Danny knew a little about guitar. That’s what he told Eli the first time they met, over a game of pool at the bar where Eli worked. Later Danny realized he knew nothing about guitar; Eli knew a little, and was much better than he was. Six months ago, with a few friends and friends of friends, Eli started a band called Sea Lion Caves, named after a business his uncle owned in Oregon that guided boat tours through Oregon’s sea lion caves. Eli spent last summer working for his uncle, earning room, board, and a stack of bumper stickers that said in block letters on a bright yellow background, SEA LION CAVES. Eli put one of these stickers on the shell of his bass drum, and, while moving into their apartment, Danny suggested that Eli name his band Sea Lion Caves so he would have some merchandise to put out at their first show.
Their meeting at the pool bar was the beginning of a stable friendship. Though they went to different schools, they both liked Hemingway and Hesse and hiking in the mountains outside the city, and both suffered from a dissatisfaction with their lives—or, they supposed sometimes late at night in their living room, a more existential dissatisfaction with life altogether.
Danny was not in the band. He had not been asked to be in the band, which didn’t offend him until Eli asked a girl named Mavis, who knew nothing about any instruments and could not sing, to be his percussionist, a fancy word for the tall, pretty, blonde girl in a mini skirt standing on stage with the less attractive but more talented band. After Danny heard Mavis “play,” he told Eli that he knew how to bang a cowbell. Eli told Danny that they didn’t need anybody playing cowbell.
Despite his not being in the band, Danny went to every show. Most of the time, Danny knew about half of the people in the audience. They were mostly Eli and the bassist Avery’s friends, and Danny had met many of them in the living room of his own apartment past midnight in varying states of sobriety, “jamming,” or whatever. They were not Danny’s crowd. Danny was at a top-rated university studying sociology. He was very organized and value-driven, according to both his resume and his girlfriend, Olivia, who he’d been with since high school. Danny did not have any social media and kept a careful journal of his days and habits. His grades weren’t always perfect, but mostly because he spent a lot of time reading books about bettering himself and forgot, sometimes, to do his homework. Danny stopped drinking alcohol at twenty-one. He ran every day, at least a mile, sometimes in his pajamas, and enjoyed reading blogs about productivity called things like Knowledge Lust.
When Eli’s friends met Danny, they certainly wondered how the two were friends. But Danny and Eli never wondered.
The only person Danny really hung out with at these shows was Zoey, Eli’s ex-girlfriend. Zoey ended it two years ago, but their group remained intact. And, anyways, everything was fine now. Eli missed her all the time, and had dreams about her often, but he was mostly okay. Zoey didn’t miss him at all, but she pretended she did to make him feel better.
The past few months, Eli had been telling Danny that Sea Lion Caves was on its way out. Nobody had been showing up for band practice except Eli and his little brother, Aidan, who was their drummer. Aidan was seventeen, which restricted the venues they could play, but he was a great drummer, better than Eli. After hearing his brother play for the first time, Eli quit the drums altogether. He started practicing the piano and resolved to know more than a little about guitar. His drums were now neatly stacked up, decorating the corner of his and Danny’s apartment, the SEA LION CAVES sticker facing outward on the bass drum at the bottom.
Usually, Danny stood at the front and never danced, watching the show through his cellphone screen, worrying the whole time that Eli was going to screw up or that Avery, the bassist and singer whose long brown hair was dyed to look like a skunk’s tail, would say something stupid on the mic between songs like, “How’s everybody doing tonight?”, like this was a pop concert and not a half-full room of college students who’d all be at the afterparty where she could ask them all this question and ascertain actual answers.
Outside tonight’s venue, Gavin, the rhythm guitarist, smoked a cigarette and told Danny, “It took almost an hour to scrape the cum off of my guitar,” referring, of course, to the word “CUM” itself, which he’d stuck to the body of his aquamarine telecaster in sparkling green sticker-letters, next to two old bandaids he used for pick holders.
Danny laughed. “I liked the sparkles,” he said.
Also outside the venue tonight was Gavin’s girlfriend, Ruby, who hit her sour apple vape every thirty seconds. She offered it to Danny a couple of times, who said, politely, no thank you.
Danny checked his watch. It was eight-twenty-five. Sea Lion Caves was supposed to go on at eight-thirty. “Should we go in, guys?” He felt, sometimes, like their manager.
Ruby said, “I’m going to get tinnitus in there.”
Inside, Danny found Zoey. She was standing alone, off to the side, smacking gum. She was beautiful, something Danny observed unwillingly and often failed to ignore. She watched Eli not merely without love but as if trying to undo the years of love she’d given him. Regret, Danny understood, was a disease.
“How’s it going?” he asked her.
“Fine,” she said.
“Do you like the openers?”
“They’re fine.”
The opening band was fronted by a guy named Ellis Roth, who was older than all these people but who remained unsuccessful enough to take any gig offered to him. He played guitar and sang and had with him a heavily bearded bassist and a sort of awkward drummer wearing a pink earflap beanie. Their amplifiers were turned all the way up so most of the crowd was standing at the back of the venue near the bar. Between songs, Ellis would say, “Hey,” pause, “come a little closer,” pause, “we don’t bite.” Nobody would go closer, and he’d do it all again. “Hey,” pause, “we don’t bite.”
Danny listened to Ellis Roth’s music online sometimes. He liked a couple of the songs. He liked, especially, when Ellis and his band came to stay after their shows at his and Eli’s apartment, how they’d ask him lots of questions about his life and his mechanical keyboard and his girlfriend, like he was an exhibit in a museum. Danny was used to boring most people, because he was neither particularly outgoing nor outwardly opinionated. He didn’t mind his fate so much—privately, he knew he liked his life and personality—but he was still a boy who wanted to be liked by people. Eli always told the music guys coming into town that Danny was a freak of nature, that his discipline and intelligence were superpowers to be watched and lauded. But there was glass between them and a sign that said, “Don’t touch.” Cross-contamination of the Dannys and the Ellis Roths of the world was dangerous. If we infect our productive people with a little degeneracy and our artists with a bit of healthy motivation, there goes our economy and our music.
Zoey was one of those rare people who were and could be both. She could be like whoever she was with. Danny wondered what she was like when she was alone.
“You seem like you want to kill him,” Danny said.
Zoey shook her head. “No.” She twisted her upper body to face him. “I just wish my life wasn’t already an amalgamation of consequences for my actions. I feel like I’m too young for that.”
“You’re ahead of the curve,” Danny joked.
“I’m moving to California,” she said. “Tomorrow.”
Danny was quiet. He had several questions, but didn’t know what order to ask them in, didn’t know if he wanted to know their answers.
“Sorry I’m telling you so late,” she said.
“It’s alright,” Danny said. “I understand.” He was unsurprised. This was Zoey. She was the kind of person to move across the country and tell nobody, for the sake of it.
“I’m going to school there.”
That did surprise Danny. Zoey had never wanted to go to college. After graduating from high school, she started working for a family friend who sold jams and jellies. She lived at home and made some extra money babysitting. She traveled in the winter, when the farmers markets were off season, to places she picked because she knew nothing about them. She had no interest in any certain path, or in earning any sort of degree or promotion. Ascension of the hierarchy was of no interest to her.
“What are you going to study?” Danny asked her.
“To be a pastor.”
“You believe in God? The Christian God?”
“No,” she said. “Though I would like to.”
He envied her ability to leave. Not that she was leaving, or that she didn’t have much keeping her here, but the very ability to decide to leave and go. He understood her impulse to reject the life she had built for herself, its foundations and its consequences. Danny felt seen by her, felt he saw her. Cynically, he supposed this was how she made everybody feel.
“You can tell Eli,” Zoey said. “I wasn’t going to.”
Eli still danced. His mind must have been totally empty. Better than Danny and Zoey, Eli knew bliss.
“I won’t do that,” Danny said.
“He’ll find out from somebody.”
Danny left her, and found Eli.
“You go on soon,” Danny said. He didn’t say anything about Zoey.
“I can’t go on until Ellis is done, though. Might as well stay here.”
Danny wondered if Eli had done any cocaine yet tonight. Eli told Danny a few days ago that he was planning to stay away from cocaine, after snorting a line of what he thought was cocaine at a party. A few hours later, while lying in a pool of his own sweat on the floor of the living room, he learned that nobody actually knew what that powder was, that somebody had picked it up off the street and had been saving it until they had test strips.
At one point in their friendship, Danny had worried about Eli. For one semester, he’d set up all these bumper rails around him and coaxed him into a life of measured substance use and set bedtimes. It worked. Eli’s grades had never been better and he’d never produced so much music. But that was all Danny had done, for several months. Keep Eli together. Resentment brewed, and after some reflection (something he did well), Danny decided to focus on himself.
Since then, Danny tried not to worry about Eli. Danny laughed when Eli told stories like the one about the mystery powder and no longer checked his phone’s location when Eli was out past midnight on a weekday. Since then, Danny had been happier, though it was a complicated sort of happiness.
He cared for Eli, but couldn’t take care of him. He hadn’t self-reflected enough to resolve that tension.
Ellis Roth closed his set with a sad song about being lonely that ended in a lot of sad screaming. Danny understood that this was how men who played indie rock music portrayed their sadness, through phrases that sounded like words but were really an open-mouthed wail.
“Good luck,” Danny said, and hit Eli on the back.
Eli and Aidan’s parents were here, sitting at a table in their down coats and baseball caps, probably wondering how two decent Roman Catholic anesthesiologists produce this.
Danny once asked Aidan and Eli if it was any different to play in front of their parents. They both gave an uncomplicated answer: “Well, no.” Really, Danny wondered if they were embarrassed to be on stage with the rest of the band. It embarrassed Danny to even watch them on stage. Probably, that was why he wasn’t in the band.
Danny went over to Eli’s parents and said hello. They asked him how he was doing tonight, and he told them he was well and looking forward to seeing Eli play. They said they’d heard the band hadn’t been practicing much. Danny nodded, but said he had faith in Aidan and Eli anyways. “They should form a duo,” he told them, “and keep the name.”
Eventually, the silhouettes of five people all around five-foot-nine started setting up musical equipment. They made up a nice picture, tuning and testing things like a real band would. This was Danny’s favorite part of the show, when he could pretend he wasn’t here for moral support or to be the only honest reviewer after the curtains closed.
Finally, the band was ready. The DJ who’d been on between sets stopped playing and foggy red lights came up on the stage. Eli pressed his mouth up against the microphone. In a voice that was only vaguely his, slow and deep, he said, “This is a show.” He strummed a little on his guitar. “We are a band.”
Ruby brought Danny a non-alcoholic Guinness. Danny said, “I’ll Zelle you,” and she said, “I put it on my parents’ card.”
Avery said into her microphone, “We’re Sea Lion Caves.” Her voice was uncannily sweet. She mused, “We’re going to start with an original.”
The song they played was alright. Eli sang most of it, making wide shapes with his mouth so the syllables came out all funky like he was Townes Van Zandt. Avery harmonized a little, but her mic was a lot louder than Eli’s, so when she sang you could only really hear her, unsure and off-melody, as if, or because, the band hadn’t actually practiced the song together.
Eli and Avery had two very different visions for the band. Eli wanted a few people fine enough at their instruments to play his songs, maybe in front of an executive one day, maybe well enough to get him a record deal. But Avery wanted something to do, or something to say she did. She wanted a reason to keep dying her hair and buying the kinds of clothes you can only wear on stage. She wanted to be applauded and shown up for, and Eli didn’t mind being ignored by everybody he knew if it meant somebody with real power, somebody who could make him somebody, would pay him a little bit of attention. Eli and Avery were incompatible people. There could be a whole band of people like Eli and a whole band of people like Avery, but to mix the two did not work, was not working. Eli knew this. Avery did not. But they were both skilled pretenders.
If Danny were Eli, he’d drop the band before it decomposed. He’d pay Aidan a nominal sum to spend a week recording as many halfway decent songs as they possibly could. He’d take the recorded demos and send them to everybody he’d ever met. He’d say, if you like this even a little bit, help me out. While everybody’s answers were coming back, he’d sit down and write a whole bunch more songs, so that if anyone asked him, “What else have you got?” he’d have his pick of a few things to show them, depending on what they liked from the demo record. He’d start going to sleep at a regular time, would drop one of his shifts at the pool bar and use that time to write or do the schoolwork Danny wasn’t sure he’d been doing instead of getting drunk on another weeknight with the older, sadder bartenders he was scared to become. He’d add back the Economics major and line up a decent internship for the summer that left his nights free for gigs, and, then, he’d stop drinking.
But Eli wouldn’t do any of this. This band would leave him, and he’d be relieved for a minute but join another just like it, with people he’d met at school who weren’t really serious about the whole music venture like he was, because Eli saw the best in people. Eli once looked at Sea Lion Caves, at Zoey, and saw kin. He’d spend his summer roadtripping again and spend all the money he’d saved. He’d write a few good songs in the backseat of his car, all alone at a rest stop on the interstate. A few of those songs would be good songs, and he’d give them to his next doomed band, and there he’d go again. Every band would be Sea Lion Caves, every job would be the pool bar job, every song he wrote and liked would either get played by people for whom Eli would one day have no respect, or it would sit in the voice memos app on his phone forever. Maybe, one day he’d move to New York. Maybe, one day, he’d even move to Tokyo. But he’d never make a real decision to change his life.
Danny thought of Zoey, and that she was going. He couldn’t find her in the crowd. Though there was no reason for her to mean anything to him, Danny catastrophized her departure in his mind. He looked at his life and saw walls, in Olivia and in school and in Eli’s understanding and characterization of him. But these weren’t walls. Only phantasms, illusions, hallucinations of walls, disguising a more evasive and elusive constraint.
“I’ll be back,” Danny told Ruby, and found Zoey outside. She put out her cigarette. It had started raining. Under the canvas awning, each drop was magnified. A little rain became a downpour.
“Are they done?” Zoey asked.
“No,” Danny said. He didn’t know what he was doing out here. “Why do you come to these things if you hate them so much?”
“I don’t hate them at all,” she said.
“You hate Eli.”
“I don’t hate Eli.” She was frustrated. “I don’t know why you’re saying these things.”
“Why are you moving?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Because I can.”
Danny moved toward her. “You could hate it,” he said, quieter than before.
“I could,” Zoey said, quieter, too. “If I do, I’ll come back, or go somewhere else.”
“Eli will be wrecked.”
Zoey shook her head. “Eli will be alright. He’ll probably be better if he doesn’t have to see me all the time.”
“He’s going to miss you.”
“No,” Zoey said. “He won’t.”
Danny imagined what it would be like to leave. He imagined breathing fresh air somewhere he’d never been, unconstrained. He imagined leaving every book he was reading and class he was taking unfinished and taking off West like a pioneer or a cowboy. He imagined how it would feel if he just leaned a little closer and kissed Zoey, kissed her deeply under the drumming of the rain on the awning.
Danny did not kiss Zoey. He never would. He did not want to kiss her, or at least did not know what he wanted.
“I’m going to go back inside,” Danny said. He didn’t know what he expected her to say, if he expected her to ask him to stay outside with her or come with her to California.
She said, “I’m going to call an Uber.”
Every day, people lived and were happy in the aftermath of their mistakes. Eli made plenty of mistakes, lived, and was happy. Danny was careful and made none.
The band closed with a melancholy tune Danny didn’t recognize. Tall and pretty Mavis dropped the cowbell about halfway through the song. Danny, who wasn’t a particularly reactive person, put his face in his hands. Ruby said beside him, “God, I can’t wait for this to end.”
It did end. The DJ took back over as Sea Lion Caves packed it all up. Eli and Aidan’s parents took their leave. Their mother asked Danny to tell the boys that they’d done great. He said, “Yes, ma’am, I will.”
Eli dropped down off the stage and came over to Danny, wiped a little sweat off his forehead with his sleeve. “Want to get out of here?”
“Yeah,” Danny said, “no afterparty for me, though.”
“Shocking,” Eli said. “What’d you think of the show?”
“It kind of sucked,” Danny said. “But that’s fine.”
Eli shook his head, clapped Danny on the back. “Would it kill you to lie a little?”
This is awkward…this week, Sasha Rotko regaled the Nassau Weekly with a story that centered on a character named Danny, which is the name of the person writing this footnote. Is this the life of a celebrity?