ceciliatan

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

I met Jonathan for a drink. At some dive in Hell’s Kitchen, which is a scary sounding name for a neighborhood but actually it was really not that bad. Not really all that different from a lot of other residential areas of Manhattan. Mine was non-alcoholic, his wasn’t.

I, of course, told him about my idea. “All acoustic, just him and me. No fancy production.”

“Pure…?” he said, swirling his glass thoughtfully.

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

Jordan threw a Concussion Party for me. I’m not kidding. I don’t know who told him what was going on but what we found when we got to his place was ambient techno burbling in the background from a new surround-sound speaker system he’d recently installed and ambient lighting low.

The first person I saw after walking in the door was Bradley, looking very doe-eyed, clutching a beer and standing at the edge of the kitchen counter. Before I could get to him, though, Marvelle intercepted me. I swung my left hand toward him and he, like Artie, didn’t blink, just locked fingers with me thumb-wrestling-style and clapped me on the back of the shoulder with his other hand. “Gonna bubblewrap you, man. Make a Daron-shaped foam cut out and put you in an Anvil case.”

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

Ziggy and I didn’t have sex for like a week. This is significant because I felt I was holding out for something but I wasn’t sure what, and he was obviously holding back, too, because when have you ever known Ziggy not to make a move in an entire week? I think we were both waiting until we felt like it was safe to go back in the water.

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

It was just me, Chris, and Courtney from the Allston house, and we picked up Bart in the van. Carynne and Bradley were getting back to the city on their own schedule–in fact maybe they’d already left a day or two earlier. I don’t remember. It was a Sunday night so there wasn’t much traffic and we grabbed dinner at the deli in Vernon.

Connecticut was long as usual despite the lack of traffic. I had some weird flashbacks in the van while we were on I-84. I thought about asking Chris, who was driving, if he remembered much about the partying we’d done while Nomad had passed through the area a few months before and then decided that was not the best topic for conversation. I didn’t want to seem to be callously disregarding his sobriety nor rubbing his face in it, by talking about how hard I’d hit the bottle that time. But something about that dark stretch of road reminded me of how far out on the edge I’d gone.

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

(22 days left in the DGC Kickstarter!)

I’ll relate to you one more Bradley story before I get back to talking nonstop about Ziggy.

The night we’d told Bradley and Marvelle we were hiring them both, we ened up at Jordan’s. When Carynne had talked to him to vet Marvelle, he’d mentioned we should drop by the loft late if we were around.

Apparently there was some music industry function—I don’t remember what—and it was Jordan’s usual M.O. to get people together socially because that so often lead to them maybe working together professionally, later, with each other as well as him. Maybe. (Or maybe Jordan just liked to have parties and that’s what happens when you know people.)

Anyway. The upshot was we went, and I figured now that I had hired Marvelle I could ask Jordan to tell me more about him, but I never actually got around to it during the party. Instead I found myself sitting in the corner by the keyboards and recording equipment watching everyone and wondering whether it was really true that other people enjoy parties more than I do or if it’s that they’re just better at acting like they’re enjoying themselves.

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

(Kickstarter is launching today around noon! Check it out and share the link: http://kck.st/1RFanDN ! -ctan)

In the end we auditioned seven drummers. Yes, seven. Bradley wasn’t the only one to show up without confirming with Carynne first. Hey, I’m sure if I got wind of a gig I really wanted and didn’t manage to find out all the details in advance, I would’ve shown up at the drop of a hat, too.

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

I don’t know why I was nervous for the first day of auditions. I was not the one trying to get a gig. I was the one doing the auditioning–I mean, the auditing? What’s the right verb for that? I guess it’s called auditioning both when you’re the one going in for the gig and when you’re the one doing the hiring.

That’s weird, isn’t it? Or maybe it isn’t, because all performance is collaborative on some level.

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

So, hit me over the head with a brick about it.

Somehow, despite ample evidence to the contrary, I was used to thinking of myself as the only gay person I knew. I in fact knew a ton of people–Ziggy, Colin, my own sister, Jonathan, Matthew, Sarah, maybe even Mills if she was right about him–but in my head queer people were still really few and far between.

I tried to work out the math. If you believe the one-in-ten estimate, well, that would mean ten percent, right? Pretty rare. And yet clearly way more then ten percent of the people I knew were not straight.

Well, I thought, maybe one-in-ten doesn’t take into account that the entertainment industry probably has a higher concentration of gay folks. And it also probably doesn’t count bisexual people properly in the first place.

Right? Did that mean my impression was less stupid? Probably not.