Colleen ponders her future in the music industry as she also labors under the trials of the Bay Area’s housing crisis.

This story will be featured in an upcoming collection of short stories entitled Short Songs, featuring characters from The Rise and Fall of Skye Wright series.

     She kept turning it over in her mind, as she stood in the midst of a crowded subway car.
     Neurocringe was losing its band manager, and the drummer and de facto leader of the band had asked Colleen if she was interested in managing their band, which was quite an offer since their popularity was quickly rising.
     And they were getting ready for a major cross-country tour.
     Colleen thought of all the reasons why she shouldn’t accept the offer: she didn’t have enough experience. At least not as much experience as the workhorse overlord of Butt Fork Studios Tandasil. She felt she was learning a lot from Tandasil, and she did not want to leave Butt Fork’s owner and her personal friend Skye in the lurch, not to mention leaving a void in the Butt Fork workload that would be more than a considerable headache for Tandasil, someone whom she now considered a friend and mentor.
     Colleen could not ignore the temptation for long, however. No matter how many mental gymnastics she performed, she could not deny the pull of the idea. She oftentimes felt stilted from being in the office all of the time. Back in her days of organizing shows as a street-level booker and show organizer, she often ran around town, talking directly to club owners and bands while also trying to find absent artists, other bookers, or missing musicians who had gone out on an ill-advised drug binge shortly before they needed to be at a club or a recording studio.
     Instead of spending most of time in one place she could be with a band going from city to city, experiencing new places, doing new things, and meeting new music industry people all while dealing with wild rock and roll issues, and encountering new situations that would remind her that she had not yet indeed seen everything.
     Not to mention it could be a step up. Managing such a band could lead her to into getting bigger and better paying gigs. She could be snatched up by a large recording label, or eventually become a promoter for bigger shows.
     The train stopped at her transfer station. She dodged her way through the lemming-like crowd to get to the farther end of the platform so she could be in the lead car, which would be less crowded.
     Choosing to stand instead of sitting as she got onto the north-bound train, she reminded herself that climbing up the corporate music industry ladder was also fraught with consequences. She did not want to get too involved with the seamier side of the music industry. The whole philosophy behind the bands and the people at the Butt Fork label is that they were a different breed when it came to selling and promoting music. Their primary aim was to work for their artists and their customers, putting the goal of profit margins in the background.
     She took off her vintage glasses and let her mind descend into a welcome fog. The other commuters looked like ghosts, fuzzed out without the aid of her prescription spectacles, something which helped her mind relax.
     Colleen scrunched herself into her corner of the train

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

     She always entered her third floor flat from the back, walking up the stairs to the small porch from the back yard. Even though the back porch was quite small, she found her white-haired mother Abby scrunched into the corner with a book.
     “We need to buy you a rocking chair,” said Colleen as she walked up.
     Abby looked down at the porch floor, her shawl falling off of her shoulders. “I don’t think a rocking chair would fit.” She looked up.      “Maybe one for a toddler.”
     “You comin’ inside?” asked Colleen as she picked up her mother’s shawl.
     “After this chapter.”
     Colleen knew that her mother was on the porch because her father was in a mood. At least a dark enough mood that she decided to escape.
     Walking into her flat, her two small and slender cats walked up to greet her, curling around her legs with their tails up.
     “I know you guys have already been fed. You can’t fool me!”
     She found her father Dylan fiddling with his turntable.
     “Just gave it a cleaning,” he said as he examined the stylus.
     “Of course.”
     Colleen went into the kitchen with her tabby Gustav and black cat Dieter on her heels. She gave them a few treats in an attempt to get them to stop pestering her.
     As Gustav and Dieter chewed away at their cat treats, she glanced at her father who was still fussing with his turntable, the one he insisted on bringing with him when her parents had to move in, right after they lost their house. Colleen always thought her father would look more like a middle-aged man if his hair was not as long as it was. It was as if his longer hair was an attempt to revert back to a younger version of himself. Ever since Colleen’s parents had moved into her place, right after her father lost his job, he had been growing his hair out and had gained more weight.
     She looked in the sink. Not a dirty dish in sight.
     Colleen tried to busy about her kitchen. She tried her best to push down a twinge of irritation as she found her small drinking glasses on the second shelf of her drinkware cabinet rather than the first, as her own personal filing system for her tableware continued to be disrupted.
     Looking around, her parent’s coffeemaker was crowded into the corner, right by her classic espresso maker. The top shelf of her cabinets had all of the plates and bowls her mother had insisted on bringing to the flat, despite Colleen’s objections, initiating a minor war over her kitchen space.
     Rooting out a bag of espresso, she started to make a latte while she ran her eyes over the kitchen, taking note of what had changed, remembering what it had looked like before the invasion of her parents. She mentally uncluttered the corners, rearranged the silverware, put her kitchen appliances back in their proper and carefully chosen former places, and just looked at her kitchen with an overlay of recent nostalgia.
     Now she had to endure the kitchen wars. It was bad enough that her mother always wanted to cook, but her father also insisted on occasionally making breakfast or dinner. If Colleen had her way, she alone would prepare the family meals. Tandasil had advised her, after a gripe about living with her parents, that she needed to pick her battles, and not make such a staunch stand when it came to the kitchen, that she was going to have to give in, at least a little, if she was going to be living with them.
     Colleen rearranged the hanging pots and pans as she reflected how she didn’t have the heart to tell Abby that she preferred her father’s cooking to hers.
     She went into the living room with her favorite coffee mug.
     “Coffee?” asked Dylan. “At this hour?”
     “I want to get some more work done before I hit the sack.”
     Dylan glanced towards the back door. Colleen knew he was thinking about her mother.
     Her father looked down at the turntable and slowly put down the cover. He sat down on the couch in front of her long, vintage coffee table, with its pleasant yet inefficient spearhead shape.
     “Take the easy chair,” said Colleen as she sat down on the other end of the couch.
     “That’s your easy chair. It’s your house, so it’s your throne.”
     Colleen resisted making a face. She hoped her father could settle down enough to make himself feel as if he were home, even if it did mean bending to the patriarchal concept of letting her father have the best seat in the living room.
     Colleen ran her eyes around the room. She contemplated moving some more of her furniture into storage, the same storage where most of her parents’ things were, and free up more space in her flat. Perhaps then they would not feel so closed in.
     Her heart took its traditional nightly drop as she glanced at her laptop. She had taken to grinding out her at-home work either at the small kitchen table or in her room, since her parents had commandeered the second bedroom, which she had been using as an office.
     “No, really,” said Colleen, “take the easy chair.”
     “I have a better view of the TV from here,” said Dylan as he pointed at Colleen’s flat screen, the most obvious piece of modern technology in the flat.
     “It’s not even on.”
     “We should watch something. Maybe with dinner.”
     Colleen tried to sink into the couch as she thought about her mother on the back porch. She was trying to calculate how awkward or unsettling it would be to get Abby and Dylan to simply relax and watch something together as a family.
     Colleen took a deep drag off her coffee, hoping that the shots of Kahlua that she had added would soon take effect.
     “So I have a conundrum,” said Colleen.
     “What kinda conundrum?”
     “A work conundrum.”
     “Hang on,” said Dylan as he got up and retrieved a beer from the fridge. “Okay,” he said as he sat down with his fresh drink.
     Colleen looked down into her coffee. “I got an offer, an offer to manage a band.”
     “One of those crazy punk bands?”
     “Naw. They’re kind of a metal an’ industrial band. Their music is hard to describe.”
     “Are they any good? I mean, are they successful?”
v Coleen looked up. “They’re going on their first cross-country tour. And they’re playing some pretty big venues because they’ve been getting so popular. It would… It could lead to something bigger, maybe even a prize position at a big music label.”
     “So what’s the problem?”
     Colleen gripped her coffee cup with both hands. “I’d have to leave my position at Butt Fork.”
     Dylan fell silent as he looked out across the room.
     “Skye gave me my job at Butt Fork,” continued Colleen. “I make good money. More than I’ve ever made before. But this is a chance to possibly really get my foot in the door and make even more money.”
     “And, you don’t want to disappoint your friend Skye?”
     “It’s not just that,” said Colleen as she set her drink aside. “Skye and the label… We’re not just about making money. We’re trying to make things good with our artists, and put out music and promote bands we really believe in. It’s not the kind of label that runs around looking for the biggest money maker. But, even so, especially with this economy, making more money sounds like a good thing.”
     “Of course.”
     He was silent for a few moments as his eyes became cold and he pursed his lips.
     “I think you should stick to your principles,” he said finally.
     “We could use the money though.”
     Dylan stared straight ahead and took a sip of his beer.
     Colleen set down her coffee and looked to the back door. Abby still had not come back inside.
     “Aren’t you goin’ off on another tour soon? With those dynamite gals?” asked Dylan.
     Colleen snapped her head around. “What? Right. It’s in the works. I don’t know what the dates will be yet.”
     “You know when abouts?” he asked as he sank into the couch.
     “Pretty much. She has most of the dates set “
     “Who? Skye?”
     “Not Skye. Their manager Tandasil.”
     “Right. The Vulcan.”
     Colleen had forgotten that she had told her dad about their studio manager’s nickname. Colleen was impressed enough that her father did not think their studio head’s name was weird or unusual, that he was down with the street enough that he was not thrown off by the more esoteric details of her work.
     Colleen stood up and made her way into the kitchen.
     She deliberately brought out an assortment of vegetables from the crisper and measured out a bowl of penne. She started heating up a large pot of water to stake her dinner making claim before walking out onto the back porch.
     Colleen crossed her arms as a gust of cold wind went through her. Abby had her nose down in her book.
     “Ma, you need to come inside. It’s too cold out here.”
     Abby let out a long sigh as she dropped her book into her lap. She looked out towards the East Bay hills.
     “I like it out here,” said Abby, still looking to the hills. “I know it’s cold, but it’s relaxing. It’s too stuffy in there.”
     Colleen’s eyes drifted to the hills, where the faint, faraway glow of the Berkeley house hills shone down on the flatlands of the East Bay.
     She took out her smartphone and looked at the email Junker had sent her, the drummer of Neurocringe.
     She felt numb.
     She felt cold.
     Colleen put her phone away and put a hand on Abby’s shoulder.
     “Please come inside. If not for yourself, then for me.”
     Abby got a sour look on her face as she scrunched her arms against herself. “What am I going to do in there?”
     “Let’s start Marvelous Mrs Maisel. I know you’ll love it.”
     “If you say so.”
     Colleen took Abby’s hand and guided her back into the flat.
     She knew she was going to make her parents dinner. She also knew that she would have to argue with her mother for at least a few minutes before she consented to letting her make dinner. She would then assure her mother that she would indeed enjoy The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, as Colleen knew she would.
     And all the while, the Neurocringe offer would linger in the back of her mind, if not for herself, then for Dylan and Abby.