Bud Smith: F 250

“I mailed those demos out. Well, they’ve been calling. A woman. Cheryl.”

Ethan’s sister.

“Been twice now, dude,” Mike said. “I’ve been trying to get a hold of you. You gotta get a cell. It’s 2005, get with it.”

“Alright, alright. What do they want?”

“You gotta talk to them. I’m not sure, but they seem interested in Ottermeat.”

“Did you tell them the drummer’s dead?”

“Absolutely not,” he said. “I didn’t say a word about that.”

I paced around in the booth. The operator’s recording came on, “Please deposit seventy-five cents for each additional minute.” I scrambled in my pockets but didn’t have any change.

“Hey, give me that number!”

“What, the label?”

“The number that keeps calling you.”

“Oh, fuck. Hold on…”

There were shuffling papers. I waited for the line to go dead.

“Here you go, write this down…”

I wrote the phone number on my arm with a BIC pen. It was a Seattle area code … not that I knew that off the top of my head back then. Mike and I didn’t get a chance to say anything else to each other. The line went dead. The rain came down harder.

I didn’t wanna leave the phone booth. There were a million reasons not to leave it. The rain didn’t help things either. It kept coming down harder and harder. The wind sent it sideways.

I smiled like a madman, but my biggest fear was that I was too late. I’d call the label and they wouldn’t know who I was or what I wanted.

I opened up the door and ran out into the rain and down the street. I was parked two blocks away on a side street. I drove like a maniac through Providence, back towards the little ratty motel where I was staying in Warwick.

There, I got on the phone in my room and called the number in Seattle. A woman answered. After I explained who I was and why I was calling, she said, “I have no idea who you are.”

“Well, I have no idea who you are, either, so that makes two of us.”

“OK, I’m gonna hang up on you, now.”

I mentioned Ethan’s sister, their lawyer. That meant nothing to her. She said, “Yeah, I know our lawyer’s name too. I also know our janitor’s name … it’s Paul.”

“You were trying to get a hold of me,” I said.

“Me? I was trying to get you? No, you have the wrong person…”

“I’m looking for Cheryl!”

“Oh … shit.” I heard the girl yell for Cheryl. She came to the phone.

“Hey,” Cheryl said, out of breath. “Who’s this?”

I told her. She seemed excited to talk.

“I was trying to get in contact with you.”

“Yeah.”

She said she was impressed by the tape we’d sent. Not the one with Ethan, the weirder one. The one with all the noise.

“You play guitar?”

“That’s me.”

“Okay. Can you bring the band out here?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I certainly can.”

She gave me an address. “Come to that address and ask for me, alright?”

“Sure thing,” I said.

“Cool. I’m so glad that you’re interested. That makes my night.”

I put the phone down.

Holy fuck. Come out to Seattle and meet with a record label about a deal? That’s what was happening here? I couldn’t believe it. I sat there on the edge of the bed in the rotting motel room, looking at the wall and all of the brown spots from people that’d smoked in there for an eternity.

I didn’t have any money. Barely had enough to pay for the motel room itself.

The next morning, I stuck a For Sale sign on the back of the F-250. Within two days, I sold it to a guy who had a lawn cutting service. He was going to use the truck to haul around lawn mowers. Good for him. I took his cash to the airport, bought my plane ticket, and flew west with my guitar and my tube amp that was still dusty and full of concrete powder.

I’d lost contactwith everyone. They drifted in and out of my life. I blinked for a second, and those people were gone — replaced by new ones. I found myself in a new city, sitting out on a shaky fire escape and looking down on a new street — brick paved and frost-lined.

Fog in the mornings. Green plants hanging in all the windows. Pretty girls on bicycles with scarves flowing behind them as they rolled downhill. Some wave at you. Some don’t even notice. It’s hard to keep track of all the humanity and what it really means as it comes, as it leaves, as it settles in.

Seattle. I was there … again. I’d just come back from a three-week tour of the west coast. I was playing guitar in a band that the label hooked me up with. Things were good but not smooth. The guys in the band were cold, distant, strange. They played nervy new wave music and had a violin player. Not my first choice.

It was all because of Cheryl, the lady at the label. She felt bad for me, and how could you blame her? I showed up at her office with a backpack of clothes, a broken guitar, and a busted amp. When I broke the news to her that the drummer of the band she wanted to sign was dead, she just sat there with her mouth open.

“Like dead dead?”

“Built his tomb with my own hands.”

I sat down on the couch in the lobby. The bitchy receptionist I’d spoken to earlier brought me back a cup of coffee. The morning was slow and weird. I was jet-lagged. My broken hand was almost useable. I never had it looked at. I still could barely make a fist.

Cheryl took me out to brunch. I’d never been to brunch.

“It’s just what stupid white people call breakfast after 9 a.m.,” she said.

She bought me mimosas and bacon, eggs Florentine, fresh bread baked right there. I ate the garnish, not understanding. She ate it too so as to not make me feel bad.

“Tastes minty,” she said.

She probably just felt bad for me, but she said that she had some session work with a band if I was interested. I jumped on the opportunity. Their lead guitarist had wound up in rehab. Pills.

“Interested? Yeah.”

One thing led to another. Another session. Another session after that. Before long, I was living above a little coffee and donut shop, Top Pot, on Summit Ave.

I was hooked on Nick Drake, Pink Moon. I used to play it on a never ending loop. It’s hard for me to think about that time and that neighborhood without internalizing a Nick Drake song.

It was a cramped apartment, and I really didn’t have anybody. I used to go and sit down in Top Pot. I was lonely. I still carried around a photo booth snapshot from that night in Seaside when the Ferris wheel jammed and we played Mrs. Pac-Man and Frog Bog. June and K would forever sit there, in black and white, grinning like devils. The picture was right before we went to see Madame Woo-the Dead.

One afternoon, I took a black Sharpie and colored K Neon out of the photos. She disappeared into the black void of my forgotten pleasures; June Doom became brighter.

She hadn’t left my head at all really. That’s how it was. I thought about her too much. Where she was. What she was doing. I carried the snap shot around with me everywhere. And if I felt especially alone, I’d take it out. Then she was there. June … a whole row of her, grinning — each cell only slightly different than the one above it, and all of them with a blacked-out apparition.

Our nervy new wave band with the violin player started the tour at the Crocodile in Seattle. Shows followed at the Northern in Olympia, Washington. Then we slowly made our way south — the Doug Fir Lounge in Portland, the Chapel in San Francisco, the Fulton 55 in Fresno, the Constellation Room in Santa Ana, Muddy Waters in Santa Barbara, Echo and The Smell in Los Angeles — before finishing up at the Til-Two Club in San Diego.