Shoot the Set

I'd known Elliot for about four months, and only in the way you know somebody through friends of friends, meaning we'd nodded at each other at three shows and he'd once bought me a beer when my card got declined, and then last week at practice he'd said hey, you're the camera guy, right, I'm going to my folks' place for ten days, can you water my plant and grab my mail, and I said sure before he even finished asking because a drummer with a studio session coming up is exactly the kind of contact a freelance photographer with six dollars in his checking account wants to keep warm.

So there I was, Tuesday evening, letting myself into a one-bedroom above a dead laundromat with a copy of his key on a smiley-face keychain that I dearly hoped was not actually his, and the first thing I did was step on a guitar pedal. Not near the door, mind you. The pedal was somehow four feet inside the apartment in the middle of the walkway, and I put my full weight on its corner and went sideways into a stack of unopened bills on a milk crate, and the bills went everywhere and one of them was pink, which I would learn later was a final notice for the power, and I thought, great, I've been a house-sitter for eleven seconds and I've already broken something and found out the guy's electric is about to get cut.

The apartment smelled like takeout containers and drum heads. There was a kit half-assembled in the living room, cymbals leaning against the wall like dirty plates, and cables coiled and uncoiled everywhere, and the egg-crate foam in the doorway of the back room made it look like the whole place had been attacked by an egg truck. The plant was a pothos and it was fine, honestly, maybe the only thing in the apartment that was fine, and I gave it some water and then stood there with my camera bag wondering where in this disaster I could set up without anything falling on two thousand dollars of glass.

The kitchen counter had a clear spot, I guess, if you didn't mind shoving aside an ashtray and a copy of some local zine from 2019. I was clearing the zine when the mail I'd gathered from the box, which I'd just been holding in a stack, slid out of my arms again, and that's when I saw a Polaroid face down, next to the pizza box, and I almost didn't flip it. But I'm a photographer, I flip things, that's the job.

It was Elliot, against a brick wall, kissing a guy, and not a peck either, the kind of kiss where the other guy was half turned, laughing at something off camera, and Elliot holding on like the picture might end if he let go. The other guy had dark hair and one forearm in frame with a swallow tattooed on it, and there's exactly one guy in this town with a swallow on that forearm, he's on half the records that come out of here and he's got his arms out in every promo shot. Reid Calloway. And I stood in Elliot's kitchen holding a photo that said the loudest drummer I knew had a secret boyfriend, and the boyfriend was the most visible session player in the city, and I felt like I'd picked up a live wire.

I put it down. Then I picked it up again. That's honest, right? I put it down like a decent person and then I picked it back up because, and this is the part nobody says out loud, it was a good photo. Whoever shot it had the light coming from the side and the grain was doing that thing you can't fake, and Elliot's face in it was softer than I'd ever seen it at a show, and I have not taken a shot that good in months, maybe longer, and I'm not made of stone.

I was still holding it, which I admit looks bad, when somebody knocked. Three knocks, fast, and then a pause, and then two more, like the person was arguing with himself about whether to keep knocking.

"Hold on," I said, though nobody could hear me, and I stuffed the photo in my back pocket like an idiot, the one place guaranteed to lose it, and went to the door.

Reid was standing in the hallway with his hands in his jacket pockets and his chin down, and up close he was taller than he looked on stage, and his hair was doing that thing where it looks like he just woke up but costs money. "Hey," he said. "You're the house-sitter."

"Murray," I said. "Yeah."

"Elliot asked me to grab a jacket. Leather one, on the hook by the, uh." He looked past me into the apartment, and his eyes went where mine had gone twenty minutes ago, the milk crate, the floor, the kitchen. "By the door somewhere."

"I haven't seen a jacket," I said, which was true, I hadn't been looking for a jacket, I'd been looking for a clear surface, and this apartment had maybe one clear surface and it was the toilet tank.

He didn't move. "Cool. Mind if I look? It's the brown one."

"Go ahead, man, it's not my apartment."

He went in and he did not look like a man looking for a jacket. He looked like a man doing a sweep, fast and low, checking the milk crate and under the zine and the couch cushions, and I watched him from the doorway of the kitchen and felt my back pocket like it was on fire. He came up empty and turned around slowly.

"He was here last week, right? Thursday." Reid said it like a statement but his voice went up at the end.

"I got here Tuesday. Mail was still in the box."

"Mail," he said. "The box. Huh." He touched the back of his neck and looked at me straight on for the first time, and I want to say his eyes did something friendly but they did the opposite, they did an assessment, like I was a piece of gear he was deciding whether to plug in. "Okay, look, Murray. Elliot's a private guy. Whatever you found, and you found something, everybody finds something, I'd like to buy it off you."

"I didn't find anything."

"Fifty bucks."

"For what? There's no for. There's nothing to buy."

He reached into his pocket and actually pulled out a folded fifty, like he'd walked over here with it already, which told me Elliot had called him in a panic at some point and Reid had stopped at an ATM on the way, and something about that made me like the guy in spite of everything. "The photo," he said. "The Polaroid. It fell in with the mail, I know it did, because he said he'd left it in the kitchen and the kitchen was clean when I got here except for your mail pile, which you have evidently touched, because it's in a different stack than it was yesterday when I peeked in the window. Don't ask why I peeked in the window. Fifty bucks."

And here's where I should have taken the money, and any reasonable person takes the money, and I said, "No!"

"No?"

"No. It's not even, okay, it's not about the money, it's about the