Old Friends, New Strings

Judy had planned this for six weeks. Six whole weeks of careful, patient, vindictive scheming, and she was proud of every minute of it!

The plan was simple. Take the broken floor tom, the one with the cracked shell that she'd bought off a pawn shop in Ventura specifically for this purpose, and swap it with Kenji's good one right before the show. Then, halfway through the set, the thing would collapse with a magnificent clatter, right in the middle of a drum fill, in front of sixty paying customers and at least one local music blogger. Kenji's precious comeback would go up in smoke, and Judy would be in the back, sipping her own pinot, watching it happen.

Was it mature? Absolutely not. Was it deserved? Well, she thought so.

Here was the history, briefly, because she'd earned a brief. Judy had been the bassist in a band called The Wet Cement back in the mid eighties. Back then she had been a man named Jude, skinny and angry and dating the drummer, Kenji, who was exactly as awful as that sounds. She'd come out at twenty-eight, left the band, left Kenji, and built an entirely new life. Now she was sixty-two, a winemaker with a small vineyard and a very good cabernet, single by choice for the last five years, and mostly content.

Mostly. Except for the part where Kenji had been giving interviews about the reunion, calling himself "the heart and backbone" of The Wet Cement. The heart and backbone! Judy had written half the songs! And the less said about what he'd been like as a boyfriend, the better, though she would say that he once told a reporter she'd "left the band to go find herself" in a tone that made her teeth ache for a week.

So. Broken floor tom. Revenge. Simple.

Except nothing, nothing, ever stayed simple for long, as Judy was about to find out.

The venue was called The Bottle and Amp, up in the hills above Santa Barbara, and it was gorgeous in a way that made Judy a little sad. It used to be a recording studio in the seventies, and somebody had kept the exposed brick walls and hung a disco ball that hadn't spun since Carter. Sixty worn velvet chairs. A little bar. A cherry-red mixing board that looked older than she was.

And sitting behind that mixing board, headphones around her neck, gray hair in a short curly mop, was Ayla.

"Oh no," Judy said, out loud, in the middle of the lobby, like a fool.

Judy hadn't seen Ayla in over three decades, since the last Wet Cement session. Ayla had also been her first real love, back when they were both twenty-two and everything was terrifying and wonderful, and the whole thing had ended gently because that's the kind of person Ayla was. Gentle endings. Judy got a warm, nostalgic feeling just standing there, which was inconvenient, because warm feelings were terrible for revenge. Revenge preferred a cold heart.

"Tickets?" a guy at the door asked, and Judy handed over cash and tried to look like an ordinary fan of an ordinary band and not a woman on a mission.

She drifted toward the soundboard during the opener's soundcheck, telling herself she was just being friendly. Which was technically true! She was going to be friendly AND ruin a drum kit. Multitasking!

Ayla looked up from the board, squinted, and her whole face opened up like a window.

"Oh my god. Jude? Wait, sorry, Judy, I read the thing in the paper about the vineyard, I've been meaning to..." She stood up so fast she knocked her headphones off. "You came!"

"Wouldn't miss it," Judy said, which was the most technically-true sentence of her life.

"Look at you!" Ayla said, coming around the board with her arms out. They hugged, and it lasted a beat longer than a casual hug, and Judy felt that warm feeling again, damn it. "Sixty-two and you look fantastic. What are you drinking these days, besides your own product?"

"Whatever's free," Judy said. "Vintners are cheap."

Ayla laughed, the same laugh, and Judy's plan wobbled dangerously for a second. Then she remembered the "heart and backbone" quote and steadied herself.

"Are you doing the show?" Judy asked.

"Doing the whole thing, the lights, the sound, the works," Ayla said, patting the board. "Kenji called me three months ago. He remembered me, can you believe it? He was very charming. People can be charming when they want something."

"They can," Judy agreed solemnly.

"So how do you know the band?" Ayla asked, casual, and Judy nearly swallowed her own tongue.

"I'm... old friends," she managed.

"Old friends! With Kenji?" Ayla made a face. "Braver woman than me."

"You have no idea," Judy said.

The opener finished and the room started filling, and Judy saw her window. Backstage access was a door by the green room, guarded by nobody, because apparently The Bottle and Amp believed in the honor system, which suited her fine.

The green room was tiny and crammed with gear, just as rumored. Patchouli and spilled lager in the air, dusty amp cases everywhere. She found Kenji's kit set up in the corner, his good floor tom sitting there smugly, and the broken one waiting in the trunk of her car like a bomb.

"Kenji's in the bathroom, he's doing his warm-ups, or his breathing, or whatever it is he does," said a younger guy with a guitar. Thad, presumably, the guitarist and manager, fortyish, exhausted-looking, the man keeping the whole circus upright.

"Wonderful," Judy said, and got to work.

The swap took her three minutes. The broken tom went on Kenji's rig, the good one went into her gig bag, and she had just stood up, sweating, triumphant, when the door opened.

It was Ayla.

Ayla looked at Judy. Judy looked at Ayla. The broken tom sat on the rig, and the gig bag sat by the door, and there was really only one way any reasonable person could read this scene.

"Oh, thank GOD," Ayla said.

"...What?"

"You're replacing the floor tom. I flagged it in soundcheck, that shell's cracked right through, it would've gone down mid-show." Ayla came over and smacked the broken drum affectionately. "I told Thad, I said, Thad, that tom is a lawsuit waiting to happen, and he said, we'll deal with it, and nobody dealt with it. And here you are, fixing it. What a friend."

"Well," Judy said, "yes. That is exactly what I am doing. Fixing."

"You're a lifesaver," Ayla said, already hauling the broken tom off the rig. "I'll put this in the storage closet, out of everyone's way. Honestly, Kenji should be paying you."

"That would be ironic," Judy said faintly.

Ayla carried the broken drum out the door, cheerfully humming, and Judy stood there holding a gig bag containing a perfectly good floor tom, having accidentally done the venue a favor. She had walked in as a saboteur and left, functionally, as crew. Thirty-five years and the woman could still ruin her whole evening without trying!

But. But! The floor tom was only plan one. There was a plan two, and plan two was sitting in her purse in a small brown bottle, and plan two could not be mistaken for helpfulness by anyone.

Plan two was laxative. A healthy dose of it, in Kenji's water bottle, timed to hit roughly during the third song. He would spend his comeback show sprinting to the bathroom instead of playing his precious fills, and his reputation would suffer in a far more personal and memorable way.

Judy waited until Kenji was mid-soundcheck, sweating over his kit, water bottle sitting on his amp like a gift from the universe. She strolled over, all smiles, introduced herself to Thad as "a friend of the band," and while Thad was distracted by an actual problem, a cable, thank heavens for cables, she unscrewed the bottle and poured in the powder.

It dissolved instantly. Perfect. Judy screwed the cap back on, replaced the bottle exactly where she'd found it, and walked away whistling.

She made it eight steps.

"Hey, hold on. Nobody leaves a drink on an amp."

Judy turned. Ayla had come back from the storage closet, spotted Kenji's water bottle sitting on the amp, and picked it up.

"Ayla," Judy said, very carefully, "that's Kenji's."

"Exactly. He's up there drumming with a dry throat, that's how singers ruin their voices, and drummers too." Ayla was already heading for the sink backstage, bottle in hand. "That water has been sitting under the stage lights for an hour, it's practically soup. I'll fill it up fresh, cold water, he'll be thrilled."

"There was something in it," Judy said. "In the water. Before."

"Something in the water?" Ayla stopped, frowning. "You mean backwash? Ew. Well, I'll dump it and give it a rinse."

"No, I mean, someone... had put..." Judy trailed off. What was she going to say? Sorry, I poisoned your headliner's water, please continue? "A vitamin tablet. A friend gave him one. Dissolved. It's fine."

"A vitamin. Well, he can have his vitamins later, hydration first," Ayla declared, rinsing the bottle under the tap with the thoroughness of a woman who had spent forty years around musicians and their disgusting habits. She filled it, capped it, and set it on a shelf behind the soundboard, safely out of Judy's reach. "There. Fresh as a daisy. He can have it at the break."

Judy stood in the backstage hallway, hands empty, both plans dismantled in under an hour by the same cheerful woman, and realized she was, against every rational instinct, starting to laugh.

"You okay?" Ayla asked, giving her an odd look.

"Fine," Judy said. "Just, ha, just thinking about the old days."

"Were they good?"

"Terrible," Judy said honestly. "Absolutely terrible."

"Mine too," Ayla said, and smiled at her, and it was that same smile from when they were twenty-two, and Judy felt the warm feeling come back and this time it did not go away.

Somewhere behind them, Kenji hit a drum fill. It sounded, Judy noted grimly, excellent.

This was going to require a whole new plan.

Plan three, Judy decided, would have to be smarter. Plan three would have to be subtle. Plan three would be the setlist.

She had printed it herself, at home, on the same cream paper the venue used, because of course she still remembered The Wet Cement's handwriting standards, she had written half their songs. The real setlist, taped to Kenji's stage monitor where he could glance at it, had the band closing with "Mudslide," their big dumb crowd-pleaser. Judy's version closed with "Slow Drain," a song so structurally bizarre that Kenji had once thrown a cymbal at a roadie over it. It was in 7/8. Kenji hated 7/8 the way some men hated their fathers.

Judy waited for Ayla to be absorbed in the cherry-red mixing board, headphones on, frowning at something glorious and technical, and peeled the real setlist off the monitor. She taped hers down with a little tape she had brought, in her purse, next to the laxative. A saboteur travels prepared!

"There," she whispered. "Enjoy 7/8, you blowhard."

The house lights went down. Sixty people in sixty velvet chairs leaned in. Kenji counted off the first song, and it was, Judy had to admit through gritted teeth, tight. Thad's guitar was fat and warm. The singer, some young woman with a voice like a wine glass, was excellent, and Judy resented her on principle.

Then the last song of the first set came around. Judy crossed her arms and waited for the train wreck.

Kenji glanced at the monitor. He counted. And he counted in 4/4.

"Mudslide," Judy said under her breath. "He's playing Mudslide."

He was playing Mudslide, and he was playing it beautifully, and the crowd was clapping along, and somewhere Judy heard Ayla give a happy little grunt at the board. The song ended. The crowd stood up. There was even, heaven help them all, a whoop for more.

Judy retrieved her fake setlist from the monitor later, defeated, and examined the back of the real one. There, in Ayla's looping handwriting, was a note: *Kenji asked for setlist copy at 6:15, printed fresh, old one had coffee on it. Presets all locked, don't touch!*

Locked. Ayla had locked the presets. Ayla had made a fresh setlist. Ayla had, apparently, anticipated problems before Judy could invent them.

Was the woman a sound engineer or a psychic?

Judy pocketed her fake setlist and went to find a drink.

The break came at nine. The little bar did brisk business, and Judy wedged herself at the end of it with a glass of the house red, which tasted like a rumor of wine. She was composing a bitter review of it when she heard the green room door swing open down the hall, and she made a decision she would later describe as tactical and everyone else would describe as walking toward someone you like.

The green room was the size of a storage closet that had storage opinions. Gear everywhere, a sagging couch, a mirror with a lightbulb out. Ayla was in there alone, eating a sandwich, and when she saw Judy she put the sandwich down and opened her arms.

"Come HERE," Ayla said.

"Ayla, I actually wanted to talk to you about something, there's something I've been..."