Soliloquies Anthology 30.1

By Spencer Diver

It was the whine of the feedback that hit me first, like the big breath a baby makes before it terrorizes your peace on an overnight flight. It cut through the sixty-cycle hum, too shrill to bear. This was my most perverse pleasure. Even if the notes following the feedback were terrible — and, speaking honestly, they often were — it was an expectant discomfort, a promise that no matter what came after it, the crowd would fling themselves into each other in Brownian motion with their limbs splayed out, occasionally tongues intertwined. I was too small for it all, both to understand it or to not get crushed by an absent-minded teenager while standing in the crowd. So I stood with my back to the wall, taking in the awkwardly strummed power chords with a silent reverence. I knew the exact spot to be — where I was least likely to get hit, where I could avoid the people with glassy eyes that stumbled out of the bathroom, where I couldn’t see what the older kids did to people who came with shaved heads and white ladder laces on their boots. I knew the older ones — they were my friends. When I got hurt or too overwhelmed, they would take me outside and keep their eyes on me while I cried. One of them gave me his old shitty practice amp, even though I never talked to him. He killed himself not long after, but I didn’t know. I got yelled at when I kept asking why he wasn’t at shows anymore.

—

My dad gave me two options for my twelfth birthday: a bike or a guitar. I thought scooters were cooler — any form of transportation with a seat was for cowards — so the choice was obvious. A Chinese knock-off Telecaster, with the fake Fender logo laminated poorly on the headstock. The neck was soft enough that even a little pressure from my nails would dent the surface, and the fret ends would cut into my thumb and palm. Nevertheless, I was biologically melded with it for the next three years of my life. I brought it to school, sitting it next to my desk and waiting until I could sneak into the music room and play it. I learned the simple stuff first — Green Day, Descendants, some Sex Pistols and “Smoke on the Water” to make my dad happy. He used to sit me down and play me old prog records, telling me that this was what the peak of music was. I liked it, but it was all too clean for me to appreciate. Where were the flubbed notes, the songs so fast the vocalist’s syllables got mangled into a flurry of consonants? Where was that unbearable whine?

—

Post-pandemic life left me in an unfamiliar city, with barely any friends and intense social anxiety. My father’s record collection, which had become part of my quarantine rituals, had moved to the Prairies along with him. I was confined to my apartment with a roommate that hated me, and I was unable to go outside for anything but groceries. I had supplemented my record drought with Spotify and YouTube recordings of live shows. I rarely played guitar anymore so as not to annoy my roommate, and when I did, I sounded clumsy and awful. Music for me had become purely a voyeuristic experience. I watched others dance and mosh and improvise and stage dive and freak-out while I sat at my desk. I was invited to a friend’s birthday party, the first social event of my post-pandemic life. It took me a week to convince myself to go, and when I did, I felt inhuman. While others could mingle and socialize, I could barely get a word out. I felt like I was trapped in a panopticon, with every move I made being observed and logged. I walked home for two hours, thinking of new, creative ways to kill myself, with painless and painful variations. I reached my apartment, put my headphones on, and blasted music as loud as possible until I could no longer think. I wanted that familiar, cathartic pain, but instead it was a new, worse one. The walls of sound were oppressive and atomizing. Where feedback disrupted the ambient noise of the amp, the sound files stored on my phone only disrupted the sterile buzz of my apartment. I laid on my bed for hours until my brain finally gave in and allowed me to sleep.

—

“Do you play?” she asked, pointing to the guitar standing in the corner of my room, causing me to clench every muscle in my body.

“Not much,” I lied. “It’s been awhile.”

By this point, my old Telecaster had finally crapped out, and I had replaced it with newer, sturdier models, like the classical guitar she grabbed and examined.

“What do you play?”

My taste had changed, along with my temperament. My love of jazz I had since I listened to Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers as a teen had overtaken my love of punk. She handed me the instrument and sat beside me.

“Play something.”

Another wave of panic hit me like a truck, but I agreed. My fingers fumbled into “Polka Dots and Moonbeams”— it was too fast and a quarter of the notes were wrong, but I kept going, keeping my eyes glued to my hands. Eventually, I slowed down and managed to play well enough to my ear. I held the final chord, kept my head down, and waited for her to break the silence with a word of praise or even a sympathetic remark. She said nothing, but just as I was about to return to my list of unconventional suicide methods, I felt her arm wrap around my shoulder and pull me in as she placed her head on my other shoulder.

“You fucked it up a bit, but it was nice.”

I smiled and placed my hand on her leg, listening as her breathing mingled with the buzz of my apartment vents.