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Drowning Out the Noise

How music became the cathartic refuge for my political frustration.

A broken piano in the music room of the abandoned Southwestern High School.

Idon’t drink anymore, but a vestigial hangover clouds my recollection of the major events of recent history. On the morning of the Unite the Right rally, I lumbered down the staircase of a Catskills Airbnb rented for a bachelor party to learn that only hours before, a gang of white nationalists stormed the University of Virginia campus wielding Tiki torches and chanting, “Jews will not replace us.” My stomach wasn’t as queasy that morning as it had been on Election Day, nor did my head throb as sharply as it did after the inauguration, when I braved the crowded Washington Metro en route to the Women’s March. Like the protagonists of 1984 and The Berlin Stories, which I reread that winter with an earnestness I now find slightly embarrassing, mine was a gin-soaked existence, senses dulled against the baffling chaos closing in.

By the time I got back to Brooklyn, where I’d been crashing with the soon-to-be newlyweds, the haze curdled into indignation and shame. I had wasted a weekend killing brain cells and hiking in sandals toward nonexistent watering holes while an innocent woman was dead 300 miles away. There was no doubt in my mind that I was living in a totalitarian hellscape. When the president said that there were “some very fine people on both sides” that Tuesday, I knew that he wasn’t talking about me.

For two years, I had been living in Atlanta, where I was due back later that week to prepare for another semester of teaching freshman English to computer science majors training to engineer universal obsolescence. I’d moved to the South from California during the twilight of the Obama administration, when the idea of a Trump presidency still retained the whimsy of a Simpsons joke. As a hesitant Yankee, I’d tried to blend in with my surroundings without sacrificing an often volatile opposition to the region’s dominant norms. It was far from impossible to find like-minded individuals with whom to commiserate, but the peaceful assemblies in which I gathered lacked a discernible outcome and did nothing to assuage the precarity I felt as a carpetbagging knowledge worker on a fixed-term contract.

I retreated to points north and west at every conceivable opportunity, and when it came time to leave New York, the compounding dread sucked me into an Internet wormhole that culminated in an e-mail offering my services to the local branch of antifa, whose address I probably found on Reddit. (While the group may not be the vast conspiracy that the right assumes it to be, there very much is a real, decentralized network of activists working to combat fascism.) What volunteering for the organization might entail, however, I had no clue, aside from a vague notion of the tasks with which a literary man such as myself could be assigned: writing pamphlets, making speeches, chauffeuring freedom fighters to and from demonstrations. At 32, doomscrolling on an under-inflated air mattress in an overstimulated fugue, I was ready to put my body on the line.

The light of day softened my resolve, even as an unsigned message arrived in my inbox:

Thank you for contacting us.

It would be best for us to meet up sometime so we can talk about how people can get involved, whatvwe [sic] do, our expectations for involvement, etc.

Let us know about any time you have available and we can meet and chat.

I immediately promised to sort out the details as soon as possible, though I didn’t know that I actually would. A more anodyne fate awaited me as I touched down at Hartsfield-Jackson: playing piano in an indie rock band.

I’d met Virgil at a mutual friend’s house on a sweltering Georgia night earlier that summer, Michael Mann’s Heat projected onto the living-room wall. He was the type of guy with which I had become familiar over the previous decade and a half of recording and performing music: unwashed and longhaired, animated and scrawny. We weren’t fast friends, exactly, but he sought me out after listening to the albums I’d self-released, and soon after Charlottesville, we began to spend a lot of time together, our........

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