Prose by Sammy Merabet

Edited by Manelle Aruta

They were still laughing when Durner, their drummer, had opened the door, and, had he stayed on the steps of the rental, he’d have found that they laughed for several beats after that, too. So. He didn’t. He flung himself off the porch and, with the leftover momentum, ran. Relief cracked out onto his face and out of his breath.

He left something with the distance that built up between him and the rental. It wasn’t shame. It didn’t tense his spine or burn his arms the way shame came to him. None of them had the words to leave him ashamed (besides Theo, who had no reason to); he didn’t have the words for them, either, which made shit-talking and mocking a safe time for the whole family. No, Durner would have felt this way even if it was someone else being laughed at—even if he had started it—or if no one had been laughed at but a joke or video or funny-looking-stain on some of the merch. Thankfully, he had an excuse to leave. So he leapt onto the path to the grocery store, leaving behind not shame, but shrill, cackles, crows, clutter. Durner hated noise. 

That’s what his bandmates had been laughing at. Not the noise thing—though they had ragged on him for that in the past, too—but his grocery run. There’s only so many jokes you can make about a drummer that hates noise. (If you stop reading right now, you can take a moment to come up with most of them, submit a few of the real good ones to some hacky sketch comedians, see if you hear back, and come back once they’ve all ignored you). A drummer that’s bad with time, though, gets new potential whenever there’s rehearsals, or lunch plans, or grocery-runs to be made.

Jen and Hall had been the loudest, which tracked, since Jen would always set her keyboard’s volume a tick higher with every hour they rehearsed, while Hal tended to blast whatever track of theirs he was producing and had recently taken up trying to get them all onto buying a marimba. 

“He’ll take ages! What about breakfast?!” 

“Forget breakfast, we’ll have started dinner by then!

“If you care so much about those ages, then please, I insist,” he had quipped back, dangling their communal grocery list as they did—barely legible, with each member’s awful handwriting breaking into the others’.

Hall had seemed to actually consider it—not like they had anything he could work on, anyway—but Corey, sprawled out across the kitchen floor and plucking at his acoustic, had spoken up before he had the chance. “Nah, man,” he had said.“This is the point. Point of it all, man.”

Point, point, point, point. Durner thought, keeping beat with the word until it lost as much meaning sonically as it did semantically. He pulled out his phone for directions to the store. Kinda a stupid point. Corey had thought of it after a month’s worth of sessions that had been leading nowhere except another year’s worth of even more awful sessions, since none of them liked talking about how shit they were, except Corey, who liked it a lot, mostly because it meant getting to come up with new, increasingly moronic reasons for why they were so shit. 

Their problem, as he had put it, was not a lack of inspiration, no, no, but instead a lack of access to it. “Our brains have it, you know, that blood stuff,” he had said, clenching his fist on the stuff, like he was a coach giving a speech to a bunch of upstart teens instead of a half-shit musician in his late 20s talking to a bunch of other half-shits in their early-to-mid-20s. “But it doesn’t matter, you know, if it’s all clogged.”

Point, point, pointpointpoint. Years of living framed as plaque and fat building up around the arterial walls connecting you and the muse of your diaper and high school years. The prescribed diet: hometown visits. “Like The Bachelor,” he had said, which, like, go fuck yourself.

Hall liked his hometown, so he agreed; Jen didn’t, but thought kissing her girlfriend in front of her old house would be a power play, and they all agreed; Corey’s family were a bag of landlords and lawyers, which, of course they were, how else could Corey put up most of the road trip himself? Durner didn’t like his hometown, but he didn’t not-like his band—halfshits and all—and he hated the the thought of getting into the reasons why he hated his hometown, the reasons why he hated this idea, the reasons why he hated the implication that his fifteen year old self was more innervated or inveined with anything more than he hated any of those reasons themselves, at least at the time. 

So, he had compromised, and taken them all to a forest-y town up in Northern California where he and his siblings used to go to visit their grandparents. Better looking, better weather, better vibes. 

But still not much of anything, really. If his hometown was dread, then this was pure boredom. He was sure its citizens lived wonderful, beautiful, exciting lives, but that was a wonder, beauty, and excitement locked to the locals.

After getting some distance away from the rental, Durner stopped running, and their phone led them onto a residential street headed towards the chest of the town. The place they had gotten was on a limb that stretched out into the surrounding trees and bushes and cliffs. Its ambience was artsy enough and its isolation was soundproof-y enough to stop everyone from complaining about how detached from the actual town it was. 

The map took Durner past an empty lot. Not much of anything, really. 

Durner had offered one half-argument against Corey’s idea a few days after he pitched it, after it had evolved from an off-handed coach speech when they were all drunk to something worth breaking out a Google Calendar out for, a question meant to poke at something deeper that was tucked into pragmatism as a cover: “What if we don’t remember anything?”

To that, Corey had just grinned, rabid at the chance to act out assurance into reality, and said “You will.”

“No, but, like, what if we don’t?”

“You will,” Corey had replied, before putting a hand on Durner’s shoulder that he flinched out of. “It’s not like you remember everything, right?”

“Everything important. Everything important to now.” Durner had then proceeded to mumble out something about how forgetting about a rehearsal or whatever was different than forgetting about the important stuff, falling over himself and his ideas and his frustration that his We’s kept getting turned into You’s, as if Durner was a unique sort of dumbass to not have gotten his plans for grand spiritual retreat to Ohio and Illinois and Virginia and Northern-fucking-California. 

But, in the midst of his falling, he had managed to grab onto something, something about memory being more than something that gets left somewhere. Not region-locked. More than that. He remembered feeling poignant when he had said it, because Theo had stopped playing their bass at that point, and when Corey and Durner had looked over at them, they had finger-gunned Durner down, and mouth-clicked, and Theo was hot, and smart, and so Durner felt like he had accomplished something. 

As Durner walked by that lot, tight-roping along its curb and occasionally falling into its dust and dirt, he thought about that general shape of ideas he had come up with. He had never seen this lot, probably, and if he had then there was nothing coming to mind, and if something did come to mind in the next eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, zero seconds that it took him to walk by it (it didn’t) then it wouldn’t have been anything exclusive to that lot at all. That empty lot was nothing different than the other empty lots built and left throughout his life, on childhood streets he played in and on adulthood streets he moved into. 

He turned out of the street, and walked a few blocks more. Gravel and sediment and green growth and signs of life mixed together in various quantities to make a suburb. The tired, greying street he walked down sprung houses from either side of him, and out of those houses sprung cars, and basketball hoops, and garden gnomes and flowers, and people, too. He made a rhythm of eyeing the houses he would have lived in and judging the ones he was sure everyone hated, cute or kitsch, and, in fairness, cute was dominant. Cute cute cute kitsch. Cute cute cute kitsch.  Cutekitsch cutekitsch cute-cute-cute-cute-cutekitsch.

Cute-cute-cute-convenience store. It was divided from the houses, separated on one end by a playground, on the other by an after-school tutoring house, and in the street through a roundabout. 

Durner pulled out the list in his pocket, which had crumbled and torn from the motion of his walk and the movement of his phone in-and-out of his hands. Corey and Hall had just listed out a variety of snacks that he could have grabbed from there, but the rest of them needed actual groceries. Jen in particular listed out a brand of ground coffee she had wanted—she had looked for it at that very convenience store when they had driven in, but hadn’t found it.

As she had looked, she probed Durner.

“You know, Tan,” she had said. She always used his first name, saying she didn’t respect family ones, which he got, on that higher level of getting. “It’d be one thing if you were bad at drumming. But you’re not.”

“Thanks.”

“So how are you so bad with…them?” 

“Beat and rhythm and…keeping time aren’t time,” Durner had replied, “And drum sounds aren’t sound.”

“They’re not?”

“They’re not.” He always knew it didn’t really make sense, but it was a contradiction he didn’t see as needing to be flattened.

“And music?” Hall had joined in, peeking over the chip aisle to get to them, “Is music sound?” 

“Depends,” Durner had wound the joke up on instinct, and braced for what came after he let it loose. “You the one playing?” 

And the two of them laughed, which had made Durner shink, but then Theo had put their hand on his shoulder, which didn’t.

So, the convenience store wouldn’t be enough. He kept walking.

It was another thirty-eight minutes and twenty-five seconds until he got to the grocery store, mostly because he could combine what he retained from arriving in town with his childhood memories to feel out the rest of the way. 

“Real stuff, my ass,” he grumbled. 

The grocery store was a chain brand, now. It was a chain brand when he was a kid, too, but a different brand. He wasn’t sure of the brand it was when he was a kid, and he wasn’t really sure of what it was now, but there it was. He followed the list biblically, trying to make up some time by navigating the rows of produce and cereal and canned and frozen goods and toys and stationery and dairy and drinks as quickly as he could. 

As he did, he saw a slew of teenagers—some shopping alone, seeming to be equally on a mission as he was, others taking their time, enjoying the company of friends, pointing at the alcohol aisle and giggling to themselves about stepping into it. He remembered something, then: him and his sister—the only ones of his family close in age, with their older brother eight years older and their younger sibling six years younger—hanging out after middle school, him in sixth grade and her in eighth. They’d go to run errands for their grandparents and see as high schoolers poured in and out of the store. They’d be equally as bored as the two of them, yet would seem so much livelier, so much more. They’d talk about them, filled with envy, or awe, excitement for high school and what they could see as progress.

But that was wrong, wasn’t it? Him and his sister hadn’t gone to middle school in that town, and only visited their grandparents on breaks. But he felt so strongly that they had done that. Had they done that elsewhere, in the Target outside of their middle school, or the Walmart outside of their high school, or was just the feeling of being out of school wrong? Had they done it multiple times, or never at all? He tried to think on it further, but he couldn’t. He got stuck over his sister. He got stuck over trying to imagine her in the grocery store. He tried to imagine her, and him, and them, standing all together, in that grocery store, but he couldn’t. He could see them as adults, sure, at twenty-four and twenty-seven, but not them as kids, not those people. He tried to picture the high schoolers, and saw the teens in front of them, not the ones that could inspire envy or awe but the ones that inspired Aww and Yeesh.

He checked out and left.

He walked quicker this time, hastened. Past kitschy and cute and convenient. Eventually, he passed by the empty lot. For a moment, an image diffused into his mind. He saw him and his sister playing in it. They’d rope as many of the neighborhood kids as they could and wrestle, tag, and water balloon until the dust of the lot broke onto their hair and cheeks and (by that point, well-accumulated) scabs. But—just as quickly as it had come—the thought dissolved. Him and his sister had played in plenty of lots, as children. Who’s to say this was one of them? 

As if it would still be here, even if it was. Lots get built on. Wood, brick, families, trash cans and dog shit—they pile on, and lots with memories become lots without memories. Without yours, at least.

But he still saw it. Still saw them. The people that, back then, would have been him and his sister and a slew of kids that they’d never interact with again. He saw those things, still. 

That’s what that town was. What that whole exercise had been. Still. Infuriatingly so. He had heard it, heard that stillness in the voices of every one of his bandmates, and in the voices of all of the people—or, rather, the people that used to be the people— that his bandmates (see: the people his bandmates used to be) used to know. That’s still there? Are they still next door? Still trying this music thing, huh? Still acting like a queer? You still on those pills?

He didn’t recognize any of the sights in the town, and certainly didn’t recognize the people. Yet, in them, he still saw it all. Still means regardless. Still means lifeless. Still means that every grocery store brings you back to every other grocery store. That every lot you look at—run-down, lifeless, and constant—is every lot you used to stand in. Still means you’re always looking at lots.

He hadn’t realized he had stopped. He kept walking

Theo was the last hometown to visit after him. He wasn’t actually sure where they were gonna take the band—they hadn’t told anyone. But, that night that they gunned him down, and then took what was left of him to their room and made him feel poignant there, too, they had said that they were going to take them all somewhere nice. 

“Somewhere,” he had muttered, already falling into sleep, “Real quiet for you. And for me, too.”

He walked into the rental. They greeted him with a laugh, and he dropped the groceries to head to the drums. He sat at them for four minutes, played nothing, and then left for a walk.

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Artist Statement: The past is a snare—a noose, typically played on the second and fourth beats of a measure.  

This is a story about a musician trying to avoid getting caught in it.