Chapter 4: The Street Team

May 2002, Costa Mesa, California

Cayde got fired on Wednesday. Nova on Friday. Roxy was already looking for work. Vex had been getting through the months on his mom's help for two months now, and every time she showed up with the envelope, he swore that had been the last one.

They had one week until rent was due.

Their reserves were gone. They needed real solutions, because next month they'd be short of more than food. They'd be short a place to live.

It was Saturday night, and for the first time in weeks they didn't have a show. It didn't feel like rest. It felt like a hole. The mattresses were stood up against the wall, the drums in the corner under a sheet, furniture in a house someone had moved out of. It was still light outside—that long, orange, May kind of light that refuses to become evening for hours—and somehow that made the room heavier than if it had been dark.

They sat around the coffee table, in the same spot where they did everything else. The fan was running… or rather, rattling. Nobody turned on the TV.

"Okay," Vex started.

He had a sheet of paper and a pen, and he'd been holding them for ten minutes without writing anything. He turned the pen over, glanced at each of them, and it was obvious he knew how the sentence began, only not how it ended.

"So. We need to build some kind of system, because we're not going to last long like this. And obviously we all want to play music, it's just, you know, if maybe somebody could find something more flexible, work-wise, then maybe…"

Nova took the paper out of his hand. Then the pen.

"Let's not tiptoe. This is shit. Sorry, but you haven't said anything that made sense in ten minutes."

She sat down on the floor next to the table, her back against the couch, and laid the sheet on her thigh. Her red hair fell forward as she bent over it, and she didn't tuck it back. She didn't ask anything, didn't look up. She just started writing, top to bottom, in a straight column, in the small, even handwriting she used for setlists.

The others watched. Roxy leaned forward to see, but Nova's shoulder was in the way, so she started spinning a drumstick between her fingers instead. Cayde leaned against the upright mattress and stared at the ceiling. Vex, at the paper.

It was the first time anyone had written it down.

Rent went first. Seven-sixty, and under it the four-way split, one eighty-five. Utilities got their own line and a question mark, because nobody had checked the meter in two months, and nobody wanted to check it now.

"Food," she said.

"How much?" Roxy asked.

"That's what I'm asking."

Nobody knew. The bad part wasn't the amount. It was that they had no idea. Cayde finally said a number that was obviously too low, and Nova wrote it down because there wasn't a better one.

Then gas. A tank to Long Beach and back, half to Irvine, nothing for rehearsals, because rehearsal was the living room. Vex watched her write, and saw that she wasn't rounding down.

Then strings. Cayde broke one a week, because he played as if he and the guitar had a score to settle.

Then sticks. Roxy said a number, then revised it upward, then once more.

Then the drum head Roxy had glued back together two weeks ago, and which was going to split in the same spot again two weeks from now.

Then blank CDs, seventy-five cents apiece. Nova wrote that one down even as Vex was opening his mouth to ask what for, when… Nova gave him a look. Vex closed his mouth.

The list got long. Too long.

Nova turned the sheet over and began on the other side. She didn't bend as close this time.

"March, April, May."

Under it, how many shows. Eight, nine, six so far.

"Twenty-three shows," Roxy said, and you could hear in her voice that it felt good. Twenty-three in three months. There had been a week with four.

"That's the other column," Nova said.

And next to it she wrote how much had come in from them.

The hundred-and-twenty-dollar envelope in February. They still talked about that like it was last week. Twenty of it they had forced on Eli, because he wouldn't take it, and because Roxy threatened to have a truckload of canned Coke dumped in front of his house and shake up every single one by hand.

In April a place paid sixty, because the owner was in a good mood, and because Eli stood next to him at the bar and didn't leave until the man took out his wallet. Ten of that had to be pushed on him again. That took half an hour too, and in the end Eli pocketed it as if it were a punishment.

At the other twenty-one shows, the pay was beer. Sometimes not even that—sometimes only that they got to play.

Nova underlined it. Once, without a ruler, and the line came out straight anyway.

"One-fifty. Three months, split four ways."

Roxy leaned forward, over Nova's shoulder now.

"That's… how much?"

"Thirty-seven fifty. Each. For three months."

"Twelve a month," Cayde said from the mattress, still to the ceiling. "Twelve dollars a month. And fifty cents."

"And rent is one eighty-five."

Nobody said anything.

The fan turned away, came back. Outside a car went by slowly, bass thumping out of it, until that too was gone.

Cayde laughed once. Short, through his nose, the kind that comes out of him when something collapses.

"So the band isn't just not supporting us. We're supporting the band. Or we were…"

"Work paid for it until now," Nova said. "And there's no work."

Roxy's eyes drifted up, to the wall behind the couch. The copy of the demo hung there, on double-sided tape, slightly crooked. Next to it, the envelope.

A hundred dollars. From February. Nobody had touched it since, not even to straighten the tape under it.

Vex's eyes went there too. Then Cayde's, down from the ceiling, as if he didn't want to but had to.

Nova didn't. She knew where they were looking, and waited for them to stop. When their eyes came back to the sheet, she went on as if nothing had happened.

Nobody said it.

And there was a fourth column on the paper that Nova didn't write. If one of them took a real job, eight hours a day, there was no three shows a week. If there was no three shows a week, there was no band. Whoever said that out loud was proposing a breakup.

Nobody said it.

Outside, it finally started getting dark.

"Fine," Vex said at last. Not loud. "So what doesn't cost money?"

Nova turned to him, and for the first time that night didn't snap back.

"Nothing. Everything costs money. Flyers are money. Posters are money. The demo is money."

"I didn't ask what's free. I asked what we've got."

Roxy set the drumstick spinning between her fingers. Then stopped it. It stood upright between her fingers.

"People," she said. "We've got people."

The skatepark on Wednesday afternoon was what it always was: fifteen, twenty kids, the usual. The morning gray had burned off, and the sun came straight down on the concrete. The edge of the rail was worn silver where boards had been sliding along it for years. In the air, the sound of wheels—that constant, dry hum you only notice when it stops for a second—and every so often a crack, when a board came down on the concrete, well or badly.

Someone on the far side was trying the same trick for about the twentieth time. The twentieth time didn't land either. He got up, picked up the board, went back, and ran at it again.

All four of them went. In hindsight this was too much; they looked like a delegation.

Vex started, and started badly.

"So, the thing is… ahem. We wanted to ask if maybe anyone would feel like helping us out with a few things, which honestly isn't a big deal, it's just that we can't be everywhere at once, and the situation is that…"

Roxy stepped two paces ahead of him.

"We need posters put up. We've got no money. We need help. That's it."

Cayde grinned and moved in beside them, hands in his pockets, with the entrance he used to walk into a scene, the British accent naturally cranked to the max for the girls.

"What she said, only far more attractively delivered. I've got the sexy voice, and she's gorgeous…"

Roxy didn't look at him. She reached back and smacked him on the back of the head.

The kids didn't haggle.

This was the part Vex didn't understand. If they haggle, he gets it: the thing has a price, and a price can be negotiated. If they laugh at them, he gets that too. But a kid with messy brown hair at the rail, who'd been picking at the bearings on his board up to that point, simply looked up, said "When," and for him it was settled.

"We can't pay," Vex said, because if he didn't say it, he'd feel later that he had cheated them.

"Didn't ask."

"What we can do is get you in. And you're on the list. And… you're in."

That last one he couldn't say any better. There wasn't a better word for it.

"Okay."

There were five of them, then eight. Somebody ran off to get somebody. The kid with the trick on the far side stopped, tucked his board under his arm, and came over. A girl who had been sitting on the steps doing nothing stood up and took a place behind the others, as if she had been standing there all along.

Nova didn't say a word the whole time. She stood a little back with her arms crossed, watching the kids the way she studied photographs—hunting for the thing in them that was off.

She spoke after all.

"Is this okay?" she asked, half under her breath, more to the band than to the park. "We're putting kids to work for free."

The kid at the rail lifted his head. His name was Ruiz, or at least that's what everyone called him, and nobody knew his first name. He couldn't have been older than seventeen. He had a scar through his eyebrow that hadn't healed right.

"I'm not doing it for you. I'm doing it for me."

Nova waited for him to go on.

"I never say no to free shows," Ruiz said, and grinned.

He turned back to his board, went on working at the axle bolt, and that, for him, was closed too.

Nova didn't nod at that. She filed it away, the way she did everything—the others saw it on her, that small movement, her head tilting to one side, her eyes going nowhere for a second. She never brought it up later, either.

"Okay, and what do we give people?" someone asked from the back, one of the new arrivals. "I mean, if I walk up to somebody, what do I put in their hand?"

The four of them glanced at each other.

"We're working on it," Vex said.

They weren't working on it. There was nothing to work with.

But there were posters.

Nova and Roxy painted them in front of the house, on the sidewalk, all day. The paper store had enough for thirty big sheets—as far as the leftover gas money stretched—and a box of tempera paints that had probably been made for children, because there was a smiling elephant on the lid. They spread the sheets on the ground, knelt on them, and painted. The neighbor came out twice to see what they were doing, and went back in twice without asking.

No two posters came out the same. Some had letters slanting downward, because Roxy was in a hurry. One, Nova worked on too long, and the black bled through the back. One, somebody sat on.

By evening they were both covered in paint from head to toe. The red strands in Nova's hair were black, and Roxy looked as if she'd been in a fight with a printing press. The thirty posters dried in the living room, on the floor, leaning against the wall, on the mattresses, everywhere, and the apartment could have passed for a campaign office taken over by kindergartners.

Then it turned out glue was money too.

Nobody had thought of it. Vex walked through the whole apartment as if a bucket of glue might turn up somewhere, and ended up in the pantry, which none of them had opened since they moved in. The landlords hadn't cleared it out either. There were jars of preserves nobody dared examine up close, a bag of sugar that had turned to stone, and at the very back, deep on the shelf, a cardboard box.

Wallpaper paste. Powdered. On the side of the box, a smiling housewife with a fifties hairdo and a brush in her hand, and a price in cents that must have been cheap even then. The top of the box had yellowed, one corner had gotten soaked and dried again. The last time anyone had touched it was when the house was wallpapered—and judging by the state of the wallpaper, that was roughly when the landlords' parents were born.

"This is older than the four of us put together," Cayde said, holding the box as if they'd found an artifact.

"Does it still work?"

"How should I know. It's wallpaper paste, not yogurt."

Cayde mixed it in the bathroom, in a bucket they brought up from behind the house. The powder was yellow and lumpy, and when the water hit it, it smelled like a cellar nobody had aired out in decades. The stuff wouldn't come together at first, and then all at once it came together far too much. Two streets later it already resembled something that ought to be thrown out.

But it stuck. That was the only thing that mattered.

They set out Tuesday night.

There were eight of them. The kids had brought more kids, and nobody asked who was who.

The city was different at two in the morning. The sodium lights painted everything orange: the sidewalk, the walls, their hands. The shop shutters were down. Now and then a car went by slowly, and every time, all twelve of them acted as if they were out for a stroll—twelve people, at two in the morning, with a bucket and a ladder.

The argument broke out on the corner of Harbor, on the side of a transformer box, and lasted forty minutes.

"Here."

"Not here. This has its back to the traffic."

"Anyone coming from the park comes this way."

"Anyone coming from the park already knows about us, you idiot."

"Then why are we putting up posters?"

Nobody had an answer to that. For a while they stood around the transformer, twelve of them, staring at nothing. In the end it went where Roxy said, because Roxy had the bucket.

On the next street, Cayde tried to stick one on a utility pole from the top of a ladder. The ladder had come out of someone's uncle's garage, and one of its three rungs was missing. Cayde had the paper in one hand and the brush in the other, and nobody was holding the ladder, because both of the people who would have been holding it were busy laughing at Cayde swearing in a British accent. The angrier he got, the more British.

The poster went up upside down.

It stayed there. For two months. The fifty-year-old paste held it as if it had become part of the pole. People walking past stopped in front of it, tilted their heads, and moved on.

On the third street a shopkeeper came out at them through a back door. They never saw him, only the light changing behind them, then a voice, and they were running—all twelve of them, though at least seven had no idea why. They stopped two blocks down, leaning on each other, gasping for air, and Roxy was laughing so hard she had to sit down on the curb. She set the bucket down next to her, and the paste slopped onto her shoe. That shoe was never the same again.

Somehow Vex got paste in his hair. It never came out how, and it never would. By morning it had set, rock hard, and he had to cut a chunk out at the back of his neck. It showed for two weeks.

By four in the morning they were out of paper.

They sat on the curb by the park, eight or ten of them, however many were left. The rest had trickled away somewhere along the route, as people do, with a handshake or without one. Someone pulled out a bag of chips and passed it around. Their hands were sticky, the chips got sticky, nobody cared. The streetlights were still on, but the sky to the east was starting to gray, that flat kind of gray that covered every morning in May and didn't lift until noon.

Someone was saying that his brother said nothing ever happens in Costa Mesa. Someone else said his brother was a dick. That almost turned into an argument, then didn't, because nobody had the energy for it.

Vex leaned back, put his palms on the cold concrete, and said, half asleep, to no one in particular:

"I'd do this even if nothing ever came of it."

Nobody answered him. Ruiz was in the middle of explaining that this paste was never coming off, not in a million years, his grandfather's house still had the same wallpaper up from the sixties, and Roxy was asking whether that was a problem or what. Cayde was asleep, sitting up, his head on his knees.

Nova was awake. She heard it. She didn't say anything, and she didn't look at Vex.

At seven in the morning Nova went out to buy food, and stopped at the corner.

The gray still sat over the city. At the bus stop, there was their name, in black tempera, the letters slanting a little. On the transformer too, in a different hand. On the telephone pole, upside down.

She hadn't put up a single one of them.

For a while she just stood and looked. A woman walked past with a dog; the dog stopped at the pole, sniffed the poster, and moved on.

The band was four people.

But it wasn't four people doing it anymore.