belted out the first defensive bass line that came to mind, one of the catchier ones Mom taught me before she’d let me walk home from school on my own. I got the last measure out just in time to snap a wall up over my head, and the Noise pancaked about ten feet off the ground, a kind of shaving cream slop that poured down the arc of my hasty Tone wall and snarled like glass in a garbage disposal.

And look, I’m real good. There’s a reason Lucille puts up with my crap, and there’s a reason it took my old choir in Philly so long to kick me out, even with all the drama I pulled. I’m a stone cold diva badass and I can hold back a yowling tsunami of whipped death all on my own, please and thanks.

But you know, like…actually canceling it out? That’s something else. And there’s only so long I can get away with battle-serenading on the sidewalk. The Tonedeaf can’t really hear the Noise, but they can sure hear you just fine, hollering at an empty sky like a lunatic.

If I’d had a chance to really stop and think about it, I would’ve slammed my phone against my fool head and told Lucille to come bail me out. She was a couple blocks away, she had a whole choir with her, they could’ve saved my ass without breaking a sweat and Lucille would’ve loved every second of told-you-so superiority over my irresponsible behind.

But I wasn’t exactly in the pocket, logic-wise, at that particular moment. And let’s be honest, I’m not a huge fan of told-you-sos from folks in general and Lucille most especially in particular.

Sunlight shines right through Noise—it’s all part of the weird there-not-thereness of Auditory creatures—so I could see the kid’s face just fine when I turned back around. And I was like, "Hey, jackass. You sing at all?" I mean hell, he liked music enough to know the shit on his blanket was worth stealing, I figured he should make himself useful.