Dirtbag: EP 5
PART 2
A Return to Form Chicago, November–December 2025
Set list: Hotel California, The Eagles—or Bossa Bros Thinking Out Loud, Ed Sheeran
Landslide, Fleetwood Mac What a Fool Believes, The Doobie Brothers House of the Rising Sun, The Animals The Wire, HAIM You Are the Sunshine of My Life, Stevie Wonder
“You’re up early for a Sunday?” My wife comes into the kitchen. I can hear her open the cupboard behind me, where we keep the coffee cups. I stare out the window at the rising sun, just above the fence in our backyard. My wife pulls back a chair and sits down next to me. Steam from the coffee fogs her glasses.
This tiny thing, this silly little gesture, reminds me that I love her.
“I need to tell you a story,” I say, reaching for my wife’s hands. The next two hours pass by as I fill her in on Pannah: falling asleep at the office, going to find him with our daughter, karaoke, and finally his story of escape.
“So the Vietnamese army invaded right in the nick of time?” My wife’s eyes grow wide. I wonder what mine look like. This is the third night I haven’t been able to sleep.
“Yeah, a miracle. He was able to secure safe passage to Vietnam by showing the soldiers where the cache of hot dogs was.” I rub my face. My wife sets down a fresh cup of coffee in front of me. “He stayed there till Koeh was born. Then his wife got cancer, and they moved to Canada so she could see a specialist. After she died, they came here for Koeh to go to school.”
“Wow, and all this time he didn’t learn English?”
“Yeah. Koeh says that he’s stubborn about it, old-dog-new-tricks and all that. But actually, Koeh thinks the real reason his father doesn’t learn English is that he doesn’t want to know what the lyrics to his favorite songs mean—like they may not be as good as they are in his heart.” My wife brushes blonde hair from her forehead and warms her hands around her mug.
“What next?” she asks.
“I dunno. I guess we record an album.”
“Why do you think he wanted to tell you all that?” My wife takes my hand in hers and traces the lines of my palm. Her hands are warm from her mug.
“Not sure.”
“Go to sleep. It’s Sunday. Nothing important to do. You need to rest.” She stands up and smiles down at me, and I look up at her. Maybe it’s the lack of sleep, but I don’t pull my eyes away. I study her irises—like if I keep looking, I can see who she really is—and that would somehow tell me who I am. That doesn’t happen. But I do see something I haven’t seen in a while: love.
I leave her in the kitchen and pad down the hallway to the bathroom. As I piss, something deep and revelatory squeezes my temples.
Was it that her love hadn’t been there before, or was it that I hadn’t looked long enough, hard enough, to see it? All the time I thought she was avoiding me, annoyed with me, secretly disappointed in me. Maybe I was scared to linger, to look at her and see what I feared in those eyes.
I collapse into the bed and sleep all day.
“The studio is on fire?!” It’s early in the morning, and I’m yelling at my brother on speakerphone.
“Well, it’s not currently on fire, of course, but there was a fire, and they are closed for repairs.”
“Hold on, I’m dropping off my kid,” I say.
“Bye, Dad.” My daughter waves at me, walking backward.
“Bye—oh, I’m still picking you up, right?”
She smiles and nods. “Yep.” I pull out of the lot.
“Hey, bro,” I ask.
“Yeah?”
“Do you own a dog?”
“Yeah, two. Why?”
“Never mind.” I sulk. “Anyway, thanks for trying to hook it up. I’ll just have to tap another resource. Let me know when we can get the deposit back.”
“Hey! Wait. Don’t hang up.”
“Yeah?” I turn onto the highway—no SBs today.
“Didn’t you read the contract?” I feel a prick of dread on the back of my neck.
“Yes.” I half-lie. There were way too many pages to fully read what was referred to me by my brothers as a standard boilerplate studio rental agreement.
“So, you know that the deposit is non-refundable, right?” I feel my guts wallop.
“What! For real?! That was a couple grand out the bank! How do I explain this to my wife? This expense, not to mention the musicians I hired—it’s close to 15k!”
“Well, you can hope that the renovations get finished and you can keep your spot.”
“Fine.” I wipe cold sweat from my forehead as I park at work. What the f**k am I supposed to do?
“Hey, bro, what has you so excited to record again? You with a new band?”
“Not exactly.” White noise builds up between us like accumulating snow. He wants an answer and won’t hang up till I give it. “Okay, I’ll send you the demo. It’s rough. I recorded it in my basement.”
“I’ll be gentle, little bro.” He hangs up.
I get to work, and my supervisor is standing by my cubicle.
“So, how is the brain fog? Are you managing?”
“Oh, yeah, actually I started taking cold showers,” I lie. “I’m much more focused now.” To my horror, she pulls up a chair and sits, settling in for a fuller explanation. When I fail to give one, she scoots closer and drops her voice to a whisper.
“Can I be honest?” I’m not sure what to say to that, but I nod. “Covid really messed me up too.”
What is this b***h talking about? I feel my hackles rise.
“That kind of radical change, the fear, the uncertainty. Powerful paradigm changes can really affect your mind, your relationships.”
“Yeah.” I half-fake curiosity. I say half-fake because this is the first real conversation I’ve ever had at work.
“Yup. The stay-at-home order was announced a week after I put my mother in a home. She died of Covid a month later.” My supervisor looks around conspiratorially. “I’m not supposed to share details about my life that are this personal. But that tragedy did something to me. I couldn’t enjoy what I enjoyed before. I didn’t think the same. I started to fixate on the strangest house projects, I made weird business investments, tried my hand at writing romantasy novels.”
“Romantasy?” I ask, leaning back in my chair.
“It’s a mix of romance and fantasy.”
“And people like that?” I chuckle and scratch my scalp through my hat.
“So many. You’d be amazed. Anyway, back to what I was saying—some psychologists call it ‘shaking the snow globe.’ When your life goes through a big change, your mind changes with it—you change. Sometimes for good and sometimes for the worse.”
“Did you change for the better?” I ask.
“My husband left me, my mom died, I lost a couple thousand dollars and hours of my life I can’t get back.” She pauses. “I changed, that’s all. No good, no bad, it just is what it is.”
This pep talk was falling flat. I feel a prickly need to show her that her efforts weren’t in vain, so I nod my head.
“But that’s not what I wanted to tell you,” she continues. “When life shakes the snow globe, it’s useless to ask whether you’re changing for better or worse. What matters is knowing that change is coming. You’re allowed to be afraid of it. But don’t waste time fearing that you’ll stay the same. That never happens.”****
I sit there with my mouth open. She looks concerned.
“Brain fog again?”
“Uh, no. Sorry. Thanks for saying that. That really helps.”
Amazed, I realize I’m not lying.
“No problem. Glad you’re back in the office.” She stands and walks away.
“So I get to meet the band?” My daughter buckles up in the front seat. “Where are they from? How did you get them to join?”
“You’re amped up,” I say.
“I just really want Mr. P to be a famous singer.” She looks out the window and waves to her friends in the schoolyard.
“My roommate back in college played bass in a punk band. He reached out to his sister, who is a classically trained jazz guitarist.”
“Don’t you know someone involved with—”
“I reached out,” I interrupt, “but haven’t heard anything. That guy is super busy. He probably has better things to do.”
We drive into the heart of the city, into a blacktop lot behind a row of connected high street shops. The dumpsters are overflowing and covered with graffiti.
“What a dump,” my daughter says, stepping out of the van.
“It’s a place to practice. In this industry, you take what you can get.”
My bassist is leaning against the back door of one of the shops. He sees me and waves through a fog of vape smoke. As he makes his way toward us, my daughter walks around the van to stand next to me.
“Will Mr. P and Koeh be here?” she whispers.
“Not tonight. I need to see if these guys have the right chemistry first. Plus, he’s cleaning my office building right now, remember.”
“Hey!” My bassist reaches us and daps me up. “It’s been a while, man. Ready to jam?” My daughter cuts her eyes at this.
“Come on in, man. The owner is real chill. He lets us play shows here sometimes—as well as practice.”
We walk through a back door and into a shabby laundromat. Off to one side of a long bar is a dinky stage, complete with PA speakers and a drum set. We pass by rows of double-decker washing machines toward the stage. A very large man sits at the bar with his back to us.
“Hey, Manny! Cool if we practice?” The man at the bar doesn’t turn around but simply grunts his consent and sips from a rocks glass. My daughter perches on an amp, kicking her legs in the air.
My bassist slings his instrument over his shoulder and then pulls his long orange hair free from the strap, flipping it back.
“You didn’t tell me you found a drummer,” he says.
“I didn’t. Not yet,” I say, confused. A toilet flushes somewhere on the other side of the laundromat.
“No way,” I say, dumbfounded.
“Is that him!” screams my daughter. “Taylor Swift’s drummer?!”
I cant believe my eyes. My college roommate who now plays in Taylor Swifts band comes out of the bathroom. He smiles and wipes his hands with a paper towel.
“Hey, bro, sorry I didn’t respond. I wanted to surprise you. Me and the rest of the band got time off for Thanksgiving, so… is this your daughter?”
The bell at the front door rings. A tall woman with black hair and a guitar case comes through and walks toward us. My bassist waves her over and helps her organize and plug in her pedals. She wears Victorian lace and a lot of eye shadow. The guitarist.
We settle in, and after the band tunes and fiddles for a while, I give them the set list and sheet music. They read and shuffle the pages, nodding to silent beats in their heads. The drummer starts a 4/4 beat with his bass drum and clicks the rim of the snare, keeping time. The bassist pongs along with the low thump and sets the groundwork for the hook. The guitarist starts with one note, quiet but resonant. Her finger quivers on the fretboard, casting a haunting tremolo. The drummer crashes, making the air around us thrum. The bassist picks up pace and begins a countermelody, while the guitarist sweeps the jazz chords around the dingy store. The hair on the back of my neck prickles, and I soak up that thick-throated feeling I always get when the music washes over me.
It’s perfect, I think. I look over, and my daughter is swaying from side to side on the amp. She turns and notices me. She smiles and then points to the band. I can’t hear her, but I read her lips.
“They rock!”
In between track one and track two, the artists talk shop and make minor adjustments. The drummer flips his crash upside down and tests it. The sound is like a baking sheet falling to the ground. The guitarist depresses a pedal on the floor with her foot. She chops a chord, and the note echoes, folding into itself before it fades to nothing. The bassist starts with a slinking, subversive reggae line. It sounds like something coming up out of a swamp. This time the guitar matches the snare with its echoing chops.
I get a text from my wife asking about dinner. The band’s really in a groove. I don’t want to stop their flow.
“That Mom?”
“Yeah, she wants to know about dinner.”
“Here, give me the phone.”
I pass my daughter my phone. The owner is scowling at us in the mirror behind the bar. I wonder how long we have until he kicks us out. I run to the bathroom. As the door closes behind me, I hear the band start up a bossa nova rendition of “Hotel California.” I finish my piss. A chill goes up my spine, despite not loving The Eagles. Then a sudden dread wakes me out of my good vibe. What if the studio isn’t fixed up in time? All this practice will be for nothing.
When I come out, my daughter is waiting for me with my phone.
“What’s the deal?” I ask. “We gotta head?”
“Nope. Mom’s coming with pizza.”
I shoot her a look. “Here?”
“What?” She puts her hands up defensively. “She told me that you told her everything on Sunday. Besides, I know Mom. She’ll feel much better about the expenses if she feels part of it.”
I scratch my head and consider this.
“How much pizza is she buying?”
My daughter turns her attention back to the band and smiles as the guitarist throttles her instrument and perfectly executes the scalding, ascending solo. The owner is still sitting at the bar, but I think I catch a glimpse of his foot tapping.
The back door opens, and a blast of December air cuts through the heat from the band and makes the large windows in the front sweat. My wife walks in carrying big white boxes in her arms. My daughter—who moments ago was spinning belly-down on the barstool—sees her coming, stands up, and yells, “Pizza!” Everyone stops playing and gathers around a sticky table to get a slice.
“We need someone to play keys,” says the guitarist.
Her brother chimes in through a mouthful of cheese and sauce: “I wouldn’t be salty if we had a brass section too.”
Things are falling into place, but we have a lot of work to do. The wife bought deep dish from the good place. That’s more money toward the project—money I can’t afford to spend.
Pannah and Koeh show up near the end. I swell with pride and confidence as Pannah leads the band in a swinging version of Ed Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud”—which is a total rip-off of Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get it On.” I don’t mention it. The players all seem to approve of Pannah, they see what I see. I watch Koeh. He smiles and nods along to the beat. We make eye contact and the smile shifts, just fractionally, into something forced.
After we finish the rest of the set list with Pannah and pack up, it’s almost 10 p.m. I walk with my daughter and wife toward the back door. The owner stops us.
“Hey!” He frowns down at my daughter. Is he pissed that we brought in a minor? An uncomfortable moment passes. He crosses his arms over his chest, jerks his chin, and says, “Cool tail.” Then he smiles at me and my wife and walks back to his seat at the bar.
Friday morning, I’m driving my daughter to school, and it’s one of those super bright—even with sunglasses—kind of mornings. We’re early, so we stop for coffee.
“Do you like going to work?” My daughter collects her bright pink drink at the Starbucks pickup counter.
“Not really.” I grab my light roast, and we walk back to the car.
“If you don’t like it, why do you work there?”
“Well…” I scratch my head through my hat. “It was a safe bet after the studio closed.”
“Why did it close?”
A thousand bitter responses pool in my head. “Covid, mainly. We couldn’t get people in. The arts suffered during that time.”
“Mom called it a pivot.” My daughter sips her neon drink.
“Did she?” We never really talked about it. I didn’t want to. Moments later, I drop her at the gate.
“Bye.”
“Bye.”
On my way to work, I get a text from Drummer:
Drummer: That singer. Where did you find him? He’s amazing, man.
This makes me feel lighter as I step through the glass door of the office. When I get to my desk, there’s a snow globe next to my monitor.
The next two hours are a blur. My supervisor’s supervisor is talking at me again, but this time he uses phrases like, “not a good fit” and “different direction” and “bad economy.” Before I know it, I’m drunk in a Chili’s with three other losers who got “let go.” Butt rock blares through the speakers of the bar.
“I heard they canned the supervisor too,” says Ape-Drape.
That must be why she had that talk with me, I think. She was lubing me up for the forthcoming ass-pounding I would receive.
“She said change is inevitable,” I slur.
“Who?” asks Barn-Face from HR.
“The supervisor,” I reply, impatiently.
“Hold up—did she tell you about this before, and you didn’t think to tell us?” Ape-Drape asks, incredulous. My hackles rise. How did I end up drinking with these dipshits?
“No,” I reply. “She just gave me a stupid pep talk last week about how change isn’t good or bad—it just happens.”
“That’s stupid,” says another A-hole from a separate department, downing his Red Bull vodka.
“Yeah.” I stand up because I need to go to the bathroom. “She told me, ‘Don’t waste time worrying that you will stay the same or never change’—some crap like that.”
I head to the bathroom, still being sonically soaked by the anthems of divorced dads around the world.
Mid-piss, I feel my phone buzz in my pocket. I pull it out and drop it on the ground.
“F**k!”
I quickly shake off and zip up. As I bend down to retrieve my phone, I hit my head on the porcelain on the way up.
“Double f**k!”
I drop my phone in a puddle of what I hope is condensation. I reach for it again, taking care not to drop my hat in the urinal. A ring of dried piss clings like hard candy to the drain.
Standing, I see that my brother has texted me:
Brother: Sorry, bro. The studio is a no-go. One of the repairmen hit a sewer main. Looks like this renovation project just got bumped back to next month. I listened to the track—it’s pretty good, but maybe this is the universe’s way of saying not to quit your day job, lol. See you at Christmas.
I leave the bar without paying, walk across the industrial complex, pass the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Chili’s, Fridays, Applebee’s, and O’Charley’s. I trudge through a frozen lawn, crispy with frost.
Once at my van, I wrench open the passenger door. I know I’m not walking straight. I know I’m not thinking straight. But it doesn’t matter now. I grab the snow globe out of the cardboard box that contained all the crap on my desk. Moving quickly in the cold, I cross the employee lot and make my way over to the large glass doors of my former place of employment. I chuck the snow globe, causing a splintering crack to appear in my reflection. That probably cost me my severance package, but I don’t care. I breathe heavily.
I hate this company. I hate my coworkers. I hate this stupid rat race. I hate myself.
I can hear the feedback of distorted guitars building—calling me back into my car. It’s a song I’ve heard many times. Stupidly, I rifle in my pocket for my phone, blinking against the blurry, drunken film over my eyes. Opening Spotify, I walk back to the van. I have to type and retype the title a number of times, which only feeds my rage. Funny—“rage” was the word I was trying to spell.
The chunky feedback becomes a reality as I plug my phone into the aux cord. The distinct cowbell signals the coming crush that is Rage Against the Machine’s magnum opus. I’m lost in the music once more. I turn the key in the ignition, rev the engine, and punch the gas.
F**k you, I won’t do what you tell me!
My speedometer crests as I recklessly speed around the lot, nearly clipping my ex-coworkers’ cars. I see them peering down at me from the desiccated husk of the office building. I’m screaming, “F**k you, I won’t do what you tell me!”
Just before the song ends, I feel a loss of control as my minivan crashes into a parking block, popping my front left tire. The van careens out of the lot and down an embankment into a man-made lake. The song stops. I hear bubbles.
Hours later, my wife comes to pick me up.
“You smell like goose s**t,” she says, not looking at me as I drop into the passenger seat of her car.
My daughter laughs from the backseat. My wife is not laughing.
“The van is totaled, but I guess that doesn’t matter since you don’t have a job anymore. It’s not like you have to be anywhere.”
She flicks her turn signal a little too hard as we leave the place I used to work. She’s got that quiet, cold reserve that lets me know she’s thinking every bad thought I have about myself. My daughter looks nervous in the rearview mirror. She’s fidgeting—maybe trying to think of something to bridge the gap between her parents.
“At least we still have the band and we’re still recording this weekend, right?” She looks hopeful, and some dark part of me wants to destroy that hope. I find pleasure in the idea.
“No,” I say. “The studio burned down. The deposit’s nonrefundable. We can’t keep this going.”
My wife gives me a sidelong glance that lets me know she’s added this failure to the top of Mr. Dirtbag’s mountain of failure. We walk inside our home, each of us quiet, wrapped up in our own thoughts. I go down to the basement and throw a blanket on the couch. I try to sleep the shame away.
It doesn’t work.
Bassist: Sorry, man.
Bassist: Me and my sis got an offer to tour with The Refused.
I don’t respond.
Bassist: Plus, with the studio falling through…
I throw my phone.
Days go by. A month.
Despite being very busy at the hospital, my wife makes time to form a plan with me. She feigns understanding, but I can tell she’s just trying to keep the peace and not upset me too much. I nod along and tell her what she wants to hear, but the distance between us is growing. It feels just like last time.
I send out my résumé. I wake up late. I smoke too much weed. I dig up an old video game console and move an old TV into my basement study.
My wife comes down and lets me know she’s not mad. She asks me to sleep in the bedroom again. I tell her I have a cold.
My daughter comes down too.
“So…”
“So what?” I reply, not looking up from my game.
“What about Mr. P?”
“What about him?” I say.
She stands in front of the screen, hands on her hips. I pause the game and stare up at her.
“You’re just not going to call him? What about the record?”
“Call him? I don’t speak his language! The studio burned—”
“You could record here.” She cuts me off, gesturing around the studio.
“It was a dumb idea to begin with,” I say weakly. “A waste of time.”
“A waste,” she repeats. Her voice catches. I can’t bring myself to check, but I know she’s crying. My daughter’s hands fall to her sides, and she walks out of the room, tail swishing limply behind her.
A doctor would say I’m depressed. Let them say whatever they want. I smoke my weed pen and play video games. After a while, I start feeling a pull to “make things right” with my wife. I realize that the only reason I’m considering this noble path of humility is simply because I’m horny—so I jerk off into the downstairs toilet.
I stay a grub, a goblin, a dirtbag.
Daughter: I’m meeting Mr. P and Koeh at the laundromat.
I pick up my controller and unpause my game. My phone buzzes again.
Daughter: Manny says he can sing tonight.
I give in.
Me: Who’s Manny? Sing what? There’s no band anymore.
Daughter: Manny owns the laundromat. He has a karaoke setup. The Drummer said he might show up.
Fat chance. I toss my phone on the carpet. His boss is back on tour—they play a packed-out stadium tonight, actually. I lean over to pick up my phone and type a response to this effect, but then delete it and resume my game.
It’s ten p.m., and no one is home. Feeling an urge to smoke a cigarette, I emerge from my cave and shuffle past the dining room table to the sliding back doors. I light up and exhale into the cloudy, freezing December night. I idly wonder what percent of the smoke is steam from my breath when the floodlights on the side of my house flick on. There, poking his head around the corner, is Pannah.
“I got you, motherfucker,” he says in broken English. And maybe it’s the weed, but my guts freeze with sudden fear. He steps out from around the corner and reaches into his pocket. I raise one leg and stick my hands out, covering my face.
“Please, don’t shoot!” I scream.
He produces a flip phone from his pocket. I relax. Pannah moves closer, and I recognize the weaving guitar of Fleetwood Mac’s Landslide. Pannah sits down on a deck chair and pats the space next to him. I sit and take another calming drag of my cigarette. He lets Stevie take the first verse but then places a hand on my back and sings the chorus.
“Well, I’ve been ‘fraid of changing, ’cause I’ve built my life around you. But time makes you bolder, even children get older, and I’m getting older too.”
I hitch, drop the cig, and put my hands in my face. I’m sobbing as he rubs my back. My face is freezing, my tears are hot, Pannah’s voice—it cuts deep and spills my soul’s guts like bloody entrails freezing on snowy ground. He couldn’t know what this song means to me—
And if you see my reflection in the snow-covered hills, well, the landslide will bring it down. Oh, the landslide will bring it down.
“Man,” I say, wiping my eyes and nose with the crusty sleeves of my hoodie. “That was exactly what I needed to hear.” He smiles and shivers in his coat.
“Come on in. Come inside, it’s cold.”
He looks apprehensive and cocks his head back toward the front of my house.
“Oh, right, the karaoke show.” He nods and gestures for me to follow him.
“Right, OK. Let me get a coat.” I go back into the house, brush my teeth, slather on deodorant, and grab my boots. Moments later, I come out of the house with a shell jacket, fully expecting to see Pannah ready to go in his work van. He throws me a motorcycle helmet and, opening the visor of his own, inclines his shining head toward the back of his electric scooter.
People honk at us as we turn onto the high street and weave our way through weekend bar traffic toward the laundromat. I catch my reflection in the shop windows. My cheeks are raw and red. The lights of the shops are bright. We push through the front door of the laundromat. The warmth and the smell of dryer sheets are a welcome comfort.
“They’re here!” I recognize my daughter’s voice and look for her among the tawdry crowd. I see my wife and a fellow nurse at the bar talking to the owner, Manny. Then I see my daughter on her speaker perch, talking to some punks who look like they came stock with the building. Koeh is there and waves us over.
“I knew you’d make it,” he says. “Pay up.” He holds his hand out to my daughter, who slaps five bucks into his waiting palm. She gives me a “my bad” look. The lights dim, and I wheel around to see that Manny has left his place at the bar and is fiddling with a PA soundboard and an ancient-looking laptop. He points at me, beckoning with a curling finger.
“All yours, chief,” he says.
“What? You want me to—”
“That’s what I told the girl.” He looks longingly back toward the bar. “Your wife’s nurse friend is real cute, and I think I may have a shot.” He lumbers off, leaving me with the tech.
It takes a while to hammer out the EQ and load the setlist into a YouTube playlist of instrumental versions of our songs. It’s almost eleven o’clock when I give Pannah the thumbs-up. More people arrive and buzz around the bar area—late-night delivery drivers, a couple more punks, and, to my surprise, my daughter’s friends and their parents. Sperry Dad buys me a beer.
I get a text from my brother:
You owe me. Merry Christmas.
The f**k is he talking about? It’s late. Maybe he’s drunk. I dim the lights and direct a beam toward the spinning disco ball.
“Check,” I say into the mic. Heads turn; someone coughs. “Ladies and gentlemen, the Wiener Man himself!” My daughter and Koeh laugh super loud. Everyone else seems confused, and a squeak of feedback jolts me back. “It’s with great pleasure, I introduce to you my dear friend, Pannah. Please welcome him to the stage.”
People clap half-heartedly; many stand with drinks and can’t clap. The first song is one of his favorites. I fought him on adding it, but it doesn’t matter now. Honky-tonk piano and spacey ’80s synth plink out over the crowd. The Doobie Brothers’ song winds up:
He came from somewhere back in her long ago. The sentimental fool don’t see, tryin’ hard to recreate what had yet to be created…
It’s jarring to hear the track without Michael McDonald’s throaty white-soul signature sound. The song plays joyfully, a calliope from a carousel, but as the chorus washes over us, Pannah’s voice shifts to a reaching falsetto, juxtaposing the pathos of the verse in a sharp minor key.
“The wise man has the power,” he keens, “to reason away…”
Something catches my attention. The front door opens, and I recognize a face—an old man’s face—but before I can get a better look, he ducks into the growing crowd and out of sight. Pannah’s flawless falsetto climbs:
“What seems to be is always better than nothing, than nothing at all.”
He finishes the song with a curt bow and wipes his forehead. Koeh hands him a glass of water. The opening bar of a slower Simon and Garfunkel song plays.
“Want a Swedish Fish?” a voice from behind me says. I turn to see the speaker inches from my ear. He holds a crumpled plastic bag of candy and shakes it around. I’m dumbfounded. I stick out my hand toward the bag slowly, taking in the world-weary eyes and sagging—yet still boyish—dimples of a living legend.
“Go ahead,” Bill Murray says. “Pick any color you want. I don’t care.”
I crack a smile and grab a gummy. He smiles too and puts the bag back into his coat pocket, sidling up to me like we were old friends.
“Did you put together this little shindig?”
I nod, chewing the sweet and changing the lights from blue to red. Bill Murray blinks slowly, indulgently, and leans over the railing that surrounds the sound booth.
“It’s cool.”
“Why are you here, Mr. Murray?”
His mouth curls, conspiratorial, and he looks from side to side. “You mean like philosophically, existentially?”
I struggle to reply, and he quickly puts me out of my misery. “Your brother is my accounts manager. We were at a show tonight and…” As he speaks, he’s looking over the heads of the concertgoers. “Your brother told me a rumor that there’s a certain Cambodian man who can sing a rendition of House of the Rising Sun in a way that can turn you inside out and—”
Bill Murray interrupts himself and raises his hand. “Over here!”
He flags down two newcomers. Big, tough-looking guys with sunglasses approach, and Bill steps over to them, cups his hand over his mouth, and shouts into the big man’s ear, then walks back to my booth.
“To answer your question, kid, I’m here because—” He points at my microphone. “Do you mind?”
I know my mouth is open. My body moves on its own, and I hand him the mic. He takes it.
“Thanks, man. I mean that.”
I slide the volume down to blend in the next track.
“I’m here because I like your brother,” Bill Murray tosses the microphone up and catches it, testing its weight, “and I love karaoke.”
“What are you going to do?” I ask.
“It’s cool, playa. I’ll hop in when the time is right.” He turns and disappears into the crowd.
I press play on the laptop, but nothing happens. I press it again. Pannah looks toward me from the stage. I panic. Something’s wrong with the PA.
All of a sudden, warm and deep guitar emerges from nowhere. A moment later, a lone musician takes the stage, picking a beautiful and immediately recognizable arpeggio. He has a swooping Euro-mullet and dark eyelashes. He plays the riff perfectly and effortlessly.
Where the hell did this guy come from?
There once was a house in New Orleans, they called the Rising Sun…
Pannah doesn’t miss a beat. He smiles and nods to the guitarist, who returns his nod with an infinitesimal smirk. I feel that chill in my spine again, as if the notes were climbing it like a ladder. One of Murray’s guys steps onto the stage holding a bass drum and stool. Pannah pays him no mind, and the man sets the equipment upright and goes to retrieve more. A bass guitar can be heard now, filling in the depth of the melody. A new player steps into the light. He’s tall and has a long, straight nose. I catch a glimpse of Murray in the front row. He winks at me, steps up on the stage, and howls:
“The only thing a gambler needs is a suitcase and a trunk!”
Pannah steps back, startled, and grabs at his chest. My own heart leaps, remembering that he doesn’t do well with surprises. But my fear is quickly assuaged as Pannah recovers composure and sings the harmony with Bill:
“And the only time he is satisfied is when he is a drunk.”
Murray leans out over the crowd and steals a beer out of the hands of a punk with red liberty spikes. He chugs from the can as the guitarist starts the scorching solo.
By now, the drum set is complete and the crowd is under a spell. It’s like everyone saw the Chicago legend, but no one believed it until now. Someone yells, “It’s Bill Murray!”
Pannah and Murray struggle to be heard over the crowd. People shout, cheer, and hold out their phones, no doubt recording the celebrity in his natural environment. By the end of the song, Bill is sweating and breathing hard, and Pannah comes to his side to support him. They sway together like drunks and sing the last verse:
“There is a house in New Orleans, they call the Rising Sun. And it’s been the ruin of many a poor boy, and God, I know I’m one. Dear God, I know I’m one.”
I look at Pannah and he points at me. Why do I feel like that last line is a warning?
The next thing that happens, no one will ever believe…
She walked through the crowd, a head above the rest.
At first, I thought she was my wife because of the blond hair, but my wife was still at the bar with her friend—and my wife ain’t that tall.
Another surprise shocks me when I look back to the stage and see a drummer—the Drummer—sitting down behind his completed kit and tightening the understrap of his snare. He stomps on the kick drum and clacks his sticks together:
Boom bap. Boom boom bap.
No way.
The guitarist takes his hand from his instrument, letting it hang, and claps along with the beat, and the crowd follows suit.
I couldn’t see her face from the booth, but Pannah could, and I thought he might actually have a heart attack. His eyes widened, and he hands this woman his microphone.
Bill Murray, having regained his breath, stretches and grunts into his mic.
“Ladies and gentlemen, do I have a treat for you.” He sits down on a stool and wipes his brow as the tall blond turns around. The crowd gasps. The band keeps up the beat. “You may not have heard of her, but I promise you, you will.”
Taylor Swift laughs like a bro into her mic.
She brushes away yellow bangs. “Hey, guys.”
How is this happening? Am I dreaming?
Taylor continues to address the crowd: “My friend Bill and my band”—she turns around to look at Drummer—“told me that there was a show in the city tonight.”
People cheer and whistle; she can barely get a word in. She looks down at Pannah, who is standing there, awestruck.
“Do you mind if I sing a song?” The crowd screams their consent, but the starlet is looking at Pannah for an answer. He smiles and nods.
Oh s**t, I think, he doesn’t know what she is saying. Wanting to save him the embarrassment, I make my way through the crowd. Koeh saves the day by whispering into his father’s ear and leading him offstage. Taylor, stage to herself, starts a long-legged prowl. She nods at Guitarist, who lets his guitar squeal out the intro to HAIM’s “The Wire.”
“You know I’m bad at communication. It’s the hardest thing for me to do…”
Stuck in the middle of the crowd, I crane my neck toward the bar.
“Hey.” I gamble, squeezing between my wife and Manny.
“Hey.” She still seems pissed.
“You like the band?” It’s the first thing I ever asked her. She looks at me, and I can tell immediately that humor isn’t going to work.
“Listen, I’m sorry I’ve been so unhinged. This whole thing—the drunk driving, the car—it’s my fault.”
“Then why do I feel like it’s mine?” she barks, letting her anger out. “I don’t care about the car; you hated that car. I don’t care about the job; you hated that job.” She takes off her glasses. “But why did you move downstairs?” She rubs at her eyes, composing herself.
“Always keep your heart locked tight, don’t let your mind retire…” Taylor sings.
“I didn’t realize that hurt you,” I say, and I feel my cheeks start to burn. “I always feel like I’m in your way. Like something you have to put up with.”
Taylor sashays over to the bassist and playfully hip-checks him, singing: “I couldn’t take it. I tried hard not to fake it, but I fumbled right when it came down to the wire.”
“Put up with you,” she tastes the words. “Well yeah, I’ve had to put up with you. But I feel like this started before…”
“It did. I see it now. When I lost my job in the music industry, I thought I lost the only thing keeping you around.” She squints her eyes at this.
“Besides our daughter, of course,” I add quickly. “But I was in a slump, and it made me believe not that change had brought something new and unpleasant, but that all the good before was fake. I’d never really changed. I’m a dirtbag, and though sometimes it’s easier to hide, I’ll always be a dirtbag.”
“Do you still think that?” she asks.
The band cuts out, and Taylor claps, keeping the beat.
“Always keep your heart locked tight.”
“No,” I say.
“Good,” she says, placing a hand on mine.
“Actually, I don’t know!” I stand up and grab both her hands with desperation. “Maybe it doesn’t matter what I think! Pannah showed me that I still care—care about you, care about our kid! I thought maybe life had ground me down, but it took this silly little man to make me realize that life isn’t just about enduring change or clinging to what’s already gone. It’s about holding on to each other and to what you love, so you don’t lose everything in the landslide.”
Taylor finishes the song. “Thank you, thank you.” She blows ruby-red kisses at the crowd and tries to hand the mic back to Pannah, but he is talking closely to Bill Murray and Koeh. She taps Bill on the shoulder. He turns and holds her hand up like the winner of a prizefight.
“Everyone, what did you think?!” Feedback squeals, and the crowd flinches. “Yeah, she’s a little green, but I think with some coaching, she could be a real star. Thanks again, Taylor.” She winks and heads out with the two security guys.
“Now,” Murray’s voice drops low, “we’re going to slow things down for you with a silky rendition of one of my personal favorites sung by the man of the hour, Mr. Pannah! Let’s give him a round of applause!”
The crowd claps obediently as Murray goes around the stage giving instructions to each musician. Drummer pulls bongo onto his lap.
Bill Murray continues to purr into the mic: “Grab someone you love—or maybe just someone close by. Take them by the hand and let Mr. Wonder do the talking.”
Guitarist gives the jazzy piano intro the old college try, but once Pannah sings the first line of You Are the Sunshine of My Life, the music is a fleeting afterthought.
I’m being pulled into the mass of people. My wife is ahead of me, still holding my hand, leading me to the middle of the dancefloor. Looking back at me, she stops and then curls into my arms. Her beautiful eyes look up at me. She puts a hand on my shoulder, and her hips brush against mine. Close again, dancing in a bar. Just like before, except this time we’re both sober.
Pannah sings: “It feels like this is the beginning, though I’ve loved you for a million years. And if I thought our love was ending, I’d find myself drowning in my tears.”
“Can I tell you why I’m still mad at you?” my wife says into my ear.
Not the most romantic thing to say at a time like this, but I’m sure I deserve it.
“What?”
“Why would you listen to an old Cambodian man? Why do his words carry so much weight—you don’t even speak the same language? Why was Pannah the one to wake you up…and not me?”
“But it was you,” I say.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it wasn’t your words per se—Stevie Nicks wrote the lyrics.” I’m floundering, and her brow furrows even more. “Pannah sang our wedding song.”
“He did? But you hate that song,” she pouts.
“I did. That’s because it’s about a woman leaving her husband because they grew apart. I thought no song choice could be less romantic.” She snatches my hat from my head and tosses it into the darkness.
“Well, I’m still mad you didn’t say anything before we had our first dance to it.”
“I was afraid to say anything that would cause you to second-guess marrying me,” I admit. “But when Pannah sang it, the tone changed. The landslide became something to watch out for—a tragedy, like a hurricane, earthquake, or blizzard. Everything you love can be lost or change and bring you down—”
She’s kissing me now as Stevie Wonder sings: “You are the sunshine of my life, that’s why I’ll always be around.”
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