EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT: Loud Is How I Love You

Excerpt

Chapter One

March 1995

Don’t f*ck anyone in the band.

This is rule number one of being in a band, and it’s especially true when you’re the only girl. Which means whatever I’m doing with my guitar player’s face between my legs goes from Oh God, oh yes, oh please at five a.m. to Oh no, oh shit when I wake up at noon.

I don’t know how I ended up in this position, but I do know I can’t stop thinking about his tongue all over me, his hands with those long and dexterous fingers digging into my thighs when I come, the way he looks like he’s going to devour me when he’s deep inside of me. I know I’m still thinking about it, eight hours later, four hours after he kissed me on the forehead and left, saying, “Sorry—don’t wake up—I have to take the van in before nine. Call me when you get up and I’ll take you to breakfast.”

What I also know is that it can’t happen again. That’s what I’m going to tell him when he gets here.

“I’ll get you in an hour,” Travis said when I called him, his voice still rough from screaming into the microphone during “Fake Tan” at our show at the Dead End last night.

“No, I’ll meet you at Neubies.”

Long, awkward pause.

“See you there at one, then.”

See? Weirdness. Exactly why you don’t f*ck your own guitarist.

Sex always complicates things, and being in a band is already plenty complicated with feelings and egos and band girlfriends and boyfriends who bitch about all the time you’re spending in rehearsal and the fact that shows always trump all other weekend plans. It’s much easier to hook up and move on, which is something you can’t do if you hook up with someone in your own band.

Once that happens, you risk turning from a functioning creative unit into a soap opera, and as much as people will talk about you, and they may even like some of your songs, they’ll remember the soap opera, not the music. They’ll show up to your gigs to see you self-destruct like so many other bands do. Punk rock may or may not be dead—we can argue that over drinks at the Court Tavern on Friday night—but the truth is club owners don’t want a shit show unless it’s called Nirvana—and we know how that worked out. If you’re not them, they expect you to show up on time for soundcheck, play hard, and bring a crowd.

Start f*cking your bandmates, and showing up on time for soundcheck is the least of your problems.

I front Stars on the Floor. Locally our nickname is “Soft” because when Billy Broadband, the WRSU DJ (that’s Rutgers college radio, folks), was trying to say “SotF” on air it sounded like “Soft,” and whatever. Close enough. One thing Soft is known for is having its shit together. We’re also a good band, if you like our moody, dark, loud, guitar-driven brand of angst. We pack the local clubs on the weekends, we play Manhattan and Philadelphia on a regular basis, and we play our fair share of out-of-town shows, too. But there are plenty of bands around here doing as well as we are right now. We’re a regular headline at the Court Tavern because we’re not f*ckups.

I may only be twenty-one, but that matters to me. There are exactly three female-fronted acts in this town right now out of three dozen bands who compete for headliner spots, and one thing you have to be when you’re a woman fighting for the headliner spot is not a f*ckup. And I’m not. Or I wasn’t, anyway. Now that I’ve gone and done it with my own guitarist, I’m not even sure.

Of all the guys in this town I could potentially f*ck, why do I pick Bean? (By the way, I am the only person on this earth allowed to call Travis that, and it’s after the Travis Bean guitar, which he doesn’t play because, hello, they’re rare and like two grand and he’s not made of money.) I don’t even know. I really shouldn’t have done it, because he’s my number one collaborator, my coconspirator, and one of my best friends, and I’m so worried that f*cking him is going to ruin everything we have between us.

I can understand how it happened, of course. First of all, he’s adorable—lean but not wispy, and he’s got excellent guitar-playing, amp-hauling arms that look spectacular in a black T-shirt. He’s tall and he’s paler than a Norwegian’s ass in winter, but I like that basement-dwelling vibe he’s got going on. He’s always wearing the same pair of untied Timberlands (a token of his Nebraska homeland) with his jeans sort of not fitting over the boots, sort of not tucked in, either. His hair is dirty blond and always in need of a cut, even right after he gets it cut, but it’s thick and wavy and falls into his eyes when he’s playing, and you have to wonder if he even sees all those girls who fantasize about trading places with his guitar when he’s running those skilled hands all over that Les Paul on stage. But he never misses a note.

I’d have to say of all the things there are to dig about Travis, his guitar playing is what did it for me. That’s why the beat brothers (that’s our drummer Joey and bassist Cole, who are not brothers but might as well be) and I picked him out of the seven guys we auditioned. He’s got a style all his own. Every review we ever get mentions his shredding, his insane use of the screeching end of the Marshall half stack. Honestly? He is so good I didn’t even want to audition him because I knew he’d be the one we picked and I knew sooner or later I was going to have an issue keeping my hands off him. Because Travis is very much my type: smart and confident, but not an egomaniac. He’s quiet in big groups and thoughtful in rehearsal, but one-to-one he loves to talk about things you had no idea he even knew about. Bird-watching. Vintage Land Rovers. Science fiction. And also music, of course. Any and all things related to music.

Damn. Well, anyway, we can’t f*ck again. We are literally just one sold-out night at the Melody away from an opening spot for Ween at Rutgers’s Ag Field Day and we can’t fall apart now.

I’m sure Travis will agree with me.

I wait for my table at Neubies in my vintage black cardigan and Butthole Surfers T-shirt, twisting my hair nervously into a golden snake. I look at my watch again and it’s 1:18 and Travis is late. Travis is never late. See? Weirdness!

“Do you want your regular table?” Sonia, my housemate and the waitress at Neubies, asks.

I nod and she leads me through the narrow dining room to our table in the back by the kitchen and pours me coffee and brings me extra creamers. I dump six sugar packets (yeah, six) into it and stir nervously. I have no idea what I’m going to say to Travis when he shows up. Something stupid, probably. But I have to do what I can to salvage what I can here. Travis is the best guitarist in town, and if Soft loses him over something as dumb as f*cking, I am going to hate myself forever.

But now as I’m remembering the actual sex part, I can’t help feeling like it was a pretty wonderful mistake in terms of straight-up life experience.

We were so psyched last night after the house show. We always get a high off of a good show. We dropped Joey and Cole off at their place and unloaded all the gear in their basement. After, Travis drove me home and we sat in my driveway talking about the drunk guy who barfed all over the kitchen while we were loading out, and whether the chorus we just wrote sounds too much like a Pavement song, and should we mess around with it? We talk about how Carl, the sound guy, must have messed with the band before us by dropping the mids, and did he do that on purpose so we’d sound better by comparison? He always says I’m his favorite. Travis rolled his eyes when he teased me about it.

Travis said he had to pee, so we went inside. It was four a.m. and Sonia and Jeff (my other housemate) were asleep, so we quietly crept up the stairs. When Travis came out of the bathroom I told him to come into my room for a minute. I was standing at my desk, rifling through a box of vinyl forty-fives, looking for the Pavement “Trigger Cut” seven-inch, when I felt him standing right behind me. I mean, right behind me, looking over my shoulder. Then I felt his fingers brush the back of my neck as he swept my hair off to the side, and I swear, I forgot what the hell I was talking about. Right in midsentence. He didn’t do anything else for a few seconds, and then he just sort of rested his lips against the back of my neck and wrapped his arms around my waist, and I started breathing like I had just carried my Fender Twin (that’s my guitar amplifier) up three flights of stairs. I had to grip the edge of the desk just to stay standing. It was four a.m. and suddenly I wasn’t the least bit tired. Everything was awake. My jittery hands. My wobbling knees. The solid, building ache deep in my belly.

“Is it okay?” he whispered into my neck, a warm tickle.

“Is what okay?” I sounded like a girl about to drown in a pool of sex hormones. And I was.

He didn’t answer me. He couldn’t because he was too busy kissing my neck, and I have never wanted anyone more than I wanted Travis when I felt his lips moving along the curve of my neck, over to my shoulder, bare where he pulled my T-shirt out of his way. I felt the edge of his teeth on my skin and prepared to die happy as he dragged them lightly back up my neck and grazed along the outer edge of my ear. I think I may have actually whimpered when he whispered again, “Emmy, say it’s okay.”

I couldn’t even answer him because that part of my brain that makes words went offline and the part of my brain that makes babies took over. I just turned around, covered his mouth with mine and kissed him. Hard. As I imagine it now, I can still taste his kiss like candy on my tongue and I can still feel my hands all through that head of overgrown boy hair of his. He ran his hands over my ass and lifted me up onto the desk. The box of singles crashed to the floor and spilled everywhere and you know I had to be high on impending sex because I didn’t even care. He stood between my legs and I wanted to feel him right there, oh God, I wanted to feel him so much I almost ripped his pants open.

“Sorry I’m late.”

I look up and I have to be ghost-faced I’m so mortified that I’m reliving, in as much detail as I can, the moment right before Travis takes me to the bed and now here he is, wet hair and open leather jacket and Timberlands. Smiling. And he doesn’t look worried at all.

“No problem,” I say. “I was just having coffee.”

He pulls the chair out and waves to Sonia. She brings him a cup and then looks at us, suspicion in her eyes.

“What?” I ask her.

“You look different,” she teases me, holding her hands up like she’s a director framing a shot. “Sorta guilty. Who’d you nail last night?”

Travis bites his lip to keep himself from laughing as my face goes from white to crimson.

“Classy.” I can feel my lip curling in aggravation. “Maybe I just reeaaallly enjoyed that coffee.”

Sonia laughs and walks back into the kitchen and now I am left all alone with Travis, who is downing black coffee while he reads the breakfast menu, like this is some perfectly normal, okay, typical kind of morning, except he and I both know he’s ordering a feta omelet, because that’s what he always orders. And it’s afternoon.

“Do you want to flyer for the Melody show after this?” he asks, looking up. “I brought the stack and the staple gun.”

“I have to go to Flemington for dinner with Mom. And I should probably think about finishing up that poetry paper tonight. Grab the beat brothers. They’ll go.”

He nods and looks down at the menu again and I think, That’s it? How the hell are you acting so normal when I’m cringing so hard over here I think I might hurt myself?

Sonia comes back and we order a feta omelet for him, pancakes for me, but there’s no way I can eat with my stomach doubled over on itself like this. As I’m trying to find a way to address this situation with Travis, Millie and Bailey from Vagaboss (they’re a stompy, rowdy, bluesy-sounding three-piece) come in and sit at a table at the other end of the dining room. Millie sees us, waves, and then they come over to our table and I can’t help wondering, does it look like Travis and I are f*cking now? We hardly ever go out to brunch without Joey and Cole. Oh my God, everyone is going to figure it out.

“You guys were incredible last night,” Millie says. “How many new songs did you play?”

“Three,” Travis says. “What did you think?”

“I loved the slow one with that picking pattern in the bridge. Very spinART.” She says it right to Travis like I’m not even there, don’t think I don’t notice. Millie is one of the other female front people in the scene, and she and I are good friends. I know she’s been into Travis for a while, which makes me feel like even more of an asshole, and I’ve always wondered why that hookup never happened. Now I realize I’m pissed off that it still might, and I can’t think like that. Travis and Millie hooking up would be a good thing, right? If Travis hooks up with Millie, then I can’t hook up with him anymore and we can just go back to being bandmates without all the added drama.

Sonia asks if we want to switch tables so we can have a supergroup brunch. Bailey and Millie are all for it and I’m trying to think of a way to say no without making it obvious that there’s an “issue” here, when Travis answers.

“We’ve got to sort out the rehearsal schedule for the month,” he says, simple as that. Bailey and Millie understand, they’ve got shop to talk, too. They go back to their table and I’m staring at him, trying to think of a way to broach this sticky subject.

“Do I have something on my face?” he asks, covering the lower half of his face with his napkin.

“Dope.”

“What did you want to talk about?”

I stare again. Does he really have to ask? I keep waiting for that thing I now realize he always does when I’m feeling stuck for words—taking the initiative in the conversation. Talking about Love and Rockets or Pulp Fiction or the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War era. But this time, Travis doesn’t do any of that. He just stares back.

“Bon appletini.” Sonia plunks two plates down on our table. Travis digs into his omelet like he’s starving. Like he’s been living off of microwave popcorn for weeks. Like we didn’t just have the best sex of my short life last night.

“Travis,” I whisper, like I’m trying to get his attention in a movie theater. He glances up at me, shifts his eyes to the side to check for supervillains or anyone else I might be wary of hearing me.

“What?” he whispers back. Then he hands me the syrup.

“What happened last night . . .” I start to say, but I can’t continue because I am choking on the awkward.

“Was really awesome?” He finishes the sentence for me with a crooked smile and I die. Then he lowers his voice to a whisper again. “I thought so, too.”

“That’s not what I was going to say.”

“Really?” he asks in mock surprise. “Because last night you seemed to think it was pretty awesome. That is, if all the orgasms were any indicator.”

Now I’m choking on my coffee and ready to hide my own face in my napkin. He’s got a verifiable point, though.

“Wait, you weren’t faking it, were you? For my ego’s sake?”

I shake my head no. No, I wasn’t faking it, and no, you are not teasing me about this. No, you are not.

“Travis, I’m serious.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m serious, too. Last night really was awesome.”

“Look, this can’t change anything. We’ve worked too long and too hard to f*ck everything up now by this one little moment of weakness, all right?”

Now he looks serious. Not the serious look he has when he’s trying to nail a difficult solo or when he’s negotiating with the door guy for our fair cut, though. This is more of a pissed-off kind of serious.

“Sure,” he finally says. Then he goes back to shoveling his omelet into his face. He hails Sonia and she comes and brings him a coffee refill and he asks for the check.

“You’re going?” I say. “You’ve got nothing else to say?”

“What else is there to say?” he asks.

“Don’t be mad, all right?” I plead. “I just don’t want it to be weird.”

He laughs but he’s not amused. I know that.

“Fine,” he says. “I understand completely. I really do.”

“You do?”

“Yeah,” he says. “No big deal.”

“It’s not?”

“Do you want it to be?”

I pause because it feels like a trick question, and I suck at trick questions. But even as I pause I feel my mouth make the shape of the word “no,” and before I get it out he’s nodding and his mouth is a straight, pissy-looking line.

“Should we tell the beat brothers?” I say, and he rolls his eyes and now I can almost see the smoke billowing right behind them. “Look, if we aren’t honest about it, it will turn into this big thing that we have to keep secret.”

“And we wouldn’t want the fact that we had sex last night to, you know, mean anything.”

“Exactly,” I say, and I am waiting for him to look relieved that he doesn’t have to deal with any weirdness as far as I’m concerned. That I am not some needy girl who expects things from him other than the usual. Be on time for rehearsal. Play your Goddamned guitar like you mean it. Drive me home when I’m drunk and carry my amp for me and be an integral, essential part of me pursuing my dreams. Okay, that’s a bit much but the thing is, he does it. All the time. And I can’t lose this.

This is what I would assume he also wants, for everything to just be normal and not weird and for us to not be on the brink of f*cking up this very great thing we have together. I expect him to acknowledge that while last night was, in fact, awesome, it was also a mistake that could potentially kill this band we’ve worked so hard to build.

But instead of relieved he looks blank, like the Travis I know so well has crawled into a hole and what’s left is this fake Travis, the cardboard cutout that I really don’t know at all.

“I just want everything to go on as usual, okay?” I say. “We can just be grown-ups about this. It’s only sex.”

I look up and see Sonia standing next to me with the check, her mouth hanging open. Travis would be amused if he didn’t look so angry. He pulls out his wallet and takes a twenty-dollar bill out and drops it on the table. Then before I can give him any money, he walks right out.

Sonia and I stare after him in silence for a moment. I don’t look up, but I feel her eyes on me and I’d like to slink down under the table right about now.

“Wow, you finally did it,” she muses. “You finally slept with Travis.”

“Yeah, I did,” I say. “And look at how happy he is about it.”

“Oh, I doubt that’s why he’s unhappy, Emmy.”

“He’s unhappy because it’s going to f*ck up the band,” I say, wringing my napkin to bits. “He knows it just as well as I do.”

“Does it have to f*ck up the band?” she asks. “I mean, isn’t there any way you two could work it out?”

“Well, I don’t know, let’s ask him,” I say way more sarcastically than Sonia deserves, but that’s my mouth for you. I turn to the empty seat across from me. “Travis, do you think . . . Oh hey, look at that. He’s gone. I guess there’s our answer right there.”

“Maybe he’d still be here if he thought that’s what you wanted.”

“This is not about what I want,” I say. “It’s about not f*cking up something important that we already have.”

“Oh, right,” she says, every bit as sarcastic as I’ll ever be. “Good luck with that.”

* * *

It’s not that I don’t have feelings for Travis. It’s really not that at all. It’s that after two years in Soft, my feelings for Travis transcend your average boy-meets-girl kind of situation. It’s not just a tingle I feel when he’s near, a bounce in my step. We’re well past that already (okay, I did feel pretty tingly when he walked in the door at Neubies today). Travis is my guitarist and there’s a thing between us that is difficult to translate for someone who hasn’t been in this kind of situation. Writing music is personal, intimate even, and you have to be pretty comfortable to be able to do it with other people. When you find someone you work this well with, it’s rare and special and it’s more than friendship. I know this sounds dumb, but it’s kind of like finding a unicorn. If you found a unicorn, you would take care of it, protect it. You’d keep it safe. You definitely wouldn’t f*ck it, right?

I started my very first band, Popsick, when I was a sophomore in high school. It was my band and mine alone because I couldn’t keep anyone in it for longer than a month, usually because all my friends wanted to be lame and hang out with their boyfriends, smoke weed, and watch TV or whatever. It’s a serious pain in the ass to find girls who can play drums and bass in rural New Jersey. (Yes, rural. There’s a non-ironic reason it’s called the Garden State.) You run out of options very fast, is what I’m saying. Hell, there really aren’t “options” at all. I ended up playing with Matilda the timpani player and Betina the first chair from orchestra because I convinced them boys would pay attention to them if they were in my band. And they did, but our songs were weak, and while Tilda could keep time, she didn’t hit hard enough. Betina wouldn’t even play with a pick! Popsick was a true creative labor of love, a stiff learning curve, if you will. There were no unicorns, that’s for sure.

When we all graduated and left for college, I was determined to start a real band. One that would play in clubs, not living rooms and backyards. One that would even play CBGB in the city one day, and with Stars on the Floor I’ve done it several times, too. One of the crowning achievements of my career so far.

I started Soft with Joey and Cole because I’ve known the two of them forever. Joey’s mom and my mom grew up across the street from each other in Lodi, and I seriously thought Joey was my second cousin until maybe a year or so ago. Cole is from Joey’s neighborhood, and the two of them have been best friends for as long as any of us can remember. Over the years, whenever Mom and I visited or they came down to Flemington to hang out, we would jam. So when Joey and I ended up at Rutgers together, Cole moved to New Brunswick and got a job washing pots at Old Man Rafferty’s so we could start a real band.

We started up freshman year, and right away we pulled our sound together and wrote a ton of cool songs and started playing parties left and right as a three-piece. We wanted another guitarist to fill the sound out, and when Travis joined it was exactly what we were all hoping it would be. Not just because it sounded better (and wow, adding Travis’s Les Paul was a dose of magic for us), but because we all got along really well, and that’s even harder to find. It’s seriously like four people in one marriage, it’s so much like a family sometimes. There’s tons of quirk and eccentricity and hang-ups that have to be negotiated when you’re working so closely like that with other people. But we luck out because we all share the same sense of humor, the same taste in fast food, the same zealous thirst for rock, and it works. We work.

But something else happens when you spend all this time with the same three guys working on music. Something important.

For example, when Cole’s last girlfriend dumped him, Joey, Travis, and I sat up all night and watched infomercials with him and we wouldn’t let him be by himself for a week until we were fairly certain he could feed and dress himself without incident. When Joey’s dad announced he was leaving his mother for his twenty-three-year-old secretary last summer, we all went over to see him at Mama Santi’s in Lodi and got drunk on red wine and ate homemade ravioli and meatballs and cannolis and listened to her cry and curse him out all night. Joey even wrote a song about it that we still have in the set today, “Carmen Alfredo.” When Travis’s dad had a major scare last year with his heart and Travis didn’t have enough money to fly home, we gave him everything we had in the band till to get him on a plane. I called him in Omaha every day, too. Actually, I call him every day anyway. There’s always some band business that needs to get dealt with, and if the band is a family, Travis and I are basically the parents.

When my last boyfriend, Josh the Michael Bolton fan (I know, I know), broke up with me my freshman year and I went all fetal position in my dorm room, those guys saved me, they really did. The first night when I was such a mess, they all slept on the floor of my dorm room. Two nights later when I hadn’t eaten anything but three bowls of Cheerios in two days, Joey called my mom and she came and surprised me with an entire spaghetti meal, including garlic knots and salad and meatballs that we all sat and ate right in my dorm room, picnic-style. And through all of that, Travis never left my side.

After going through the assorted travails one goes through in their later formative years with a support system like these guys, it’s damned painful to even imagine life without them around. In fact, I can’t bring myself to even try. And that bond that we’ve got going on is a part of our sound, too. You can hear it when we play. We play like we’ve been playing for ten years already and we know it. We’re good. If we just keep it together and keep working, we’re going to make it, and that’s what we all want more than anything.

And that’s why I can’t keep f*cking Travis, even though part of me definitely, absolutely, and positively still wants to. I can’t deny that. In fact, I can’t stop thinking about it. But I can’t risk it.

We’ve got everything to lose.

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