imwiththeband | cunt mag

NIGHT ONE

Sunday, March 3rd

Bar Prima

9 pm

I saddled up to their table at the restaurant, the white linen tablecloth was strewn with stains, and green bottles of Peroni lined the perimeter. I leaned in when the tall guitarist spoke in my ear, I laughed high and loud at his jokes. My throat burned from his Juul that I vaped on the walk to the bar, I only did that to pass something slight between our fingers, it was Virginia Tobacco flavoured, he said. It tasted like nothing.

He was tall - very tall - “see things from my perspective,” I said, placing a hand on his shoulder, he crouched down to my height, “I guess that you miss a lot from down here,” he observed.

Bar Bowie

11 pm

“You know I hated that bar at the time,” he said later, about my favourite mirrored bar in the city. He said it the next night, at the Irish pub in the sleepy Beaches on the outskirts of the city. “But in retrospect, it was my favourite.” That made me laugh as I sipped my whisky, aware of the thinness of my tights and the proximity of my body to his gangly legs.

The Australian turned to me in the booth and said: do you ever undo that top button, about my red cardigan, to which I replied: no.

Lucky Shrike
Midnight

At this bar, across the street from the restaurant that was an education for me, at 21, we sipped drinks we didn’t need and talked about sex, drugs, rock and roll. In a way that made it all seem funny and simple, like it was nothing at all.

NIGHT TWO

Monday, March 4th

The Concert
8 pm

I remember, in I’m With the Band, reading Pamela’s vivid descriptions of lusting licking pining for her leading men: Mick Jagger, the singers and guitar slingers on stage. When I watched the Tall Guitarist play, knowing how veiny his hands were, as I’d run my fingers over his callouses his ring as much skin contact as I could at the bar the night before, I understood what she meant.

His white shirt was unbuttoned at the top and I thought about that a lot when I raised the plastic cup of fizzy limey tequila soda to my lips. He was so lanky and fluid on stage, never

disappearing in the dark, the white lights stayed on him the whole time, I screamed and hollered at him in giddy glee.

“What if we rush the stage,” I had said the night before.

“Just make a really big poster sign,” he replied. I would’ve if I thought he was joking.

The Irish Pub

The Beaches

9:30 pm

The tall guitarist spoke Welsh to me, he said it sounded like Elvish and I agreed. When the Welsh word for music slipped off of his tongue I felt warm. I ordered two shots of tequila for us and we slung them back standing against the dark wooden bar.

“I thought that you made up that story about Lindsay Lohan,” I chided him, he had an easy way of drinking that made his eyes droop slightly, his voice a low murmur. He had told a story about a late night at a hotel room in New York, drugs, no sex, waking up naked.

“No, no it was real,” he replied, shuffling in his pocket for his phone. “Here,” he said, pulling up a contact labelled LL.

The bell rang to close up shop around midnight as the lights came on.

Captain Jack’s

Midnight

The two-man cover band growled out Psycho Killer as N and I shimmied and swayed in tipsy stances on the sticky bar floor.

“This is my favourite bar that we’ve been to,” he said, smiling over his light beer.

Their next stop on the tour was Montreal: they were boarding the bus at 1 am, like Cinderella, I said to the Tall Guitarist at the bar, but he didn’t hear me. He pulled a girl with a plaid flannel shirt and a slick back bun in, playing her arm like a guitar. The flannel shirt girl and her friends talked a lot about Drake as I looked on in bitter silence.

Bar Bowie

1 am

After the plaid flannel perceived rejection, the magic of the pumpkin carriage disintegrated and we decided to return to our stomping grounds (the mirrored bar in a basement) for a nightcap. It was 1 am on a Tuesday, technically, although it was really in the dying hours of that magic Monday night, when we walked into the bar, and I could tell that it was him at the booth from the back of his neck, the way that his hair curled behind his ears, the slight curve of the tops of his shoulders. I didn’t have to catch his tattoos to know that for sure, it’s a feeling that you can sense more than anything, like when you can predict a song that’s about to come on or unlikely weather conditions. You feel it first, in the back of your throat, and it makes your skin tingle.

“[He’s] here,” I said to her, swivelling around to look back at the door.

“Do you want to go?” she asked.

“No, no. No, I think I’ve been wanting this,” I replied. We slipped into a booth and hugged the bartenders we see three times a week, more often than I see my blood relatives, which I think says everything there is to say about being 24 in the city, and I walked over, waiting awkwardly at the edge of the table. “Hi,” I said, to him and his friend, silently, like an apology.

“Hey, oh hey, hey,” he said, understanding what was happening as he said the words, looking up, sliding out of the booth and giving me a hug. We locked eyes and he smelled sweet and when his arms were around me I fell asleep, the floor fell out from my feet and I was dreaming. I was dreaming when I ordered a scotch on the rocks which I have never drunk and when he sat with us and we said in pleasant fond exchanges how are you how have you been and I played the part of awkward side eye smiles but inside I was asleep in a dream, like when I was a little kid and my eyes would close and suddenly it was morning.

I was dreaming when I ordered a scotch on the rocks which I have never drunk and when he sat with us and we said in pleasant fond exchanges how are you how have you been and I played the part of awkward side eye smiles but inside I was asleep in a dream, like when I was a little kid and my eyes would close and suddenly it was morning.

I don’t sleep like that anymore (deeply, easily) so when he offered to walk me home I said yes when he kissed me outside I didn’t pull away when I let him in I boiled water for tea when I asked if he wanted to lay down right next to me I knew what he would say.

My apartment

Tuesday, March 5th

7 am

I listened to a song by the band on my walk to work the next morning, running on four hours of sleep after he slipped out of my strawberry sheets, my eyes were bloodshot in the bathroom mirror, it was a song that I listened to in my bedroom when I was twelve, when the tall guitarist was “shagging all the girls in New York,” like he said at the bar, the song that he (he, skin smell he, asleep in a dream the last one to love me he) asked me about, “do you remember hearing it for the first time” over tea at my kitchen table, I listened to it and felt a low hum deep in my chest then a high flutter at my collarbones: yearning, for a dream, in memory.