Shaun sets the stack of boxes at the top of the steps and turns around for another load. His first and last month’s rent had been paid on the loft space in the converted dairy shipping center downtown and he has one more box to get before he’s officially moved in. He doesn’t have much – clothes, a computer, his music collection, a guitar. The move will be good for me, he thinks.

His new spot is on Victoria Street, six doors down from Tower Street. He could throw a rock and hit a dozen bars. Crawling distance. On his first night, he takes a stroll in the new neighborhood. Some punk-revival music is blasting from Freddie’s Club, so Shaun lets himself in to investigate.

“Three bucks. Twenty-one up.” The tattooed bouncer with waist-length goatee holds a hand up to block the doorway.

Shaun hands him three singles with his ID and holds the inside of his wrist out to be stamped. The door guy grabs his hand and flips it over to stamp the back. Shaun finds his way to the far end of the bar, next to the sound booth. He peers over the mirrored wall from his barstool to observe the engineer. The band sounded like shit. Most of it was their music, but it didn’t help that the sound guy was taking bumps from a plastic CD case instead of working the board.

On the next break, Shaun slips out the back door to mix with the musicians. He lights a cigarette and steps into the circle where a joint is being passed around.

“Hey, nice set,” he says to nobody in particular. He didn’t think it was, but it’s a customary greeting in the music world. Even if he didn’t dig the sound, maybe they were having a great time playing, and that would still make it a nice set. You just don’t want to say it after a complete trainwreck.

Not that he was an expert on the matter. Shaun plucked on the guitar some – he had his own shitty-sounding band with some high school buddies back in the day. Performing wasn’t for him, but he enjoyed playing with the sound gear. They did a few gigs. House parties. No music clubs like this – only one member of their group was over twenty-one at the time.

“What’s up, fella? I’m Adam. AC.” The cleancut guitar player, around the same age as Shaun, passes a joint to the newcomer.

“Shaun. Liking that Twin Reverb. I’ve got a Deluxe.” He takes the smoldering devil’s lettuce from AC and sucks in a deep breath of the sooty air.

“Yeah, the Deluxe is okay, I guess. What’chu gotta get you is a Super. I ain’t seen y’around,” AC adds an okiefied twang to his voice. “You a playa?”

“Nah, not really. My friends and I played, but I mostly gave it up to paint and draw.”

“Shit, mang! That’s fate. We was s’posed to meet. I got this new record-album coming out and need art for the front cover and posters for my CD-release party an’ shit. You do that shit, mang?”

“Yeah, I can do all of that. You’d have to tell me about what you want and we can get an idea of time and cost.”

“Well, here’s the thing.” The other band members return to the bar for refills on their PBRs. Adam lights a fresh joint and hands it to Shaun. “The thing is, I got all my money tied up in this record. Paying the studio and all. I got Peter Wolf producing. Know Him?” Shaun shakes his head, holding his breath with the previous hit. “Anyway, he’s good, but he’s expensive, my man. You can see I’m barely able to make a livin’ out here at three-dollars a head. Shit, how many people you think are in there? Twenty-five? Fuck that, mang. This is my new solo album I’m rappin’ ‘bout. Blues guitar. Stevie Ray Vaughn and Jimi Hendrix covers, mostly. I got me an original or two on there. Good shit, mang. So anyway, I’ll pay you, but I gotta make some money on it first, y’know? I’ll pay you double once I get it out on the bandstand where I’m the bandleader. Gonna tear some shit up, mang, I’m tellin’ ya.” AC holds the burning marijuana cigarette without smoking it while he continues, “Like I say, there’s money, but I ain’t got it right now. But I know everyone ‘round here. I could introduce you around. You’re new, yeah? I know some cats with some deep pockets, mang. I’m off tomorrow. You and me, we gotta go out to this other spot down here, I’ll show ya. Anyway, I gotsta go play this next set. Meet me here at seven tomorrow. We’ll be seein’ ya.”

And with that, AC lets himself into the rear entrance of the club, pulling a folded piece of Marlboro wrapper out of the latch so the fire-door locks behind him. Shaun doesn’t want to go around to the door guy again, so he walks home. To his new place.

The next evening, Shaun is standing outside of Freddie’s, smoking a cigarette, when AC pulls up to the loading-zone on the curb. He steps out of the green Chevy S-10 and walks around to the sidewalk.

“Sup, pardner? C’mon.” Adam leads the way into the bar, which lacks a bouncer today. A few daytime regulars shield their eyes as the door swings open, sending a column of natural light into the building. The stage is vacant except for some rolled cables and microphone stands.

Adam hands Shaun a can of Pabst and pulls the nearest stool under him. His jeans lack a belt and sag to reveal striped boxer shorts and the top of his hairy asscrack. Shaun steps over the neighboring barstool, hitches up his pants, and pulls a coaster from the bar-rail.

“So lookie here, mang. I got this ‘Music 101’ record almost done. Gotta get a good cover and get it out on tour with me. What’cha got?”

“Wait, weren’t we going somewhere else?”

“Yeah, we’ll get there. I just wanted to talk business first.”

“You’d have to tell me about it. Is there a theme or story? Do you have an image or brand?”

“Blues, mang, blues. Stevie and Jimi. That’s it, just the blues. The good stuff, brah.”

“Led Zeppelin?”

“What? Fuck those guys, mang. Mothafuckas gotta be stealin’ the black man’s music. That ain’t the blues, mang.”

Shaun spends a couple more beers trying to extract anything more about the album besides AC playing ‘Texas Flood’ on the jukebox. Finally, he gets AC to take him to his truck to hear some unfinished mixes of the album. Doesn’t sound like anything from a pro studio in Shaun’s opinion. If Shaun tries to ask a question, Adam shushes him to point out a particular part that he’ll air-guitar along with. It sounds like an early Ray Charles or Roy Orbison record. Before they could multi-track everything. Except this is all guitar solos.

While he’s driving the two of them to the next bar, Adam puffs a Marlboro Red while explaining that he was going for that ‘vintage’ sound, so he only used two mics on the drum kit and one mic for both his vocals and guitar. The bass was recorded direct. At least he’s finally using a word besides ‘blues’ to describe his music. Vintage doesn’t have to mean bad, though.

“Why not record it good, then make it sound shitty later?”

“Naw, mang. I gotta be authentic. You think Robert Johnson woulda multi-tracked all up on his shit?”

“Yeah, actually.”

Adam pulls his Chevy under the outline of a neon martini, next to the dumpster. He turns the truck off. When Shaun reaches for the door handle, Adam grabs his sleeve and pulls him toward the center of a cab, where he holds the ignition key out. Shaun takes a hard sniff of the white powder and checks his nostrils in the rearview mirror while AC helps himself to a couple of scoops from the twist-tie sandwich baggie in his lap.

They stumble up the ramp and into the side entrance of the restaurant. To the right, a hostess in all-black holds leather-bound menus, ready to seat them. Instead of going into the restaurant, Adam continues straight across the hall, pressing his hip against the crash bar on the opposite door to swing it open.

“Hey!” A chorus of drunken patrons greets them as they pop out on the patio of The Landmark. Like Shaun’s apartment, this place used to be an old dairy facility. So says a bronze plaque on the exterior wall. Through the window, he can see a carved and polished oak bar stretching the length of the room. The kind of bar with the polished-brass foot rail that’s inevitably worn to a blackened patina every three feet. Under some of those generic French restaurant signs, a jazz trio bangs out standards just loud enough where you can’t quite make out the song from outside. A black-clad waitress approaches with a tray and passes cocktails around the table where Adam is introducing Shaun to the drinks’ recipients. There are ten of them, and he doesn’t expect to remember any names. Except Paddy and Skip, those are easy. The rest are Toms or Tims. Lauras or Lindas. Cindys and Mindys. Chris and Christy. Something like that.

After receiving and consuming some vodka drinks of their own, Shaun and Adam follow Paddy and a couple others into the dark alley between the bar and the neighborhood. Paddy lights a blunt and passes it around.

“Yeah, man, this is my place,” the man with the silver ponytail points over the fence they’re leaning against.

“Damn, that’s convenient. I just moved in over on Victoria Street.” Shaun motions in the other direction.

“Well, shit, brotha, you gotta come over. We’ll drink a bottle of wine.”

“Yeah, sounds good…”

“Steve.”

“Right. Shaun.” They shake hands and Steve follows Paddy back to the patio. Shaun is ready to tag along when Adam again grabs for his sleeve.

“Listen, mang. That Paddy, he’s the one with all the scrill. He’s the guy you gotta get in bed with.”

“Why aren’t you working with him?”

“Naw, mang. I gotta do me. They got a band with horns and five singers and all that shit. I gotta be the one that people see on stage. Can’t be sharing airtime with no saxophone or piano. I got me a bass and drummer. That’s all I need, mang.”

Back on the patio, Shaun orders another cocktail and, unable to find a chair, crouches at the table next to Skip and Paddy.

“Hey, we heard you’re an axe-man! Right on!” Skip shakes Shaun’s hand for a second time.

“Yeah, guitar. A little bass sometimes. You?”

“Drummer, man. Paddy’s the guitarist in our band.”

“Nice. What do you play?”

“That’s the thing, my man, we don’t know yet.”

“You have a band and don’t know what kind of music you play?”

“We’re still figuring it out,” Paddy interjects, offering Shaun an American Spirit. “We have backup singers and horns and all that, but no lead singer. And we need a guitar.”

“A second guitar?”

“Yeah, someone who can play some leads or trade off with me.”

“What do you listen to?” Skip asks.

“I dunno, I change it up, but my main playing influences are probably Zep, Floyd, The Beatles.”

“Awesome! Same here. Lemme get your number.”

Shaun joined Skip and Paddy’s band, Sweet Virginia. An eleven-piece tribute to the Rolling Stones. They acted as their own acoustic opening band, playing the more obscure Stones songs. At their first gig, someone shouted, “When are you going to play some Rolling Stones?!” Shaun was never a Stones fan, but he came to like their album tracks a bit more while he was in the band. Goats Head and Exile have some groovy tracks on them. Better than early Beatles, maybe, but not later Beatles. And they’re definitely no Led Zeppelin.

Through Sweet Virginia, Shaun met a colorful array of local musicians, all eager to glom onto Paddy – or anyone else they could appropriate for drinks, money, or time. There was nothing that Shaun needed, so when the band eventually went defunct, he parted ways with Paddy having not asked for a cent to support his growing music-art business. They paid Shaun for gigs – a fair wage – but there was no stipend for rehearsals, where they’d work him like a critter in an Orwell novel. He charged them a hundred bucks for a Filmore-style flier that he spent way too much time working on.

In his first six months in the new town, Shaun had picked up almost a dozen bands or musicians who needed posters or press kits or album art. His loft was only six-hundred dollars a month, so even though most of his clients never followed through on their promise to pay, he eked by on what he made from those who did.

In the way that some people seem to find their own unhappiness easier to tolerate when others suffer, AC brought a myriad of vexed characters around Shaun’s place. After the third or fourth of Adam’s friends that he did pro-bono work for, Shaun realized that they were probably only coming to him because they’d been told they could get away without paying. After Nate Pierce, country-superstar wannabe, ghosted Shaun after receiving a couple thousand dollars of designs, it was time to cut Adam off.

The crew that hung out with Paddy and Sweet Virginia seemed to be a little less needy-greedy. With the exception of a couple frequent members of the entourage who never seemed to have money for their own top-shelf doubles. Paddy would tell the Landmark or Stone’s waitress to put it on his tab and he’d slip her an unbranded silver credit card at the end of the night without waiting for his bill.

Since these sidekick guys were omnipresent fixtures in the neighborhood, Shaun began hanging out with them when Skip and Paddy weren’t around. A couple nights a week, Paddy would venture out of his gated McMansion community on the north side of town to slum it with the boys. They saw Skip even less frequently. Although he only lived a mile or so up West Street, his family kept him home except on rehearsal nights.

Shaun is sitting at a black-mesh table on the patio of Stone’s Bar with Nate – a different Nate, not the Tim McBrooks&Dunn wannabe – and three guys named Chris. One of them, the tall and gangling one with a beard that seems to grow out instead of down, used to be the lead singer for Sweet Virginia. Still is, technically. The same way Shaun is still their rhythm guitar player. They just haven’t had any gigs or rehearsals in a few months.

The next Chris, another tall drink-o’-water, but not as stringy, has his feet up on the table in an uncivilized display of his polished Doc Martens. He’s a friend of the previous Chris. Between the two of them word-vomiting constantly, there’s hardly a break in the conversation where Shaun and the other two attendees of this ‘meeting’ can participate.

The last Chris doesn’t talk much or seem engaged in the conversation at all. He wears his long hair down in Robert-Plant style where it curls into ringlets. His eyes are concealed behind smoky, Windsor-rimmed sunglasses. If he weren’t chain-smoking Camels and downing Anchor Steams, Shaun could have thought he was taking a nap.

“If we’re going to do this, you guys are going to need some better names,” Nate interrupts the bearded Chris, who looks agitated to have the attention drawn away from him. Nate is the elder of the group. He’s a foot shorter than anyone else at the table and rail-thin except for a massive Santa-belly that he has restrained behind a threadbare six-button tuxedo vest. His shoulder-length blonde hair is thinning and his crooked nose gives him the appearance of a troll that will let you cross his bridge if you can answer these riddles three.

“My uncle was Gino Lavagnino, my dad was Tito Lavagnino, and my other uncle was Dino Lavagnino. I’ll be Pino Lavagnino,” the first Chris, the spindly one, volunteers.

The second Chris, the one with his boots on the table, nearly knocking over drinks while he gesticulates, rolls up the sleeves of his shirt. Underneath, he has black-ink sleeve tattoos. Hotrods and mudflap girls and dice. Hipster shit. On each elbow, reaching out several inches in each direction, are permanent drawings of black widows on conventional webs.

“You should call me ‘Spiderweb’,” he offers.

“Spiderpig, Spiderpig, does whatever a Spiderpig does,” Nate sings.

Why don’t we call you “Inaccurate-Depiction-of-Arachnids Man”, Shaun thinks. The tattoo is clearly of an orb web, whereas Black Widows spin sheet webs. Also, if the spider is standing atop the web, as the shading would indicate, why is the red hourglass on its back? Nevermind the fact that every black widow Shaun had ever seen hid out in some darkened crevice near its web and only came out when it felt a tug at the silk.

“What about you?” Pino turns to the sunglasses-at-night Chris.

“I don’t give a fuck, man.”

“Fine, you’re CJ, then.”

“How original.”

“Anyway. Getting back to the opera. I’m going to direct and be the love interest of the lead actress. Spiderman is my understudy and assistant director.”

“Spiderweb.”

“Spiderman, Spiderweb. Whatever, Spidey. So as I was saying before I was interrupted yet again, Nate is going to be the bandleader and pianist. We’re bringing in the girls from Sweet Virginia and a couple of horns. We need a reliable rhythm section.”

“What about Paddy and Skip?” Shaun suggests.

“I said ‘reliable’. That also means they’re going to listen to me. Those two are control freaks and they’ll try to take over. I mean, I’d love to get my hands on Paddy’s checkbook to pay for the show, but he’ll want to be the star of the band. And you know neither one of those guys are any good. We got CJ here for guitar and maybe you.

“Music director,” Pino points at Nate.

“Script supervisor and guitar.” He points to CJ.

“Art director and producer? Second guitar?” Pino directs his finger at Shaun.

“I mean, yeah, I think so. I need to know more about what I have to do.”

“You do whatever you want. You’re a producer. It’s up to you to make everything come together in time for the show.”

“When is the show?”

“I went to the Tower Theater today and talked to Lawrence. We’re booked for February twenty-seven, twenty-eight, and twenty-nine.”

“Only three days?” Nate asks.

“Yeah. That’s all they would give me. Why?”

“Well, the other shows I’ve done for the children’s theater ran at least ten shows over two weeks. If we’re going to spend the next eight months working on this, we should get a bigger payout. Even if we sell out, we’ll barely break even.”

“Don’t worry about it. I have a money guy. He says if we can make this show happen, he’ll put it on tour. The whole cast and crew and band.”

“Do you know how expensive that shit is?” CJ speaks up.

“Fuck, do I. I had to give Lawrence my last two-Gs to reserve the theater and he wants another five in two months to rent his sound and lighting equipment.”

“Wait, do we have to use their gear? What if we bring our own?”

“Nah, that shit is built into the price.”

The five men sat around the table until closing time, brainstorming changes to the story, suggesting people they knew for the cast, and getting generally shitfaced.

It’s two weeks before the opening of the rock opera and Shaun felt exhausted. He’s spent months living on ramen and whatever beer his more generous friends would provide. Shaun hated being a leech, but he’d committed so much of his time to the show that he wasn’t able to take on commissions.

The sets and signage were designed and painted. Shaun had to take over part of Nate’s duties, writing charts for the orchestra. Even though he was a pianist by trade, Nate couldn’t write music. If he could, nobody would have been able to read it, given his alternating periods of DTs and drunkenness. Instead of playing second guitar to CJ, Shaun had somehow been voluntold into being the conductor. Personally, he didn’t think it was necessary. It was a rock band with partial-orchestra accompaniment. The drummer should be plenty good for keeping time. It sucks for Shaun, as he has to spend most nights at rehearsal, followed by the compulsory evening of drinking while Pino and Spidey shout over each other.

A few more weeks and we’ll be done, he reassures himself as he scribbles notes on staff paper. Every time Pino makes a change to the arrangements of the songs, Shaun has to rewrite those pages times thirteen – one for each member of the band. He can barely keep his eyes open but after this he still has to storyboard the lighting cues.

Worse than the evening rehearsals and debauchery are the morning meetings. Every day, Pino expects his producers to join him for bloody marys as he explains the premise of the opera to a potential actor or technician or engineer. He spends an hour giving the same spiel without room for interruption or detraction. Shaun and Spidey are tired of it and don’t know why they need to be there except to make Pino’s ego feel better. To make him look like a big shot, or to intimidate through numbers.

Pino admits to his inner circle that he’s feeling overwhelmed with the show. Aside from talking a lot, scheduling pointless meetings, and singing the most solos, it’s unclear to Shaun what he actually does. He tells them that he’s hired Joel, a local director with a good reputation, to take over. He agreed to pay Joel fifteen percent of the box office – without discussing it with the other two producers first, of course. They’d agreed months ago, at the meeting where they picked nicknames, to split the returns evenly after the venue expenses and a token payment to the actors. Shaun pushed for three-hundred per performer until the others agreed. They’d argued that nobody pays musical theater actors anywhere near that. The local dinner theater only pays ten bucks a night. Shaun wanted to pay them tenfold?! But none of those figures account for rehearsal time. The way Shaun had calculated it, at forty-dollars a ticket, times three nights, times seven-hundred seats, they’d still make seventeen thousand after paying for the venue, equipment, and a reasonable wage to the band and cast. Now Pino is promising Joel twenty-five-hundred bucks and expects it to come out of their net profit.

Shaun has rehearsed the band and vocalists to perfection, so when Joel takes over, everything falls into place with ease. They begin blocking and stage rehearsals at a rented space in the near-abandoned mall that’s close to downtown. For the first time in months, Shaun starts to think the show might not be so contrived after all. The story is still a regurgitation of an old trope, but seeing it come to life makes it art.

On Thursday, Shaun and Spidey are at the loft, disassembling the set pieces that crowd the tiny art studio and spill into the bedroom, stacking them in preparation for the afternoon rebuild at the theater. Pino opens the door and lets himself in without knocking.

“It’s off,” he moans.

“What is?” Spiderman questions.

“The opera. I canceled the venue.”

“What the fuck?”

“It wasn’t ready. We can’t take it out until it’s perfect or Regan will never give us any money.”

“Wait, I thought he was going to sponsor the show if we could ‘pull it off’.” Shaun stops unscrewing plywood.

“He wants to invest in the show. He’s going to pay the up-front costs for half of the profit.”

“Half?! Are you kidding me?”

“Yeah, we need it to make it something people are going to talk about. The show I was picturing when I wrote it is bigger, more instruments, a bigger choir.”

When you stole it, more like. This shitkicker town has never seen a local production with over twenty people in the band and chorus. For fucks sake, the other theaters use canned MIDI tracks!

“Dude, sorry, I can’t,” Shaun empathized. “I’ve gone broke not being able to work these last few months. I’m going to need something in advance if you want me to move forward. Especially since its gone from a three-way split to Regan and Joel and who knows how many others.”

“What? You’re a producer! Fuck you, man. I never said you couldn’t work.”

“Fuck me? I’ve been busting my ass on this, sitting through your witless meetings, painting and buying supplies and doing Nate’s job and your fucking job while you smoke weed – wasting half of it – and blabber on about how great it’s going to be, without so much as a ‘thank you’.”

“It’s my rock opera, and I make the decisions on how it’s going to be run. That’s the way it is.”

“I don’t even care about how you want to direct it, man. Shit, I’ve been rewriting charts on the reg for all the changes you make, then unmake, then re-make again. I’m just saying I’ve made all the investment I can, so if you still want me to help with it, I need to be able to pay rent.”

“Fuck this. Fuck you, man. Piece of shit artist. Your art sucks anyway, fag. Let’s go, Chris.” Spidey follows Pino out down the stairs, leaving the front door open.

Shaun opens an email from one of his former bandmates the next day. “Have you seen this?” the message reads. There are links to Nextdoor and Craigslist posts where ‘somebody’ has anonymously posted about Shaun, claiming that he’s a thief and scam-artist. Warning local artists and musicians not to work with him.

Over the next couple of days, Shaun runs into neighborhood locals who relay that Pino is going around, telling people that Shaun sabotaged the opera. In response, Shaun sends an email to Pino telling him to cease-and-desist use of any intellectual property, including the logo and band charts. Pino goes to Nate, who has been uninvolved in the drama thus far, and adulterates the tale about how Shaun is trying to undermine his ability to bring his musical to fruition. He offers Nate a hundred bucks to rewrite the music notation and trace the logos and designs. Nate, the perennial alcoholic that he is, gladly accepts.

It’s still intellectual property theft, but not worth Shaun’s time or energy to pursue it any further. Pino never has any money, anyway. His disability payments (he’s quite abled) go straight to premium weed and whiskey cocktails. Since all of Shaun’s art was hand-done, there’s no way to date it any earlier than Nate’s facsimiles. Pino would accuse Shaun of attempting to steal his work if it went to court. Fuck that. The really shitty part is that he’s being shunned in this neighborhood that he’s only lived in for a year and a half. A neighborhood he likes. A neighborhood where he’d gone out of his way to help others. And why? Seniority. Pino had lived there since high school. The rumors he spread about this newcomer would take years for Shaun to come back from. Maybe I should just move. Again.