Daria had been nineteen when she’d fallen over backwards into her first band.

She was living in a Southside firetrap with a guy named Pablo, had worked day jobs flipping burgers and sold blotter acid on the side to keep a roof over their heads, Ramen noodles and Wild Irish Rose in their bellies. Their apartment had been on the topmost floor of a building that might still have been habitable when her grandmothers were her age. Rats as big as puppies, and they’d slept with all the lights on to keep the roaches off the bed. When it rained, the roof was little better than a colander, rainwater seeping through a sagging foot of plaster and rotten lathe, pigeon shit and mold, before it dripped from the ceiling and streamed in murky rivulets down the walls.

Pablo had played bass for a band called Yer Funeral, three punker holdouts with identical Ramones haircuts who covered the Sex Pistols and the Clash and made everything sound like crap. The singer and guitarist, a painfully skinny cokehead named Jonesy McCabe, had lived in Manhattan in the early eighties and claimed to have given the ghost of Sid Vicious a blow job one Halloween. Carlton Hicks on drums, and they’d opened for marginally better bands on the local hardcore circuit, two or three shows a month and the rest of their time spent picking fights with rednecks and skinheads, fucking their girlfriends; counterfeit anarchists scrounging bedlam in the sunset days of Reagan’s America.

Daria had never asked Pablo to teach her to play, had never had any particular interests in music or anything else creative. Sometimes she’d talked about college; she hadn’t dropped out, and her SAT scores had been decent enough, but there was never any money, never would be, and although there were loans, the thought of owing Uncle Sam twenty or thirty thousand for an undergrad degree had finally soured her on the idea. So she worked at McDonald’s and Arby’s and sold her cheap blotter, stamped with dancing rows of rainbow-colored Jerr-bears and so weak that even high school kids who still thought cigarettes were cool had trouble getting a trip off the stuff.

But the more bookings Yer Funeral managed to worm itself into, the more serious Pablo became about his music, and he’d actually begun to practice, hours spent sitting around their apartment rehearsing his bare-bone rhythms. And she’d learned that unless she paid attention, he ignored her altogether.

It had started as a joke, yeah, Dar, let’s see what you can do, let’s hear what you got in there, and Daria holding his silver Gibson while everyone laughed and made their punker boy pussy jokes. But there had never been a single moment of awkwardness. The instrument had seemed to belong in her hands, had almost seemed built for the span and stretch of her fingers, like something that should have been there all along.

And whenever Pablo was asleep or off screwing around with Jonesy and Carlton, she’d sat on their one chair and played, fuck the chords and notes, had listened hard to the bass lines on Pablo’s pirated tapes, and it was always so goddamned obvious, fingers here and here, then here, until she’d simply merged with the recordings. She had quickly discovered that the bass was capable of other sounds besides the all-the-way-up, tooth-grinding throb Pablo hammered out of the thing, sloppy attempts at discord that always dissolved into a noteless spew of ear-splitting low-end noise as he got drunker and cranked the blue gain knob higher and higher.

Two weeks, and she had figured out all of the songs in Yer Funeral’s set list; so little variation in punk bass lines, anyway, almost everything on the bottom two strings. She’d deciphered most of the knobs on the cabinet and the bass itself, had grown puking sick of the Sex Pistols and the Ramones and the Clash, everything fuzzy and flat through Pablo’s junker stereo, and she’d begun to just string notes together like popcorn or plastic beads. Pictured them as fat brown blocks of different shapes and sizes to be stacked any way she pleased. And Daria had realized that she was writing her own songs, things that might become songs, and she would shut her eyes and stand before the thumping rig, imagining the drums and guitars, the singer’s wordless voice, all tied together with the warm chocolate rhythms she coaxed from the Gibson.

And then Pablo had smashed up his hand, had been drunk and fallen, tripped on a crack in the fucking sidewalk and tried to break his fall with his right hand. One week before Yer Funeral was supposed to open a big show, Battle of the Bands thing, and there were rumors that a scout from IRS would be coming down. When they’d gotten back from the emergency room, Jonesy had been waiting for them on the front steps of their apartment building, and when he’d seen Pablo’s hand, ridiculous swollen fingers like splinted sausages and the shell of fresh white plaster, he’d socked Pablo in the jaw and broken two front teeth.

Next day, after he’d heard that Jonesy was seriously looking for someone to replace him on a not-so-temporary basis, he’d volunteered Daria. She’d told him to fuck off, but he’d begged, and Jonesy had finally agreed to let her sit in on one practice. Yer Funeral had rehearsed in the garage of an abandoned Chevron station, concrete floors gritty oil-dark and darker pits where the hydraulic lifts had been. Pablo had sat alone in a shadowy corner, sucking beer and looking sullen and anxious; Jonesy and Carlton had exchanged doubtful smirks as she’d tuned and adjusted the strap to fit her shoulder.

Then Carlton had started off, no warning, three loud beats slammed from his foot drum before Jonesy leaped into the New York Dolls’ “Chatterbox,” spitting the words at the mike and his graceless fingers ripping madly at his guitar. Daria had only missed a beat or two, and by the time they reached Jonesy’s solo, both drummer and singer were grinning. Daria had never looked up from the bass, never once taken her eyes off the strings, had chewed her lower lip until it bled, until the song had ended and Jonesy was laughing like a hyena and Carlton had kept repeating “Gawddammit, girl,” over and over. Pablo hadn’t said a word, had popped the cap off another bottle of Sterling and watched from his patch of gloom.

Daria had followed straight through Yer Funeral’s entire borrowed repertoire, had ended with “ Rockaway Beach,” and her fingers had been numb, fingerprint whorls scraped raw and smooth. No breath left in her, gasping and her arms gone to slinkys, her sweat standing out on the garage floor around her feet, bright droplets and splatters unable to soak into the oil-and antifreeze-saturated cement. And Jonesy had slapped her on the back, big, stupid boy gesture of affection or camaraderie, fraternity, and then he’d hugged her tight, and Pablo, drunk off his cheap beer and confusion, knowing that this whole thing was getting way out of hand, blowing up in his face, but not sure why or how to stop the explosion, had mumbled something not entirely to himself.

Jonesy had asked him to speak up, come again, and Pablo had stood, slight reel and sway as he stepped toward them.

“What the hell difference does it make,” he’d slurred. Jonesy and Carlton had looked back at him with blank faces, not following; Daria had kept her eyes on the grungy floor, on her rejected sweat and abused fingers.

“No freakin’ scout wants to hear a cover band anyway, man. Punk’s dead and you guys are pissin’ up a goddamn rope.” And then he’d staggered off to take a leak, to hunt down the toilet even though the station hadn’t had water since it’d closed.

“Hey, fuck you, man,” Carlton had shouted after him. “You fucking wanker. You’re just pissed ’cause your old lady made you look like shit.”

Pablo had ignored him, had disappeared through a darkened doorway (the door torn off long ago, propped useless somewhere nearby) into the darker lobby. A second later, he’d cursed, had given up his search for the toilet, and they’d heard the metal-through-fabric zrrrip, the wet spatter of Pablo’s piss on the lobby’s tiles.