Cal has forgotten about Zac’s unconscious talent for making this part of the creative process seem less like preparation for trial by jury. He’s forgotten how safe Zac could make it feel.
Cal came to LA with stars in his eyes, fresh off the bus at eighteen with hopes of meeting musicians who’d take his dream as seriously as he did. He lived off his college fund—to his parents’ distinct disapproval—and slept at a hostel to save money until he found a day job as a waiter and could afford to get a place of his own. He went to small local clubs every night, wrote down his impressions of the bands he liked, the things he’d improve for the bands he didn’t like, and listened to anyone who’d talk to him. He wasn’t just a sponge, he was a sinkhole, taking in everything in his vicinity. He politely badgered people into letting him pick their brains, devouring introductions and connections and advice.
Later, when a few intrepid reporters bothered to look past Zac in order to do spotlight pieces on Cal, virtually all of those stories included quotes from industry insiders who laughingly complained about how annoying Cal had been when he was starting out. “I gave him what he wanted to make him go away,” someone said once. Cal was embarrassed to read that at the time, but he couldn’t regret it. Those connections eventually led him to an as-yet-unattached musician with a lot of promise but enough drawbacks that the professionals in the industry hesitated to work with him. As one of those connections explained: “Zacary Trevor’s an asshole and he can’t play guitar for shit, but he’s got one hell of a voice, man. He’ll make you cry it’s so gorgeous. And then you’ll want to punch him in the nose.”
Cal didn’t have a lot of options at the time. Pros weren’t interested in the rambling, half-formed songs of a newbie, and the other guys were all already either attached to projects, or—frankly—not good enough for Cal’s high standards. So he tracked Zac down.
He met Zac backstage at an after-party for a not-very-good indie band. Zac was trashed, sprawled on a couch and nodding with earnest enthusiasm as Cal introduced himself and explained that he was starting a band. The conversation was a mess—frequently interrupted by other partiers, waylaid by Zac’s wandering, drunk thoughts, and complicated by Cal’s growing frustration at the whole thing. Cal doesn’t remember much of the specifics that they talked about, which is unsurprising because it was useless, but he still remembers every detail of Zac, from the shaggy mohawk to the smeared black eyeliner to the sloppy kiss at the end of the night that missed Cal’s mouth and landed on his chin. Cal was uncomfortable, offended and painfully aroused. Even more so when Zac slurred, “Ya wanna?” and made a jerking off motion with one hand. Cal said no thanks as politely as he could while speaking through his teeth and put Zac in a cab, disgusted. He couldn’t imagine how that guy could possibly have a voice capable of making someone cry.
After some reconsideration, Cal called Zac at seven a.m. the next morning and invited him to an audition. He figured if Zac was willing to drag himself out of bed and across town with a bad hangover that early, it meant he took the opportunity seriously. Zac showed up at Cal’s buddy’s place an hour later on a bicycle in a dirty T-shirt, his hipbones peeking out above low-slung jeans. He’d gotten off his bike, walked past Cal into the house, found the bathroom, puked loudly, pawed through the medicine cabinet for mouthwash, and then returned to the garage where, without a further word of greeting, he started singing. He didn’t have a tape or music or anything; he just started a cappella with Tool’s “Eulogy.” Despite the circumstances, he was flawlessly on pitch—including the ten-second hold at the end, tricky for a guy with Zac’s range. He growled his way through Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, managed to make Coil’s “Love’s Secret Domain” sound even filthier than it already is, and then finished up with a haunting rendition of Nine Inch Nails’s “Something I Can Never Have.”
Cal didn’t cry, but he was tempted to, especially during that last one. Even rough and untutored, that dark baritone sent chills up his back. This one, Cal’s instincts whispered. He’s the one.
Hyde started like most bands do—in a garage. Zac was nineteen then, and living with his parents in the house he’d grown up in. Cal was about eleven months younger (although several decades more mature). They recorded their first demo with their sound waves reflecting off a concrete floor.
Cal had roommates at first, like pretty much every young, starving artist in LA. Then, a handful of months after they decided to make a go of it together, Zac’s relationship with his mother imploded and Zac showed up on Cal’s porch at three in the morning.
“I don’t have anywhere else to go,” he said, trembling and red-eyed, his lashes damp and spiky. Cal gave him the couch and a key, already questioning whether the forced proximity would cause enough friction to kill the band before it really started. Instead, through some amorphous magic Cal hadn’t known could exist in the world, they became irrevocably connected under the skin.
Cal was attracted to him from the beginning, but Zac’s sloppy brand of living made that easy to ignore. Cal’s other feelings for Zac were harder to put aside. He didn’t always like Zac, who was too chaotic, too loud, too argumentative to mesh well with how reserved and driven Cal was when he first arrived in California. But Zac was also full of sly humor, easy generosity and vehement loyalty, and those good traits slowly grew to outweigh the bad. It helped that Zac didn’t behave as though the attraction was returned; that one drunk, messy kiss was never repeated.
When one of the roommates moved on, Zac officially moved in, and Cal woke up one day with the knowledge that he’d acquired not only a creative partner, but a friend.
Around that time, Hyde began to get paid half-decent wages for local gigs and started selling rough cuts of their songs on tapes after their shows. Eventually the income was enough of a supplement to their day-job salaries that they could afford to leave Cal’s other roommates behind. They rented a tiny, dilapidated house solely because the garage was in good shape and one side of the house abutted an empty lot. Cal figured that half as many neighbors meant half as many calls to the cops for noise complaints.
That was the beginning of the end for Cal. Living alone with Zac stripped their relationship of all insulation and distraction, and underneath, Cal found something pure and wild and inescapably good. He fell hard and he fell permanently.
It feels like those early days again, rolling into work in jeans and bare feet, still chomping on breakfast while they tune their instruments, and if it isn’t quite as exciting as it was in the beginning, they’ve replaced that newness with a kind of certainty. They know what they can do now. They know what they are to each other.
Musically, anyway.
They’re still not making much progress with the album—Cal’s every bit as locked up in Zac’s presence as he was before—but Cal doesn’t mind so much anymore. There are worse things than spinning his wheels with Zac peering over his shoulder and complaining.