Brendan Dude

I got in contact with Luke and Ren and Soria immediately after discussing Lindsay’s idea, and thankfully, all of them were totally up for it. I told them about the whole “helping-out-depressed-people” and mentioned David, and before I could even finish they’d always say yes. Which was awesome. I didn’t want their pity, but it was nice to know that they were still thinking about him and me and all of that crap that went down in January.

And as it turns out, Lindsay really had her sights set on this thing. Within a week after talking with her, I got an email from her (we exchanged emails that Sunday) saying how she already came up with a name for the event/foundation/fundraiser/whatever she wanted to call it.

She wanted to call it “Speak Up!”

Suddenly I had a thousand memories racing through my head, memories of nights when David tossed and turned in bed while I was kept awake by his constant shuffling; days where I’d walk into our room and he’d be sitting on his bed, listening to music or writing without a peep. Nights where I heard him crying and never bothered to ask him what was wrong. And I felt like shit, but at the same time, I couldn’t help but smirk. It was like she knew everything. And the way she silently said volumes about David, I wouldn’t have doubted it.

I have to admit that I didn’t exactly have high hopes for this ever coming together the way it did so fantastically. Things don’t work like that. I’d learned to not expect much out of things that are promised. That way I don’t get disappointed. But I kept my expectations low, and man, Lindsay must’ve grown wings for this thing, ‘cause what she did completely soared above them.

When I told the rest of Plaster Caster about it, they all jumped on the bandwagon and asked me every day how it was coming along since I was the only one out of them all who met Lindsay and knew her. So one day at school, at lunch, they were hounding me with the usual questions and throwing ideas at me (Soria had suggested renting a tiger from the Jacksonville Zoo, which I didn’t immediately doubt). And I got kind of fed up and said, “Why the hell don’t you guys just come over to my house and I’ll invite Lindsay over? Then you can meet her and talk about it for real.”

And that’s exactly what happened.

All of us – me, Joey, Ren, Soria, Luke, and Lindsay – chilled at my house that Saturday, just bouncing ideas and details off of each other. Some of the suggestions they came up with were a little weird, some hit a little close to the ballpark, and some were gold. And the thing that was really awesome was how well we seemed to work together, the six of us. I mean, I already knew our band was awesome at coming up with stuff, but throwing Joey and Lindsay into the mix only made it better.

What was cool was how immediately they seemed to pick up on how she communicated, too, and how they didn’t even really point it out. This time, though, Lindsay brought a big dry-erase board along with her, not only just to maybe jot down ideas on a bigger surface, but to write easier. By the end of it, the board was stained with scrapped ideas and kept ones, black streaks streaming across her fingers despite the numerous paper towels provided to wipe them down with.

There were so many suggestions being thrown out at once, and she insisted on writing them all down (she mouthed out something about not leaving anything behind). Things had to be cut. First of all, we cut Soria’s suggestion of renting a tiger, and then we scrapped calling Katy Perry to come play.

Lindsay told us that she was able to get in contact with the people at the Jacksonville Landing since that place was known to host a bunch of events including concerts and art shows. It seemed like a little bit of a long shot at the time, but with some work, she was able to book us. Not to mention that the Jacksonville Landing had a rather specific way of getting your band there.

Not only did she have to get a picture of us, Plaster Caster, but we also had to give the place our Facenook and FlySpace (we used both), a set list, and the contact information of our “booking agent.” We didn’t know what the hell that was, so we just went along with saying Joey was our booking agent as well as our manager. It worked, apparently. He was into it.

One little fly in the ointment was getting a CD of a recent live recording, which was also required. When we played gigs, we tried to get people to put away the cell phones and cameras and just focus on the music and the moment. We thought we were screwed – how the hell do we make a live CD if we don’t have any live music recorded?

Well, there was this little magical thing called Cooltube. If we typed ‘Plaster Caster’ in the search engine there, more than a few live videos came up. And to our surprise, somebody had posted the entire gig a few weeks back at those twins’ party. The one with the impromptu “Bones” cover. Each video was separated by song, and all in all there were around fifteen songs, so it’d be perfect. As it turns out, the person who videotaped us was a girl who went to school with Joey, and he was able to talk her into ripping the audio off and sending us the video-less songs. I don’t know how she did it, since she was a blonde who seemed a little dim, but what mattered was that we did, in fact, have a live CD that sounded pretty damn good for an amateur recording.

Lindsay also told the people in Jacksonville about how she was planning to make it into a fundraiser-type deal with a few other bands playing, and the ones in charge were all into it when they found out that it concerned David Veins, the teenager who took his own life mere months ago down in Claymore.

Luke messaged Fiberlight over FlySpace and asked if they’d be willing to play alongside us at the Speak Up! thing, and they accepted happily. I asked the dudes in Kickback if they were up for it, and they, too, agreed. A mix of publicity and helping a bro out? Hell yeah! People down there weren’t mean.

And Kickback even told us that they knew this other band up in some rinky-dink town in Georgia that they could ask to play, too – their name was, like, I Am You Are, or something. I told Lindsay about it, and she declared, “The more, the merrier!” Four relatively-well-known local-ish bands playing in one gig for a good cause was bound to end well.

We’d even joked about rounding up Red Jumpsuit Apparatus and Lynyrd Skynyrd to help us out. Maybe even Yellowcard or Shinedown, even. They were from around here. But we were just little chumps compared to how they were played on radio stations around the country, touring the world and having drunken rednecks request their biggest hit at every concert they ever go to. (And God knows how embarrassing it’d be if somebody thought you sucked so bad that they’d rather hear you do a cover than an original song.)

The first step - after rounding up the bands and actually getting the OK from Jacksonville Landing to hold the Speak Up! event – was publicizing it all.

Every few days Plaster Caster put together a CoolTube bulletin advertising to our subscribers the show and the background. We’d fill them in on how things were going, give snippets of Kickback and Fiberlight and I Am You Are songs to get them more interested, and even give updates about how we were even getting an article in the local newspaper about the event.

Oh! And the flyers. Man, those flyers. Every frickin’ telephone pole from Claymore to Orange Park to Green Cove and back was plastered (pardon the pun) with them. It was just a black and white ad with the bands’ names written in big letters with info about where and when it was gonna be, and since that made it real cheap to print them, we had a ton made. And it paid off, too. Claymore Middle even gave us the okay to tack on some of them to certain areas of the school as well.

Tickets for the Speak Up! concert cost ten bucks. Lindsay said that all of the profits would go into renting out an old building somewhere near Claymore and turning it into a sort of rehabilitation house or therapy center that she’d run. She really had her head on straight with this. She had her sights set, and even though I didn’t talk with her much about David other than that first time I met her, I could tell that it all meant a lot to her. Being able to turn such a shitty thing into a beautiful thing.

And it meant a lot to me, to be a part of that beautiful thing. To not only be able to be up onstage right by the river and play with my band, but to know in my heart that it’d all be worth it past that performance high I got. Nobody had ever taken a walk in my shoes, but it was nice knowing that they cared. Even Joey, who was working real hard with Lindsay and helping her out to Hell and back getting everything right, even when the people at the Jacksonville Landing took over a lot of stuff.

April 10th was the gig, a sunny Friday evening. We’d get there at around five in the afternoon and start setting up, Joey’s van carrying our gear as usual. Kickback and Fiberlight said they had their own rides, and right after we got there, they did too – both in big vans that were also crammed up to the rim with their crap.

I Am You Are came at around six, which was understandable to us since they came all the way from northern Georgia just to play this gig, which was pretty cool of them. We’d never met them up until that point, but they were about ten years older than all of us, a pretty normal bunch of adults. And the funny part was that they had a girl guitarist as well. I think their singer wanted to bang her, too. Weird how that happens.

My parents, Ren’s folks, Luke’s parents, and Soria’s dad even showed up, too. I can’t say that I was expecting them to be there, but it was nice, nonetheless. They even took us out to dinner before the show and after setup. It was just us – the Plaster Caster family – the members, the manager, and the people who made us by having sex with each other. Made me feel like things were closer knit than they already were.

“You better play your best out there,” Soria’s dad – er, Mr. Zach, as he insisted – had said, winking at us.

“No problem,” I smiled back.

Holy shit, it was a good show, too.

When we got back to the Landing, Kickback was doing a sound check. It was only six-thirty and the show was supposed to start at around seven, having Kickback play first before I Am You Are came on. Then Fiberlight would do a few songs, and then we’d hit the ball outta the park with our stuff and make it all worthwhile for the people who shelled out ten bucks a ticket.

Plaster Caster, Fiberlight, and I Am You Are just hung out behind the stage while Kickback was doing their thing. Fiberlight was mentally prepping themselves and trying to gear up for the quickest setup possible, and IAYA was…well, they were just chilling. They struck me as that sort of band that was so laid back and mellow that everybody liked ‘em.

Lisa, Fiberlight’s singer, was softly singing hushed lyrics to herself while her bandmates were practicing riffs and beats the best they could while a pop-punk band was playing loudly over them.
Meanwhile, I was speaking over the loud rasp of Kickback’s squealing guitars to get to Soria, Luke, and Ren, but it wasn’t really working that well.

“I’m really excited!” I yelled.

“What?!” they’d shout back.

They were like one of those bands that sprouted up right after blink-182 broke up, Kickback was. Except they weren’t whiny and didn’t puss out on loudness if it interfered with the singer’s beautifully wimpy voice. They were louder than shit, they were hella proud of their loudness, and they had a distinct way of getting everybody in the crowd to dance and just forget their problems, if only for a moment.

Although they had quite a slew of original songs, they were mostly all under three minutes long. As soon as one ended, they powered into another similar-sounding one, and the crowd didn’t even know it. They just kept on dancing and having a good time. Kickback was just doing what seventh graders did best – jump around with naïve smiles on their faces and get so annoying after about ten minutes.

Not that I hated them or anything. I just wasn’t real big on that kind of music.

When Kickback was done, Fiberlight went up and did their half-hour of playing. And man, they were good at setting up – it was only five minutes and they broke into their first song “Chernobyl, Oh Chernobyl.” (Yeah, didn’t make any sense to me either.) David used to listen to these two cute Canadian chicks when he was alive – which ultimately made me listen to them too – and Fiberlight sounded a little like them. That indie kind of soft chick-rock stuff. That band’s name escapes me now, though. I always forget it ‘cause it’s so hard to remember.

But while Kickback hooked all of the kids in the crowd, Fiberlight was busy swaying the older teens and young adults there, even the full-blown adults. They weren’t loud or offending to the ears, and they had that sort of ambient aura to them, but every so often they kicked out a rocking jam and set the place on fire.

The sun was beginning to set over the St. John’s River. The sky was painted red and pink with little cloud streaks strewn across; clear spring air felt fresh in my lungs. It would only be a few more weeks until the humidity of Florida would overpower the unusually cool weather and I enjoyed it, drinking it all in. When I looked out at the riverside, those pre-performance jitters went away. We’d go on sometime around 8:45 or until I Am You Are was outta songs. Until then we’d just be hanging out.

I was caught in a trance for a while until I felt a hand wrap around my arm and pull me back into reality.

Lindsay was behind me. “Is the show good?” she mouthed out.

“It’s awesome,” I said back, smiling. And I hated pity, I hated everything about it – feeling it, receiving it – but I couldn’t help but to pity her a little bit. She wasn’t able to hear the awesomeness. In a couple of months, maybe she’d be able to.

Before we knew it, Fiberlight was done with their set and I Am You Are was up there, playing their beachy pop-rock with such precision that I mistook them for coming straight out of a time machine from 1999. They sounded like one of those bands you’d hear blasting through the speakers at Allister or American Weasel or something. A little generic, but good nonetheless.

We let ‘em play for around forty-five minutes since their songs were longer than Fiberlight’s and Kickback’s, and when we heard their music on their FlySpace, we knew they’d appeal more to the folks here in Jacksonville. They did – they got an applause a little bigger than Fiberlight and Kickback, which was neat since they came all the way from Georgia and nobody here knew who the hell they were.

We, Plaster Caster, scurried onstage when they were done and got a pretty big hand from the crowd as we set up quicker than them. And I was putting together my drum set with the help of Joey when I heard Joey say, “Can I say a couple of things before you guys start playing?”

I looked up at him in confusion. “What do you mean?”

He sighed and closed his eyes, shaking the hair out of his face. “I don’t…I don’t know. Maybe say a few things about this. The event. Lindsay told me she wanted to tell everybody about what it’s really about but she can’t talk, and I wanted to…like, yeah.”

“Oh, man, you’re hitting on your dead brother’s girlfriend. That’s low,” I smiled, punching his arm.

Joey turned bright pink. “I’m helping her out as a friend. You know I want Luke’s dick.”

“Whoa, what?”

“Nothing,” he grinned cheesily, turning around and standing up. “Anyway, I’mma go say a few things into the microphone.”

I watched from behind as he trotted up to the front of the stage and poked Ren’s shoulder, who was standing at the mic. They exchanged a few words and then Ren moved out of the way to let him speak. Joey pumped up the crowd by raising his arms in the air.

“Hi,” he said into the mic, echoing over the Landing, “I’m Joey. I’m Brendan’s brother – the drummer back there. And I’m Plaster Caster’s manager. Y’all know me.”

Our fans cheered him on. Joey showed up in our video bulletins on CoolTube a lot of the time recently.

“And I was David’s brother too, which this is sort of all about. And I wanna say that it’s awesome that all of you guys came out here today to help out, and even though that sounds cheesy, it’s true. But I’m not the brains behind this – David’s girlfriend is, Lindsay. She’s the one who came up with all of this and organized nearly all of it,” he continued, sounding a little awkward at first but eventually warming into it.

He turned around and motioned for Lindsay to come out. She was standing at the side of the stage near the back, looking surprised at the mention of her name. But she went along with Joey’s beckoning and came out, flipping her hair back and generally looking flustered and embarrassed.

He threw his arm over her shoulder, looking so much taller than her even though he was only a few inches taller than me. She hesitantly waved to the hundreds of people gathered before the stage, smiling and blushing. I felt like I was in some bad movie that was cornier than poo, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was how nice it felt to have all of that cheesy happiness circulating in a place that wasn’t exactly the happiest place on earth.

“Anyways,” Joey spoke back into the microphone, “it really means a lot, all of this help. So let me shut up and let these guys play!”

He stepped back and scuttled offstage with Lindsay at his side, still holding her around the shoulder, and the applause got even louder.

Ren looked back at us and smiled, counting off his fingers to signal the start of our first song on the setlist. And then we exploded into “Anonymous,” never looking back at the past and powering through the present, looking with eager eyes into the future.

We played indoor gigs a lot (hell, with the exception of that shitty Pi Day gig, I think all of them had been indoors), but not really outdoors. This time, the music echoed into the night so much better. We could play as loud as we wanted and didn’t have to face complaints from the neighbors about it. And I liked playing loud. It was sort of like telling the world that we were there and weren’t going away anytime soon.

And when the sky turned dark with all of the stars dotting it like a backlit canvas, I truly felt like I was home. When I noticed our parents in the crowd near the front of the stage, I felt like a kid, but in a good way. When I felt the sweat slide down my back and clash off of the toms and cymbals, I knew I was born to do this, just like I’d always known.

I thought about everything good that could ever come out of this, because I couldn’t think of a single bad thing that could have resulted. Maybe some recording agent would see it and sign us and rocket us into stardom, maybe Speak Up! would become a worldwide thing that would make Lindsay the world’s biggest philanthropist or something. I didn’t know what was going to happen to us. And at that moment, I felt like I didn’t care – like I’d taken a trip back before January ever happened and lived without thinking about everything that had gone wrong in my life.

That one thing that went wrong that seemed like a million things in one.

But with that roar of the biggest crowd we’d had yet, a mixture of kids and adults and people we grew up with, all of that pain lifted away. It’s funny how that happens. How you spend such a long time carrying it all on your back and then for just a brief little second, it feels like people are helping you carry it and lift it away, way up into the sky, past the moon, into the stars, rocketing through the universe at a million miles an hour.