“Just giving you shit,” she said. “Everybody’s a tourist. Except Sid Vicious. Kill Devotion’s playing in two weeks at Hamilton Street. Come hang out. Your face is still bleeding.”

The maelstrom of noise started up again and she drifted away from me. Up on the edge of the stage, I could just make out something that I assumed was the lead singer of EOB, bent over, screaming.

“And you,” he bellowed. “Thank you for your book and yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeear. Something happened in the GARAGE, and I owe it for the BLOOD!”

“Traffic!” the crowd responded.

“Those lines are by the only real American poet,” the singer said. “There will be no encore, go home and kill yourselves, good night.”

Thomas led me back to the wall to retrieve my record, still standing where I’d left it. I pulled it out of the sleeve. It had broken in two, one chunk significantly larger than the other. I handed the smaller piece to Thomas. We walked outside, and the October air turned our sweat cold immediately. Thomas was shivering but trying not to show it.

“Do you see your mom?” I said. I was no help in spotting her, of course, and was worried that even no-worries Mrs. R would be freaked out by my grisly appearance. It had to be well past midnight.

“Naw,” Thomas said, scanning the parking lot.

It turned out we were being taught a lesson about coming out late—since we’d made her wait half an hour, she was going to make us wait for as long as she deemed fit. Which of course, like most parental punishments, just wasted more of her own time. We found Thomas’s knife—it had been dug up or accidentally unearthed somehow, but was basically where he’d left it—and I watched while he flipped it in the air unsheathed and mostly failed to catch it. His mother pulled up around one a.m., with only a few conspiratorial EOB diehards left in the parking lot to keep us company.

“Oh, Jesus, Paul,” she said when she saw me through the rolled-down passenger window. I imagine she’d planned to deliver some kind of wisecrack, something along the lines of, “Not much fun waiting, is it?” Now, instead, she got out of the car and hurried toward me.

“What happened to you?” she said. I’d never seen her so actively concerned. “Paul, you need stitches.”

“It’s not that deep,” I said.

“How would you know?” she said, which was fair. “I can’t give you back to your parents looking like this.”

“I think it’s an improvement, actually,” Thomas muttered to me when we were in the backseat. “Somebody literally knocked that stupid look off your face.”

I said nothing. I’d resigned myself to silence in protest of being taken to the hospital for necessary medical attention.