Although I’d been let go from bands before (well, just about all of them, really) I was so angry I cried. Anger crying is the ugliest crying and the least rational. In that least-rational state, I decided I was done with bands and I was done with Providence and re-done with Mercy. It was less me fleeing than I needed a change, and I needed a place to hole up for a while, to tend to myself and maybe save a little money while doing so.

I didn’t tell anyone in Providence I was moving until the night before I left. I threw myself a bar-crawl dirge with a small group of friends. By the time I pixied into Tortilla Flats to end the night, faithful Walter was my last friend standing and politely trying to convince me it was time for him to get a cab. He stepped outside to call and smoke, and I sat at the bar alone, finishing my cerveza. When I rummaged through my jacket pockets looking for gum or a mint, I found the Polaroid photo that had cost me five bucks.

Or a pain pill.

Walter led me out of the bar. “Are you okay? You gonna make it? Cab will be here in five. Let’s get you outside, get you some air. Hey, what’s that?”

“The photo of a rock star.”

The night had pooled outside the bar. He glanced at the picture. “Was that last month, at AS220? Oh shit, your last show with us, yeah? I’m sorry about that.” He went on, as he had earlier, about how that was no way to treat me and if it made me feel any better the new guitarist was shit and Walter was going to leave Antigone as soon as he had another landing spot. Walter did not look at the photo closely. If he had, he would’ve seen what I saw.

The creases in the leather, the zipper, the chrome buttons, and the shadow of the lapel impossibly swirled and fit together to make a face. Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. That fucking face was there. It was the same, but it was also different because it sort of looked like me. And I felt it staring from inside me.

You felt it staring at you from the photo, or you felt it inside you and it was staring?

In the cab I asked Walter to look at the photo again. He said it was too dark for him to see anything. When I smooshed the picture into his face and asked if he saw anything, he said, “Just you.”

Walter helped me get my apartment door open. I hugged him and thanked him, and I took off my jacket and held it out toward him. I said, “I want you to have this.”

He laughed. “What? Nah, man. Thank you, though.”

“Everything must go. You get the jacket.”

“You love that jacket. I’ve never seen you not in it. That jacket is you.”