I was about 2,000 miles from home when I jumped.
It was only a fill-in gig, but I was determined to treat it like I’d been pouring my heart and soul into this band for years. The band was called Fed Ash, and I was asked by my friend Matt to substitute for their vocalist, who couldn’t make the nine-day run out to Denver and back to New York. Matt was an old friend and bandmate that had heard that I was coming back to the States and apparently still thought well enough of me after our adventures together. When we had toured together in the past, people often thought Matt and I were brothers. And we are. We both are bald, tall, and devilishly handsome; however, we’ve only ever shared a motel bed, not a womb.
In my eagerness, I said yes to Matt before I even listened to the music.
DIY touring requires a lot more than musical skill to make it work. You have to be comfortable with a not insignificant level of humiliation. Gigs fall through, sometimes you have to play to an empty room, and every once in a while, the whole thing goes to shit while you’re thousands of miles from home with nothing but five bucks and a packet of wet wipes in your pocket. You get used to sleeping on strangers’ smelly couches and carpeted kitchens each night. Hopefully, you’ll get a couple hours of sleep before you have to cram into the van and do it all again. Hopefully, there’s a spot open to grab a couple breakfast burritos and a coffee before you hit the road—only another couple hundred miles to the next gig.
That was my life before I changed everything about it. I had been living a lifelong dream. Playing shows across the country, traveling in a rusted husk of a van, sharing sleeping arrangements with other large, sweaty, tattooed men who I didn’t much care for. Putting every spare cent I earned into t-shirts, equipment, and vehicle repairs. Putting every extra second into going to practice, recording, and writing lyrics. Putting every bit of my body’s energy into chasing the sensation of grabbing hold of a total stranger and screaming in their face, while I watch the joy and terror swirl as they scream the words that I’ve written about my own pain back at me. That sense of connection was the greatest drug I’ve ever done.
I traded that dream for another. A dream where I skipped across the planet like a flat stone on water and told unforgettable stories of the people who lived between the waves. I split four years between three different countries, experiencing things that I’m sure no one in my family tree has ever imagined.
By sheer happenstance, I met and grew to love a fierce woman during her brief time in my hometown. Like me, she was angry and frustrated, but unlike me, she had elected to do something more about it than scream. Megan’s career as a humanitarian immigration attorney led us across the world. She inspired me to go farther, to cross other horizons, to do something I never thought I would have a chance to do: become better.
After four years, I was tired. Meg was tired too. We had left the United States to its own devices in 2015 to fight the good fight abroad. As 2019 came to a close, she and I were needed back home. And so, we decided to try a new dream in the most impressive city in the world as it, and we, unknowingly hurtled towards the invisible precipice of COVID-19.
All was set for our return in August 2019. We signed a lease for a 5th-floor walkup in Brooklyn, which was made all-the-more daunting by the fact that our bank account documents were in another currency. It wasn’t so bad until the brokers and landlords noticed the numbers on the paper were for ringgit, not dollars.
One broker had asked us, “Are you sure you don’t have any other accounts with real money in them?” We told them we were sure.
“Our butts are going to look amazing,” Meg said after the deal was sealed, as we took a break with our suitcases on the third-floor landing.
This fill-in gig would be my first opportunity to play music in over four years—that one set I did with a cover band in an empty bar in Bangkok notwithstanding.
The anticipation of playing music after what seems like several lifetimes and rejoining the only community I’ve ever known was agonizing. Was I making the right choice? Aren’t I too old for this shit by now? Will this new version of myself still find the screaming cathartic?
Once all the boring shit like the apartment, jobs, and electric bills were settled, I traveled north to my ancestral homeland in the Mohawk Valley to get my broke rockstar on.
No Sharper Spur To Victory
The naming convention of Upstate New York towns is a testament to the all-American tradition of plagiarism. Among the handful of towns and villages ostensibly named after Native American settlements and tribes—Mohawk, Oneonta, Canajoharie—are great cities from across the globe. There’s a Rome and a Frankfort, a Delhi and a Cairo.
When I told people I was moving to Cairo (ki•ro) in 2015, many were confused and grilled me on why I would want to live in a place “like that.” After I clarified that I wasn’t talking about Cairo (kay•row), NY, they would say “oh,” and ask the same questions again.
Then there’s Utica, my home, a ruined shell of a city at the center of NY state named after a ruined city in Tunisia. I mark all these town names in my mind whenever I go back. It feels like I’m crossing the planet through some kaleidoscopic bug in the code of spacetime, disregarding the linear. Half-expecting a ruined limestone pillar or pyramid to peak above the tips of fir and pine. It was near there that I met up with Matt and my new, temporary bandmates.
The shows were amazing. Very few people came to most of them, but that didn’t matter much. “I’m sorry, dude,” Matt would say to me after the bad gigs, which were most of them. I told him again, and again I was having a great time, regardless of the turnouts. In Hamtramck, Michigan, as we sat waiting for our set in the back of the unloaded van, I explained to him how much I’d needed this. Needed the irreplaceable experience of standing in front of a wall of sound so dense and sharp, it filled the space between my atoms—left no room for things like bad memories and inherited mental illness. How much I needed the confidence boost of performing the art I’ve worked to make my own since I was 16 making obnoxious noises in my grandmother’s basement.
All Growth Is A Leap Into The Dark
Denver was a good gig until I jumped. The spot was called Rhinoceropolis, one of those amorphous spaces one encounters in these circles: part venue, part warehouse, part art studio, covered in graffiti, with “sculptures” made from old mannequins and stolen street signs tucked into the dark, mold-scented corners.
The stage was high. About shoulder level with the tall dude in the brand new Rotting Christ shirt. His head poked and bobbed above a sea of faces. I don’t like playing on stages most of the time. I’m not a rockstar looking to bask in the fleeting glory of the lights, more an actor at a haunted house lurking amidst my victims in the manufactured dark.
We were about 15 minutes into the set, almost halfway done. Everyone was very receptive to the cacophony of blown-out amps, blastbeats, and old movie samples that accompanied the incomprehensible bullshit coming out of my mouth. It is crucial to never jump off a stage when people aren’t paying attention. Part of the art is knowing how to make people pay attention. A few probing shoves, holding eye contact as I howl and stomp like a demented Godzilla. Having a stranger respond to the act with a completely inaudible “fuck yea” was the green light. It is only fun to scare people when it’s consensual.
Not seeing a better way down, I jumped off the stage, like I’ve done thousands of times before and probably won’t ever do again.
They caught me. For a moment, I was floating on a cloud perfumed by body odor, legal cannabis, and cost-effective beer, kept aloft by the spirits of heavy metal and punk-rock gigs past. The other guys in the band were still grinding away as I was lowered gingerly to the concrete Earth. I felt the people around me pat me on the back as my feet touched the floor, coated in broken glass and beer. Rotting Christ guy had dropped his PBR bottle to catch me. This was not the first time I’d slipped at a gig in a puddle of my own making. This time though, several other people, entangled as we were in spirit and body, came down with me. My left leg shot out from under me. The weight of four or five people and four or five years of expatriate desperation was unbearably forced upon my right leg.
I heard the sound of my kneecap popping out of place as it was conducted through my bones. The rest of the band was still playing, filling the air with feedback and thunder until there was no more room for me to hear it any other way. It felt gross. Tripped that wire in the primordial part of the brain that overrides every synapse with two timeworn evolutionary messages: you fucked up, and this is going to hurt. It wasn’t as bad as the sound of my patella, popped out its comfy resting place and exploring somewhere far from home, shattering as it hit the concrete.
The bands I play in are loud. If you don’t wear earplugs, you’re not going to have a good time for long, no matter how much you love black t-shirts with scratchy logos and vivid depictions of violence on them. No one heard my pleas as I begged them to violate the first and only law of the moshpit: when someone falls, pick them up fast. Eventually, they stopped trying to lift me off the floor, and the other guys quit their racket so I could break the news our set was now over. The crowd and my friend helped me get to the faded flower printed couch that, through some quantum action, simultaneously exists in every DIY punk venue and sweet Grandma’s living room at once.
As my temporary bandmates broke down their gear and attended to the post-performance ritual of folks saying “sick set” and telling you how cool your shirts are without buying one, Rotting Christ shirt guy and several of his pals came over to check on me—my leg propped on a three-legged coffee table that doubled as an ashtray. The woman with him told me she was a physical therapist. Her tattooed fingers probed around my rapidly expanding knee as I attached myself to the handle of vodka that Rotting Christ shirt guy was so kind to offer me.
“You probably just dislocated it,” she assured me. “It’s not too big of a deal unless the ligament right here is-,” she stopped and abruptly took her hands off the balloon that now existed between my ankle and ass. She turned to Matt and told him I needed to go to the hospital right now.
Return To The Earth
Much of what I remember about leaving Rhinoceropolis is hazy, but I do remember the pain. Each hobbled step held up by Matt and my new friend and drummer, Calum, sent continuous barbs of information to my brain, confirming I was an idiot. No one spoke as Matt and I drove to the emergency room in the van, me clutching my extended leg in the passenger seat with both hands to stabilize it against the malice of Colorado’s potholes. No one spoke, but I did scream. Good thing I had warmed up, or else I would’ve hurt myself.
A few x-rays later and I was all set up with a full leg immobilizer and crutches. I struggled with guilt as my phone calls to a sleeping Meg back in NYC went unanswered, and I weighed the stress I was putting on her. Do I leave a message and send her into a panic first thing in the morning, or do I let her wake to my missed call notifications and do the same?
I had to finish the tour. Denver was the apex, the furthest out we go before turning back towards home. There was no way I was getting into an economy-class seat to fly home, and we had to stop to sleep and otherwise exist on the drive back home, so, why not play the gigs? Brutal. The country flew by me in a whirlwind of Netflix, pain pills, and pit stops until I returned home in pyrrhic victory.
Bright Lights, Big, Inaccessible City
I’m going to reiterate here that I had just moved to the 5th floor of a building with no elevator in a notoriously inaccessible city. Meg was right: half of my butt is quite toned.
Surgery back in an Autumnal NYC took care of the needles of bone floating around in my knee. It also replaced the vanished ligament with a rubber band of meat from elsewhere in my body. Next came six months of physical therapy: three times a week, at a charming facility across the city, shared with professional athletes I don’t recognize.
When I was at that hospital for special sportspeople, learning to walk unlike a peg-legged pirate again, staff and patients would always ask, “What’s your sport?”
This time—like each and every time—I put on a big frown, contorted my tattooed hands into the universally understood symbol of my culture—middle and ring finger down, pointer and pinky up—and proudly told them, “Metal.”
By February 2020, I was free of any crutches, canes, immobilizers, or braces. I had managed to catch a few concerts—canes make excellent air guitar accessories—and knock out a couple of the more accessible exploration pins off my map app before the entire city shut down in March. I took one unaided walk in the old world before it was lost forever. Meg and I visited the Brooklyn Museum. Her cheeks burst into scarlet flame as she scrambled to distance herself from me as I loudly read from their copy of the Egyptian Book of the Dead in my “metal voice.” It started snowing on the walk home. Great, lazy frozen wonders floated down to us from above to rest on the asphalt ever so gracefully. This was the first snow we had seen in years. We walked arm-in-arm, grateful for each other, our past adventures, and the ones to come. We took the long way home.
The Brotherhood of Steel
My community, like so many others, has been devastated by Covid-19. Venues across the country are closing permanently. The vital outlet for my friends and I is all but impossible for the foreseeable future. You can’t livestream a grindcore show from your bedroom on Instagram. Your iPhone just can’t handle it.
Matt and the rest of my friends have lost something integral. They’ve lost their art. Not by choice, like me, gallivanting across the planet eating weird snacks and running from the ancient demons that haunt my blood. Running until I could not physically get any further away without actually getting closer.
The brutality that I had felt in those years without music was immense, compounded as it was by distance and circumstance. But still, I felt it of my own volition. I felt like I deserved the depression because I had made a decision. My friends don’t deserve this. The venue owners and road crews and sound guys who have been abandoned by the status quo don’t, either. The billions of people I’ve never met, and yet who are my family, do not deserve this apocalypse.
We’re all struggling with our mental health now, not just us in the extreme music scene. But many of us, with closets full of black t-shirts and ears ringing with tinnitus, are wired in a way that makes us predisposed to self-destructive acts, depression, and anxiety. It’s science. Which came first, the spiky black chicken or the egg with the traumatized yoke, is still up for debate. For many of us, starting a band or going to a gig is cheaper than therapy.