The Need for Practice Space

After being a closeted nobody in high school, my college rock band was my savior. But would a surprise romance with our newest member make everything better or worse?

Photo by Victor Barrios on Unsplash

We carried the equipment down precarious sets of stairs, unloading guitars and amps onto area rugs stretched over the unfinished floor. Alex, RJ, and I were students moonlighting as rock stars, looking to make it big like Vampire Weekend so we could drop out of college. We just claimed our first official practice space. Now all we needed was a drummer.

Alex, our guitarist, who I trusted implicitly due to how creatively he could improvise along with the simple chord progressions I’d write, said he’d invited his weed dealer to audition for drummer, but it didn’t look like anyone was showing up. So we began practicing. I cut us off after we made it to the chorus of the first run-through of a new song. I was about to offer my feedback when I heard, from the staircase, my name, spoken as a question.

Niko, an acquaintance from high school, was standing at the foot of the basement stairs. I’d forgotten he’d gone to my university. A small cohort of us had followed each other from high school to college, but I’d been trying to make a clean break. Last time he and I hung out, we were middle-schoolers playing Magic: the Gathering on a suburban living room floor. Here he was: same freckles, pitch black hair, mischievous smile, and oversized band tee worn over a thermal long-sleeved shirt. Except now—or, who knows, maybe always?—he dealt drugs.

I would have never guessed that this was the guy Alex was talking about when he said his weed dealer played drums. Last time I saw Niko play drums, he had timpani strapped to his chest in the marching band. He’d since rebranded. I had too. And here we were, staring at each other’s naked new identities.

---

Brenden back in his college days.

My new identity came into focus when I’d met Alex at college orientation about a month earlier.

Our dorm was in a high rise near downtown Pittsburgh. Orientation was just the guys on our floor, hosted by the RA. During introductions, I was painfully aware of how different I looked from my peers. I had long dark hair streaming down my back, wore a cardigan and a striped shirt, freshly purchased from the clearance section of the Urban Outfitters on the other side of the river. Everyone else was wearing some kind of sports swag: Steelers jerseys, Penguins hats, the occasional Pitt or Penn State hoodie.

When it was my turn to introduce myself, I defaulted to sharing something I hoped at least some people could relate to: “I’m a songwriter.”

I wrote songs and performed them at open mics throughout high school, sometimes mixing in covers of Neutral Milk Hotel or Elliott Smith. It wasn’t very gay of me; I knew that. I was haunted by the line from “Shakespeare’s Sister” by The Smiths:

“I thought that if you had an acoustic guitar then it meant that you were a protest singer. Oh I can smile about it now but at the time it was terrible.”

I’d always interpreted “protest singer” as a euphemism for heterosexual: an idea that Morrissey seemed to wince at. My lone self standing around with an acoustic guitar playing my little songs always felt embarrassing—a lauded heterosexual pastime à la “anyways, here’s Wonderwall.” Even though I was out, I’d felt so far from other gay people.

Yet, finally, in this case, my embarrassing habit was useful, since everyone else on my floor seemed to be straight. Maybe someone would want to talk to me about music.

When I mentioned writing songs, I saw Alex—in his Cleveland Browns hoodie, apparently a controversial choice in Pittsburgh—quickly turn his head to me. I’d only seen him once before. He’d been playing beer pong the previous night through an open door at the end of the hallway, which I quickly walked past to get to the bathroom.

After introductions, the guys gathered and headed to the lounge to watch a football game, but he ignored them and made a beeline to me.

“Hey Brenden. I’m Alex. You tryin’ a start a band?”

I stared blankly. My dad immediately came to mind. When I first came out to him, he started buying me instruments. I wasn’t sure why. I was perfectly happy with the cheap second hand guitar my friend gifted to me when she upgraded. And yet, suddenly, when I turned 17, I had an electric guitar. Christmas that year, a banjo. For my 18th birthday, a mandolin. That Christmas, an acoustic electric. I accepted them all with excited confusion. Was he trying to amplify my gay voice? Or was his hope that, David Bowie-like, my identity as a musician would eclipse my queerness? Maybe he was just out of gift ideas.

Either way, I’d learned to associate music with hiding.

I accepted Alex’s invitation to join him and form a band.

After Alex’s roommate, Scott, returned from watching the football game, the three of us passed around my laptop, taking turns playing our favorite songs on iTunes. They were devoted Death Cab for Cutie fans. I’d just played “The Moon” by The Microphones—proud of consistently sharing songs they’d never heard of—when Scott asked, “You’re gay, right?”

I looked back and forth between the two straight guys. I became immediately aware of my proximity to the door; I’d have to walk around Alex to get out, but he seemed distracted. I could probably make it if I left right away.

“It’s okay man — we’re Democrats. I know we’re from the country, but we’re not like that,” Scott said, sensing my discomfort. I remained quiet.

“Fuck yeah brother. Besides, more girls for us,” Alex said.

They laughed. Then I laughed.

Later that night, four girls from two floors up came down to play drinking games and listen to music. RJ, the most outgoing of the four, wore a curly blonde bob and proudly announced that she played bass. Instant sparks erupted between her and Alex. While Alex and Scott paired up with RJ and another girl, I was on my own entertaining the remaining guests. I somehow began lecturing to them about the importance of Björk, playing selections of her best while they tried to wrestle my laptop off of me so they could play Guster.

Over the next few weeks, Alex, Scott and I settled into a rhythm. After sessions teaching Alex how to play the songs I wrote, we’d party like normal college students. He and Scott drank and I waxed profoundly, having become the group’s songwriter and ambassador of strange music. A sexless sage. This role fit uncomfortably, like an oversized robe billowing in the wind; I awkwardly held it onto myself. My gayness was an open secret that stayed just below the surface.

Down the road at University of Pittsburgh, many of my high school friends were immersed in LGBT student life. I never accepted their invitations to parties. I didn’t attend the sparsely populated gay-straight alliance meetings at my own university. I had nestled into this predominantly straight social world; not a full relapse back into the closet, yet far from the out and proud existence I’d heard college would be.

Eventually, Alex asked if RJ, who played the bass, could join our band, and I quickly assented. Like The Talking Heads and Sonic Youth, we now had a cool female bassist.

RJ began to sit with me while I wrote music to help develop and test my ideas. One day, I was sharing a new concept for a song while she and I sat on a plushy, rainbow Christmas light-dappled rug in her dorm room. I sung a verse that gave her pause:

“Statuesque, you are no less than Greek/ashamed to feel the love of which I speak.”

She looked at me with a forced blankness, hiding a sly smile. “Wait…Brenden, really?” was all she said. I stopped playing. I stared back at her, horrified.

The lyrics described my feelings of shame around having crushes on straight guys. Her interruption turned my dormant, choking feelings of shame into active panic. Is she judging me for liking guys I shouldn’t? She knows I’m gay—why is this such a shocker for her? I quickly scrapped the song.

I’ve since pieced together that RJ was thinking that “Greek” referred to Greek life. She’d assumed I had developed a crush on a frat bro. I still try to picture which popped-collar salmon-shorted dude she imagined I was lusting after. When actually, I was referring to the idealized figures captured in the Greek statues I was learning about in my intro to classical archeology class. It was a song about the tension between romance and romanticizing.

This moment of crisis sparked a new pressure to write songs that my straights would feel comfortable getting behind. Any lyrics that were too gay would have to be revised. It was like they wanted the benefits of an ersatz Morrissey or Freddie Mercury without participating in any real subversiveness.

Perhaps I’d too easily trusted RJ and Alex, this straight couple I’d teamed up with. Perhaps it was time to cool off on the gay stuff a bit. I was one of very few openly gay students at that school, let alone in our group of friends. I began to accept that I, the songwriter, had the least control over the meaning of my songs. My return to the closet became a kind of dowry for my membership in a band of straights.

Though, would this be a band of straights? I didn’t let myself fully hope for the fourth and final member to be someone to whom I could better relate.

---

When Niko showed up to our practice a few weeks later, he and I stared at each other, unsure how to signal our shared history. Wordlessly, we agreed to not mention it to RJ and Alex. The past wasn’t important. We exchanged “heys,” and he slipped behind the drum set.

He quietly improvised as we practiced, occasionally asking us to replay portions of songs so he could get a drum break just right. A perfectionist, I was quickly grateful to have someone besides me to nag the band with focused drills. Alex and RJ often got impatient with me. Niko seemed like he would help balance the band’s energy.

What started as an audition naturally became our first band practice as a four-piece. We mapped out a schedule without even properly asking him to join. He was one of us.

Now with the legitimacy of a drummer, we began playing house shows.

The best parties took place at the bottom of the hill, just outside of the safety of the school’s gates. One night, we threw a party in the house where we rehearsed, setting up a keg in our basement practice space and a little stage on the crumbling concrete in the backyard. We played covers of the Smashing Pumpkins and Death Cab for Cutie. It was the coolest I’d ever felt. I’d recognized some attendees as kids with whom Niko and I’d graduated high school a year earlier. Last time they saw me, I was a nerdy goth kid who avoided eye contact; now, I was in the band, arch and unaffected, entertaining them. Pretending I didn’t recognize them anymore.

At the end of the night, the four of us stumbled to the house across the street. RJ lived there with some of her friends and Niko had recently moved into the basement. His wasn’t an official bedroom, but boarding an extra person helped to drive down the rent. Alex chased RJ up to her attic bedroom. The living room was full of refugees from the party we’d just left and it was far too late for me to make the trek back up to campus alone. Niko told me I could crash with him.

The basement was unfinished, so his futon lay against the wall on a patch of carpet over the concrete floor. Streetlight entered from a basement window above the bed. We gawked at the remnants of the party, standing on his bed to peer through the window’s wrought iron bars. We laughed at the people spilling out drunkenly. When we couldn’t keep our eyes open anymore, our knees buckled and we dropped onto the bed. I carefully arranged myself facing away from him to give him space, afraid that our sharing a bed would make him uncomfortable.

I was lying staring at the paint peeling from the cinder block wall when he pulled me toward him, waking me from my intoxicated fog with a deep kiss.

Considering the circumstances, it was as romantic as it could have been. Of course, my standards for romance at that point were abysmal. I’d just spent the last four years of high school pining for straight boys. But suddenly, there was this guy who grabbed me and showed me what it felt like to be wanted.

I’d never thought of Niko that way. He was always high. He was usually talking about girls and sports with Alex while RJ and I rolled our eyes and talked about music.

After making out for a while, his hands were starting to wander. He climbed onto me and began grinding against me as we kissed until suddenly, he stopped.

“I want to go further but I don’t think I’m ready yet,” he whispered.

“That’s totally fine. Let’s just go to sleep,” I said, stroking the side of his face. He rolled over and turned away.

The rest of the night, I lay awake, retrofitting the history of our friendship to make sense of this moment. Of all the straight guys I’d had crushes on, he’d never made an appearance in my fantasies. I decided that he’d been in love with me all along and had been hiding it from me. Perhaps I was the reason he auditioned for the band. Perhaps even dealing weed was part of his master plan to get closer to me.

I shifted my perspective on his appearance so that his oversized shirts were an intrepid fuck you to fashion norms. He transformed from scrawny to wiry. Not a nerd; a punk. Not a stoner; a deep, misunderstood lover.

In high school, I had been so fixated on straight guys for one simple reason: I did not like that I was gay, so I couldn’t like that quality in someone else, either.

Convincing myself that this straight guy loved me felt like a relief. I was now allowed to go back to hating my gayness. He was straight; I could simply love him instead of myself. It was like a relapse; after all the work I put into coming out, I didn’t have to finish the job and start loving other gay people.

We played more shows in our practice space, around campus, and in nearby towns. RJ and Alex would go to their room; Niko and I went to ours. It was accepted that Niko and I stayed together simply because RJ and Alex were a couple. We were the leftovers.

As our second semester of sometimes-successfully balancing academics and band obligations came to a close, felicitous practices became more and more infrequent. Niko would be too stoned and I’d storm off, lecturing my bandmates about their ingratitude for all of the work I was putting into the band. RJ and Alex would be in some faux marital squabble. Full practices would occur with Alex in a tantrum, facing the corner of the basement while playing his guitar, like a musical version of that scene at the end of The Blair Witch Project.

Then, RJ and Alex finally broke up: a relief from the bickering, but an omen for the future of the band. Soon after, at the start of a new semester, we had our last meeting. We tried to organize a practice schedule that worked for everyone. Nothing seemed to work, and the spirit of trying had left the room. We glanced around at each other in acquiescence. Here was where it ended.

---

After the band broke up, Niko and my relationship transformed from afterparty hook-ups to weekly booty calls. He’d become less inhibited, grabbing me in alleys after nights out with friends. He started asking me questions about bottoming, as though I were an expert, having slept with only one person before him. I wondered if perhaps we were transforming from a weird fluke to a relationship. I began to realize that I wanted this—something more with him. Perhaps we were meant to be. Perhaps the band broke up to create our path to a loving relationship. My mind raced into the future: the charming story of how we fell in love at a band practice.

I was especially encouraged one night when he stumbled to my house after a nearby frat party. I’d been living in a neighborhood on one of Pittsburgh’s nearly vertical slopes. Sober, it was hard to walk up the hills; drunk, it felt like the hills were trying to shake themselves free of the houses while you held onto the sidewalk. I was amazed he made it all the way to my house, a clear sign of devotion.

After descending the stairs to let Niko in, he grabbed my hand and backed me against a wall for a quick, passionate kiss before we chased each other back up the stairs. I loved that he didn’t seem to care that my roommates were home. His brazenness inspired my own; so, later, lying together after sex, I asked lazily how he felt about telling Alex and RJ the truth about us.

He jolted up as though a fire alarm had gone off, lunging on top of me, arms on either side of my head. His legs hovered over mine with his feet pressing into the bed toes-first, like he was doing a military plank. He wasn’t touching me, but I felt his weight. He lowered his mouth to my ear and whispered quietly but firmly, “Don’t ever tell anyone. Ever.” He rolled off of me and turned away. It seemed he instantly drifted off to sleep with a strange innocence, blanketed by a renewed heterosexuality.

In shock, I still felt him weighing on me. I forced myself off of the bed, nearly falling onto the floor. I gathered my clothes and descended the stairs to give my heart a chance to slow down. I stared at a page from Villette, which I was reading for my senior English seminar on trauma literature. Eventually, morning came, and I left my house, trusting that by the time I returned after classes, Niko would be gone. And he was.

In the weeks following, I continued to text Niko when I was drunk and horny, as though one more hook up—this time without any threats or fear—would wipe the memory. We could start fresh. He never responded.

I was openly gay, but I felt like I was the one trapped in my feelings for him. Meanwhile, he stayed in the closet and seemed to carry on as if nothing happened. I suffered quietly, keeping the secret he insisted that I keep, while he continued living his life. I heard he started dating a girl soon after and I felt jealous, but I couldn’t tell if I was jealous of him or her. He seemed to have it all: the comfort of shame, the nostalgia of the closet, and the lightness of no longer illicitly hooking up with a guy.

---

Liberated from the closet, the band’s repressive atmosphere, and Niko’s threats, all felt scary to me, but at least there was one good thing about it all: it now left me in a position to pursue queer life more openly. I soon asked my manager at Starbucks out on a date and he became my first boyfriend, which lasted about two months. Then, I set my sights on graduate school in English, so I started sleeping with English graduate students.

Eventually, though, I realized what I was doing. I was seeking containers for love and sex—a rock band, Starbucks, the English department—and that I refused to look outside of them. Arbitrary boundaries helped me cope with the fear of facing my sexuality directly. Instead, I always created practice spaces for myself. Which would maybe be fine, except that left no room in my life for music.

After the band broke up, I put down the guitar and didn’t play a note for the next seven years. It was surprisingly easy: I just didn’t need have room for it and the baggage it brought me. At least, until toward the end of my graduate work, in my mid-twenties, when my live-in boyfriend abruptly broke up with me. I spiraled into a deep depression. I had no idea how to get better.

On a whim, I bought a new guitar and 11 songs about gay heartbreak poured out of me like they’d been waiting all along. I made sure that I used the pronoun “he” whenever I referred to my beloved in the songs, no longer beholden to appease a tribunal of straight bandmates, no longer associating new instruments with hiding.

I quietly wrote, practiced, recorded, and performed them at some open mics in my Boston-area neighborhood. I didn’t win any Grammys. I didn’t get a record deal. But I finally got the kind of space I always needed most: to write music as queer as I was.

And Morrissey, if that makes me a protest singer, I could live with that. Mostly because, this time, I’ve earned it.

Photo of Brenden these days practicing guitar.