Tino sat at a small table toward the side of the stage, his back against a pillar, and got up to hug his friend.
“Thanks for coming on a slow night,” Allen said. He and his band had just finished their first set at a honky-tonk-themed bar in downtown Fresno. “I can’t remember the last time I saw you.”
“Probably the show in Oakland last year.”
“Two years ago,” Allen corrected. “Lizzy hadn’t been born yet.”
Tino blinked, trying to grasp that it had been two years ago, not one. Allen’s daughter was named after his wife. They’d been together since their last year in college up in Chico, had a wedding on a farm they lived on, and carved up a burlap-sack pig that had been buried in the ground and cooked it for dinner. They both went on to earn even higher degrees and landed jobs at Fresno State. Tino, meanwhile, took an extra year to complete undergrad, and for the past five years he’d been bouncing between temporary admin jobs, his résumé a greatest hits of San Francisco’s financial district.
He went to shows, but he was no longer onstage like his friends were, no longer screaming his heart out through journal pages that became lyrics about fighting geographic isolation and jock mentalities and finding true freedom. He lived alone in a downtown Oakland studio apartment with a kitchenette and a small bathroom; a “house tour” could be framed in a single photograph. He missed the joy of playing music, something he’d had since childhood and that he’d assumed would grow alongside him into adulthood. He missed playing with Allen, Kris, and his other bandmates. He had come to watch Allen here in Fresno, and was on his way to visit Kris in Pomona, to feel seen by people who remembered him as a singer.
This story appears in Issue 35 of Alta Journal.
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Allen described the past year of his band’s biweekly residency, their evolution from a live country karaoke band to performing their own sets and taking fewer to no requests. He was up for tenure with the music department and had stopped playing basketball, worried he’d break his hands. He had been the only one in their high school band who could read tablatures and sheet music. He had smoothed out most of their imperfectly written songs and chord changes simply by playing in tune, proficiently. Kris, their lead songwriter, had always complained that Allen sounded “too stiff,” which Tino assumed was out of jealousy.
“You talk to Kris?”
“I was going to ask you,” Tino said, reaching for his pack of cigarettes. “I haven’t…well, graduation.”
“High school?”
Tino nodded.
“I was dating a friend of his girlfriend’s, briefly, right around the time I met Lizzy’s mom as a friend,” Allen said. Strange hearing “Lizzy’s mom” knowing she, too, was a Lizzy. Allen described what he’d heard about Kris: that he was a codependent serial monogamist; drank like a fish with a bottle on his nightstand, confirmed by several lovers; that he still played in bands that sometimes paid to play Hollywood clubs, hoping an A&R was there; that his day job was still in the receiving department of a big-box department store away from customers; that he brought a flask to work.
“When me and my ex broke up, I never heard from him again,” Allen said. He peeked at his watch, noticing his band members repopulating the stage.
“Thanks for catching me up,” Tino said. “It’s really fun to see you onstage again. I mean it.”
“Aw, thanks for coming. I wasn’t sure you’d show. So sorry I have to run after the set,” Allen said. A promoter had given the band a two-night gig at a resort in San Luis Obispo, with complimentary room and board. Lizzy and their daughter were already there, awaiting their troubadour. “We’ll hang next time you’re in town. Good luck with Kris.”
Allen still hugged the same, Tino thought: full embrace, no perfunctory handshake.
The busboy clearing glasses kindly offered to fetch Tino another beer. Kind enough or desperate enough to keep folks around for the second set. Tino didn’t care either way and handed him a fiver and said “No change” upon the pint’s arrival. He wished he could smoke inside, the unopened pack burning a test from inside his denim jacket’s interior pocket. Instead, he watched Allen return from the staff restroom behind the bar to the stage, inspecting the setup with the same silent paternalism as in high school. That was a little more than 10 years ago.
Tino and Allen had met in high school and were the only two kids from their class to travel north, away from the freeways of their childhood. For Tino, that meant the lecture halls of Berkeley, and for Allen, the greenery of Chico. But Tino had known Kris longer, from back in junior high. They were skateboarders, running into each other at local spots and skate-shop events. They talked about music, dubbed mixtapes for each other, and went to shows at the California, worshipping local and touring bands alike before deciding the summer after freshman year in high school to give it a shot. Kris wrote the music, and Tino wrote the lyrics and helped with song structure. Their band, Glass Houses, meant everything to them, two new directors of a world they defined, an outlet for whatever energy their skateboards couldn’t contain. Their band’s logo was a crude sketch of a cube with a triangle and squiggles out the top meant to represent a house on fire, with the all-caps words glass houses beneath. Before they’d even written a song, they made stickers and plastered their logo on every phone booth and news rack around town. They eventually assembled a quintet with Allen and two other classmates. Over the next three years, they recorded a five-song demo on a borrowed four-track, learned how to burn CDs, and sold their music during shows at coffee shops and veterans’ halls.
After graduation, with Tino’s and Allen’s collegiate departures on the horizon, the band stopped practicing. At first, they still went to shows together, but by August everyone went their separate ways, with Kris’s direction pointing toward a barstool.
Tino remembered how, while back home after his first year at UC Berkeley, he’d gone to a show at the California Theater, the hometown local. Kris was there. They spotted each other and Kris intentionally rammed into Tino, decking his chest with his shoulder. “Go back to your hella Ivy League school,” Kris blurted, drunk and smelling like an ashtray.
That was the last time they’d seen each other. And now, after tonight’s visit with Allen, Tino would be going to Kris’s show tomorrow night.
Tino assumed playing the California would be a victory lap for Kris and his band, a ticker-tape parade of friends and family and new fans ready to buy merch and cheer them on. Maybe they were even on the verge of breaking out. The best way to check in on Kris, Tino thought, was by going to his show and to pay admission, stick around, and bear witness to something larger than any one person onstage or in the crowd.
Tino sipped his beer and listened to Allen’s band’s second, mellower set.
The tule fog consumed the road ahead, brake lights playing peekaboo, hinting at a vehicle’s presence. It was nearly 9:30 a.m., and the fog still hung. With half of a tank, Tino didn’t stop until after Bakersfield for gas and coffee at the TA station. The restaurant portion (it had one) was already full with the second shift of morning truckers waiting out the traffic up on the Grapevine. Tino paid, sipped, and pumped, trying to remember which side of that mountainous crossing was initially steepest, requiring a swing of speed, momentum, and open road for his little two-seater Nissan truck to make it up there without overheating. Tino pulled back onto the paved, foggy interstate and strained to see the lane in front of him. Isn’t this how bands fail? he thought. Unable to see a road ahead? Neither he nor Allen had been able to, even if Kris had. Or was it just a matter of time? Were all high school bands—and all the feelings of hope they were built on—meant to end?
Tino wondered whether he should have called or texted Kris. But what would Tino say to him that coming to his gig couldn’t? Tino had resolved that showing up would be the method. It was how they’d met in the first place, as skaters.
A pair of 18-wheelers slowly on-ramped the climb to the Grapevine on the far right side with few other cars in sight. Tino turned off the heat and cracked the driver’s-side window after he passed the tractor trailers.
The burger spot on the north side of Pomona was packed when Tino arrived in the early afternoon. Locals like him knew that this was the place for the best breakfast burritos, served with the juiciest carne asada and free chips at any time of day. He picked up his food and looked for a seat. A viejito in a booth beckoned with an extended palm and said, “Siéntate.” Tino sat down across from the old man, who smiled and returned to his issue of La Opinión.
Tino devoured half his burrito before fishing a flyer out of the jacket pocket that also housed a still-unopened pack of Camel Lights. He stared at the creased paper: a showcase of 10 local bands starting at 3 p.m., Saturday and Sunday. Had the scene blown up to microfestival status? Was demand that high? Weekends at the California were usually reserved for touring bands; this local festival must be popular.
Tino glanced up at his boothmate, el viejo, whose granddaughter arrived with a kind smile and an outstretched hand herself. She guided the old man and his cane back toward her car, his newspaper tucked tightly beneath his armpit.
Tino pushed away his unfinished burrito.
Do you have a Saturday or Sunday ticket?”
“Neither,” Tino said. “Why?”
“Oh, you don’t—” the ticket taker sighed. “Tomorrow’s lineup is also tonight’s lineup. Both tickets work but only today.”
Tino paid cash, took his ticket.
“This is good for today,” the guy said, pointing to the date on the ticket as if to confirm his authority.
Everything began to feel off to Tino—the sound of the current band reverberating crisply in the empty air; the parking lot that should be full of folks pre-partying at the famously dry, all-ages venue; the tone of the impresario’s voice. Tino felt the void in himself swell as he stepped inside the California, this the first proper venue he and Allen and Kris, and half the crowd here this afternoon, probably ever called home. He crossed the deserted dance floor and approached the stage, which was tucked into a corner.
Tino couldn’t remember the 500-capacity space looking so desolate. The crowd was the size of what you’d find at a garage alley show. The audience hugged the stage, a nonexistent mosh pit behind them. A smattering of bored folks at concessions. Two bored cameramen behind their tripods on either side of the room. Even the band—all guitars aside from a singing drummer—seemed bored.
Tino spotted the rhythm guitar player, who was in a crouched position facing the drummer, jamming away carelessly. His guitar strap was a faded and tattered green strip of cloth, seemingly incapable of holding any weight. A collection of black shoelaces for bracelets covered his right wrist.
“That’s Kris,” he said aloud. It was weird seeing him no longer a frontman. He was in the background of the band, just a musician. The five-piece played solidly and hit their marks, but it seemed like they were going through the motions. No real movement, no real excitement, no playing to the crowd. Kris strummed long and bored, a silver streak in his black hair going past the top of his ear toward the back of his head, this lightning bolt of age somehow made more apparent by his obvious apathy. Wheeling, Pete Townshendesque strums were what Kris did in high school when he didn’t want to practice a song any longer.
A few more bursts of music and Kris’s band neared the end of its set. The four musicians faced each other and hammered out their final notes. Against the higher-pitched cry of the lead guitarist’s feedback, the drummer smashed his cymbals to end things and then stood up. He snapped the microphone off of its stand. “Thanks for sticking around in spite of these lame promoters charging $20 a head for shows they barely advertise, forcing us bands to sell tickets to shows canceled at the last minute. What the actual fuck, guys? We no longer trust Faith in Void Productions and neither should you. Two years and two fests in a row and they still fail. Thanks.”
Several in the crowd clapped above their heads while others yelled “Fuck you!” toward a balcony above the concessions. Most of the audience drifted outside to the street, a new ins-and-outs policy probably due to the lousy attendance.
Tino waited on the sidewalk near the ticket window for Kris’s band. The drummer came out first, followed by the others. Kris’s slinky, frail frame slouched and shuffled along like a depleted pup. Tino lifted his chin in an all-caps hello, even threw a half wave Kris’s way to get his attention.
Despite a hesitant glint of recognition, at no moment did Kris look at Tino. Instead, Kris continued talking with his girlfriend, a short woman with bangs who wore a tiny top and baggy jeans. After a couple beats, Tino walked over. Kris angled himself toward his girlfriend as if to shield her, mumbling something to her under his breath.
“Hi,” Tino said, pausing for Kris to turn and face him. “Congrats on playing here. Caught most of your set.”
“You’re…here,” Kris said, feigning surprise. “This is—”
“Sarah,” she said, her arms folded like a two-story middle finger.
“Pleasure.”
Kris began turning back toward Sarah, her presence an excuse to ignore Tino.
“I came down for the show,” Tino said to Kris, who quit turning and was half facing him at least.
“Yeah, I drove down from Oakland, stopped and watched Allen’s band play the Flamingo Club,” Tino said. “Spent the night at a motel in Fresno and came the rest of the way today.”
When that triggered no reaction, Tino looked at Sarah. “Kris, Allen, and I were all in a band together in high school. We were called Glass Houses.”
She nodded. Her chewing a mouthful of gum was her only other indication of a pulse. Kris had smirked at the sound of the band’s name, and let an uncomfortable silence build. He looked away from Tino, his eyes seeming to search for a reflection of something in the gloss of his polished Dr. Martens. These Docs had replaced the tattered Chuck Taylors he’d worn in high school.
Tino noticed that Kris appeared sober and, by his grin, that he seemed to be enjoying Tino’s discomfort, the terrible feeling of being ignored in public, in real time. Tino thought that each chunk of silence represented a year they were out of touch. But what would we have shared? he asked himself. High school was long ago, as was their band. College, jobs, real life—10 years had passed.
“Aright, well…” Kris said and wheeled away.
No hand raised for a handshake, or hug, or nice to see you or meet you. In the case of Sarah, just a slow, silent turn of dismissal. They left Tino alone on the sidewalk.
From outside, Tino heard the next band begin its set as he walked away from the California. Some kids were exiting a car near his truck. One wore a shirt with the Price Is Right logo photoshopped to read “Dave’s Games—Uptown.” It looked new enough to suggest that the local arcade, where he and Kris and Allen spent many nights, was still in operation.
Tito climbed into his pickup and finally opened the pack in his jacket pocket. He lit a Camel Light while rolling down the window and then drove off and adjusted the radio to the Uptown Community College Station, run by students and sympathetic faculty. The sound of a guitar melody looped against a robotic drum machine pattern with a soft voice singing through distortion pedals, lyrics about dreams and flight. Tino took the freeway and tried to make sense of it all. What’s the word for the very least a person can do for someone else, the bare minimum? he asked himself. Tino almost missed his exit deliberating an answer.
Dave’s Games was right next to Uptown High School. The original Dave had bought what was previously a Blockbuster Video to open the place; his initial games were purchased from foreclosed roller rinks and laser tag businesses. He then added the county fair’s massive pinball collection, which was donated to him by the casino owners who had bought up the fairgrounds and installed satellite horse wagering and slot machines. “A Taste of Vegas Without the Drive!” read the billboards.
Tino walked around the curved rows of video game consoles, finding his way to the billiards and air hockey tables near the vending and change machines. As he bought a can of soda, he heard cheers from the pocket of the arcade that used to house pay phone booths. The space now featured two miniature, illuminated dance floors that looked like bingo cards for a specific choreography—Dance Dance Revolution, or DDR, a game that had peaked a handful of years ago but, apparently, never died in Uptown. A girl and a boy were playing against each other.
There were two consoles; each had massive speakers above a screen pulsing louder and louder as each game progressed. The girl tried her best to sync her footwork on the blinking dance floor with the corresponding directions on the screen above. Bonus points for double-footed maneuvers performed at faster tempos, or for certain mini-sprints that garnered even more machine-judged points. Though she was having trouble, stumbling over her feet, her opponent, a short kid with bleached-blond spikes, was killing it. He wore massive baggy jeans and Adidas shell toes tied with two sets of thick red-and-white laces, flying in rhythm to the display and its announced instructions. The sound of his successful footwork was like a room full of people stamping their feet, so vigorously did this kid pound the manic steps of a technicolor dance champion. A small crowd watched him knowingly, a local hero performing for his flock.
The girl called it quits after just one round, and the dance star boy was now going to rock solo. Mr. Footloose had executed his turn so perfectly that his high score unlocked both dance pads, the swelling crowd murmuring as the two floors became one playing field, blinking patterns across both pads.
The next round started, the music began, and the arrows scrolled across the screen. The kid started off strong, moving fluidly across the pads while keeping his head up and shoulders toward the screen. The tempo increased, the instructional arrows forcing him to execute wicked combinations, like almost doing splits, stretching his legs and balancing on his toes on different points of the pads as if playing some demented game of Twister. He used every part of his feet—toes, heels, arches—to hit his marks. Faster and louder the music accelerated as some steps forced him to leap from the farthest side of one dance pad to the other, then to find middle points between and feverishly sprint in place, wowing the cheering crowd.
The song’s crescendo kept building, the arrows streaming seemingly indecipherable directions on both screens. The kid’s feet still pounded out the schizophrenic rhythms like a double bass drum pedal thundering through a heavy metal song, yet he seemed to sharpen his skills the faster his body was told to move. He read the screen so well that Tino could sense the kid almost predicting the next moves as the round progressed. At one point, everyone gasped when they watched the kid grab the waist-high U-shaped guardrails along the dance pads like an Olympic pommel horse, swinging his legs to the correct illuminated spots on the pads—on time and in style—a gymnast shocking the crowd with his wizardry.
Tino dropped his mostly empty ginger ale in astonishment. He felt like he was just now at the right concert, witnessing a new one-man band that he’d apparently driven across the state to see. This feeling, which he realized everyone else was also experiencing, was clearly tonight’s best show in town.
The dancing king took a deep breath, drank from a thermos, then wiped his sweaty forehead with his T-shirt. He began swaying from side to side as a torrent of arrows shot across the screens. A loud ding screamed out of the speakers and started the Grand Finale round, the crowd screaming “Come on!” and “You got this!” His first moves were flawless, jumping and double stomping across the pads, going corner to corner on some maneuvers, until suddenly his toes got caught along the panels, tripping him and causing a ribs-first fall into the guardrail. Everyone gasped a collective “No!”
The kid was shaken, but he pulled himself up straight. The crowd, and even the arcade attendant behind the counter, then delivered rousing applause as his girl opponent helped him off the dance floor and found him a bench near the billiards tables. The boy leaned his head against the wall and exhaled hard toward the ceiling. Soon, he stood up and stretched his arms slowly above his head, forming two goal posts that announced bruised, not broken, ribs.
Tino found himself in line for the bathroom and next to the girl dancer.
“He’s been dancing forever,” she said, without Tino saying a word. “But when the game came out?” She shook her head as if to say Forget about it. “He still goes to raves, too, but you know”—she paused—“more sober here than a warehouse party off the 60.”
She went inside the restroom and left Tino mulling the vulnerable thrills of performing a game of choreo-karaoke in public. Something told him that the girl was going to be a long while and that he should hold his pee and go outside to smoke.
The steel bike rack was the same from when he was a kid, back when Tino shunned cigarettes and alcohol, quoted the same hardcore band lyrics as Allen and Kris that proclaimed purity through abstention. He exhaled his cigarette smoke toward the parking lot and saw the dancing king, talking to three much taller, older men who had that familiar
manic look of tweakers.
The three were passing a folded brown paper bag between them like a game of hot potato with the dancing king’s lunch, or something valuable and rightfully his. The kid reached for it a few times in vain, the men laughing.
Tino walked over, cigarette in hand. “That was some nice moves in there,” he said.
For a moment, the three men stared at him with glowing headlights for eyes.
“Everything OK out here?” Tino asked.
They ignored him with a confident aloofness. “Psh, told you,” the guy in the middle said to the others. “First loans, then no paybacks, and now this? This is over.”
“Can’t trust a ballerina anyway,” another said, laughing to himself as the three of them were off, jogging back to a car idling along the side street.
The dancing king called back at them, telling them to wait, yelling how he didn’t know this strange dude who showed up out of nowhere, that this was all a mistake. Tino felt the return of the sinking ache he’d been hoping to leave behind.
The kid marched back toward him, furious.
“Sorry, I just thought—” Before Tino could finish, the kid’s shell toes clipped the side of his jawbone perfectly, an elevated, both-feet kick delivered just so.
“What the fuck were you thinking, man? You fucked up my deal!” He kicked the fallen Tino in the ribs three times.
The girl dancer came running out and pulled the dancing king away by the strings of his hoodie. “Get the fuck in the car,” she repeated multiple times, until Tino heard the driver and passenger doors slam and the sound of them speeding away.
Tino crawls from the parking lot to the curb, lies on his back once he finds the sidewalk. He stares at the dark sky and the lights of small planes flying to small airports nearby. Tasting blood from the cut inside of his mouth, he thinks of a time before he had his truck, back when he had a four-door Ford sedan, and he and Kris drove up to San Francisco to visit Tino’s cousin in college at State. On the way, his car broke down in Cherry Canyon near Pyramid Lake, before they got to the top of the Grapevine. Tino remembers how Kris knew just what to do, how he quickly moved into action, writing down the license plate of the Ford and the name of the last freeway exit, how he ran down Interstate 5 toward a blue-and-yellow box to call for help.•
José Vadi is the author of Inter State: Essays from California and Chipped: Writing from a Skateboarder’s Lens, from Soft Skull Press. He lives and writes in California.
