Bud Smith - F 250

I wondered if she was naked for a split second and then felt stupid: of course she was.

She flipped her phone open and looked at the screen, deeply concerned, as she sucked on her lower lip. Seth walked into the living room in his boxer shorts and a wife beater. I wanted to tell the both of them to put on some goddamn clothes.

“What’s up?” Seth asked groggily.

“He keeps calling,” she said, pointing at her phone.

Seth’s eyebrows raised. He motioned for Trish to hand him a PBR. Feral was looking at Denise’s tan thighs. I was too.

“What am I supposed…” The phone started to buzz and ring in Denise’s hand. She panicked and hit the red button. The phone went straight to voicemail.

“Well, gig’s up,” Feral said. “Now he knows straight-up that you’re ignoring his calls.”

“It is what it is,” Denise said. She plopped herself down on the couch next to me and looked back and forth between everybody. “Come on, shit happens.”

Feral said, “Amen.”

We put the TV on. Trish and Denise were going through cardboard boxes trying to dig up the VHS for Overboard with Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell because they both just decided that it had to be watched. Our lives depended on it. Seth got up and walked down the hallway to help, crouching down next to Denise, rubbing her shoulders.

The wind picked up even more and the lightning set in. Thunder followed horribly. The lights flickered, went off. “Welcome to the haunted bungalow of doom.”

“Spooky now,” Feral said. “Beware the wolf man, little girls.” He started howling.

I dug up some candles and lit them in a circle as if we were about to sacrifice a virgin. I was out in the kitchen looking for matches in the drawer when the house phone started to quack.

It was Ethan.

Feral answered in the living room, on the second phone. (the Sports Illustrated football), “Yeah … yeah, Ethel. Whatever. Yeah, we’re here.” Then he hung up the phone.

My heart fell into my stomach.

“Why’d you tell him that,” I said, walking out to the candlelit altar.

Feral just looked at me dumbly. I wasn’t aware of just how obliterated he was. That was the thing with Feral. He was often stealth-wrecked. You never could tell till it was too late.

Seth and Trish and Denise came back in holding Overboard. “I think it’s a little melted from the great fire of 1997.”

“He’s coming over here,” I said.

“No! Fuck!”

Everybody looked like they’d just seen a ghost and weren’t sure how to react. Any second, Ethel was gonna show up in his white BMW and he was gonna find naked Denise in Seth’s Rush 2112 t-shirt and he was gonna lose his shit. He was going to kick us out of the band, and that would be that. We were in the middle of recording an album to pitch to a label in Seattle.

Denise ran back into Seth’s room, gathered her things, which were really just her soaking wet, pink dress and her flip-flops. She stood in the hallway, looking frightened.

“Hide me!” she said.

“Hide you?” Trish said. “Damn.”

Feral got up and pulled the cord for the attic. “Get up there.”

“No,” Denise shouted; lightning struck again. “I’m not going up there alone.”

Trish grabbed an armful of PBRs and said, “Come on, darling, I’ll hide out with you.”

No sooner did they get up in the attic and we shut the door behind them, Ethan’s headlights appeared in the rain-soaked windows. He parked behind my F-250 and came to the door.

“Holy shit.”

The three of us ran to the living room and sat down, all nonchalant, in front of the candles. Ethan pounded on the door. Rattled the whole house.

“COME IN! UNLESS YER THE POLICE,” Feral hollered.

Ethan stormed into the living room. His eyes were adjusting slowly to our new light. He saw it was just the three of us.

“What’s up,” I said flatly. “You look all twisted up.”

“Was just looking for Denise. Thought she might be here.”

“Nah,” Seth said. “She alright?”

“Yeah, she’s fine,” Ethan said. “She keeps trying to get a hold of me today and I keep missing her. She’s driving me nuts.”

We invited him to sit down and have a beer, pointing out that we had a lot of them. He was weird and evasive and said that he couldn’t hang around. He had to get rolling along. Feral, laying it on thick, said, “Have a beer with us, you pussy.”

“Dude, I’m cool.” Ethan said, “I’m not gonna drink and drive.”

“Oh true,” Seth laughed.

Ethel spun around on the heels of his motorcycle boots, slipped out the front door. As he pulled away, the lights came back on, and my first vision was Denise’s highlighter-yellow purse sitting on the kitchen table. Her romance novel sat there too. Ethan wouldn’t have missed that, no sir.

“Is it safe to come down?” Denise called from above.

I got up and pulled the cord, unrolled the attic stairs, and took her hand as she carefully descended the stairs.

“Safe as it can be,” I said.

It was late. Seth clicked around aimlessly on the computer.He was trying to mix the drum tracks — digital colored blocks: orange, purple, blue, green — as they flickered on a white screen. Our eyeballs were burnt out.

It was tedious work. He’d adjust something, a knob or a fader, hit play, and thirty seconds of noise would explode into the small room. He’d slam the space bar to stop everything, shake his head. Seth wasn’t so sure of what he was doing, became more annoyed as the nights in front of the studio computer labored on. I was no help.

We were at Mike’s studio in the basement of his house on Noon Ave. Gear, rack upon rack of it, surrounded us. Who knew what any of it did? Black egg crate foam insulation covered every square inch of the walls and ceiling. Dust burned up on hot surfaces; the place smelled like an electrical fire. Seth sat before a massive 32-track mixing board, which loomed like an altar with tubes glowing orange, humming, fans spinning on and off to cool components, red and white lights strobing, in sync with … something.

Other objects cluttered up the place, adding to our already heightened hysteria: a heavy console as big as a pinball machine with two-inch magnetic tape, a tangle of black cords with red jackets running out in every direction connecting into compressors and reverb units, and god knows what all these square analog units, with their bazillion knobs and switches did. I felt like I was inside a Sherman tank and about to be killed by my own senses.

I sat on a pink love seat with tropical flowers underneath one window, and Mike was stretched out on the other sofa, with his Gilligan hat covering his eyes, his bearded face, his gaping mouth. He’d begun to snore around 9 p.m. It was funny then. By ten, it irritated us both.

Seth spun around in the computer chair.

“We gotta wake him. I’m lost. I can’t figure out what’s going wrong.”

I shook my head. As much as I wanted to wake the guy up, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. He was working a day job at the rail yard; he got up at 4 a.m. and drove an hour to work, worked a ten-hour shift, and then, when he got home, had to deal with punks like us who thought their album was more important than anything else in the world.

“Nahh, maybe that’s it for tonight, ya know?”

He didn’t want to hear that. Our project was almost done, and we’d worked so hard on it.

I mean, first you write the songs in your bedroom or wherever, and then you show them to a close friend. They say cool, so you start jamming in a cold garage — your fingers freezing while crowded around a kerosene heater and hating life. You rehearse for months like that. Then you find a bass player. The bass player knows a singer. Now you’ve got a band. You show the singer the songs, and he says, “That totally sucks, I can’t sing over that.” Back to square one. New songs come, they’re dumbed down. A different style. Lyrics get slapped on top of them haphazardly. The singer wants to call the band The Bedspins.