Chapter 8: The Comp CD

September 2002, Costa Mesa, California

It was Thursday, and the tickets were still on the table.

They had been there a week. Nobody had put them away and nobody had picked them up; only the fan moved the top one, as it had a week ago. Vex sat down next to them twice and got up twice. Cayde counted them once, as if there might be fewer by now. Roxy didn't touch them.

Nobody said yes.

Nova opened the notebook. She didn't turn the page; it was on the right one, at the six hundred. She worked something out, the end of the pen at her mouth, and then said only:

"Eighty."

"What's eighty?" Cayde asked.

"If eighty go, we don't lose. Anything above that is ours."

Roxy set the drumstick down on the table.

"Eighty, then."

Cayde nodded. Vex picked up the stack and started dealing it into piles; he didn't ask how many, he just dealt. Sixty in one pile. Forty in the other.

"Sixty are ours," he said. "Forty are the kids'."

That was the decision. Four sentences, and one pile that became two. Like Eli's deal in June, except this time Eli wasn't there.

Nova called him the next day, from the lab, on her lunch break, and said only that they were in. Eli wasn't surprised, or it didn't come through.

"I know," he said. "How are you selling?"

Nova didn't know.

"Then listen." And he told her. Where, to whom, when. At the end, one sentence that was strange coming from Eli, because until now Eli had always said what was right, and this wasn't that. "Don't ask whether they want one. Ask how many."

It was three weeks, and four counters.

Vex put the tickets next to the register at the record store, in an empty coffee cup, fanned out. The owner looked at them, said it was good for a store to have a band, and asked nothing else. In the first three days Vex sold six, all six by asking whether the customer might maybe want to come to a show, if they had nothing else going on, and the customer said sure, and you could see they didn't mean it.

On the fourth day he stopped asking. He slipped the ticket into the bag next to the record and said only, this is us, Saturday. The customer took it out or didn't. Most didn't. In the remaining two weeks eight went that way, fourteen with the first six, and Vex understood that Eli's sentence hadn't been about what to say but about what not to.

Nova asked nothing at the lab. Whoever brought in pictures of a backyard party, beer, a crowd, a guitar in the corner, got a ticket in the envelope with their prints, and she didn't mention it. Whoever came back asked for another, because the girlfriend wanted one too. A woman whose photos had the dog in every frame bought two, and said her son was in a band, and it would be good for him to see that other people were too. Nova couldn't tell whether that was a compliment. She took the money. Nine in three weeks.

Roxy sold the most. From behind the bar, after the second beer, to anyone who sat there long enough. There was no trick to it: she set the ticket down next to the glass, said six dollars, and people paid after the second beer, because Roxy was looking at them. Twenty-four in three weeks.

"These people aren't going to come," Nova said one night over the notebook.

"Six dollars is still six dollars."

"It's not the same."

"Not to you," Roxy said. "To the club it is."

That was the only argument, and nothing came of it, because they were both right.

Cayde sold at the music store with the accent, the way he sold everything. A ticket next to the strings, next to the pick, next to the cable, and one line the customer already knew from TV, and Cayde knew exactly where they knew it from. The fifty-year-old man who'd bought an amplifier in July instead of finding the post office came back for strings, listened to Cayde, and bought two tickets. For his daughter, he said. She was fifteen, and she listened to this kind of music, and he didn't understand it, but he'd come with her to see what it was. Cayde sold thirteen in three weeks, those two included.

The kids sold at the park, and in front of the high school in the mornings, and Ruiz didn't report. He brought no money, gave no number, and when Nova asked in the second week where they stood, he said: later. Brandi let slip only that a few of her sister's friends were coming, and didn't say how many. For three weeks nobody knew how many of the forty had gone, and the kids' line in Nova's notebook stayed blank.

Nova wrote a number in the notebook every night, but Cayde kept a tally on the side of the merch box in marker, in fives, and so the box was in use again, and nobody walked around it anymore. They stepped over it. Like in July.

At the end of the third week the tally stood at sixty. All of them. Vex fourteen, Nova nine, Roxy twenty-four, Cayde thirteen, and the coffee cup at the record store was empty. About the forty, nobody knew a thing.

It was Wednesday, three days before the show.

They went to the park, the four of them, and this time they didn't look like a delegation, because people knew them now. The kids were at the rail, ten of them, like always, Ruiz at the end with his board, Brandi on the steps where she'd sat in May, as if she'd been sitting there ever since.

The money was in a chip bag. Crumpled ones, fives, and change, a lot of change, because in front of a high school in the morning nobody has six dollars in one piece. Ruiz handed Nova the bag, said this is it, and went back to his board.

Nova counted on top of the rail. She smoothed the bills, stacked them, the coins separate. The first time it didn't come out. She counted a second time, slower, and then it did: the price of twenty-two tickets, exactly, to the last cent. The kids handed back eighteen tickets, bound with another rubber band.

"That's what's left," Ruiz said.

Eighteen tickets. Twenty-two of the forty had gone. Nova checked the notebook, added it to the sixty, and the number was eighty-two. Two over eighty. What was left: eighteen, all of them in Ruiz's hand.

Vex looked at the others. Roxy looked back. Cayde at the kids, then at Vex. Nova up from the notebook.

Nobody spoke. They didn't need to. They nodded, not at the same time, not for show, just all four of them, one after the other, the way they did before the tap, before a song starts.

Vex took the stack from Ruiz, counted off ten, and handed them back to him.

"Saturday," he said.

Ruiz looked at the top one. The date was on it.

"I know."

He would have put them in his pocket, but Brandi got up from the steps, came over, and stopped closer in front of Ruiz than she needed to. She took one out of his hand and said, you gave me this one. Ruiz said no. Brandi smiled, put it away, and went back to the steps, and Ruiz watched her go for two seconds, and then didn't.

The other nine he didn't pocket. He went along the rail and pressed them one by one into the hands of the ones who had sold. Whoever hadn't sold didn't get one, and didn't ask. One was left for him. He put it away and turned back to the bearings.

On the way home nobody talked about the ten tickets. There was nothing to say.

Eight were left at home. Nova set one aside, and on Thursday she put it on the table in front of Eli. Eli looked at it and didn't reach for it.

"I don't need a ticket. I'm the one who gets you in."

"We paid for it," Roxy said. "Take it."

Eli took it. He put it in his wallet, behind the bills, and Vex saw him look at it once more before he closed it.

Four Nova stuck to the wall with double-sided tape, next to the envelope and the demo, in a row, slightly crooked, because the tape always holds crooked. The wall now looked like this: a hundred dollars, seven songs, four tickets. They didn't talk about it, but all four of them stopped in front of it at least once that night.

Three tickets were nowhere. Nova recounted the piles, Cayde went through the box, Vex his pockets. Three tickets had simply vanished, into pockets, under a bar, in a car, at the bottom of a chip bag. Nobody knew where. At least not that night.

Nova wrote in the notebook: eighty-two. Under it: a hundred and eight, with a minus in front. Then she looked at it for a while, and crossed the minus out. That wasn't what it was.

On Saturday the room wasn't full.

But it was full of them.

That was the difference, and Vex noticed it during the second song, because during the second song there was time. Up front the ten kids, the faces from the rail, Ruiz in the middle, Brandi off to the side, and next to them another twenty or so the kids had brought, because ten tickets mean ten people, but ten kids mean thirty. The record store customers, four or five, standing apart, beers in hand, like people who weren't sure they were allowed in here. The woman from the lab, the one with the dog, with a boy who was seventeen and looked at the stage like someone who'd start a band tomorrow. Cayde's fifty-year-old customer with his daughter, who was fifteen, in a black T-shirt, mortified that her father was here, and knowing at the same time that this was the best night of her life. Roxy's drunks: more than a few had come. Most of them stayed at the bar all night, but one went up front, and knew the words.

Seven songs. The tap, three, twenty-one. The sound was good, the room had been built for it, and nothing came back off the back wall, only from the crowd.

The headliner's people stood by the side wall, two of them, with beers, and watched. During the fourth song one of them nodded once, not at them, just to himself, the way a person nods when something is in order. Nothing more. Then they went back to the backstage, because they still had to go on.

Vex saw the nod. He didn't do anything with it. He just kept it.

At the merch table, because now there was a table, a real one, with a cloth on it, by the exit, a woman stopped after the show, mid-thirties, short hair, a stack of CD-Rs under her arm and a photocopied, stapled fanzine in her hand.

She didn't introduce herself, or if she did, nobody caught it. She put the zine on the table and said she was making a compilation. Local bands, twelve of them, on one disc, five dollars, she burned them herself, at home, one at a time, and the skate shop sold them under the counter. Not a label. She didn't want to be one. She only wanted there to be a record of what was here.

"I need a song from you."

She didn't ask whether they wanted to. She asked which one.

The four of them looked at each other. Vex opened his mouth to say they'd have to talk about it, and Roxy beat him to it, before anyone had time to think:

"My Board is My World."

Nobody argued. Not because it was their best song. Because behind the woman, in the doorway, stood ten kids with boards under their arms, and if there could be one song on the record, then let it be theirs.

The woman nodded, took out a pen, and looked around for something to write on. Nova reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a ticket she hadn't known was there. One of the three. The woman wrote her number on the back and handed it back.

"Two weeks. Bring me a clean copy."

And she left, CD-Rs under her arm, out the exit, through the kids, who stepped aside for her, because they knew her.

Nova put the ticket away. Nova never threw out anything with a number on it.

At home, on the wall, the four tickets, the envelope, the demo. Nova stood in front of them with her jacket still on. Then she sat down at the table, opened the notebook, and under the eighty-two wrote only one word.

Comp.

She closed it.

you gave me this one