My Punk Festival Mistake

I got to Puncture Fest on Saturday afternoon, two hours late, and I was already in a bad mood about it. The whole reason I'd bought the three-day pass, forty-two years old and still buying festival passes, was the Lyric-Line Scavenger Hunt. It's this trivia game they run every year. You collect clues, you write down lyric lines, you turn in a sheet Sunday night. Last year I got third. Third. I'd been planning my comeback since October.

Then my car decided it needed a new serpentine belt at eight in the morning, and by the time I parked in the dust field and walked in, the first clue drop was long gone. The guy at the info tent told me, with real sympathy, that the second drop wasn't until six.

"So you missed one of four," he said. "You could still theoretically place."

"Theoretically," I said. "Great word."

I had my clipboard with me. Yes, I brought a clipboard to a punk festival. I'm a copy editor at the regional paper, I'm not going to apologize for being organized, and my friends Travis and Darcy had already started giving me grief about it before we even got through the gate.

"You look like a building inspector," Darcy said.

"I look like someone who's going to win," I said.

Around five, I was killing time near the second stage when I saw her. She had a laminated badge on a lanyard around her neck, and a wristband that looked like the official kind, the good ones, not the paper ones they give at the gate. She was standing by the barrier with a bass slung low on her hip, tuning it, and she had that easy confidence people get when they've done a thing a thousand times.

I walked straight up. I don't hedge when I think I'm on the clock.

"Excuse me," I said. "Hi. I'm doing the scavenger hunt. I missed the first drop. Can you give me the second clue early? I know the schedule says six, but I've been here since two and I'd really rather not stand around."

She looked at me. Then she looked at my clipboard. Then back at me, and something happened in her face that I didn't understand at the time, this little quick grin as if a door were opening.

"Second clue, huh," she said.

"That's the one."

"You missed the first?"

"Car trouble," I said. "Serpentine belt. I'm not proud of it."

"Well," she said, and she plucked a string and leaned toward me like she was sharing something confidential. "The second clue. Okay. It goes, 'I tore my shirt in the mosh pit of my own regret, and the bouncer of fate said no re-entry.' Six words after the comma."

I wrote it down. I aim to be straightforward here, which is a thing I apparently say, my friends tell me, way too much. I wrote it down fast, in my neat little print, and I underlined "bouncer of fate" because it seemed like a band name I should remember.

"Where's it from?" I asked.

"That's part of the clue," she said. "Figure it out."

"Is this the band that played the noon slot? I missed that too."

"You missed a lot," she said. "Shame. Great set. Bassist was incredible."

She hit one last chord, and the low note went right through my chest. I thanked her twice, maybe three times, and walked off already composing my answer sheet. It wasn't until I was about fifty feet away that I realized I'd never gotten her name, and I turned around to ask, and she was gone, and I figured staffers wander.

Travis and Darcy found me at the beer tent an hour later, and I was still riding the high of being ahead of schedule on a clue nobody else had.

"You will not believe what I got," I said, and read it to them off my clipboard.

Darcy listened with her eyebrows climbing the whole way.

"Elliott," she said. "Read me the band lineup in the program."

"Why?"

"Just do it."

I read down the list. Second stage, eight o'clock slot: Doghouse Anthem, with Jia Caldwell on bass and vocals. Jacqui Everett on guitar. Dillon Nguyen on drums.

"That's her," I said. "The badge lady. That's her name on the program, that's, oh no."

"Oh yes," Darcy said. "You asked a musician for a clue and she gave you one."

"She was wearing a laminated badge."

"They all wear laminated badges, you absolute nerd. That's their laminate. For backstage."

I sat there with my beer getting warm and my clipboard getting heavy. Somewhere behind the second stage, I could hear a sound check starting, and a bass line I recognized from about forty minutes of my own humiliation.

"I'm going over there," I said.

"That's a terrible idea," Travis said, delighted.

"I'm going over there."

I found her behind the barrier, plugging cables into an amp with her boots off. She saw me coming from a good distance, and I watched the grin come back before I'd even said a word.

"Back for the third clue?" she called.

"You're not staff," I said.

"Sharp copy editor over here," she said to nobody, to the sky, to a roadie who laughed.

"You let me write down a fake clue. You made that up on the spot. 'Bouncer of fate.' Who says that?"

"Grown men with clipboards say yes to it real fast, turns out," she said. She hopped down off the stage riser and came over, and up close she was shorter than I'd thought, with a tattoo of a swallow on one forearm and her badge, I now noticed, had her own face on it. "Jia. Band's Doghouse Anthem. We play at eight. You should come, you'd hate it."

"Elliott," I said. "I don't hate punk. I'm competitive, not a monster."

"Sure."

"I came in third last year. Third. This was supposed to be my year and now I've got a clue that doesn't exist written down in permanent ink."

"That's so sad," she said, in a voice that made it clear it was the funniest thing she'd heard all week. "What are you going to do, edit my fake lyrics? Red pen me?"

"I'll tell you what I'm going to do," I said, and here is where I should have apologized, probably, and walked away, and instead I doubled down, because that's just how I'm built, God help me. "That clue you gave me was better than anything the real hunt would've come up with. Obsolete. Mine's the superior clue now. I'm turning it in Sunday and when they disqualify me I'm going to tell them a bassist sabotaged me, and it's going to be your fault, and I hope you feel terrible."

She laughed. Not a polite laugh, a real one, head back, hand on my shoulder to steady herself, which I felt for a good ten minutes afterward, not that I'd admit that to her face.

"Okay, Elliott," she said. "New plan. Come to our set at eight. If you can name the song I quote mid-set, I'll give you a real clue. A real one. I'll even sign it so it's official."

"And if I can't name it?"

"Then you buy the band drinks and admit on your clipboard, in writing, that you got played."

"Deal," I said, and shook her hand like it was a contract, because I'm me.

Her guitar player drifted over then, a tall relaxed woman with her amp cable over her shoulder. "Who's this?" she asked.

"The clipboard," Jia said. "He's hanging with us tonight."

I did not know yet how that was going to turn out. I did not know about Jacqui's raised eyebrow, or Dillon the drummer wandering over to see what was funny, or any of it. I just stood there holding my clipboard, feeling like I'd finally won something, at a festival where I'd lost everything, and eight o'clock could not come fast enough.

The eight o'clock set was a revelation, and I say that like someone who owns a laminated card explaining what a semicolon does. Doghouse Anthem was loud and sloppy in the good way, and Jia played the bass like she was arguing with it and winning. Twenty minutes in, mid-song, she leaned into the mic and sang a line that was definitely not theirs, and I felt my whole chest light up, because I knew it. Of course I knew it. I'd spent months with lyric sheets, ever since October.

I didn't shout it during the song, because I'm not an animal. I waited until they finished, and then I pushed through the crowd to the side of the stage, and she saw me coming and grinned before I'd opened my mouth.

"Buzz Lightyear," she said into the mic, right into the mic, so the whole crowd heard it, "found his clue."

"Candle," I said, when she came over. "It's Candle. You quoted Candle mid-set and I caught it and I want my clue."

Jacqui, wiping down her guitar, said, "Oh, he actually got it!"

"Boo," said Dillon, the drummer, who seems to boo things professionally.

"Beer tent," Jia said. "You get your clue, but you have to earn it first."

I should note here that everyone I'm about to describe to you is a grown adult, all of us north of thirty, nobody confused about anything. I was forty-two, she was thirty-nine, and the beer tent was full and loud and smelled like spilled beer and sunscreen, which I'd been smelling all day anyway.

* * *

The trivia duel, as she staged it, worked like this. She'd name a