In Nashville we always landed at the same place first. Edgefield was an East Nashville dive, smoky and grimy and exactly right. After thirteen hours in the car we would go straight there without unloading, order burgers and booze, throw darts, and talk like men who had arrived somewhere instead of men who had nowhere to sleep.
Before there was a band worth the name, there was that booth: the four of us under Christmas lights that stayed up all year, planning a future we had no evidence for. I have stood backstage in rooms that cost more than every house on my childhood street put together. I have never felt as rich as I did in that booth with eleven dollars to my name and three men who believed the same impossible future I did.
I slept on a blowup mattress at Joel’s place. A photograph catches the room: a Foo Fighters poster, an old Union Jack, drum cases, clothes, a bottle of Jack standing within arm’s reach of the bed. Most nights I woke around three with my hip on the floor because the air had leaked out beneath me again.
I would lie there in the dark and think, with a certainty I have rarely felt since: We are going to make it. We have to make it. Not we might. We have to. I had sold the car and quit the job. I had not left myself another version of the future.
The mattress had a slow leak and so did the plan. I could not see either one yet. God, I was happy.
