| a scrap of hello kitty notepaper In junior year of high school I became the bassist in a metal parody band called Sparkling Honeypuff. But if you asked my bandmates, Brandon and Charlie, they would probably have told you we were in a serious thrash metal band called Slaughtered Goat (or something), and they would probably have made some mean joke about how I couldn’t play even the simplest bass chords despite their six-plus months of effort to teach me. To this I would have said that it was funnier overall if I didn’t really know how to play bass, more in line with the parody aspect of the band, and also that it was more fun to simply hang out and have a good time than to listen to the same Black Sabbath song over and over, and slide my fingers across rough strings that gave me blisters, trying to imitate the bass line of some song I didn’t even like. “How can you not like Black Sabbath?” Brandon would say. “Is that a real question?” I would say, completely mystified. “You honestly like this music?” These kinds of creative differences ultimately led to the band’s demise, at which point Brandon and Charlie started a new band, also called Slaughtered Goat (or whatever) with a new bassist, a role they didn’t actually fill. I had known I wasn’t a musician since my second-grade keyboard recital, during which I stopped playing in the middle of the song and yelled to the audience, “I don’t know the rest!” I liked the idea of being part of a group and contributing to something larger than myself, and hanging out with my friends under the guise of being productive, but I didn’t actually want to play music. Especially not metal. “Can I be the bassist in your new band?” I asked Charlie. “Um,” said Charlie. “I’ll have to ask Brandon. We might not need a bassist.” “Brandon is right there. Why don’t you ask him now?” They let me back into the band after a small degree of persistence and manipulation, but things were never the same. For one, I had to promise never to refer to the band as Sparkling Honeypuff; also, we never had band practice again. Or, at least, I was never invited to band practice again. “We’re never going to get the gig if we don’t work together on some jams,” I said to Charlie. “What are you even talking about?” he said. When I was invited to be the photographer for my friend Logan’s metal band, Broken Femur, I eagerly accepted. I didn’t like the responsibility of being in a band anyway; being a photographer was more my speed. I went to all of their practices and house shows, where I would halfheartedly snap a few action shots with my digital camera and then spend the rest of the night looking for snacks. Later, I would upload the photos onto my computer and never look at them or do anything with them again. It was a pretty sweet gig. I first saw Sage at a Battle of the Bands concert that Broken Femur was competing in, which took place on my high school football field one Saturday in the summer. “Who is that?” I said, looking at a pale, skinny dude with black bell-bottoms, no shirt, and shiny brown hair down to his butt. “Which one? Tony?” Logan said. “Oh, that one? Sage. He’s the drummer in Johnny’s band.” Maybe a hippie boy version of Alanis Morissette isn’t everyone’s idea of the perfect man, but it was mine. I took a few photographs of him with my camera, then switched to video mode and filmed a five-second clip of him walking across the field. | 