Your Band Sucks by Jon Fine Page B

greet you, he would practically knock you down. You prayed he wouldn’t cuff you in the nuts, because his paws were as big as baseballs. Each day the overflow from his panting mug could fill a few pint glasses. Luckily he didn’t bark much, which was good, because when he barked, it scared the absolute crap out of you.
    Orestes was too broke to kennel Victor—and god knows the band wasn’t making any money—so oftentimes he brought him to shows, where Victor would wait, long-faced and lugubrious and panting and drooling, in the back of Orestes’s truck while we played. Today, I understand the balm to loneliness Victor was for Orestes, but to me, back then, he only looked like an enormous pain in the ass. And Orestes was as bad as a new parent about him. One day he went on and on about how much he liked mastiffs and then he told me he wanted to get another one, and I lost it and started screaming. How the fuck would he be able to handle two mastiffs? He could barely manage one. You had to be a weight lifter—or Orestes—to take Victor for a walk. Once, when Orestes wanted to visit his girlfriend on the side, he tried, desperately, to talk me into boarding him at my parents’ house for a few days. I turned him down. Possibly after a lot more yelling.
    What causes most band conflicts? Disagreements and competitions over girls and boys. Money. People getting fucked up on drugs and booze, especially if different members prefer different substances. “Creative differences,” which means someone’s ideas are so bad you start to hate him. Orestes and I fought most avidly
over a dog.
Sometimes one tiny thing your bandmate does drives you insane.
    A mastiff is not a tiny thing.
    ***
    EACH JANUARY, BETWEEN SEMESTERS, OBERLIN HAD A MONTH long winter term during which students completed mandatory independent projects, however half-assed those projects might be. In 1989—my last January at Oberlin—my project was playing in a rock band, which made it the second January term for which I got school credit for Bitch Magnet−related activities. We had a mini-tour booked across the East and Midwest, and had studio time reserved in Chicago to record our second album with Albini. At the last minute the recording had to be canceled, because Orestes’s beloved paternal grandmother, who helped raise him, died. (Albini gave the recording time to Slint, and those recordings came out in 1994 on a two-song self-titled EP.) We still planned to play all the shows, but—
    But let me start somewhere else.
    A windy Saturday evening in mid-January, around dinnertime at a gas station in the middle of Pennsylvania. The temperature’s dropping. There’s so little light by the pumps that you have to squint to jam the nozzle into the tank. Sooyoung and I are driving my grandfather’s old car, a mid-seventies Oldsmobile, primer gray, shockingly huge by the standards of the eighties and possibly by those of the seventies as well. The front seat is one big bench, with nothing splitting the driver’s and shotgun seats. You can seat three people up here, if necessary, and maybe four more in the back. That backseat and the enormous trunk—the kind that protrudes several feet past the rear wheels, a duck’s bill sticking out its ass—are crammed with Sooyoung’s and my equipment, plus some assorted student detritus, like my milk crate full of LPs. We just played two shows in New York and are heading back to Oberlin for one night before setting off for our next dates in Columbus, Ohio, and Champaign, Illinois. I just finished putting our ten or twelve dollars’ worth in the tank while the wind picked up, promising another kind of weather—no, that weather is here, and the first raindrops start slashing sideways while Sooyoung maneuvers the beast back onto Route 80, heading west.
    Somewhere between Milton and Williamsport, on a lengthy elevated stretch that connects