903 words down, 49,097 to go!
Guillermo has also joined the battle to write a novel in a month. As should you. You're not supposed to show anybody little bits and pieces of something big you're writing, I have heard the pros say, but fuck 'em. Motivation is going to be a huge part of this, and what motivates me is instant feedback from random dudes and girls on the internet. So here's Chapter 1 (after the jump)...
I’m not Randall Coats.
The girl giving me head in the downstairs bathroom at a house party in the suburbs doesn’t know that. She is kneeling on a vinyl copy of “The Moving Furniture In The Dark EP,” by Randall Coats, who I’m not, the jacket of which features the only known picture of Randall Coats, as an adult, anyway, his face turned towards the window next to the kitchen table he sits at, face all washed out by bad photography or an attempt to be artsy or both, wearing a shirt and tie, like the ones I’m wearing, and a hooded sweater, like the one I’m wearing, and a knit cap, like the one I was wearing but is now on the floor next to the record and the girl.
Her left knee is smudging where I signed the jacket. Randall is now looking at the window at a blue marker smear. Before that, he was looking at his own name. But he didn't write it. I did.
It was my first willful act as Randall Coats. Who, in case you hear otherwise, I’m not.
The Thursday Brigade. I used to sell merchandise for these guys. Jesse and Mark, the vocalist and drummer, respectively, I went to school with. I stood in the back of all kinds of shitty venues for these guys. I watched people actually leave bars because these guys started tuning up. On their way out into the cold, those people threw me you-should-be-ashamed-of-yourself glances, like I was watching my friends shoot up in a rusty bathtub. They were awful. And now look at them. Look at these haircuts.
These are things I think when I watch them take the stage at Stagnant, one of the two rock clubs in Tulsa. They haven’t signed to a major label yet but they’re being courted (“being courted” is not my choice of words, it’s in the e-mail Jesse sends me two weeks earlier when he tells me they’re coming to town) by Extra Medium Records, an indie label out of Portland. The band they’re opening for, Amory, just got a stellar write-up (again, Jesse e-mail language) on Thumbscrew Media, a music website that’s gospel for every kid who wishes he could walk out the front door of his suburban house and onto Avenue A. The place is packed. If I remember being seventeen correctly, all the kids who found out about Amory on Monday are scoffing at the Wednesday bandwagoneers. A cute girl walks by wearing a T-shirt with iron-on letters reading TULSA IS TERRIBLE! I agree.
The band comes on to a chorus of digital-camera flashes and camera-phone clicks. A lot of these pictures will show up on teenage girl’s online diaries later tonight, under the words THESE GUYS SUCKED. Or Thursday Brigade! Cute! No one in Brooklyn thought they were all that cute. I am wondering who got them matching black skinny ties, and come to the conclusion that it was probably them.
It says something about my new life that when they play the first few bars of “Shannon,” the opener that used to send eyes rolling and exit doors swinging and my hand for the flask I kept in my pocket to get me through these never-ending gigs, I get homesick. I start wading through the crowd towards the stage. I haven’t been to a single concert since I’ve moved here. Finally have the means to go see a show a night and nobody but nobody plays here.
The crowd is squarely divided between kids who are making a statement by dancing and kids who are making a statement by standing.
At the end of the third song, which is new and halfway decent, Jesse spots me.
“Boys and girls,” he says, “we are very lucky to be joined tonight by, uh…someone I’m sure you all know, and if you don’t know, you need to get to know…someone you wouldn’t expect to see at a concert in your fine city, or even out in public, anywhere. Somebody who probably doesn’t want me to point him out, but I think he deserves your thanks and acclaim.”
I don’t get it. I’m about to crack a smile and shout “Less talk, more rock!” which back in the day I shouted many times and they never, ever took to heart.
“Randall Coats,” Jesse says, looking right at my where I’m standing now with my elbows on the stage, “I had no idea you were a fan.”
I look down at what I’m wearing. I have the EP at home. I get the joke.
“I’m not,” I say.
Mark counts off the next song. It’s hard to pay attention. There seems to be a lot of finger-pointing going on. The cameras are flashing again, and this time, if I’m not mistaken, at me.
Jesse and I did a video project our senior year of college where we pretended to be protestors advocating the United States’ immediate withdrawl from Iowa. (US OUT OF IOWA NOW! was the name of my thesis film.) We discovered something on the streets: people think that when they ask you if you’re kidding, you say “no,” there’s no way you’re kidding. There’s a lot of talk about the death of trust in our society, but more often than not, if you look somebody in the eye and don’t crack a smile, they will believe whatever you say.
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