Travis Flatt

My Wife Won’t Believe I Played in a “Real” Band

But, that’s because of the stories I’ve told her. Sleeping on the marble floor of an abandoned old Baltimore church where the crustie punks squatted. Attempting to sleep, anyway, with rats running over my feet. In West Philadelphia, I chased a pitbull who escaped from the bathroom where the house boys kept it locked up during the blasting and screaming; the dog made a break for the front door, squirted out between a drunk couple of kids who’d stopped to make out in the doorway, me happening to see all this on my way to the truck for beer. The dog ran for blocks before I managed to catch it and carry it back. The looks on peoples faces when I asked for help hauling this forty five pound dog with my arms covered in cigarette burns from some drunken, 2am contest between screamo bands a few nights before. The feel of pressing my forehead to the forehead of a boy in a Milwaukee basement, him shouting words to a song I wrote, us sharing my microphone while beer rained from the ceiling, everyone in their underwear.  Waking up at noon to coked up kids in Charleston insisting we record a live show for an apartment suddenly full of college students wanting to watch us play, and then driving to the next city with a cassette of our new “live album,” making flip phone calls on the drive, looking for someone to help record copies to sell. A show falls through in Chicago. We can’t find another venue and end up in some field with a gas generator to power our amps. Having to break into our truck with a coat hanger on a sidewalk in Manhattan. We averaged ten dollars a show. We lost money on “tours.” Spinning like a top during guitar solos, running my fingers through sweaty heads of hair, kissing strangers, them kissing me, all one big squeeze. Hugging straightedge skins—not Nazis, just big friendly guys who gave big friendly hugs. We ran the Nazi scene punks out of Knoxville. Most of them. Our last show in a trailer lit by Christmas lights, glass shards in the carpet, me running a 103 degree fever. I knew I’d never see most of those people again, of course, including a couple of the guys who filled in on guitar or drums. I don’t, with complete certainty, remember the name of a single venue we played. If it wasn’t for that cassette, which captures us playing way, way too fast, the drums banging too loud to hear the guitars half the time, it’d be like none of it happened. And all these cigarette burn scars on my arms.