Meaning It
I’m going to see Roxy Music with Marianne and John because they accidentally bought three tickets instead of two. I like tagging along with them. They are fifteen years older than me, in their early forties, and it makes me feel important having older friends. This is a relic of my childhood and my people-pleasing nature.
John drives us from Highland Park to Inglewood, forty-five minutes on the freeway, down South to a neighborhood where we would never usually go. I’m relieved to get out of my apartment, where my boyfriend and I have been going around and around in circles with the same argument for days. We’re trying to book tickets for a trip to Europe, but we can’t agree on the cities or the route. My boyfriend won’t budge from his position that we should only be going to three cities. London, Berlin, and Brussels. These are cities where he has friends that will hook him up with gigs. I want to go to Aarhus, a town in Denmark where I lived as a kid when my dad was working there. My boyfriend is also older than me, even though he isn’t as old as Marianne and John.
John drives in fits and starts, slamming the gas and then slamming the brakes, jerking us around. Marianne is in the front seat and I’m in the back. While we pass through side streets on the way to the stadium, Marianne points out Southern style restaurants featuring gumbo and grits. They remind her of Nashville, where John and Marianne grew up and used to live.
We park several blocks away from the stadium. John is wearing a black leather jacket and pointy snakeskin shoes. Marianne is wearing a long black dress and red lipstick. She is so pretty. John is handsome in a shy way. They’ve been engaged for six years, and together for ten before that. I’m only wearing jeans and a T-shirt because I’m not that familiar with Roxy Music, so this isn’t much of a special occasion for me.
“Make sure you have everything you need in your pockets,” says Marianne when we get out of the car. “They don’t allow any purses into the stadium. Some sort of safety precaution. Remnants of the pandemic bullshit.”
I leave my keys and purse in the car and stuff my iPhone and slim cigarettes into my too-small pockets. We walk through the darkness and talk about the strangeness of certain signs we see reminding us of our contemporary moment, saying “Masks Required” even though no one has really worn a mask in LA in several years. The signs mean something else than stating a rule or regulation.
We see more and more concertgoers as we get closer and closer to the stadium. They are predominantly very old. Much older than John and Marianne.
“Good people-watching,” I whisper to Marianne.
“Very,” she says and widens her eyes.
It’s good people-watching because there are lots of freaks. Freaks with pale faces and wrinkles, dressed in black, with thick undereye eyeliner. Freaks wearing leather and freaks wearing red. Rockers with leathery skin. Tall, skinny women with wan faces. Crooked teeth. Bug eyes. Wizened knuckles adorned with rings. Mini-bangs. Mullets. Glam. Rock. We bottleneck towards the entrance.
We’re behind a woman in her late 70s with spray-tan skin. She’s walking with a swing in her hips, all by herself. She has highlighter-yellow blond hair all the way to her waist. She is wearing a pink halter top and Hawaiian-print capris. Her gnarled feet are squeezed into clear plastic stilettos. In her arms is a woven wicker purse with a mother-of-pearl clasp. Her hair swishes back and forth as we all walk.
The pace of the crowd slows as we approach security. Marianne intertwines our arms. John stands behind us. The brightly colored woman is right ahead of us. She walks with determination toward the metal detectors, but before she is waved through, a security guard stops her.
In his deep, tall voice the security guard says something along the lines of “No purses.” Marianne nods at me. Our spines stiffen. The woman keeps walking as though she can’t hear him. She walks faster and faster, her hips swinging this way and that, her stilettoed feet only able to make the tiniest steps. Quickly, quickly. She’s scowling, her light pink lips pursed, her manicured nails wrapped around the handle of her wicker bag. The security guard shouts. And then, he grabs her arm.
John pushes us ahead. We try to move past her without looking at her directly. We pack tightly together with the rest of the crowd as we walk through the metal detector.
We can’t hear what the woman is saying, only her tone. It’s very aggressive. It’s becoming a commotion. We look over our shoulders when we hear the woman scream.
“This is the only bag I have! I don’t have a bag that fits in those dimensions!”
The security guard speaks in a hushed tone.
“This is the only bag that goes with this outfit!” she yells again.
There’s a crackle of violence in the air. She’s white-knuckling that bag. Her face is bright red, even through her spray tan. It’s clear something is about to happen. Maybe she’s going to clock the security guard, denting the wicker of the basket with his shiny head. Maybe she has a knife in there, or a gun. I’ve never seen fierceness in anyone’s eyes like this.
What happens is that she walks into the stadium with that wicker bag, the security guard standing sheepishly behind her. I can’t relax my shoulders, even though the situation is resolved. I wonder how the security guard performed the risk assessment in his head, about what was to be gained or lost by letting this woman into the stadium to see Roxy Music.
“Impressive,” says Marianne.
Marianne and I get in line to buy drinks, but John wanders around because he got too drunk the last time the three of us hung out together and wasn’t able to drive us home.
“Why don’t you look at the merch?” Marianne suggests to him.
Alcohol has an intense effect on Marianne and John. The three of us all like to drink, but sometimes a switch gets flipped in one of them, and it’s like a parasite has invaded their body. Their personality completely shifts. I’ve seen it happen to both of them, but since Marianne has been financially supporting John for the past few years, she gets especially vindictive and resentful when he’s the one infected. I worry about them both sometimes, but not too much. They can make their own decisions. They are adults.
“I told John he’s not allowed to drink anymore,” says Marianne.
“That seems wise. What do you think you’re going to get?” I ask her.
“Something that’s not too sweet. Are you excited for your Europe trip?” she asks me.
“It’s hard for me to be excited about it right now,” I say. “I haven’t been to Europe since I was a kid. And I don’t know when I’m going to be able to afford to go again.”
“Will you go back to that town you used to live in? In the Netherlands?”
“In Denmark,” I say. “I really want to. But with all the stops my boyfriend wants to make it doesn’t seem possible. It breaks my heart though to think of being so close and not going back.”
“Why doesn’t your boyfriend want to go?”
“It’s too far from his gigs.”
“It’s not like you’re paying less for the trip just because he’s performing,” says Marianne, “you should go where you want to go.”
“I’ve been thinking about going by myself,” I say, looking at the ground.
We’re at the front of the line. The drinks are ridiculously overpriced. We get tequila sodas. Marianne makes hers a double. I pay.
“It’s the least I could do, since you bought my ticket,” I say.
“You are the sweetest,” says Marianne, and we cheers.
When we find John, leaning against a railing by the door we need to enter to find our seats, he’s eating from a box of Sour Patch Kids.
“You shouldn’t eat sugar like that,” says Marianne.
“I have to have something,” says John, in his gentle way.
We climb way up in the stadium, up and up and up. There is black cloth draped over the nosebleed seats, where we thought we were headed. The show didn’t sell out. They want people seated closer to the stage. It’s a free-for-all. Only the best seats are spoken for.
Marianne and I sit next to each other and John sits behind us, chewing on his Sour Patch Kids. Marianne and I suck on our tiny black straws.
“There she is,” I say, and nod towards the woman with the wicker purse. She sits down by herself a few rows ahead of us. Her blond hair glows in the dim light of the stadium. She’s like a lamppost. A night light. A bioluminescent jellyfish.
“Your boyfriend should want to go see that town you used to live in,” says Marianne. “He shouldn’t make the whole trip just about himself.”
“I know,” I say, and rest my knees against the seat in front of me. “It’s just that every time I try to bring it up, he overwhelms me with facts and figures—the number of flights that go to the city per day, the length of bus rides from the airport to the city, the wasted time, the potential for disruption.”
“You lived there when you were a child,” says Marianne. “Just tell him that you’re going to go. Tell him you’ll go whether he joins you or not. I bet he’ll forget all about the fucking numbers if you say something like that.”
The lights dim. Marianne looks over her shoulder at John in excitement. They stand up. I stand up with them. The stage is a hundred feet away from us. The curtain raises. The stadium erupts in applause. I clap my hands together and smile. I’m with my friends, and I’m with a sea of strangers. This is my first ever Roxy Music concert, but other people in the audience have been coming to see them since they were my age, decades and decades ago.
Roxy Music is too far away for me to see any of their faces. But the drums and guitar vibrate in my knees. I thought I would find the show boring, because I don’t know any of the songs, but I find out that I really like it. The visuals behind the band depict swirling galaxies. It feels good to be in the dark with all these people. I tap my feet. I even tear up. I think about myself, all alone, getting off of a train in Denmark. It will be cold and dark. It’s possible that all of the things I remember as being beautiful in my mind’s eye are dingy and unimpressive, now that I’m an adult.
I skipped school pretty often the last year my family lived there, when I was eleven. I was a year younger than all of the kids I went to school with, because kindergarten in Denmark doesn’t start until you’re six years old. That year, all of my classmates were going through puberty, and I was still tiny and flat-chested. The teachers didn’t notify my parents when I didn’t show up. Like the whole country, things sort of operated on an honor system. School at that age was more about facilitating social connections than passing tests or getting good grades. Once a week there was a whole afternoon called “Class’s Time” where students would bring in cake on a rotating basis and we would talk about our feelings. This felt like a waste of time to me, when I was eleven, and instead I would take the bus to the museum downtown. When I would come home to my parents, I would tell them stuff I learned from the exhibits at the museum and say that that was what we discussed in class. They never doubted me. They believed what I told them. I think about this while I watch the band play.
“I don’t want to go to Denmark alone,” I whisper to Marianne, in between songs.
“Of course you don’t,” she says, tilting her cup back even though there’s not a drop of tequila soda left. “But maybe if you say you will, it will scare him.”
The curtains close. The crowd goes wild. There’s an encore. I sit down, even though Marianne and John stay standing up.
My boyfriend will know I’m lying. My boyfriend doesn’t take me seriously. My boyfriend would rather go somewhere he wants to go, alone, than go somewhere he doesn’t, together. I would rather go somewhere I don’t want to go together. I don’t want to be so lonely like I was. In an ideal world, I have myself and my boyfriend. But if I can only have one, I’ll choose him.
The show ends, and we walk carefully down the stairs. The woman with the wicker bag is sitting alone with misty eyes. She’s still staring at the stage with a relaxed smile. She’s taking as much time as possible before she leaves, just the way she likes it.
Ruby Zuckerman is a writer living in Los Angeles. Her fiction has been published in the Beloit Fiction Journal, XRAY Literary Magazine, SARKA, and others. Her literary criticism has been published in the Whitney Review and is forthcoming in In Geveb: a Journal of Yiddish Studies. She hosts a Sabbath reading series called This Friday, copywrites for Hoffman Donahue, and works for a wedding DJ company.