“On March ninth of the year nineteen ninety-four, at 1:40 in the morning, the greatest novelist in America passed out of this life and into legend.”
Approximately half the people milling around the room quieted and turned toward the corner where the band was set up. Laughter and conversation drifted from the kitchen and front hall; a man’s voice could be heard proclaiming “Not even!” repeatedly and loudly enough to sound amplified. Jaymie, clad in a mailman costume, turned toward the drums.
“Dear brother,” he said into the microphone. “I’m concerned that these good people will miss an important part of the story. Perhaps if the two of us chime our spoons against our teacups both at the same time—”
A resounding smash ricocheted through the room. Several people jumped. A man screamed delicately and a woman plagued by tinnitus clapped a hand to the side of her head and fished around for earplugs. Aaron sat watching Jaymie from behind the drum set, his hands in his lap and one knee vibrating. The ride and crash cymbals quivered and hummed, soothing each other and bracing for his next sneak attack.
“Thank you. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Jaymie Bukowski, and I was born in the same instant that my ancestor, the great writer Charles Bukowski, slipped away into the afterlife.”
Jaymie had their attention.
“Bukowski was not ready to die! There were drinks to be drunk, sunrises to stay awake for, women to be rejected by. His soul sought a vessel in order to cling to the earthly realm. Ladies, gentlemen, and other classy people, I am that vessel.”
Jo struck an angelic harmonic on the high E string.
“A descendent born at the very moment of his death! Bukowski’s spirit understood what was meant to be.”
As Jaymie described the infant days of his ghostly possession, Rex adjusted their bass to a clip-on tuner and spun the volume knob. They looked around at Jo, now fuzzy-eared and whiskered and swaying serenely with her guitar, and at Aaron, who slouched over his kit wearing a sardonic expression on his own cat face.
The audience began to assemble, the first few rows seating themselves on the carpet while more reluctant listeners lounged against the walls. Rex flashed a smile at Maggie, who grinned up at them from close enough that Rex could have reached out and tousled her hair.
“There were always signs. At the age of four I got into the schnapps and wrote a treatise on the absurdity of existence. In crayon.”
Rex began a gentle pulsing in the key of A.
“Knowing instinctively of my destiny, my mother raised me on German folk songs and the works of Henry Miller …”
Aaron flipped the snare switch and began the softest possible rolling march.
“I never knew my father! Outcast and scorned by other children, I comforted myself with the knowledge that I was meant for greater things. A memory of my former life called to me—haunted me.”
Rex began a more urgent rhythm, locking in with Aaron.
“By twelve, I had discovered alcohol. My nights were spent in solitude, writing. My first poem was rejected by all the major periodicals. It was about loneliness.”
Suppressing a smile, Rex glanced at Aaron, who had shared a bunk bed with Jaymie until well beyond the age of twelve and could confirm that Jaymie hadn’t been lonely a day in his life.
Jaymie Brzezinski was, by Maggie’s calculations, the fourth most brilliant human alive today, and an idol much more worth meeting than the three that surpassed him.
“My brothers and I stand before you, the bluebirds in our hearts bursting to escape, smiling through our sadness with a set of almost-made-up songs! We’re the Bukowski Brothers’ Broken Family Band …” The band cut out and the room thrummed with a charged silence. “… And you can find us on most streaming services and social media platforms.”
He winked. Aaron coaxed the snare into a great swell and finally crashed into the beat of the first song. Jo hit the main riff.
Maggie leaned against the red-toqued boy from school, letting the familiar music wash over her. She chanted under her breath as the band launched into the verse of “Most Poets.”
“I take it you’ve seen this band before?” asked her new boyfriend, not understanding that the volume absolved him of the responsibility to make conversation.
She sang, “I’ll write you a poem if I wake up on time / most poets can’t write a single fucking simple line …”
“Ha, I like them too.”
“I got famous ‘cause the other writers never understood / it’s because they’re all so bad, not because I was so good!” Maggie shout-whispered the words in his ear as Jaymie crooned them into the microphone.
Red Toque appeared to be picking up her signals, or had at least acquired the expression boys get while piecing together a potentially romantic situation: Probably she liked him—or she just really liked this band—how could one tell?—maybe they should kiss?
Jo kicked on an overdrive pedal for the bridge section and Maggie let go of his arm to yell, “Fuck Tolstoy!”
“This is the worst band I’ve ever heard,” said a petit man standing against the back wall of the living room. His companion, an equally petite woman, giggled.
“I like them,” she said. “Is this what they call, like, alt-country?”
“His voice is like that guy on the X-Factor.”
“They sound like Vulpix, but with words, you know?”
“Yeah, I know.” He didn’t.
“Do you wanna go make out?’
“Yep.”
They left.
The band was decent, maybe even decent enough to live up to the hype generated by the show’s promoters. But god, what a stupid band name.
Lucas Yarbrough, sovereign scholar of the local indie scene, sat cross-legged at the side of the room, covertly jotting notes into the phone balanced on his knee. He deleted something, grimaced at the screen, then remembered he was currently Making a Living Whilst Having Fun! and bobbed his head in time. His music blog had been getting a lot of traction lately, but the new ad revenue made it harder to sit back and enjoy the show.
I can’t help but feel a deep contentedness settle over me, he lied, as the band breaks into their fourth song, “No Responsibility.” The guitarist turned on a delay pedal and sent soft bubbles of sound floating over the heads of the crowd. She really could play.
Bukowski (if that is, in fact, his real name) leads them into a gentle ballad that, upon closer listen, seems to be about its narrator’s penchant for “getting drunk and jacking off in bed.” Could he publish that, now that he actually had readers? He tried again.
Be assured, your boy here will not let the mythology influence the review, even though the only thing I’ve heard about JB is that he dropped out last minute on a Dead Zebra Beach tour to focus on his own music (he must be sore now, considering DZB’s success at NXNE), and that his twin brother once inexplicably screamed, kicked over a floor tom, and fled midway through an audition for the BMI Babies. Delete delete delete. Lucas’s was not a gossip blog.
Though the term “indie rock” is too broad a category to be descriptive, the BBBFB’s guitar- and synth-centred sound falls firmly on the darker side of this genre; JB presents the lyrics with a frantic theatricality that hearkens to bands like Of Montreal, Mother Mother or godddddd I don’t want to write this right now
He tapped backspace in sync with the ticking hi-hat, breathing a sigh that was swallowed by the synthesizer. The guitar sighed back in sympathy, exhaling a spiral of sixteenth notes. A girl in a blue onesie waved from across the room, and he rose, casting a regretful look at the band. She’d sent him early mixes from her upcoming album, and he’d promised her an interview. He pocketed his phone, missing the days when he and his friends went to shows to get deranged on spiked energy drinks and didn’t worry about remembering the details later.
“I can’t decide if this is, like, cosmic nihilism, or if he’s just trying to get attention.”
Jaymie was midway through the chorus of “Professional Drunk.”
“Well, the real Bukowski would never have considered himself a nihilist. There are certainly themes of pessimism and absurdism in his writing.” Two college students in Daft Punkian helmets hunched in the far corner of the room, hands shoved in the pockets of their skinny jeans, trying to decide whether or not to enjoy themselves.
“Where’d you hear about this show, again?” one of them asked the other.
“I keep up with things. Heard there’s a singer in town claiming to be the next Charles Bukowski, so I figured we should check it out,” her companion replied, his voice muffled behind the solid black of his mask.
“Well, this guy’s read the Bukowski Wikipedia page, I’ll give him that.”
“If it’s nihilism, it’s more existential than cosmic. There’s a lot of hope in Bukowski’s shit.”
“There’s a lot of literal shit in Bukowski’s shit—”
“Hm, I should read more Bukowski.”
“—And death and depravity and misogyny—”
“This is catchy, though, right?”
“Which is what matters, when you really get down to it.”
“They’re so legit!” The show’s co-organizer clasped her partner’s hand and bobbed on her toes to see over the heads of the audience members packing her living room.
Her boyfriend nodded, but couldn’t focus on the music enough to share her delight. His mind kept wandering to the small guest bedroom off the upstairs hallway.
Righteous band, no doubt, he thought, but how are we going to deal with that legit dead body? Putting on an indie show never turned out to be as simple as you expected.
“This is exactly like that scene in Infinite Ends.” The petite woman pushed her companion against the wall of the staircase. The band had drawn most of the aimlessly fluttering party attendees into the living room, and the upstairs was quiet.
“I know exactly what you mean,” said the man, running his small hands through her hair and wondering if she’d just invented a movie title off the top of her head. He untucked her blouse from her jeans and felt the skin of her back, briefly pausing to calculate that this was an acceptable move three minutes into this particular make-out session.
She angled her head in a non-verbal cue to kiss her collarbone, which he proudly caught. He involuntarily took the sort of deep, shuddering breath that could come across as either repulsive or irresistible depending on the kind of mood one was in, and then waited to see which way she was going to take it.
“Let’s find a bedroom,” she said.
At the top of the stairs was a hall with a door on the left opening into darkness. They groped at the walls for a light switch, but soon gave up. There was a vaguely visible mattress on the floor, surrounded by oddly shaped piles of junk or debris. A single square of pillow was lit by a streetlight shining through the curtainless window.
The woman pushed him into the room and pounced. He tumbled, laughing, onto the bed, but instead of soft sheets, he squelched into something cold and wet with slime. All around him, clammy, slippery ooze moved in, soaking his clothes and hair. His fingers grasped a handful of the stringy mucus and held it to the light.
He screamed.
Garrett leaned against the doorframe, listening to the songs he’d grown so used to drumming on in rehearsals. It was strange to hear his parts in their original form, stripped of his unique ornaments and fills. He noted with satisfaction that, of the two of them, Aaron was the inferior drummer.
The Bukowskis had hired Garrett on a recommendation from their cousin, whose musical opinions they trusted unquestioningly, so he’d never actually seen them play live before his first practice. It was the first time he had a view of the band from an audience perspective.
The twins were good-looking, if musicians were your thing. They were floppy-haired and lightly freckled; identical and identically dishevelled—yet somehow Jaymie always looked like he’d just given a vigorous performance on a stage or in a bed while Aaron gave the impression of having just barely outrun the cops.
Besides being a little scrawnier and a little more likely to wear the expression of someone having a dream where everyone is clothed except him, Aaron had one subtle distinguishing feature from Jaymie, which was a small scar on his left cheek, mostly concealed by a wave of hair hanging over his face. Jaymie wore his hair the same way either out of solidarity or because he liked having the option of impersonating Aaron.
The band executed the hard stop at the end of “Don’t Do It” and started into “A Place in the Heart,” which featured a great chorus hook and lyrics almost too emo to get away with. Jo played an arpeggio pattern that traversed the entire neck of the guitar and back.
Jo had intimidated Garrett at first with her size, her straightforward manner, and the facility she had on her instrument. He’d even had a bit of a crush on her, until he’d realized what a complete deadbeat she was. Jo seemed entirely unambitious when it came to money or musical employment—besides the online profile that had gotten her this gig—and yet conveyed the self-assurance of a person who has done much more with her life than just play the guitar and watch TV in her parents’ basement. Garrett couldn’t tell whether she’d perhaps been overly drug-happy in her teen years, or if she really just didn’t give a shit.
Jaymie sang a line about the irremediable emptiness of the soul and gave a little flourish on the keyboard. He jogged a lap of the stage, stood by the drumkit for four bars doing a shoulder stretch, and then yelped into the mic, “There’s no help for that, n-n-n-n-no, no help for that …” which, repeated sixteen times at different volumes and with one dramatic modulation, made up the outro of the song.
Jaymie had boundless energy. Garrett had never seen him tired or downtrodden or at a loss for words, though he’d frequently seen him elated, furious, enraptured, or grief-stricken (for instance, when one of his favourite bands released a bad album). Jaymie moved like whatever pitiful square of floor he’d been given to perform on was a spotlit stadium, and like it never occurred to him not to be confident.
Little Rex played simple, solid, and perfectly in-time bass parts, which mostly meant you didn’t notice them much. They even adjusted tempo unflinchingly along with Aaron’s dicey drumming. Rex wore their usual uniform of band t-shirt and jeans. Their blue-streaked hair was gelled into a spikey frame around their face, and one of their painted whiskers—applied by a careless or shaky hand—wiggled snakily down their cheek. Garrett liked Rex. Nice kid.
“What the hell are you doing here?” A curly-haired woman had appeared from nowhere.
Garrett cringed. He should’ve foreseen that Anika would be here.
“Came to see a show,” he said, without looking at her.
“Right. You came to see the band, for fun, after you cheated on their cousin. Or maybe you forgot the family connection. Would you have made different choices, had you recalled you were dating the cousin of the people whose band you’re in? Sorry—were in.” Anika’s tone was academic, but Garrett caught the vitriol.
“It was an open relationship, Nik. Like you wanted,” he said, and winced as Aaron played a fill where, in his opinion, a fill should not be.
“Sure—conveniently open, from that moment onward.”
Garrett was not interested in revisiting the same conversation they’d had for the last four days in a row. “I had thirty-six pumpkins,” he said evenly. “I came to pick them up.”
“Seriously? You expect me to believe you came to a house show looking for a bunch of pumpkins? Look around! See any vegetables? You’re jealous or something. You know what? Good luck. I hope you find your goddamn pumpkins. I’m not letting this ruin my night.” She was gone as quickly as she’d appeared. Anika had an uncanny aptitude for silent entries and exits.
Garrett stood undaunted, and Jo hit a wrong note that only he noticed, and Jaymie sang, “Hey, you don’t like it? Then get your ass out of here …” At a quarter to one, the Bukowskis finished playing “Dirty Old Men,” their final song, and began to either pack up, seek a drink, or mingle. Garrett considered this to be perfect timing, because at 12:50 the police showed up to arrest them.
Bukowski's broken family band 
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