Chapter 2: Attack Decay Sustain Release – Part 2

The first thing she noticed, as she got out of her brother’s truck, was the sound.  Even from the back of the lot, she could hear The Fist Amendment ripping through their set.  It was almost offensively loud, and it was a shock that the volume was bothering her.

 

Her brother looked at her over the hood of his truck and raised his eyebrows.  “I didn’t know TFA was playing at this thing!”

 

Vivian would have shrugged if using the crutches didn’t rely so heavily on her shoulders and upper arms.  Instead, she said, “Friends.  Ifilledin… For Their Bassist... A Few Times.”  She held up her arm and twisted her hand back and forth.  “Sprained Wrist.”

 

Her enunciations were more severe and halting than they needed to be.  Even after two weeks of talking until her throat hurt, her speech was only mildly improved.  She’d even started giving voice to her inner monologue when she was alone, just for the practice, and had reached her first goal the day before wherein neither of her nieces had asked her to repeat herself for the whole day.  She still sometimes found her words tumbling out together, but she usually caught herself shortly after.

 

“You played with these guys?” he said, eyes widening. “You never told me that!”

 

She twisted her lips, but forced herself to make eye contact when she said, “We... Weren’t... Speaking… At The Time.”

 

“Oh.  Sorry.”

 

“Nnnn… Not Your… Fault.”

 

He nodded, but he didn’t look convinced.

 

“Do You Like Them?”

 

“Yeah,” he said, as they made their way slowly through the lot; her as fast as she could hobble along while he kept pace beside her.  “Yeah, I’ve been to a few shows over at the Grand.”

 

“They Were A Bit More… MmmMetal… Than I Play… But The Showswere… Good.”

 

“What do you guys sound like?”  Then he frowned and corrected himself.  “Did you sound like?”

 

“Punk.  Rocka… Rockabilly.  Fast.  Loose.  Better Live Than… ”

 

“I gotcha,” he said, graciously stepping in when her voice failed.

 

As they got closer it became apparent the park was packed, and that gave her incredibly mixed emotions.  They eased past the ticket window just as The Fist Amendment wrapped up the outro of their usual encore song to thunderous applause and cheers.  A bearded man ran onto the stage and took the mic.

 

“Yeah,” said the man, whom she was pretty sure she recognized.  It was hard to be sure.  “The Fist Amendment, everybody!”  The crowd roared again, and kept it up for far longer than it took the four men to hustle offstage.  “Yeah!  Alright!  Now, I keep getting asked this, so I’m gonna say it again.  100% of the ticket sales, and 100% of the proceeds from the food and merch, folks.  It’s all gonna help.”  He pointed at the two big food trucks parked alongside the crowd.  “Big thanks to Taco No You Didn’t and Yeti Burgers.  Give them a big hand, folks.”

 

Lots of applause.  Lots of cheering.  Vivian was surprised she didn’t want to hide, per se, but she also didn’t want to draw any attention to herself.  Darren, seeming to notice her quasi-discomfort, huddled in close to her, and the two of them stood a little ways behind the main crowd.

 

“Now, If you want to make a donation as well, that’s great too.  We’ve got a booth over here where we’re taking those.  Obviously, that’s lovely, and you guys rock.  Everybody knows Portland has the best live music scene in the country, and you folks are proving it once again by being here tonight.”

 

At this, the crowd went wild.

 

“We’ve already covered the amount we needed to help Kevin’s family with the service.  I know a lot of you Insanity Hall fans were there, in person and in spirit, a few weeks ago.  That’s amazing.  Kevin’s mother and brother are with us here tonight, and your generosity moved them to tears.  It was beautiful.  Give yourselves a hand, folks.  Yeah.  Yeah.”

 

Vivian had never met Kevin’s family.  He mostly talked unflatteringly about his abusive father, but he had mentioned his mother and brother fondly on a few occasions.  She did not think she was up to introducing herself.

 

The man on stage clapped a few more times, and then looked down at the clipboard in his hand.  “The rest of what we get from there on out is going toward Vivian LeBlanc’s medical bills.  Two surgeries and a four week hospital stay, when you don’t have insurance, is outrageous, and she’s gonna have a lot of ongoing care as she continues to recover.  She’s got a long road ahead of her.  Thanks to all you beautiful people, we’re gonna be taking a big chunk of that burden off of her and her family.  Thanks to The Fist Amendment and Killcreek for coming out tonight and giving you guys a hell of a show!  Yeah!”

 

She felt grateful for her hoodie, pulled up over her head.  Her eyes darted across the crowds, looking to make sure no one had recognized her.  She’d been invited to the event, but no one knew she was coming and she kind of hoped to keep it that way.  Before the man started speaking again, though, Vivian’s eyes were drawn behind him.  The Fist Amendment’s impressive drum kit had been hastily disassembled, revealing another kit behind it that had been under a black curtain.  It was a kit she knew well.

 

“The roadies are getting everything all set up as we speak, and then we’ve got a real treat for you.  The final band taking the stage tonight is none other than Portland legends Greyscale Rainbow, and they’re gonna be joined on drums by the organizer of this whole shindig, the woman who put this all together, Insanity Hall drummer Lucia Alvarez!  Yeah!!”

Four men hustled onto the stage, but Vivian barely noticed them.  She was staring intently at the wiry Latina with the streak of red in her pitch black hair, who jumped behind the drums with an exultant expression.  She counted off time, and then exploded in a vortex of tattooed arms, sticks, and sweat.  The sound was raucous and sleazy, Southern Rock dragged through an acid bath and pumped through a distortion amp cranked to eleven, and it hit Vivian like a kick in the gut.

 

Lucia was a wildfire.  Grayscale Rainbow’s usual drummer, a man closer in age to the rest of the band, stood just off stage with his fists raised in the air, but she paid him no attention.  Lucia could play anything after hearing it once.  She was an incredible musician, and the rest of the band fed off of her boundless energy.  It was just like the first time Vivian had seen her, when they were both much younger and new on the scene.  The venue had been smaller, as had the crowd, but she had pounded out frenetic rhythm for ninety minutes like a goddamn demon.

 

Vivian was staring so intently that she failed to spot a man approaching her warily from the side.  He leaned practically right in front of her, eyes narrowed for peering, and then a wide grin broke across his face.  He didn’t say anything, though.  He simply jerked his head to the side toward where three other guys were waiting behind the Taco No You Didn’t food truck.

 

“Holy shit,” Darren hissed.  “You’re Aiden Freeman!”

 

Aiden, The Fist Amendment’s lead guitarist, pressed his finger to his lips and pointed again.

 

“Dude, I love you guys!”

 

“Who is this?” Aiden asked, turning back to Vivian with a dubious expression.

 

“My Brother,” she slurred, as she tried to work up to a loping pace with her crutches.  “Big Fan.”

 

“Oh right on, man!  Did you guys catch our set?”

 

Darren said, “We caught the end of it, yeah!  You guys were on fire tonight!”

 

The rest of The Fist Amendment waved her behind the truck, then took turns greeting her and doing their best to give her hugs like siblings would, around her crutches.  The two bands had certainly shared bills often enough.  They all talked at once, like they always did.  Before when Vivian had been around them, their overlapping banter had been more of a charming quirk than a problem, but everything was coming to her slower now.  It was their drummer, Geoff, a grizzled balding man in his late thirties, who noticed something going on with her and tried to slow the conversation down for her benefit.

 

“Actually,” she said, a little while later, “I Woke Up A Lot.  For Two Weeks, I Kept Waking Up For Like A Minute And Then Falling Asleep Again.  It’s A Mmmm-Mmmyth That You Just Wakeup And Are Up.  For Good.”

 

“Naw,” Aiden said, slapping Darren on the shoulder a few minutes after that.  “Viv didn’t even try to match our tone, man. She’s got a tone all her own. We sounded filthy for those shows but, like, in a good way?  Really helped us out.”

 

“Actually, Kim Shattuck,” Vivian said, even later on.  She paused, while a few people gave her dubious stares, before continuing.  “Them Covering Kids In America… Changed My Life.  I Kind Of Stole Lyn-Z’s Whole Look, A Little Bit, But It Was Kim Shattuck That I Wanted To Be.  Love Her Voice.  Tried To Sound Like Her.”

 

At first it was just the six of them.  The band members were all eager to share their well wishes, to check on her, and to give their regards over Kevin.  They shared memories of him, and those stories ranged from wacky to a kind of raunch that would strike a nun dead of a heart attack, because that was just the kind of guy Kevin was.  Darren gave her a sideways glance whenever the topics seemed to be careening toward a sexual place, like he was afraid they would upset her, but she was used to it.  The Portland scene had shown her a lot, and so had Kevin.

 

It didn’t take long for their in-crowd to expand.  Little by little, people came over.  Some of them Vivian recognized, and some she didn’t.  Most of them were very respectful, in keeping with the tone of the event.  In the background, Greyscale Rainbow were putting on a hell of a show, but she was happy to sit off to the side largely away from the crowd.

 

Before her coma, Vivian had suffered from fairly gripping stage fright.  Lucia had helped with that, and then alcohol or cocaine had gotten her the rest of the way to the stage to perform.  Just hearing crowd noise would normally have been enough.  She was pretty sure Aiden had pulled her aside to get her away, which was sweet.  As she looked over her shoulder, though, she found herself staring at the crowd with a feeling she couldn’t describe.  It wasn’t apathy or indifference but it was definitely in that neighborhood, especially compared to how frightened she remembered being.

 

The only warning she had that something was about to happen was a sudden quiet behind her, and then there was another set of arms around her.  Vivian just had time to make out gray hair in her peripheral vision.  The woman said nothing, but her shoulders and torso shook slightly as she hugged Vivian.  A younger boy, barely through puberty, stood a few steps back with his hands buried in his pockets.  Shaggy hair hid most of his face from view, but he and Kevin had the same nose.  None of them said anything, and Vivian did her best to hug back, but the effort was feeble and she hated herself a little for it.  When the hug broke, Kevin’s mom gave Vivian a big smile, patted her cheek gently, and moved on.  It was both too much and not nearly enough.

 

After a little while the group moved further into the park, away from the concert.  One of The Fist Amendment’s roadies started a wood fire in a stone pit, and their group, now ten strong, settled in around it.  Someone brought her a lawn chair, which Darren helped her into, and once she was settled Vivian was happy to become a part of the scenery again.  Geoff and Aiden held court, regaling a small crowd on sheer charisma.  The whole thing was refreshing.  Low key.

 

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As with any gathering of musicians, it was only a matter of time before the guitars came out.  The group had gotten large enough that most of those gathered were standing just at the edge of the firelight, and somewhere in all of that the main concert behind them ended.  Vivian didn’t notice it when it happened, only the lack of it much later.

 

It was strange to be sober.  As far as she could tell, the event had been ridiculously chill by the standards of any of the involved bands, especially Insanity Hall, but nearly everyone had a beer in hand or an empty near their feet if not both.  Darren was having the time of his life, and that gave Vivian a warm feeling.  She’d never been able to give anyone else the rock star experience.  No one but herself, anyway.

 

That life seemed a million miles away.

 

Suddenly, there she was.  On the other side of the fire, black hair matted to her face in places, was Lucia Alvarez.  Laughing.  Clasping shoulders enthusiastically.  She got like that after shows sometimes, when she was still flying sky high on adrenaline.  It seemed like the whole world turned toward her when she came in the room, and that was where Lucia shone.  Vivian knew better, though.  She could see Lucia was lost.  She could feel the thunder breaking in her heart.  She could see through the scars inside her.

 

“Hey,” someone said beside her, in the slightly elevated tones of someone who had already repeated themselves and was about to be a dick about it.

 

Vivian blinked and looked at him.  She couldn’t quite place his face, but he’d been in a band she knew.  Sometimes it felt like her memories were buried in six inches of mud, and finding them was almost as hard as pulling them up.

 

“What song was that?”

 

“What Song,” Vivian said.  She winced, knowing she’d practically shouted it, and squirmed in her chair.  That was surely going to draw more attention to her, and she’d been quite content as a wallflower.

 

“You were mumble-singin’ somethin’,” he said.  Then he started swiping his hand up and down.  “You were air guitaring it too, like you were playing somethin’ in your head.  What was it?”

 

Vivian just stared blankly at him.  She didn’t know what he was talking about, nor had she realized she’d been doing anything anyone else might have noticed.  After a moment, the man twisted and crooked a finger at someone else on the other side of him, and Vivian’s heart leapt straight into her throat as she watched an acoustic guitar start to slide through the crowd toward her.

 

“Here,” the man said, as he played his part in the relay, and just like that there was a guitar in her hands.  She stared down at it in abject horror, though she knew her expressions were all very same-y and likely no one but Darren would have spotted the panic.

 

While it wouldn’t technically be the first time she’d ever held a proper guitar, it had been quite a while and those few times had all been electric.  Her instrument was, and had always been, the four-string electric bass, and a six-string acoustic guitar was about as far from her comfort zone as was possible while still being a thing she could maybe play.  At her best Vivian would have been hard pressed to make those strings sound good, and she was pretty far from her best.

 

She spent a few seconds setting her right palm against the face, making a slight adjustment in the hopes that her muscle memory would let her ignore the two heaviest strings.  Her fingers pinched together, and it felt wrong.  Something was missing.

 

“Pick,” she said, looking up.  She needed a pick.  Couldn’t play without a pick.  That was her out...

 

...and to her dismay, she found one immediately proffered from either side of her.

 

She knew enough chords to flounder through a Ramones song if she had to.  She still couldn’t remember what she’d been singing in her head, but maybe if she noodled around for a minute she could get back there.  The neck settled into her palm, and Vivian gave the guitar an exploratory strum.  It sounded awful, so she shifted her fretting…

 

...and it made the same awful sound.  The exact same awful sound.  Vivian’s brow furrowed, and her blood ran cold when she looked up at her left hand; she was barely touching the strings.  Her fingers were barely bending them.  She tried to will them down, to touch the fretboard at all as she gave the two highest strings another strum, but the sinking feeling in her stomach sank even deeper.  

 

They barely twitched.  That same awful sound when she swiped the pick across the strings.  People were looking now.  Lots of them.  Conversations had dropped into whispers as they watched.  Sweat broke out across her brow.  She’d had no idea her left hand was so atrophied.  She hadn’t used it for anything since waking up.  Not while eating, or writing. Even her typing had been done with her right hand, and her therapy had focused on other things to that point.

 

Her hands had always worked in concert.  Timing the movements of them, to get the string down on the right fret just before the pick connected, was not something she’d had to do consciously in a long time.  After enough practice, it just became second nature, and now her nature was failing her in front of an audience.  It seemed like it should work, though, so she strummed again.

 

That same awful, discordant sound.  Her breathing felt shallow.  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Darren making his way through the crowd toward her, but someone else beat him to it.

 

“The fuck kind of ghoulish shit is this?” Lucia snapped, as she grabbed the neck and yanked.  She cast a baleful glance at the two men on either side of her, and shifted her grip so that she wielded the body like the blade of an ax.  “Huh?  Which of you two shitheads thought this was a good idea?”

 

The guilty party waved his hands frantically, stammering “I-I-I… I just—”

 

“I-I-I,” Lucia aped, eyes widened in anger.  “Why?”

 

“She was humming somethin’!  I just wanted to know what it was!  I thought maybe it was new music or someth—”

 

Lucia turned and heaved the guitar into the dark.  The pale wood arced off, quickly escaping the firelight, and everyone turned to watch it go.  Lucia grabbed Vivian’s upper arm and helped her to her feet, and the only sound behind them as she limped away, supported by her friend, was the crackle of the fire and the oddly hollow thump as the guitar bounced off a rock in the distance.

 

“The fucking nerve,” Lucia mumbled, just loud enough to be heard.  “Are you okay?”

 

“Um, I’m, Um…”  She kept a death grip on Lucia’s arm, and could hear Darren making his way behind them with her clattering crutches in tow. “Yes.”

 

“Yeah, well…”  Lucia stopped and looked back over her shoulder for a moment.  “They’re just lucky this wasn’t one of our shows.  I’d have cracked a bottle over his head.”

 

That was not an idle threat.  It wouldn’t have been the first time she’d seen Lucia snap on someone.  Her temper was as legendary as her stick skills.

 

“I hate to do this,” Lucia said, leaning in conspiratorially, “but… what did you tell the cops?”

 

“It’s Good To See You Too,” Vivian said, and though her inflections had not returned she would have said it flatly anyway.

 

“You didn’t give them my name, did you?”

 

“You Mean, About The Accident?”

 

“...Yeah.  The accident.  About you two bein’... having substances in your system.”

 

Vivian shook her head.  For just a moment, the briefest flash, Vivian and Lucia had direct eye contact, and as soon as she noticed it Lucia broke the gaze and sniffed.  Then she licked her lips and sniffed again.  It had been a brief glance, and the light wasn’t great, but she was sure that Lucia’s pupils had been huge.  Like dinner plates.

 

“Yeah,” Lucia said, sheepishly.  “Okay.  Good.  Real good.  Listen, I, uh…”  After a beat, her confidence seemed to reassert itself, and she turned back to Vivian with her chin held high.  Her eyes were wary, though, as she jerked a thumb aimlessly over her shoulder.  “I’m really glad you came out, but I’ve gotta get back.  We should catch up though!”

 

“Yeah,” Vivian said, crestfallen.  “Okay.”

 

“I’ll be in touch!”

 

Lucia turned to go even before Darren had caught up to them, and Vivian was left with an empty feeling in her chest.  She mouthed the word okay though her breath failed her, and she made no sound as her best friend hurriedly walked away.

 

“Wow,” Darren said, as he helped her get settled on her crutches.  “That escalated quickly.  You okay?”

 

Vivian nodded and cleared her throat.  “She Was Coked Up.”

 

Darren stared back over his shoulder and frowned.  “Did you expect something different?”

 

She didn’t answer him, mostly out of embarrassment, and Carly did not look pleased when they finally got home well after midnight.

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