Overtures - a short story

A musician trying to find his spark through bad art.

Author’s note: This story contains mature themes and is intended for older teen and adult readers. It is loosely inspired by the events of my novel Vaguely Human Figures (out now!).

evan holloway, reverse piano drawing, 2000

The DJ at the college club down the street had a penchant for synthwave and jazz, and he mixed them like oil with water.

The tracks, which were perfectly respectable separately, were unsettling when combined, drawls of saxophone crawling between the holes in the synth bass. Thin hi-hats darted between deep, bitcrushed kicks, and the result was a tasteless mix that told me he had tried. Tried to create something avante-garde, tried to think outside of the box, tried to cook up some unique flair that would differentiate him from the rest of the college-dropout, pot-smoking, high-school-girls-dating DJ crowd that characterized the Sunset Strip. In all honesty, I could relate to his failed efforts more than I could judge them.

The night after my twenty-second birthday I let him provide the soundtrack to my evening walk from a run-down bodega to my hotel room, a five-minute journey that threaded me through the club street. College kids that couldn’t possibly have been of age clambered around the entrances, nervously flashing fake IDs under relaxed guises.

“C’mon, dude, just let us in,” one guy argued loudly, his girlfriend at his side. “How much do they pay you to do this, anyway?”

A year ago I’d have been in line with them. Now, the life of relentless partying and staying up and overloading my system with manufactured chemicals lay behind me like a cocoon I’d grown out of. I put myself in bed by midnight. Loud noises irked me. I tapped my fingers nervously any time I was around strangers, and the thought of a room packed with them damn near gave me a heart attack.

Instead, I spent my evenings in between composing sessions in the lobby or at the rooftop pool, watching people live their daily lives from a comfortable distance. I’d watch families with young kids toddle about the pool in floaties and rafts, and elderly couples at the bar sip martinis that I knew tasted terrible. Once in a while someone would strike up a conversation with me—usually old men with no one else to talk to—though it wouldn’t last long. When you lived in a hotel, people moved in and out of your life like butterflies, lingering for a moment before drifting off to some new horizon. It wasn’t wise to get invested. They did their thing and went about their course regardless of the time you shared with them.

Earlier that week I’d met a girl at the lobby bar who had, coincidentally, dated the synthwave/jazz DJ for a couple of months in college. Her name was Jackie, and she more or less confirmed my initial impression of him.

“It’s not that the music is bad, it just doesn’t work the way he thinks it does,” I’d said over cheap beer I’d bought for both of us. “Or maybe it’s the outfit. The hat’s not doing much for him.”

“It’s also the terrible mustache,” she said, and we both laughed.

After college Jackie had moved to Seattle to design propulsion systems and analyze structural dynamics, which, in regular people terms, meant she was a rocket scientist. Her family friend had helped her land the job before throwing a fit over her being promoted before him. What do you do? was one of the first things she’d asked me, and I had been lost on how to answer that. I’m a musician was technically true, but it had been a while since I’d felt like one. I played the piano every day—I had since my childhood—but the six months I’d spent in rehab had separated me from the musical world I’d grown so accustomed to. Without a sense of direction, I wasn’t sure how well-suited that term was for me anymore.

“I’m a scientist, too,” I decided. “Of music.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“Music science? What does that look like?”

“I take noises that sound bad and try to make them sound good. You take a sound like this—” I knocked the bottom of my bottle against the wooden countertop “—and you can distort or clarify it to sound like this—” I rapped the metal armrest of my chair with my knuckles “—or like this—” I crushed the napkin that came with my drink.

I wasn’t sure what I was talking about or why I had said all that to begin with. I wasn’t drunk. I didn’t get drunk anymore. If anything, I had my distance from society to attribute to my rambling. Nevertheless, it seemed to intrigue her. She likely spent most of her time around socially inept people anyway, given the rocket scientist thing and all.

“Really?” she said, genuinely intrigued. “You’re telling me you can make anything sound like anything?”

“More or less. Very rarely are the sounds you hear on the radio in their raw forms. Everything in popular music is rearranged and cut and pasted and edited.”

I tended to forget that most people were not aware of this and that manipulating sound wasn’t a common skill. I mentioned this to her, and she said she felt the same way about her field, which I believed because I didn’t know anyone who knew how to build rockets.

“People don’t say it’s not rocket science around me anymore,” she said. “You ask someone to describe what they think rocket science is, and they can’t tell you anything.”

“Yeah, I mean, I don’t know what that is either.”

Eventually I told her who I was, or rather who I’d been, and she seemed impressed enough by my musician job, or as impressed as an engineer could be (because, as I had learned, people who pursued science and engineering generally assumed that anyone in the arts was an idiot). I didn’t tell her any of the details—my creative struggles, my artist block, the time I’d spent in rehab—and stuck strictly to the work I had done, trying my best to explain my process to someone who hadn’t so much as touched an instrument in her entire life.

10 p.m. flickered across the digital clock and she gathered her things to leave. She had a meeting the next morning and wasn’t even supposed to be staying out that late. She handed me a few dollars for the drink I’d bought her and wouldn’t let me refuse it.

“I’ll see you around,” Jackie said before she left. “Hope the music stuff goes well.”

“Yeah, you too, with the, uh, the rocket stuff.”

She grinned, patting her coat down, and adjusted the strap of her bag. “The rocket stuff will be perfectly fine.”

Years later I’d read her name across the front of the Tribune. She, along with her team, would launch a rocket to the moon and contribute to the building of the International Space Station. I would remember her in glimpses, picking up the stray pieces of her memory and reassembling that night at the lobby bar as best as I could. Within what I salvaged I’d remember the wonder in her eyes when I’d explained the concept of sound engineering.

I taught one of the first women to build a rocket that you can make a crumpled napkin sound like a hi-hat. I could only laugh at how frivolous that sounded compared to her life’s work. I headed upstairs with faint traces of Footloose and Love Shack dancing through the night wrapped around me.

🎼

A week before my trip to L.A. I’d received a call from Eli, an old painter friend I’d met a year ago. Motivated by the art community there, he’d made an impromptu move to the Hollywood hills and insisted that I come see him. Though he’d completed some work since then, his schedule had quickly been overtaken by a romance with a young lawyer he’d met at a party at the Chateau Marmont. I was happy for him, though I was far too preoccupied with my own life to dole much of my attention out to others.

The last year had been a test in my ability to recuperate and ease myself back into the musical world. I no longer stretched myself out for days at a time, staying up on caffeine and inspiration. Rather, I paced myself, sleeping at regular hours and eating three meals a day for the first time in my life. I’d managed to find work from small labels and independent musicians who miraculously still remembered I existed despite the shifting musical landscape, and I made enough money to sustain myself. You didn’t have to be rich as a single, childless man.

When it came to my independent projects, however, my pen stalled at my notebook, inert and uninspired. When I brought this up over the phone, Eli had encouraged me to visit the west coast.

“It’s crazy out here, dude,” he’d said, his voice flush with enthusiasm. “I met a famous actor during my first hour. I can take you to art shows, and maybe you’ll find some ideas there.”

I’d agreed, partially because I had nothing better to do and partially because I had never been to L.A. and it seemed like the kind of place where I’d find inspiration in unseemly places. It was also Eli who had encouraged me to get a hotel on the Strip. When I told him I wasn’t interested in partying anymore, he had put his entire heart and soul into trying to guilt me into going out.

“But that’s, like, your thing, dude,” he’d said over the phone. “Don’t you think it’ll make you feel like yourself again?”

“I’m not that kind of person anymore,” I’d said, though I couldn’t be annoyed at him. I knew he had good intentions. He was just about the least evil person I knew. If anything, I found it cute, perhaps a little juvenile, that he thought I wanted to return to my old life.

“Are you kidding? That’s so you.”

“Nothing good comes out of that,” I said.

He laughed. “Dude, we met at a bar.”

“We met at the Hotel Ex Machina.”

“We met at the bar of the Hotel Ex Machina,” he corrected. “Well, if you don’t want to go out anymore, that’s fine. But I’d still recommend you get a hotel here. It has great nightlife, even if all you do is observe it from a distance.”

In the end I’d followed his advice, and for the most part it was great, minus the shitty DJs and the permanent cloud of weed smoke floating over the street.

In the following week he told me to meet him at the basement of a spiritual trinket shop. Some nepo baby he knew had organized an art show to take place there. Eli had finessed a quarter of the display space to put up his new collection titled Viewpoints, which I understood to be a series of life size, human-esque plaster dolls with scenes constructed inside their hollow bodies. Except, the viewing hole was in their crotches, so you had to bend down to observe the scene inside of them. The other half of his collection was composed of ten paintings of the scenery inside the dolls, each slightly altered to resemble an apocalyptic world. Shockingly enough, Eli’s collection was relatively tame. Another artist had recorded erotic videos of a couple wearing alligator suits and another of two people in the front and back of a horse costume. It played on a chunky TV tied to a pole. I struggled to deduce the meaning of that and kept my mouth dutifully shut.

“This is interesting,” I said, pausing before Eli’s paintings. I had looked inside every doll except one shaped like an old man because that was too much for my taste. “What’s the point of all of this?”

“Sex and the apocalypse,” Eli said. “That was the original title, but it was too on-the-nose.”

He quickly figured that didn’t answer my question and followed it up with a better explanation.

“Sex and the apocalypse are the only two circumstances in which you’re not distracted by anything else. Both of them demand your full attention, which, in an age full of ads and television, is particularly rare. And also throwing up, but I didn’t want to make vomit art. That’s Vlad’s thing.”

Eli gestured to a man with a massive wooden septum piercing and a blue goatee on the other side of the room. He stood beside a series of splatters on canvases that now, given the context, resembled vomit. I made a mental note to steer clear of them.

“What about the animal videos over there?” I gestured to the horse film.

“The whole point of this exhibition is to shock the viewer. Shock forces you to confront your hidden desires.”

I couldn’t help but laugh, but I did so discreetly so as to not offend him.

"And how much would most of these go for?" I asked. I patted one of his figurines, a young man with stringy blonde hair that was likely made with a dollar store wig.

"This would be about a thousand bucks,” Eli said. “The scenery inside it isn't too crazy—it's just a bunch of books on shelves to replicate a library."

I'd seen it already. Inside was a row of doll-sized shelves with a ladder and little volumes of hand painted books. Moby Dick, Pride and Prejudice, Catcher in the Rye. He'd also included a couple of lesser known novels, like Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye, which I'd had the displeasure of reading a couple of weeks ago by recommendation of a literature student who lived on my street. I thought the piece should've gone for more given the deliberation that went into designing both its inside and outside. Maybe Eli desperately wanted someone to buy it for their home. Maybe he laughed as hard as I did at the thought of some pretentious collector coming home to his wife and kids and showing them a doll with a library up its rear.

“Was any of that inspiring to you?” he asked me after the show as he walked me back to the hotel.

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “Those dolls, though. Those were pretty crazy.”

“Aren’t they?” His lips split into a grin. “I’m arranging for a privately owned gallery to buy some next week. I’m working on another project and need the space cleared.”

I knew I should’ve been doing the same. Even a couple of months ago I would’ve been glued to my piano bench or holed up in a studio for days at a time. For years and years I had been in a full sprint, and it was a wonder I hadn’t fizzled out. I was young, but I’d been younger. I was passionate, but I’d been unstoppable, and the lack of that spark now killed me any time I tried to compose something new.

“This is where we split,” Eli said, stopping before my building. “Let me know if you want to go to dinner with me tomorrow night. I know a guy who owns this excellent Italian place two blocks from here.”

“Yeah, I’ll think about it,” I said with little intention of following through.

“Good luck on everything, man. Don’t forget who you are.”

He patted me on the back before he left. It was easy for him to say. He seemed to be constantly evolving and growing as an artist. I’d been stilted for too long by my own lethargy and lack of inspiration. Quietly, I retreated into the lobby, slightly dizzy and heavy with the burden of my unproductivity.

🎼

A couple of days later the synthwave-jazz DJ disappeared.

At first I thought he might’ve taken a few days off of work or fallen ill, but one day turned into two into three and there was still no sign of that god-awful music. I figured he had either realized that he sucked and changed his music style or quit altogether.

Strangely enough, I found myself missing him as my walks between the bodega and my hotel became wholly uninteresting. The new DJ played strictly synth pop or club electronica, and it drew a crowd thinner than before. It appalled me that people had truly enjoyed that abomination, though I had to admit it had been captivating. A crucial feature to my impression of L.A.

Throughout the week I did little but work, fulfilling requests and commissions and odd jobs from random labels, but I found myself drifting closer to madness with each project. No longer did I enjoy producing—rather, every hour working on a project was torturous, and my favorite parts of the day were the moments in which I slept or consumed large quantities of desserts. One evening I grew so frustrated with a recalcitrant project that I slammed my notebook shut, flung it into the trash bin, and went to bed for sixteen hours. When I came to, housekeeping had emptied it, but I wasn’t bothered in the slightest. Nothing in there would’ve been salvageable anyway.

One evening I returned to the bar I’d met Jackie in and people-watched for about two hours. The music alternated between Talking Heads and Van Halen and Eurythmics. A couple of men played pool—most of them quite badly—beside a group of middle-aged women, and when one launched a ball too hard, it rolled under their table and disappeared into a forest of velvet heels. A young couple by the door spoke loudly about whatever song was playing on the speakers. A man in a suit furiously scribbled on a notepad behind them, a book of financial records balanced on his knee. People, I’d learned, were like a dull task—uninteresting until you spent significant time engaging with them. It took immersion to see who they were beyond lackluster surfaces. Sitting there, noting the ripples of chiffon on the womens’ skirts and the crunched velvet wrapping their shoes, I began to craft a narrative of who they were, where they’d come from, and what they were doing in the lobby bar.

One track on the speaker transitioned to the next and the next, and I considered retreating upstairs or walking around the street, though the summer weather had picked up substantially and rendered that quite unappealing. Instead, I remained seated, tapping my foot against the tile floor and staring into space.

One of the dolls Eli had crafted contained a bar. It had been inspired by a hotel he’d stayed at the night he met his partner. The little room included a baby grand Steinway, a couple of pool tables, and a drink island that looked not too different from the one I occupied that evening. Ever since the art exhibition I’d struggled to stop thinking about the dolls, about Eli’s weird creations and the strange people at his show. I was not a stranger to avant-gardism—the music scene was chock full of hipsters trying to become the next Frank Zappa or John Cage—and I began to wonder if the remedy I was seeking to my creative lethargy was just that. Something bold that worked in unexpected ways.

🎼

“I need one of your dolls,” I told Eli over the phone that night.

“Dude,” he said under his breath. “I’m having a client look at them right now.”

“Can you spare me one? I’ll pay you tonight. The full grand.”

He laughed then muttered incomprehensibly, presumably to said client on the other end.

“All right, man. Just for you,” he decided. “Which one do you want?”

“The library,” I said, inclining toward the first doll I’d seen.

All night I’d paced my room, restless, ruminating on my projects. Despite the gravity of my situation, Eli’s dolls lingered at the nucleus of my mind, pulling me back in every time I tried to focus on something else. The obsession had driven me halfway insane, and I had called Eli the instant his studio opened. A few hours later, the hollow doll stood at the corner of my room, glossy black eyes gazing at me through plasticky blond locks.

For some time I simply stared at it, bending down and looking up its hole to examine the scene inside. The longer I examined it, the more apparent the little details became to me. The books were shelved alphabetically by the author’s last name, and the spines were color coded by genre. Eli had sculpted a tiny couch and an end table, presumably with clay, and painted them to match the burnt luster of the shelves. A mini Tibetan rug with red splotches covered the floor space. When the side of my neck began to cramp, I returned to the piano and watched the doll from afar until darkness drew over the sky.

At that point I flipped to the end of a song book and uncapped my pen. For months I’d tortured those blank pages with terrible music and scribbles. A part of me wanted to fling it across the room. Nevertheless, I put my hands to the keyboard and began to write a melody. I focused on the strange art Eli had shown me and bent myself in that direction. I placed chords beside each other that would’ve enraged a music professor and adorned them with polyrhythms and unnatural time signatures. Instead of predictable progressions I concocted a jarring series of notes that were little but pure noise. The dynamics and timing were completely off but I kept writing, convincing myself that this was what avant-gardism was all about and that trusting the process would lead me to a stroke of genius. I assumed the skin of Eli and his artist coworkers, envisioning their unhinged freedom from conventionality.

When I finished the first page, I put my pen down and played through what I'd written. The first bar progressed smoothly with an undertone of expected chaos. The second bar was cataclysmic, an avalanche of unlistenable noise.

Frustrated, I pulled away from the keys. The library doll grinned from the corner of my eye. Its mars black irises glared back as if to taunt me, its lips slack and face lifeless yet so, so realistic. My heart began to pound and a collar of heat rose up my neck, my jaw, and my entire face.

I had flown out to L.A. in search of inspiration and beauty. I expected to find a reminder of the dormant brilliance within me. I had booked a hotel on the stupid club street hoping to hear good music only to get slapped in the face by that experimental DJ nonsense, and I had followed Eli to his art show to find myself looking up at a doll's asshole. The entire ordeal was, simply put, utterly and undeniably humiliating. God had put me there only to flick me on the forehead and give me the middle finger.

I slammed the song book shut. I chucked the pen across the room and slammed the piano lid down enough force to shake the floor. I rose, pulled my fist back, and slammed it into the doll, my knuckles colliding again and again with the plaster. My heart rate thundered in my ears. My knuckles burned but I kept flinging them, rage boiling in every corner of my body. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Its face crumpled under the force. Spiderweb cracks erupted across its blushing cheek. Another blow caved it in completely. White chunks flew across the room and showered the floor in powder. When its face had little but an eye to spare, I snapped its arms, its legs, its torso. Tiny books erupted from its split midriff. Again and again, I struck it until it crumpled to the floor, its ratty clothes hanging off its ashy corpse.

I stood back, panting, crushing the mini books under my shoes. Half of a painted eye stared at me from the crater that was now its face. A piece of its hand and foot had found their way to the other side of the room. I cast my gaze from the piano book to the plaster foot to the crumpled doll by the door, then back to the music.

Stupid, stupid. The whole trip had been a mistake.

I fell back onto the piano bench, my head spinning and my fists aching. Through bleary eyes I eyed the doll, its face contorted monstrously and its body twisted into inhumane shapes. A piece of its grin waited at my feet, its lips flushed a deep red, the rounded curve of its cheekbone framing it from the left. From some incomprehensible pocket of my body emerged a laugh. Whether it was at the situation or at myself was difficult to tell.

I rose from the seat and washed the dust off of my hands. With fresh eyes, I returned to the keyboard. I lifted the cover, retrieved the pen, eased the ink cartridge back into the shell it had fallen out of. I turned the page, the indents from the previous one rising out of it, and lined up the ballpoint end.

It’s not that the music is bad, it just doesn’t work the way he thinks it does, I’d said to Jackie the night I’d met her.

Fine, then. I’d make it work. My adrenaline was pumping, and my pulse thumped under my skin to light me up from the inside out. My knuckles were a crushed-plum purple against the five parallel lines. Fine. I’d write something stupid. I’d make aimless noise. I couldn’t make a bigger fool of myself than L.A. already had. It wasn’t rocket science.

🎼

This story is inspired by the events of my novel Vaguely Human Figures. It’s not completely lore-accurate and ignores some stuff that happened in the book because this is my story and I did whatever I wanted with it. Anyway I hope it was enjoyable and off-putting! This is my first time posting fiction on my Substack so I guess we’ll see how it goes. Thanks for checking it out and read Vaguely Human Figures!