There Was This Tree, Part 2 (Adventures in Temporary Enforced Sobriety, Part 4)

A week before the show, I found out that a good friend of mine had done the whole latent TB drill in her early twenties. As she’s very smart — several advanced degrees deep — and also not as prone to blindly following rules as I am (the husband calls it “an unhealthy fear of authority” but I think it's just a fear of having my mellow harshed) I asked her advice. “Can I have, like, one beer?” The internet isn’t very helpful in this regard. Ask it what happens when you mix Rifampin and a single alcoholic beverage and you basically get a lot of fine print about liver failure. But even my infectious diseases doctor (who has the same last name as my husband, though I don’t think she gives me any special treatment as a result) had said that, later on in the course of meds, i.e., around the holidays, I can skip a dose in order to have a glass of wine at Thanksgiving dinner. So what about now, early on?

My friend and I agreed that, given all of the damage we’d done to our livers already, a single beer wasn’t going to hurt me. She warned me, though, about going down a slippery slope. I agreed. By the time the night came, I had promised myself one beer, but only if needed. The husband and I had a relaxing but productive day — took the dog to the park, did some house stuff. I may have roasted a chicken. We ate an earlyish dinner, watched a little TV, and then I got ready to go out. I had Facebook-messaged Rob my number the day before, but hadn’t heard from him since.

At some point I pulled a page from my old photo album — they don’t really stay in the binding anymore — and said to my husband, “Should I just bring the whole page? That seems silly.”

“Listen,” he said, “he’s been on tour for a while. He may just want to say ‘hi.’ He might not want  to go down memory lane.” Now, my husband — how shall I say this? — doesn’t take very long to get ready. And I do. Does that make sense? He just puts on a pair of shoes and goes. And he’s used to the way I mull things, turn them over in my head, write them down, process them verbally with this person and that person, change my outlook (and outfit) a few times. But he’s just not wired that way. And I know that he really was just trying to take care of me by warning me about this. But he went to college about an hour-and-a-half drive from where we live now; he also lived there for some years afterward, and many of our friends now are people he was friends with in his late teens and early twenties. There is an unbroken line between his then and his now. So I don’t think he realized the importance of this narrative thread being picked up in a cohesive way. Actually, I don’t think I did, either.

But I thanked him for his concern, dutifully dialed down my expectations, and worked on my eyeliner for a little while. A few minutes later — shortly before 8, when the doors were scheduled to open — I got a text from Rob: I put your name on the guest list.

“I’m on the list,” I told the husband with a smirk.

Yay! I texted back. Is it sold out?

First band goes on at 9. We go on at 11. It might sell out.

Husband and I will get there early to be sure he can get in.

You’ve got a plus one.

“He got me a plus-one,” I told the husband triumphantly.

He nodded coolly. As is his way.

We got to the show about a half-hour after the doors opened. Rob came running out from backstage to greet me. We hugged, and I mentally estimated that we now weigh about 265 together, soaking wet.

“Do you want to see some photos?”

“Fuck yes,” he said, and I showed him what I had brought. He remembered everyone in the photos — including some random chicks who, if it weren’t for their names written on the back of the pictures, I’d not have known — and we swapped stories about them. He introduced me to his bandmates and tour-mates and showed them the pictures, too. We jumped back and forth between what we’d been doing over the course of the last two-and-half decades and what we had done back then. I started to tell a story about one time we listened to Pink Floyd in his car and Rob corrected me — it was the Butthole Surfers — and then jumped in on the part about me destroying his back seat, a punchline my husband had heard a half-dozen times before.

And yes, at some point, I asked the husband to get me a beer.

I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t handle the emotions coursing over me, the nostalgia and triumph and connection. Having the legendary magic of that time validated felt like being plugged back into that same distilled feeling, like the golden light of a Florida dusk was filling the room, glimmering into my veins. I needed to celebrate; maybe I needed to calm down a bit. Dammit, I needed something in my hand to toast to this guy who, standing outside as I fiddled with the “selfie” setting on my camera, pointed to my chin and said, “You’ve got a little lipstick there” and, when I thanked him, said, “Man, it’s been 25 years but I still think of you as one of my best friends.”

The show did sell out. I had a second beer. We stayed almost to the end, but eventually the emotions (and OK, fine, the late hour on school night) got the best of me — not the beers, which I hardly felt since I was buzzing so hard otherwise — and we had to go home. The next day was a Monday and I went to work with a stamp blurring on the back of my hand and that radiance still in my system. The beer, too, I guess. I had nine days before the my first blood test to see how the antibiotics (and my liver) were doing. So my latest addition to the experiment would soon show its results.