Punk House
By
Andy Martin
“Hot take,” Ben said, sitting up slowly on the bench seat, “we don’t ever do Orlando to Charlottesville in one night again.”
“It wakes,” Chrissy said. “Weren’t you the one that booked the show?”
“No comment,” Ben said, looking out the window. He knew that Charlottesville had some sort of a historic downtown but this wasn’t it. The road was narrow, crowded with houses and businesses, but all of them shabby, run down, modern. Take out the line of distant mountains and it could have been New Jersey.
“Make a right here,” Kevin said, his phone in his hand. “It’s up here.”
“Where?” Chrissy said, hunching in her seat a little like she was avoiding a nonexistent glare.
The street angled up, climbing again, like this whole part of Charlottesville was rising and falling on its way to the Blue Ridge like the spikes on an echocardiogram. A block off the main road and the houses immediately changed, became big, old-timey, with columns and front porches. Once they’d probably been gorgeous but now, at minimum, they all needed a fresh coat of paint, IE, they were in the right neighborhood for a house show.
“Here,” Kevin said, pointing to the right side of the street. True to form, the show house was the one most in need of a new paint job. It also had the most shit on the porch, a whole collection of end tables, la-z-boys, and a couple of couches that Ben could already smell. The only concession to the season was a plastic pumpkin sitting on the end table closest to the door.
“Ah fuck,” Chrissy said. She slid the van in along the curb, a lucky break, a spot big enough for the van right in front of the house. “Will you look at that?” she said as she cut the wheel and angled the van in.
“Shiiiiit,” Kevin said.
“You know,” she said and turned in her seat, “maybe next time try getting a street-view of these places?”
Ben flopped across his bench seat like a seal and stuck his face to the window. The sidewalk was a full four feet lower than the front lawn, a single crumbling concrete step to cut distance in half like an afterthought.
“Fuck me.”
“Yup,” Chrissy turned and said to him. “You’re carrying the 8x10.”
#
“Seriously man, no Orlando to C-Ville ever again man. You got to break that shit up,” Kevin said, a cigarette already sticking out of his beard. Ben rubbed at a nagging spot low on the left side of his back, thinking ‘well then how about you book the next tour’ but only grunted, noncommittal.
Chrissy bounded up the step, like somehow, she didn’t feel the drive at all because she was two years younger than Ben and Kevin or maybe at 5-foot nothing you could always find a space to stretch out. Ben leaned back in the door and snagged his water bottle before Kevin shut it. A reusable bottle had replaced road sodas as his hangover cure.
Road sodas were a lot more effective.
Ben left Kevin smoking by the van and followed Chrissy up the walk. God damn that’s a big step. It would take him and Kevin both to get that huge bass cabinet up it.
“Yo! What’s up motherfuckers?” Chrissy shouted, banging on the front door. Brooding lumberjack Kevin could never do that shit, and even though he looked like a math tutor, Ben probably couldn’t either. Rolling up to a stranger’s house and banging on the door and yelling was something that you could only do if you were five feet of big smile and purple hair.
The front door cracked as Ben hit the porch.
“Whattup? We’re Man Is…” Chrissy shortening their name like she always did, the kid in the doorway tall, younger than them by a decade, and stoned or had just woken up or both.
“Oh hey,” he said, looking down at Chrissy, grinning because that’s what you did.
“You ready for a SHOW?” Chrissy shouted.
“Haha yeah, yeah, come on in,” the kid grinning and laughing and holding the door open, already a little in love.
Ben followed, Chrissy peppering the kid with questions, stepping over the legs of another kid, this one with a mustache and coke bottle glasses. There was a sheet on the far wall and he was watching a movie on a projector. The kid from the door was showing Chrissy outlets--
“We play in the living room? Sick,” Chrissy said.
“Yeah, the basement floods so—”
Ben looked at the movie playing on the sheet.
Groundhog Day? Who watches Groundhog Day on Halloween?, he thought.
The living room was biggish, maybe a few feet larger than your average suburban living room but not what you’d call spacious. The only furniture was the couch Mustache sat on.
Thank God they were a three piece.
“So Jaime, we gonna blow your power? Blow our heads? Because we’re running full stacks…”
“Noooo,” door kid, Jaime, said. He shook his head. “We never have any problems. Matt here did all the wiring himself.”
Mustache nodded.
“Cool cool,” Chrissy said.
There was a pocket door off the living room leading to a room that overlooked the porch. Ben didn’t mean to look in, he was simply drifting in that direction, trying to figure out where to put his drums.
The room was dark, a small bedroom that probably used to be a walk-in closet or something--
“Shit, sorry,” Ben said, startled. There was a girl in there, sitting on the bed in the dark, messing with her laptop.
She gave him a look and he turned back to Chrissy and Jaime.
“…Orlando was cool man, it always is,” Chrissy was saying.
“Orlando? Word?”
“Yeah, it’s like those kids have a chip on their shoulder about Disney so they go fucking haaaard—”
“Yo Chris, I’m gonna start loading in,” Ben said, the look the girl had given him still stinging. He couldn’t blame her; he was a total rando peaking in her bedroom.
“Cool,” Chrissy said. “I’m gonna take a pee and smoke this bowl with Jaime and Matt here. Don’t forget my cab homie,” she said and goosed Ben.
#
“We are MAN IS THE WARMEST PLACE TO HIDE!” Chrissy howled, “and this is one called…TIED TO THIS FUCKING COUCH!” and they were off.
It wasn’t a bad crowd for Halloween in a punk house living room, maybe fifteen people that didn’t live there or play in a band. It wasn’t like there was room for many more.
Ben was just this side of fucked up, playing hard, head banging, getting strobe light slashes of the room as he drummed and howled backup for Chrissy. He was already dying in his RJ MacReady thermal shirt, but Chrissy had only made him promise to wear it for one song so he’d ditch it momentarily. Kevin was using his height to his advantage, looming over the crowd, his guitar low, stomping on pedals in his Porkchop Express Tank and trucker hat.
Chrissy looked even more deranged than usual in her mascara stubble and eye patch, but if anything, the costumes had broken the ice with the crowd because even if these kids were too cool for Halloween, who doesn’t love Kurt Russell?
Ben felt eyes on him and pivoted, smashing the crash and high hat at the same time.
The little room’s pocket door was open again and as he head-banged Ben caught glimpses of the girl inside.
Somehow, she was ignoring them, despite Chrissy’s 8 x 10 rattling the windows behind him.
“…Couch” wrapped and there were screams and howls from the handful of people in the living room. They’d fallen back a little, the amps that loud, and were crowding the room’s edges. Ben could hear the front door swinging open, could see a smoker ducking in to gawk.
They hit the first note of “Windows” together and Ben was lost in it, the notes subsumed by the wave-roar of his cymbals, hitting them so hard he was popping up off his drum throne, screaming along into the mic, almost dizzy with it-
Movement to his left.
He looked, the girl in the room had her laptop open, the light illuminating her face.
He couldn’t help himself, playing harder now, thrashing behind the kit and screaming louder, selling it for the cheap seats, which in this case was the little room behind the pocket door 10 feet away.
She didn’t so much as look up. There was take out, maybe Pad Thai, in a container next to her.
She was beautiful, that much he got in the freeze frame glimpses between head bangs and cymbal crashed and back up screams. Big, sad eyes and gorgeous lips under the kind of angular haircut he hadn’t seen in a minute.
And still, she didn’t look up or so much as acknowledge his presence.
Unreal.
Infuriating and maybe the hottest thing he’d ever seen, this bored girl in her oversized hoodie, face half in shadow, half lit, by the blue light of a lap top--
#
“Cville, we fucking love y’all!” Chrissy said and lunged forward to throw her arms around the closest kids and hug them, leaving sweat and Snake Plissken’s stubble on them.
“Fuck yeah!” Kevin said and slapped Ben hard enough to knock him off his feet a little. Ben laughed, drunk, high, and just plain dizzy from how hard he’d played, pushed back at the big grumpy asshole that he would gladly die for, and they embraced.
Kevin kept his arm around him and turned to Chrissy.
“Yo! Chrissy, we crashing?” Kevin yelled.
She shrugged. “Jaime, we good to crash?”
Jaime was talking to a girl in fishnets, but to Ben it didn’t look like a Halloween costume thing, more like an everyday grindcore uniform thing. Jaime shot them a thumbs up.
“Alright! Let’s get fucked up!” Kevin said and dragged Ben out from behind the kit towards the cooler at the other end of the room. Ben went along, blundering into the arms of a half dozen sweaty strangers, hugging, trading high fives, these tattooed college kids making him feel like Bruce Springsteen and he turned, hoping that maybe she was standing there--
The pocket door was closed.
#
Later.
The party flowed from inside the house, to the kitchen, to the van for more weed, to blowing their gas donations and merch money on pizza for everyone in the house. Ben kept an eye out for the girl from the little room for a while, but then the party rolled outside and he put her to the back of his mind.
Later still, Ben had decided to pee indoors and had wedged himself into the little bathroom off the kitchen. He’d had to vie for space with a mop bucket he was pretty sure had never been used. He was on his way back through the kitchen when a picture on the fridge stopped him.
He took a step toward it. It was a polaroid of the girl from the little room. No doubt about it. That same angular haircut, those same big sad eyes.
“What’s up?” Chrissy said from behind him.
Ben jumped.
“Hey, nothing, just—”
“Just staring at a picture of a girl on the fridge? Not weird at all bro,” Chrissy said. She took the picture off the fridge. “I get it though. She’s gorgeous but there’s something sad there. God, you’ve got a type.”
She put the photo back on the fridge and stuck it in place with a magnet.
Ben was maybe too high for this, too high to put how much her ignoring them had wound him up into words. He came up with, “She’s like…sleepy hot.”
“What?” Chrissy said.
Jesus, he thought.
“Sleepy hot, like….I don’t know, like you could spend all day in bed, just like, making out and napping with her.”
Chrissy raised an eyebrow. “I’m deleting your TUMBLR.”
“She’s in that front room, and she didn’t give a fuck about us playing. Ignored us the whole time.”
“Jesus Christ. You have got a type,” Chrissy said.
Jaime burst laughing into the kitchen.
“Yo Jaime, who is this?” Chrissy said, tapping a finger on the polaroid. “Ben here thinks she’s sleepy hot.”
His laughter caught, died in his throat.
“Shit. Damn. Like,” he shook his head, tried again, “—man, you don’t need to be saying shit like that. ‘Specially not around Matt.”
Chrissy took a step closer to Ben and slid an arm around his waist.
“That’s Mayrose. She—she died. Over dosed in the front room. That’s why we always keep it closed.”
Andy Martin is an archaeologist, musician, and writer who lives in South Philadelphia with his wife and cat. Andy’s writing is informed by his years on the road playing music and his lifelong love of the outdoors. Andy’s story “Bobby’s Kayak” will appear in “Atlas of the Deep Ones” by Obsidian Butterfly Press later this year and his historical horror stories “Stumphead” and “Adios Hombre Lobos” were published by Gravestone Press and DandT Publishing. He’s also grateful to have been published by Timberghost Press, Midnight Tales, and the Horror Tree. He can be found on Instagram as @grassapewritesandyells.
By
Andy Martin
“Hot take,” Ben said, sitting up slowly on the bench seat, “we don’t ever do Orlando to Charlottesville in one night again.”
“It wakes,” Chrissy said. “Weren’t you the one that booked the show?”
“No comment,” Ben said, looking out the window. He knew that Charlottesville had some sort of a historic downtown but this wasn’t it. The road was narrow, crowded with houses and businesses, but all of them shabby, run down, modern. Take out the line of distant mountains and it could have been New Jersey.
“Make a right here,” Kevin said, his phone in his hand. “It’s up here.”
“Where?” Chrissy said, hunching in her seat a little like she was avoiding a nonexistent glare.
The street angled up, climbing again, like this whole part of Charlottesville was rising and falling on its way to the Blue Ridge like the spikes on an echocardiogram. A block off the main road and the houses immediately changed, became big, old-timey, with columns and front porches. Once they’d probably been gorgeous but now, at minimum, they all needed a fresh coat of paint, IE, they were in the right neighborhood for a house show.
“Here,” Kevin said, pointing to the right side of the street. True to form, the show house was the one most in need of a new paint job. It also had the most shit on the porch, a whole collection of end tables, la-z-boys, and a couple of couches that Ben could already smell. The only concession to the season was a plastic pumpkin sitting on the end table closest to the door.
“Ah fuck,” Chrissy said. She slid the van in along the curb, a lucky break, a spot big enough for the van right in front of the house. “Will you look at that?” she said as she cut the wheel and angled the van in.
“Shiiiiit,” Kevin said.
“You know,” she said and turned in her seat, “maybe next time try getting a street-view of these places?”
Ben flopped across his bench seat like a seal and stuck his face to the window. The sidewalk was a full four feet lower than the front lawn, a single crumbling concrete step to cut distance in half like an afterthought.
“Fuck me.”
“Yup,” Chrissy turned and said to him. “You’re carrying the 8x10.”
#
“Seriously man, no Orlando to C-Ville ever again man. You got to break that shit up,” Kevin said, a cigarette already sticking out of his beard. Ben rubbed at a nagging spot low on the left side of his back, thinking ‘well then how about you book the next tour’ but only grunted, noncommittal.
Chrissy bounded up the step, like somehow, she didn’t feel the drive at all because she was two years younger than Ben and Kevin or maybe at 5-foot nothing you could always find a space to stretch out. Ben leaned back in the door and snagged his water bottle before Kevin shut it. A reusable bottle had replaced road sodas as his hangover cure.
Road sodas were a lot more effective.
Ben left Kevin smoking by the van and followed Chrissy up the walk. God damn that’s a big step. It would take him and Kevin both to get that huge bass cabinet up it.
“Yo! What’s up motherfuckers?” Chrissy shouted, banging on the front door. Brooding lumberjack Kevin could never do that shit, and even though he looked like a math tutor, Ben probably couldn’t either. Rolling up to a stranger’s house and banging on the door and yelling was something that you could only do if you were five feet of big smile and purple hair.
The front door cracked as Ben hit the porch.
“Whattup? We’re Man Is…” Chrissy shortening their name like she always did, the kid in the doorway tall, younger than them by a decade, and stoned or had just woken up or both.
“Oh hey,” he said, looking down at Chrissy, grinning because that’s what you did.
“You ready for a SHOW?” Chrissy shouted.
“Haha yeah, yeah, come on in,” the kid grinning and laughing and holding the door open, already a little in love.
Ben followed, Chrissy peppering the kid with questions, stepping over the legs of another kid, this one with a mustache and coke bottle glasses. There was a sheet on the far wall and he was watching a movie on a projector. The kid from the door was showing Chrissy outlets--
“We play in the living room? Sick,” Chrissy said.
“Yeah, the basement floods so—”
Ben looked at the movie playing on the sheet.
Groundhog Day? Who watches Groundhog Day on Halloween?, he thought.
The living room was biggish, maybe a few feet larger than your average suburban living room but not what you’d call spacious. The only furniture was the couch Mustache sat on.
Thank God they were a three piece.
“So Jaime, we gonna blow your power? Blow our heads? Because we’re running full stacks…”
“Noooo,” door kid, Jaime, said. He shook his head. “We never have any problems. Matt here did all the wiring himself.”
Mustache nodded.
“Cool cool,” Chrissy said.
There was a pocket door off the living room leading to a room that overlooked the porch. Ben didn’t mean to look in, he was simply drifting in that direction, trying to figure out where to put his drums.
The room was dark, a small bedroom that probably used to be a walk-in closet or something--
“Shit, sorry,” Ben said, startled. There was a girl in there, sitting on the bed in the dark, messing with her laptop.
She gave him a look and he turned back to Chrissy and Jaime.
“…Orlando was cool man, it always is,” Chrissy was saying.
“Orlando? Word?”
“Yeah, it’s like those kids have a chip on their shoulder about Disney so they go fucking haaaard—”
“Yo Chris, I’m gonna start loading in,” Ben said, the look the girl had given him still stinging. He couldn’t blame her; he was a total rando peaking in her bedroom.
“Cool,” Chrissy said. “I’m gonna take a pee and smoke this bowl with Jaime and Matt here. Don’t forget my cab homie,” she said and goosed Ben.
#
“We are MAN IS THE WARMEST PLACE TO HIDE!” Chrissy howled, “and this is one called…TIED TO THIS FUCKING COUCH!” and they were off.
It wasn’t a bad crowd for Halloween in a punk house living room, maybe fifteen people that didn’t live there or play in a band. It wasn’t like there was room for many more.
Ben was just this side of fucked up, playing hard, head banging, getting strobe light slashes of the room as he drummed and howled backup for Chrissy. He was already dying in his RJ MacReady thermal shirt, but Chrissy had only made him promise to wear it for one song so he’d ditch it momentarily. Kevin was using his height to his advantage, looming over the crowd, his guitar low, stomping on pedals in his Porkchop Express Tank and trucker hat.
Chrissy looked even more deranged than usual in her mascara stubble and eye patch, but if anything, the costumes had broken the ice with the crowd because even if these kids were too cool for Halloween, who doesn’t love Kurt Russell?
Ben felt eyes on him and pivoted, smashing the crash and high hat at the same time.
The little room’s pocket door was open again and as he head-banged Ben caught glimpses of the girl inside.
Somehow, she was ignoring them, despite Chrissy’s 8 x 10 rattling the windows behind him.
“…Couch” wrapped and there were screams and howls from the handful of people in the living room. They’d fallen back a little, the amps that loud, and were crowding the room’s edges. Ben could hear the front door swinging open, could see a smoker ducking in to gawk.
They hit the first note of “Windows” together and Ben was lost in it, the notes subsumed by the wave-roar of his cymbals, hitting them so hard he was popping up off his drum throne, screaming along into the mic, almost dizzy with it-
Movement to his left.
He looked, the girl in the room had her laptop open, the light illuminating her face.
He couldn’t help himself, playing harder now, thrashing behind the kit and screaming louder, selling it for the cheap seats, which in this case was the little room behind the pocket door 10 feet away.
She didn’t so much as look up. There was take out, maybe Pad Thai, in a container next to her.
She was beautiful, that much he got in the freeze frame glimpses between head bangs and cymbal crashed and back up screams. Big, sad eyes and gorgeous lips under the kind of angular haircut he hadn’t seen in a minute.
And still, she didn’t look up or so much as acknowledge his presence.
Unreal.
Infuriating and maybe the hottest thing he’d ever seen, this bored girl in her oversized hoodie, face half in shadow, half lit, by the blue light of a lap top--
#
“Cville, we fucking love y’all!” Chrissy said and lunged forward to throw her arms around the closest kids and hug them, leaving sweat and Snake Plissken’s stubble on them.
“Fuck yeah!” Kevin said and slapped Ben hard enough to knock him off his feet a little. Ben laughed, drunk, high, and just plain dizzy from how hard he’d played, pushed back at the big grumpy asshole that he would gladly die for, and they embraced.
Kevin kept his arm around him and turned to Chrissy.
“Yo! Chrissy, we crashing?” Kevin yelled.
She shrugged. “Jaime, we good to crash?”
Jaime was talking to a girl in fishnets, but to Ben it didn’t look like a Halloween costume thing, more like an everyday grindcore uniform thing. Jaime shot them a thumbs up.
“Alright! Let’s get fucked up!” Kevin said and dragged Ben out from behind the kit towards the cooler at the other end of the room. Ben went along, blundering into the arms of a half dozen sweaty strangers, hugging, trading high fives, these tattooed college kids making him feel like Bruce Springsteen and he turned, hoping that maybe she was standing there--
The pocket door was closed.
#
Later.
The party flowed from inside the house, to the kitchen, to the van for more weed, to blowing their gas donations and merch money on pizza for everyone in the house. Ben kept an eye out for the girl from the little room for a while, but then the party rolled outside and he put her to the back of his mind.
Later still, Ben had decided to pee indoors and had wedged himself into the little bathroom off the kitchen. He’d had to vie for space with a mop bucket he was pretty sure had never been used. He was on his way back through the kitchen when a picture on the fridge stopped him.
He took a step toward it. It was a polaroid of the girl from the little room. No doubt about it. That same angular haircut, those same big sad eyes.
“What’s up?” Chrissy said from behind him.
Ben jumped.
“Hey, nothing, just—”
“Just staring at a picture of a girl on the fridge? Not weird at all bro,” Chrissy said. She took the picture off the fridge. “I get it though. She’s gorgeous but there’s something sad there. God, you’ve got a type.”
She put the photo back on the fridge and stuck it in place with a magnet.
Ben was maybe too high for this, too high to put how much her ignoring them had wound him up into words. He came up with, “She’s like…sleepy hot.”
“What?” Chrissy said.
Jesus, he thought.
“Sleepy hot, like….I don’t know, like you could spend all day in bed, just like, making out and napping with her.”
Chrissy raised an eyebrow. “I’m deleting your TUMBLR.”
“She’s in that front room, and she didn’t give a fuck about us playing. Ignored us the whole time.”
“Jesus Christ. You have got a type,” Chrissy said.
Jaime burst laughing into the kitchen.
“Yo Jaime, who is this?” Chrissy said, tapping a finger on the polaroid. “Ben here thinks she’s sleepy hot.”
His laughter caught, died in his throat.
“Shit. Damn. Like,” he shook his head, tried again, “—man, you don’t need to be saying shit like that. ‘Specially not around Matt.”
Chrissy took a step closer to Ben and slid an arm around his waist.
“That’s Mayrose. She—she died. Over dosed in the front room. That’s why we always keep it closed.”
Andy Martin is an archaeologist, musician, and writer who lives in South Philadelphia with his wife and cat. Andy’s writing is informed by his years on the road playing music and his lifelong love of the outdoors. Andy’s story “Bobby’s Kayak” will appear in “Atlas of the Deep Ones” by Obsidian Butterfly Press later this year and his historical horror stories “Stumphead” and “Adios Hombre Lobos” were published by Gravestone Press and DandT Publishing. He’s also grateful to have been published by Timberghost Press, Midnight Tales, and the Horror Tree. He can be found on Instagram as @grassapewritesandyells.
