It was the summer they shot the Wallace brothers, the renaissance of a Los Angeles uninspired; when the genre of celebrity publication verged on extinction and no one had much to read about anymore. I’d driven out to a rather disorienting fragment of New England suburbia to write about a local brewery’s Battle of the Bands, in the hopes that I might find something there, anything, that could inspire one more publication of Rapture before the magazine went under entirely.
That is to say, I was given the same assignment as every other staff reporter.
The music was decidedly subpar and the selection of performers rather limited, so it was early in the evening when I began to wander. Some hours in, after a weak coffee and runny omelet at a highway-adjacent diner, I found myself driving down the long streets, counting homes and wondering what the rest of my life was going to be without writing. The windows were half down, and I swear the music was entirely in my head— everything I wished I could be writing about— until it started getting louder. And I decided to follow it.
I turned down a dead-end street lined with identical beige houses, and there it was— a two-car garage with one door thrown half-open, light pouring out in golden slices. Inside were two guys, backlit: one of them behind a drum kit like he was just killing time, skinny, loose, chewing gum and flipping a drumstick between his fingers between fills. Tapping out rhythms like it was just something to do and not everything. He barely looked up when I pulled the car over. That was Mark St. Mary, I’d later learn. Effortlessly cool, and a rockstar in his own right.
But the other was Robbie, and I’d never forget it.
T-shirt torn at the collar, fingers shredding a guitar duct-taped to hell. Singing like the mic owed him money. He looked right at me and didn't stop playing, just nodded once like he knew exactly what was happening, and he was ready.
I’d been sent to write about battle-of-the-bands hopefuls, beer-sticky pop-punk acts with names like Moose Garage and Vinyl Remedy. But this wasn’t hopeful, this was biblical.
I like to think he played harder for me that night, gave more of himself away when I showed up, because I showed up. And I think that’s half true— he was a performer even then and that was just how he behaved. But I wouldn’t know it until his first show, that it had never been about me, that he would’ve done it for anyone, that he would do it for anyone.
As for pure instinct, even then I had it. I had just struck gold. Standing in St. Mary’s driveway, fingering the notepad in my pocket and the tape recorder up my sleeve, I felt deep in my bones that this was going to save my career. But beyond that, there was this other feeling, quieter but heavier, that started building in my gut the first time I laid eyes on Robbie— one I’d never experienced before and would never quite shake in all the years since: a sinking certainty that it was never going to be just about me ever again.
Because that night made my career, yes, but it could’ve made anyone’s.
The moment was mine, sure, as much as it was St. Mary’s. But even more than that, even from the start, it was always going to be about Robbie.
The more I think about it, the more I’m sure he did play harder that night and gave the most of himself away that he ever would in one show. But it wasn’t for me, Scott Walker, back then a nobody-staffer for a nothing-magazine.
It was for whoever was going to hear about him next.
Robbie Rozak didn’t need me to discover him. He needed someone to document the inevitable.
The song ended while I was still figuring out what to say, slipping away peacefully like a death in the night. No applause, just the faint hum of the amp and the light tapping of Mark’s sticks against his thighs. Robbie didn’t say anything right away, just unplugged his guitar— a 70s Mustang, upon later examination— and set it down like it was sleeping.
I stepped away from the Taurus and the curb before I had time to lose my nerve, feeling like a wallflower pulled to the center of the dancefloor by the blush of a pretty girl even though prom had been almost a decade ago and the wall was the side of a Ford Taurus. I walked up the driveway with my notepad and tape recorder ready, but I didn’t take either out yet. I knew better. You don’t pull out the tools until someone asks what you’re building.
“Hey,” I said. “You guys have a name?”
Mark looked up, still tapping away absently with his sticks. Robbie glanced at me like he’d already decided how the conversation would go.
“No,” Robbie said. “Should we?”
I smiled. “Depends on whether you want anyone to remember you.”
“They will,” he said flatly, but without any bite. It was just factual, as if he were telling me the time of day.
I pointed at the guitar. “You write?”
Robbie nodded. “Everything.”
“Good.” I shifted my weight, letting the silence hang for a second. “I write too. For Rapture.”
That pulled a reaction: not quite awe, but maybe interest. Rapture was going out of style anyway, but even if it hadn’t been, things would’ve gone the same. Robbie tilted his head slightly, like a cat hearing something under the floorboards. His hair, blonde and getting long, stained darker with sweat, tilted with him in damp strings.
“I’m not here officially,” I added. “Yet. They sent me to cover a beer-sponsored indie gig. But this…” I gestured around the garage. “This is better than anything I heard there.”
Robbie looked at Mark. Mark shrugged, still chewing gum as if it was the only thing keeping him awake, but he’d stopped twirling his stick. Robbie turned back to me.
“What do you want?”
“To write about you,” I said. “Profile, photos. Something clean, and raw if you’re willing. First piece of real music journalism I’ve gotten to pitch in months, and I think you’re worth it.”
He didn’t smile, but I could see the idea calcify in his brain. His face gave everything away back then, and it was still nothing I could’ve expected. A tiny crease formed between his brows, his expression closer to strategic than excited. He was already thinking four steps ahead. I liked that.
“You got a name?” he asked.
“Scott Walker.”
He nodded again, slowly. “We’ll remember it.”
He didn’t ask for my number, and he didn’t offer his. He just turned back to his amp and fiddled with a cable, silently telling me we were done.
And maybe the conversation was over, but as I walked back to the car, I knew exactly what had just happened— not a meeting; not an interview. A transaction.
I’d seen something undeniable because Robbie Rozak had let me see it. I owed him the only thing I had left to give:
Words.
I called Stacy from the motel bathroom, crouched on the edge of the tub with the door shut and the fan running, as if that could mask the desperation in my voice. I dialed her desk number from the room phone, an actual phone, plastic and beige with a coiled cord stretched too thin.
“Let me guess,” she said, not even bothering to hide the yawn. “The IPA guys weren’t exactly headliner material?”
“They were fine,” I lied, and I almost kept going. I was itching with an alien urge to spin whatever story I liked, to tell her they all lit their guitars on fire, that one of them had a heroin problem and a poet’s jawline. A last spasm of my own creativity. But even that was already bleeding into Robbie and his band, still nameless back then, the guitars wrapped in duct tape and the poet sweaty and blonde. “But I found something better.”
There was a pause on the other end, long enough for me to hear the low hum of her radiator and a faint click, maybe of her pen but more likely her lighter.
“Better how?”
“Better like biblical.”
That got a pause.
“Scott,” she said carefully, “we’re closing in six weeks. I don’t need God. I need a story.”
“I’m telling you— this is worth it. The sound is raw, the frontman is magnetic, the drummer plays like he’s asleep and still makes you want to cry. They don’t have a name yet. No PR, no label, nothing. It’s a blank slate. I could be the first.”
“You were sent to cover a brewery’s vanity project,” she said. “Now you’re calling me two days before your deadline to pitch me a garage band with no demo? Did you even start the piece we’re actually paying you to write?”
“Stacy, I swear. There’s something there. The frontman, he’s got that thing. That unnameable, unbearable thing that makes you want to write until your hands fall off.”
Another, longer pause.
“He looked at me like he knew why I was there,” I said quietly. “Like he’d been waiting.”
She groaned, low. “Jesus Christ, Walker, are you in love with him?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe I just finally saw something worth writing about.”
I imagined my editor sitting at her desk in that half-empty Manhattan office, surrounded by ghosted covers and unpaid invoices. I imagined her calculating: how much time she had left, how much space was worth wasting on my gut feeling.
“Scott, you haven’t filed anything usable in months. We’ve got one, maybe two issues left. I’ve got interns faxing promo mailers and our fact-checker just quit to join a ska band— and you want me to gamble print space on a story about two guys who haven’t even made a tape?”
“I don’t want you to gamble,” I said. “I want you to let me do it.”
She didn’t speak for a long while.
I traced the cracked grout between the bathroom tiles with the toe of my boot, watched mildew sweat down the mirror. The phone cord was stretched taut across my lap. I’d started sweating somewhere around “he looked at me like he knew why I was there,” and I wasn’t sure if it was heat or shame.
There’s a special kind of quiet you only get on the phone with someone who’s deciding your future. Dead air hung around me, but I swear I could hear Stacy Fry alive on the other end, thinking while she breathed, weighing whether this was just another of my hail marys or something with real blood in it, hot and throbbing and touchable.
I thought about Robbie, though I still didn’t know his name then and neither did she. He’d promised he’d remember mine.
“If you want to write it,” she said finally, “write it. I’ll look at it, and if it’s any good, it might make it to print.”
That was it. No enthusiasm, no budget extension, not even a formal assignment. I was almost insulted on behalf of the boys, but then again, it was the 90s. No one bet on the next big thing until it already had a number on the charts and a breakdown in, well, whatever was going to replace Rapture.
I extended the room for one more week and ate dry cereal in the lobby while I wrote notes on the back of a map I’d grabbed from the lobby, the Battle of the Bands long forgotten. I tried to remember the way the singer's voice cracked on the high note— like it wasn’t a flaw but a feature, like he wanted to break in front of someone. Like he wanted someone to watch.
The next night, I drove back to the house
I loveee the narrative voice Christine, everything feels so vivid and the dialogue is so interesting, I’m hooked !!!
me patiently waiting chapter two (feral)