Chapter 5: The Merch

June 2002, Costa Mesa, California

There were posters. There was no pay.

The shows stayed what they were: two or three a week, backyards to clubs, for beer or for the privilege of playing. More people came, that much was true. The kids from the rail stood in the front row and knew by the second song when the tap was coming. But the owners didn't count the crowd, they counted the bar, and the bar hadn't changed.

In the end they begged the rent together. Vex's mom brought the envelope. Roxy asked her father, and didn't speak to anyone for two days afterward. Cayde asked no one; one morning the money was simply on the table, and nobody asked where it came from. Nova didn't say where hers came from, and nobody asked her either.

They took day jobs where there were any. Vex spent a week stacking boxes in a warehouse, Roxy washed dishes two nights at a place on Newport Boulevard, Cayde dug a garden for an afternoon and couldn't hold a pick for three days after. They told the landlord how things stood, too. Vex went over, because his name was on the lease, and spent half an hour in the kitchen beforehand working out what he was going to say.

The landlord heard him out, and shrugged.

"Fine. We won't starve if you're a week late."

That was all. Vex came back and sat down on the couch like a man who wasn't sure what had just happened to him.

They breathed a little easier. Only a little, because a week is a week, and after it comes the next first of the month.

It was Saturday afternoon, the living room, the coffee table, the fan. The same setup as a month ago, except this time there was no paper. Nova didn't bring it out. She didn't need to; everyone knew the numbers by heart.

"If I have to move one more box that smells like dead fish," Vex told the ceiling, "I swear I'll go jump after a train."

Roxy cracked up. She loved Vex's humor, the twisted kind, sometimes incomprehensible, sometimes flat-out morbid, that nobody else found funny but her. Somehow that made it better.

"Okay," she said, and set the drumstick down on the table, which for her meant she was now being serious. "We need something that's steady money, not tied to a schedule, and pays a lot."

"Cayde could do porn," Vex offered, grinning.

Cayde pinched his chin between two fingers and gazed into the distance, a man giving it serious thought.

"I think I'd be good at it," he grinned back.

Nova chimed in without looking up from her nails.

"If we're going there, gay porn pays better."

"Shame your British accent won't get you far in that line of work," Roxy howled, and Cayde threw a cushion at her.

"So we're no further along," Vex waved it off.

They weren't.

For a while there was only the rattle of the fan. Outside someone started a lawnmower, three pulls before it caught.

Then Nova got serious.

"What about our own merch?"

"Huh?" Vex said.

"Shirts. CDs. We could sell them."

"Nova." Vex sat up. "Thirty people know us. If every one of them buys a shirt, that's three hundred dollars. Once."

"Fifty," Nova said. "At least. More since the posters. But that's not the math, you clod. We don't sell them here. We sell them at the shows. We put a table out, shirts, a few CDs, and whoever's there has just seen us and has cash in their pocket."

"Actually, yeah," Roxy said. "If the owner pays in beer, we set the stuff up next to the amp."

Vex studied the ceiling and did sums. Nothing came out, because he didn't know what a shirt cost, and he didn't know what one could sell for. But something moved in him that hadn't moved in a month.

"Let's ask Eli," he said at last. "He'll have something smart to say about it. But I like it."

Eli came over Thursday night, because Thursday was when he came over.

He listened to Nova explain it, to Vex explain it again, only longer, and to Cayde modeling what a shirt would look like on him, which Eli ignored.

"Two days ago you were skipping meals," he said then. "What are you planning to make anything with?"

He wasn't laughing and he wasn't needling. He was stating a fact, the way he stated flyer math.

"Okay. So that's dead," Cayde sighed, and slumped back against the mattress.

"I didn't say that."

Eli waited until all four of them were looking at him. He did that when he wanted to buy time.

"I've got a little saved. Not much. I'll invest it in the band. Fifty shirts, fifty CDs. I cover the materials, you make them. You sell them at the shows. I get the materials back, and twenty percent of the profit."

Silence.

Three of the four stared blankly. It didn't take an expert to see it: they understood roughly half of what Eli wanted. Roxy lost the thread at "invest," Cayde at "profit," and Vex was wondering whether this was a gift, and if it was, how he was going to turn it down.

Nova, on the other hand, came back at him within seconds.

"How many rounds?"

"Until you've got enough to run your own."

"Paper?"

"You want it?"

"You trust us?"

"Would I offer if I didn't?"

Nova measured him. Eli held it.

"This isn't a gift," he added, because he'd seen Vex's face. "It's business. If you don't sell them, that's your problem. And mine."

"Deal," Nova closed it, and held out her hand.

By now the other three had no clue what had just taken place in front of them. Six sentences, then a handshake. But Nova seemed to know what she was doing, and for the moment that was enough.

"I'll bring the stuff tomorrow."

"Thanks. We'll be here."

After Eli left, Roxy asked whether that had been a good thing.

"I don't know," Nova said. "Neither does he."

Eli arrived Saturday early afternoon with two enormous boxes and a bag full of smaller bags.

The first box held fifty black T-shirts, folded, still smelling of the factory. The second held fifty blank CDs, fifty plastic cases, and a stack of iron-on transfer paper whose packaging showed a smiling family wearing matching shirts on a beach. In the bag: three brushes, a box of pins, a pair of rubber gloves, and a roll of tape nobody could find a use for, but which according to Eli you always needed.

By then Nova had briefed the others. They'd cleared the living room: mattresses against the wall, drums under the sheet, coffee table in the corner. Newspaper went down on the floor. Nova sketched designs for the painted shirts in a notebook and marked out a spot for the ironing board Roxy had brought from her mother's, the sticker from the packaging still on it.

"Two teams," Nova said. "CDs and shirts."

Cayde and Vex got the CDs, because Vex had the computer.

It was a Pentium III, rescued from home when his mom bought a new one, and it had lived on a chair in the bedroom ever since. It had a 4x CD burner in it, which had been top of the line in 1999, and this was 2002. They put in the first disc, hit start, and Vex watched the progress bar crawl.

Cayde did the math.

"This is not going to be fast."

One disc was about half an hour, with the burn, the verify, and the two occasions per disc when the machine stopped to think about something it never shared. Fifty discs. Twenty-five hours. Cayde said the number out loud once, and never again.

But while the machine burned, there was other work. Nova had made the cover: a shrunk-down version of the demo's, the name, the seven song titles, and the living room phone number, in the same lettering as the business card. They ran it off on the copier at the library, where a copy cost ten cents and the lady didn't ask what it was. Vex cut, Cayde folded, and together they slid them into the empty cases. In an hour they had all fifty covers, and four CDs.

It didn't make things any faster. But it made them less boring.

Nova and Roxy were on shirts.

The transfer paper was supposed to be simple. Print the design, iron it onto the shirt, peel off the paper, done. On the packaging the smiling family managed it in three steps.

They ruined the first shirt. The lettering was on it perfectly, crisp and white, only mirrored. tceffE akniaD ehT. Nova stared at it, Roxy stared at it, and then Roxy laughed so hard that Cayde came out of the bedroom to see what was going on.

"Well, yeah," he said, and went back.

On the second shirt they ruined Roxy's iron. Too hot, too long, and the transfer bonded not to the shirt but to the soleplate, in a smooth, glossy layer of plastic with part of a letter "a" in it, and from there it never came off. Roxy's mother later asked what had happened to the iron, and Roxy said she had no idea.

"Okay!" Roxy shrieked, laughing, iron in hand and still smoking faintly. "We have no fucking clue how to do this!"

Nova wasn't laughing. She was looking at the iron, the two ruined shirts, and the box that still held forty-eight.

"Wait."

Everyone waited.

"Brandi."

"Who?"

"From the postering. The girl who was sitting on the steps at the park, and then came along. She said she makes shirts. Or her sister does. Or… whatever. She wrote her number down."

She had. At dawn after the poster night, on the curb, on the back of a chip bag that Nova still hadn't thrown out, because Nova never threw out anything with a number on it.

They called. Brandi picked up on the second ring, heard Nova out, and said: "We're coming."

Brandi and four or so others showed up around six, with roughly twenty cans of beer and a roll of baking parchment.

Brandi was short, with a voice that could carry across a skatepark. She looked at the mirrored shirt, she looked at the iron, she looked at Roxy.

"Yeah. You did it wrong."

Roxy opened her mouth, then closed it.

"Listen." Brandi set down the beer. "One: you flip the image when you print. It says so on the box, nobody reads it. Two: you don't slide the iron, you press. If you slide, it smears. Three: you put a thicker sheet on top, parchment, so it doesn't scorch and doesn't bleed. Four: you peel while it's hot, not after. And…"

There was a five and a six. Nova wrote all of it down.

"My sister makes this stuff," Brandi said, almost apologetic. "Tie-dye and prints, for clubs. I just do her ironing. But I can iron."

She could.

Twenty minutes later the first successful shirt was born. Black, white lettering, dead center: The Dainka Effect. Crisp, straight, the right way round.

Roxy lifted it and held it in both hands the way she had held the demo in February.

"That's ours," she said.

Brandi opened a beer.

It was going to be a long weekend, and nobody complained.

In the bedroom the Pentium burned discs, one every half hour, and somebody always had to go in and swap. Cayde devised a system: whoever was sitting nearest the door went. After that everyone sat progressively farther from the door. Vex finally put a chair in the bedroom doorway and waved from there whenever the bar reached the end.

In the living room two ironing boards were going, Roxy's and one that a friend of Brandi's had brought over on a bicycle. The parchment rustled, the iron hissed, and the shirts dried in rows on the back of the couch, on the chairs, on the drum sheet.

That was the easy half.

The painted shirts were twice the fight.

Nova wanted something on the backs as well. Not all of them, only ten, so there'd be some that were different. There was no white fabric paint; that hadn't fit in Eli's bag. There was bleach, though, under the sink, the landlords', half full. On a black shirt bleach leaves white. You can put it on with a brush. That was the theory.

It needed water, and the water was in the bathroom.

Brandi tried once to warn them.

"Don't do the bleach in the tub. It'll take."

"Take what?"

"Everything."

They knew better. Or thought they did.

Of course they didn't.

The bathroom was small: a tub, a sink, a toilet, a mirror, and the landlords' shower curtain, blue, with fish. That's where they took the shirts, the bottle, the brushes, and the rubber gloves, which after the first shirt nobody wore again.

For the first back Nova wanted the logo. The real one, the infinity sign with the board, the one from the posters and the demo. She sketched it in chalk, dipped the brush, and drew the first curve.

Bleach doesn't behave like paint. It doesn't stay where you put it. It runs along the threads, pulls the color out an inch to either side, and by the time you get to the second curve, the first has become a blurred, rust-colored smear that has nothing to do with an infinity sign. The wheels turned into dots. The board turned into a streak. Altogether it most resembled a dead fish.

"That's not a skateboard," Roxy said over her shoulder.

"I can see that."

Nova looked at it for a while. Then she took another shirt, and this time she didn't sketch anything.

Three lines. Two slanted, one straight across the top, so the point faced down. A triangle. You can draw a straight line with bleach if you do it fast and don't think. Then a T in the middle, its stem running all the way down to the point, and on either side of the stem a D and an E, leaning on it like two people leaning on a post. T, D, E. The bleach ran a little here too, but a straight line can take it. The edges came out ragged, which made it look scratched in.

It dried. A rust-white triangle on black, three letters inside.

"Is that the logo now?" Cayde asked from the doorway.

"Today it is."

Nobody argued. Years later, someone would claim that the very first shirts had something different on the back than what was on the records, and they'd be right.

By the time the tenth back was done, the bathroom was no longer the same bathroom.

They rinsed the shirts in the tub to stop the bleach, and the black dye the bleach had pulled out went down the drain as brown water, or didn't go down, because by the sixth shirt the drain had clogged with lint. From then on the water stood in the tub, brown, and it left a ring on the enamel that could be scrubbed later, and was, but the ring knew where it lived.

The fish on the shower curtain got white spots wherever the brush had flicked them. The bleach ate the color out of the blue bath mat in patches, in one spot in the exact shape of a shirt, because someone had set one down there dripping. Vex later referred to it as their first album cover. The bottom third of the mirror was spattered, and when Cayde tried to wipe it he only smeared it, so that from then on everyone in that mirror appeared to be standing in fog.

The grout between the tiles turned snow white, but only where bleach had reached it, so the wall ended up looking like a crossword someone had filled in halfway. The chrome on the tap kept spots. The smell didn't leave for two days, no matter that they opened the window, which didn't open properly anyway.

One shirt was lost, too. They never worked out how. Someone had set it on the edge of the tub next to the bottle, and by morning half of it was rust brown, the bottom of the lettering had run, and all that remained of the triangle was a faint patch.

"That's unsellable," Nova said.

"That's the best one," Roxy said, and put it on.

They carried the shirts from the bathroom to the living room to dry, dripping, and where the newspaper had given out, the floor was left with a mess of colored stains: brown where the water had dripped, white where the bleach had. The carpet was never going to be white again anyway. But now they'd given it the mercy stroke.

At eleven Sunday night Brandi went home. The four others had trickled away earlier, the way people do. Two beers were left. Brandi called back from the door.

"I told you not in the tub."

"You told us," Nova said.

"Is there more next week?"

Nova looked at her. Brandi waited.

"I'll call you."

"Okay." And she left.

But they did it.

They could feel that something had started, that they were tearing toward financial independence, or at least they very much hoped so, and at one in the morning there isn't much difference between the two.

Vex sat on the chair in the bedroom doorway and watched the bar on the last disc reach the end. The machine clicked and pushed out the tray. Vex took the disc out, put it in its case, set it with the others. He counted. He counted again.

Forty-three CDs. The seven missing ones were still in the machine, half written, because somewhere around hour twenty-four the Pentium had decided it had had enough, and from then on spat out every third one.

Forty-one and a half shirts. Forty-one on the couch, on the chairs, on the sheet, on the ironing boards, in neat rows, the name on the front, ten with the triangle on the back. And the half on Roxy, who had fallen asleep on the mattress wearing it, the rust-stained one with the run lettering, most of which the bleach had eaten.

Nova sat at the table, writing in the notebook. A new column. Fifty shirts, fifty CDs, minus the rejects. Under it, an empty line for how much.

That, she didn't know yet.