Dissonance - Chapter 8

After dinner, Kat, Hanna and I went back to her aunt’s house to get ready while the rest of the band headed back to their apartment. Although the last time we’d been in Raleigh our club experience had some hitches, we ended up picking the same one, since it was the only one we knew of that allowed under eighteens.

Since Hanna had nearly been assaulted the last time we’d been here, we all agreed that we’d leave in a group, to prevent further incidents. We didn’t have Victor with us this time, but I was more comfortable since I’d been there before.

Honestly, clubs weren’t really my thing. I liked to dance okay, but if I had my choice, I’d rather be playing the music that people danced to than doing the actual dancing myself. Still, I danced with Kat and Hanna most of the night. I’d join them, the three of us would dance, then I’d go  sit down while they stayed out on the dance floor, sometimes dancing with each other, sometimes dancing with Marco and Seth, and sometimes just dancing with strangers.

Lyla disappeared almost as soon as we got into the club. Of all of us, she was the most used to this kind of environment and she had a lot lower inhibitions than the rest of us. We’d track her down at the end of the night, probably having to pull her off some random girl, making out in a corner.

The only time things got really weird was after a set of songs when I went back to the table we’d scooped up as ours to rest for a bit before the girls dragged me back on the dance floor. We hadn’t had any problems yet, so I wasn’t really paying attention, which is why I was surprised after two songs when, instead of both Kat and Hanna coming through the crowd to get me, it was Kat and some girl I didn’t know.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Come dance with us,” Kat said, reaching across the table and pulling on my hand

“Where’s Hanna?” I ask

“She’s dancing with Seth. This is Katy. Now come on, let’s dance.”

I was a little bit confused by the switch. Not so much that Hanna was dancing with Seth, since she was friends with the whole band and had danced with all of them already, although she stopped dancing with Lyla after she got a little handsy. What confused me was first that Hanna would have left Kat alone at all, and second that Kat would have gone, made friends with some random girl on the dance floor, and then come to get me to join them in the span of two songs.

Still, since Hanna wasn’t around, I didn’t want a rehash of what happened last time, so I let her drag me onto the dance floor. From the moment I got there, things got uncomfortable. I’m not a great dancer, so my go-to move is to just kind of bop side to side with the beat, sometimes moving my arms in unison, and trying to kind of imitate the person I was dancing with. When I’d been dating Rhonda, we’d done the grinding kind of dance a few times, but I always kept some distance between myself and Hanna or Kat.

This time, Kat started dancing closer and closer to me, encouraging the girl she’d brought along to do the same from the other side. I guess some people would have found it hot, but I was just uncomfortable. I’d already had to talk to Kat just a few hours before about pushing boundaries where she shouldn’t, and this was way beyond the innuendo she’d used then. The weirder part was the other girl, who Kat was egging on more and more.

The final straw was when Kat grabbed my ass with one hand and mimed the girl doing the same thing on my other side.

“Okay,” I said, loud enough for them to hear me over the noise as I moved out from in-between them. “Katy, it was good to meet you, but we have to go now.”

I felt a little bad about ditching the girl on the dance floor, since she looked mostly confused, which wasn’t surprising since she was getting some pretty significant mixed signals, but I needed to put a stop to this before things got out of hand.

Kat started to protest until she saw my face. The confident, flirty Kat disappeared, replaced by the version of her that she retreated into when she was too scared to face whatever was happening. I hated to see this version, because it was the same one her father had always seen, but the other Kat from tonight wasn’t the real her either. It was an overcorrection as she actively tried to stop being the girl her father abused. In a way, it was healthy she was actively trying to find herself, but it still caused her to treat herself unhealthily.

“What are you doing?” I asked Kat when I got her outside the club, where we could hear each other.

“I don’t know,” she said, not making eye contact. “I just thought we could have some fun.”

“I thought we were having fun.”

“We were, but you were sitting by yourself and I started talking to Katy, and she said she was single, and I thought you two would hit it off. You’ve been by yourself since Rhonda.”

There was more to it than that, I had no doubt, but I also knew I wasn’t going to get a straight answer from Kat any time soon. Probably, she didn’t really know why she did it herself. If I had to guess, I’d say it had something to do with my rejecting her, maybe wanting to live through someone else vicariously by having a hand in making it happen. Of course, it could be anything. She still had a long way to go on her mental illness recovery, and it was often pretty hard to figure out why she did things.

“I appreciate it, but you need to let me find my own dates.”

“I just want you to be happy,” she said, a tear sliding down her cheek.

I felt bad for coming down on her, but she got into patterns of behavior very easily, and this was definitely one pattern I didn’t want to keep happening.

“I know,” I said, pulling her into a hug. “You have to let me be happy on my own terms though. I mean, I’m happy right now. I just finished my first album and I’m about to go on tour with my two best friends. How could I not be happy?”

“Okay.”

“I really do appreciate it. Just next time, talk to me before you start making decisions for me, okay? Give me a chance to decide what I want to do.”

“Okay,” she said again.

It was hypocritical, in a way, since I still made so many decisions for her, but it was the situation we found ourselves in.

“I’m about danced out. Let’s grab everybody and head home.”

***

“It came,” Hanna said, bounding down the stairs to meet the delivery driver walking towards the front door.

After a week filled with constant work getting the album recorded, we’d spent the entire weekend doing nothing. The rest of the band had gone out to a club again on Saturday night, but they’d wanted to go somewhere with an older mix of people, which meant a place I definitely couldn’t get into.

That worked out for me. Dancing wasn’t my thing and I’d been wiped after being drug around by Kat and Hanna all night. Instead, the three of us had reverted to being teenagers, sleeping half the day away, watching movies and just lounging about the rest of the day.

Sam hung with us some of the time, although with his energy level he wasn’t able to sit still through two movies back to back. Sometimes he disappeared to entertain himself, and sometimes he dragged Kat with him to play a game, since they shared interests.

‘It’ turned out to be a large box that she could barely get her arms around with a logo on it I didn’t recognize. Kat, Sam and I huddled around her as she tore the box open and pulled out the packing material on the top.

Inside was a bunch of clothing, mostly shirts. Pulling out a black shirt, she unfolded it, displaying the all-white logo on the front. In the center was a sketch outline of some kind of cat, maybe a bobcat or the like, roaring. Above it in a shallow arch was my name and underneath, in an arch bending the opposite way, it said ‘and the Wild Cats.’

We’d let her run with merch and she hadn’t shown us any of the designs she’d picked, so I hadn’t really known what to expect. Honestly, I’d been so wrapped up with recording the album that I’d completely forgotten about the merch plan. I did know she’d gotten all of the money needed from people investing in it, but after that I’d kind of put it to the side.

There were three other logos and a couple styles of shirts, each with a different logo, along with two hats, each using one of the logos.

There was a logo that looked almost like a college sports team, still with the roaring cat, but in a circle, with ‘Charlie Nelson and the Wild Cats’ going around the middle of the circle. It also had twenty-twenty-two, with twenty on the left of the circle and twenty-two on the right and a pair of lines, one thin and one thick, on both the top and bottom of the logo. That one was probably my favorite of all of the shirts, although it kind of locked us in to sell them only this year, so if we didn’t sell them on this tour or back at the Blue Ridge, we were going to be stuck with unsellable shirts.

The other two logos I didn’t love as much. One had the cat on the right and the name on the left and the other had the name on the front and the cat on the back. They were okay, but I preferred the first two. I preferred the standard short-sleeve crew-neck shirt, but there was a long sleeve, a V-neck, a long sleeve where the sleeves were different colors than the middle of the shirt, and something called a women’s cut, which just looked like a fitted t-shirt to me, but then I didn’t know much about clothes.

There was one thing I did worry about as she pulled everything out, though.

“This is all the merch we got?” I asked, realizing how little was actually in the box.

“This is just the samples of the logos, shirts and hat styles. We need to go through them and pick which ones we like and place the order. I was hoping they’d be here last week, because we’re cutting it close getting them in before you start your tour, but they told me it could take up to two weeks to get the samples.”

“Should we call the rest of the guys?”

“Yeah. We need to make a decision today.”

“Is this going to be a problem?” Kat asked, pointing at the name.

I instantly knew what she meant. Although he’d been on board when we’d signed the contracts, Marco had been increasingly insistent that I was being singled out above the rest of them, even though Seth and Lyla hadn’t had any problems. He specifically had made comments about the band name, since in all of our materials, we were listed as ‘Charlie Nelson and the Wild Cats’ not just ‘The Wild Cats.’

Rowan had had to put his foot down one day at recording, telling him to drop it. That was something the studio wanted, so it was either live with it or find another record label. That had been enough to get him to shut up, but no one believed he was actually dropping it.

“Even though we didn’t have to, I checked with Kent before I put in the request for samples, and he made it clear we needed to keep all merch in line with the rest of the marketing the label was doing.”

“He agreed to the contract,” Kat pointed out.

“I know, but that doesn’t matter. If you talked to Kent and he said we needed to do it like this, then we will. I just know this is going to be a problem.”

I wasn’t wrong. When the three of them got to Hanna’s aunt’s house, with Lyla looking particularly wiped out, since she’d gone out again Sunday night after even Seth and Marco had called it quits, Marco took no time being angry about it.

“This is bullshit,” he said after quickly looking through all the options.

With the speed he’d looked through them, I knew he’d only been looking at the name and not any of the actual designs, but I wished he’d at least given it a little bit of a chance.

“Let’s not get into this again,” Lyla said, squinting as he raised his voice. “You heard what Rowan said.”

“That was for the CD, but the label isn’t paying for the merch, we are. We should be able to put whatever we want on it.”

“None of the investments were made to you. It all came in through Charlie’s name and he’s on the hook if we can’t sell this stuff, so don’t pretend you had anything to do with it,” Hanna said, annoyed.

Hanna, never one to mince her words, had been getting a shorter and shorter fuse with Marco the longer he’d complained about how unfair he was treated. I’d had to talk her down from giving him a piece of her mind multiple times before. I liked Marco and needlessly antagonizing him would just cause him to quit, which I didn’t want to happen. I also didn’t want to have to find another keyboard player this close to our tour.

“Marco, do you think we should have a different name on the merch than what’s going to be on all the announcements for the gigs or up on the sign?” I asked, speaking over the end of Hanna’s tirade. “I know you want it to just be ‘The Wild Cats,’ but we’re stuck with the name the label wants us to use, and I think we should have all the merch match that, to help us sell it.”

“Of course you think that. Your name’s on all of it.”

“How about we just take a vote and see what everyone wants to do, first?” Lyla said.

“Fine.”

I’m not sure what he thought would happen, since we’d already been down this route once before, but the vote was me, Lyla and Seth to keep it the way it was and Marco to change it. Hanna always declined to vote on these things, although considering she was the one doing all of the work on this, I thought she should get a say too.

Marco huffed and stormed out. Seth had the keys to the van, so it wasn’t like he was going to go anywhere, but if he followed his normal form, he’d come back in ten minutes and pretend he hadn’t thrown a tantrum.

For the logo everyone agreed with me that the college logo looking design was the best, followed by the head with the name split across the top and bottom. We went with those two designs and three of the shirt types, along with the hat using the college logo, although Hanna said she wasn’t going to get a lot of those because they were pricey and she didn’t know how well they’d sell.

For now, we were just doing six shirt designs and one hat. If things went well, and especially if the label started picking up the bill, we’d end up doing more, but for a first tour this seemed almost like overkill.

***

Tuesday we still hadn’t heard from Kent about re-recording anything and I had training with Victor. Part of me kind of wanted to cancel, because after a year of constantly being busy, a weekend of doing nothing had been amazing. I’d made a promise though, and besides, I didn’t want to get used to this, since once the tour started it would be back to go, go, go.

I’d worked out with Victor once before, so I knew how to get to the kung fu school he trained at. I was still considering what to do about Chef. I liked training with him and liked how I felt after I finished training each day, both mentally since it was a good way to clear my head and physically from how strenuous the exercise was. My dilemma was getting him to understand that, while I enjoyed training with him, this wasn’t my focus. He’d said he’d back off trying to push me to do more competitions and the like, but that wasn’t all I meant when I’d talked to him about not wanting kung fu to be my life. I was fine training every day, as long as I didn’t have conflicts, but the more I moved forward with my music career, the harder that was going to get, and there were going to be long stretches when I couldn’t train. I needed him to understand that and not push me to put training ahead of music.

I was happy to see Victor again. We talked from time to time and I’d trained with him back in April, and I liked his approach to training. It was just as physically strenuous as Chef’s, but he was somehow more laid back in his approach, which worked for me.

“Hey, you made it,” he said, leaving the training ring he’d been doing stretches in and coming over to me.

The training rings weren’t rings, at least in the boxing sense. They were areas of the carpeted floor boxed off separately from each other by lines marked in the carpet which noted areas where different groups would work in. There was a little room in between sectioned-off areas that, when the school was full, would have people standing along, around the edge of the box they were waiting to get a turn in. It was up to those people to stay in their area, since there weren’t physical barriers like in boxing.

“Yep,” I said, setting down the small bag I’d carried water, my training shoes, and a towel in.

“How’s the recording coming?”

“All done, I think. They’re having us hang around for a week in case they need something re-recorded, but we haven’t heard a peep so far. Next week we’re off to start the first leg of our tour.”

“Where’s it going to be?”

“Here, actually. They knew we’d be here for recording and decided why not just start the tour here. We do another show in Chapel Hill, and then up to do some dates in Virginia. We actually just got asked to open for House of Grace in Richmond, which is cool.”

“Look at you, having famous friends and all. Chef mentioned their lead singer came by the Blue Ridge. Won’t be long until you don’t need us little people anymore.”

“I wouldn’t say we’re friends. She heard us at that festival during spring break, really liked our sound and helped us get our chance in front of the music scout after I was attacked and missed our first shot. It’s not like we’re hanging out or even talking regularly. The request for us to open for her came through the label. She didn’t call me or anything.”

“Say what you want, but I’m not having famous singers asking for me to do anything,” he said, but I knew he was just messing with me. “I guess it’s up to me to take you to the floor enough times so you remember you’re still down here with the rest of us little people.”

“I see how it is. All that was just an excuse to beat up on me.”

“You got it,” he said, slapping me on the back. “So, I’ve been watching some video from the competition, and I thought we’d go over some of your trouble spots.”

“I did okay.”

“You did great, especially for only having a year of training under your belt, but a couple of your wins were more due to your opponent making a mistake than you pulling off some great move or anything.”

He wasn’t wrong. While I did think I did okay, it had become readily apparent how outclassed I was by some of those guys who clearly had more experience in sparring than I did, and knew how to take advantage of it.

“I know you’ve used some of the things Chef’s been teaching you to defend yourself, which is good, but it’s also led you to see fighting someone untrained as your default when what you need to be doing is going into any fight as if the person you are facing knows what they are doing.”

“Okay,” I said, my tone clearly expressing that I didn’t really get what he meant.

“When you fight someone without training, you have time to think about what you’re going to do. Untrained fighters are generally slower than someone with training and, more importantly, they really telegraph their intentions before they do something, giving you time to think about the counter and then implement it. I know one of the things Chef has been teaching you is to strike close from the body, over a minimum distance, so you can maintain power without any kind of wind-up. One of the main purposes of this, beyond ensuring you always have enough power, is to keep your opponent from guessing what you’re going to do. On the video I watched, I can visibly see you thinking about what they’re doing, picking a response, and reacting. You were doing it fast and got lucky, but every hit you took was because you spent too long thinking about a counter rather than reacting on instinct. That’s what we need to work on fixing.”

“How do I do that?”

“That’s the hard part, since it’s going to need someone to work against. You can’t just do forms or work on a bag and build up the reflexes you need, and when Chef only has one person training, that tends to be his go-to, since he doesn’t ever spar himself. You’re going to need to have someone else to help you with these.”

He went over to a bag on the corner of the ring and pulled out two small mitts. Chef had used ones like them a few times, but mostly when he was teaching me to throw a good punch and how to use my waist for power.

“I know you and Chef have worked with these, but we’re going to use them for something slightly different. I’m going to move around with them. Sometimes I’m going to try to tap you with them, and you have to block, and sometimes I’m going to stop for a second, and you have to strike. Depending on where I stop, you’ll have to pick between a punch or a kick. I won’t hold long, so you’ll have to make fast decisions. It’s easier than it sounds and, once you get the hang of it, you can have a friend run you through drills. You’ll probably have to show them how to do hits that simulate how someone would actually swing at you so you can add in dodges and blocks, but it’s not hard. Let’s get started.”

I was familiar with the use of the mitts in this way, since anyone who’s watched boxing on TV has seen a trainer working with a boxer in a ring using them. Although we weren’t doing combos, which is what I think the boxers used them for, it wasn’t that different. It was, however, a lot more difficult than I’d have thought it was from just watching it on TV, and it was pretty exhausting.

He also moved a whole lot more than trainers on TV did, not just bobbing and weaving with them, but sweeping low or wide out to one side or another. Sometimes he went really random, so it was hard to guess what he was going to do next and other times the series followed pretty close to how fights I’d actually been in had gone, although a lot faster.

I missed. A lot. Throwing strikes after his hand had moved away or letting his mitt touch me while I tried to process a move and do the appropriate counter. He was right. At this speed, I was thinking too much and reacting too little.

We worked for several hours and then spend almost another hour, on top of that, with him showing me how he did the other side of it so I could teach someone else how to hold the mitts for me.

Of course, I’d have to find someone willing to let me hit their gloved hands over and over again in order to get that help, but it was another training option.