We were in a band called Malibu Stacy and none of us could stand each other.
This is important context for what happened at Warped Tour, which was nothing and everything and the kind of day that only makes sense if you were twenty-two and had chunky blonde highlights and a press pass from an indie alt magazine nobody read and two friends you’d picked up the way you pick up habits — without thinking, and with consequences you wouldn’t calculate until much later.
Lex was the one who threw up. She was five-ten and over two hundred pounds and had the kind of personality that swung between maternal and violent with no discernible trigger. We’d met at a concert where Miley Cyrus’s brother’s punk band Metro Station was performing with 3OH!3, who’d gone to my high school back when they were just two guys from Boulder nobody took seriously and still don’t.
Justified.
Lex had elbowed her way to the front of the pit and then turned around and screamed at the girl behind her for breathing too close. I thought: I need to be near this person, for protection or entertainment, and I never figured out which.
Tori was the one who slept with the drummer. The ugliest member of Fall Out Boy and the least desired member in any band.
We called her I Rot, which was either a nickname or a diagnosis depending on the week. She was small and sharp and addicted to methamphetamine in the way that some people are addicted to methamphetamine — which is to say, comprehensively, and with the conviction that nobody had noticed. She had cheekbones that could cut paper, implants, bleach-blonde hair, and a voice like a rusted hinge, and she hated my singing voice with a specificity that suggested she’d thought about it carefully and arrived at her contempt through a process resembling peer review. Oddly enough, she was the drummer of Malibu Stacy. Oddly, despite being a groupie, she couldn’t keep a tempo. Only her job at the strip club she called “Dancing.”
We met working the same cocktail bar in Las Vegas. Hired for looks, not talent. Serving cocktails in knee-high boots and red bras.
I saw her as a stepping stone when she mentioned FOB. She saw me as a punching bag. But only I was the one with the press pass.
The three of us drove to Warped Tour in my car since nobody else owned one, where the air conditioning hadn’t died somewhere around I Rot’s third DUI, and the radio played Fall Out Boy and Cobra Starship and something by the Jonas Brothers that Tori said she hated and then sang every word of, and Lex went silent for two hours out of spite.
The California sun pressed down on the highway like a hand on a throat.
We arrived at eleven. By eleven-fifteen, I had my lanyard on and my voice recorder in my pocket and my hair was already separating into the specific texture of a woman who had straightened it that morning with a flat iron and was now watching her efforts dissolve in real time.
My first interview was William Beckett from The Academy Is. He was tall and beautiful and exactly as gracious as a frontman needs to be when a twenty-two-year-old girl with a magazine nobody reads is holding a recorder too close to his mouth. He answered every question. He made eye contact. He sarcastically talked about loving parking lots. I actually took him seriously.
The Cab was next. I don’t remember what I asked them. I remember the heat was starting to become a character in the day — not background, not atmosphere, but an active participant, pressing against every surface, turning the asphalt soft and the air into something you had to chew before you could breathe it.
Katy Perry was supposed to interview with us. She cancelled. But I saw her — walking through the backstage area with Travis McCoy, both of them in sunglasses, hand in hand, both of them radiating the specific energy of two famous people pretending not to be in a fight. She was wearing a dress that didn’t belong at Warped Tour and he was wearing the expression of a man who’d been told something in a parking lot that he was still processing. I filed this under gossip and moved on.
By two o’clock, Lex was gone.
Not missing. Just — absent. I’d been at the press tent doing my job, and somewhere between the second interview and the third water bottle I’d remembered to drink but Lex had forgotten to drink, Lex had disappeared into the crowd and then reappeared in the women’s bathroom, where she was throwing up with the force and volume of a person whose body had decided unilaterally that the day was over. Lots of people were throwing up into large lined trash bags. I opted for Gatorade, water, and frequent bathroom trips.
I didn’t stay in the bathroom with her. I knew she’d been standing in the sun for three hours without shade, without water, without the basic mammalian self-preservation instinct that tells you to sit down before your organs start filing complaints. I knew she was sick. I knew where she was.
But I was talking to Gabe Saporta.
Gabe Saporta, who was leaning against a barricade with a drink in his hand and his shirt unbuttoned to a latitude that suggested he’d done the math on exactly how much chest was optimal and had arrived at the correct answer. He was saying something about the tour and the heat and the kids in the crowd, and I was nodding and laughing and tilting my head at the angle that my chunky blonde highlights looked best at, and my friend was alone in a bathroom stall with her face in a toilet.
I didn’t hold her hair. I want to be clear about that. Not because I’m proud of it but because the version of this story where I’m a good friend doesn’t exist. And for me, that’s rare. I was twenty-two and a boy from Cobra Starship was looking at my cleavage and my friend was vomiting from heatstroke and I chose the cleavage.
By four o’clock, Pete Wentz punched a bouncer.
The bouncer had thrown a kid — actually thrown him, hands on the collar, out of the pit like a bag of laundry. The kid was maybe fifteen. Pete saw it from the side of the stage and came down and hit the bouncer in the jaw with the specific commitment of a man who’d been waiting all day for a reason.
“DON’T TOUCH MY FRIENDS!” he exclaimed. The fans lost their minds in support.
Security swarmed. Somebody was screaming. The fifteen-year-old was sitting on the ground with his hand on his face and the expression of a person who had just been rescued by Pete Wentz and did not know how to file this experience. The band slowly left the stage, confused.
I watched from ten feet away. Reporter instinct said: get closer. Self-preservation said: the bouncer is enormous and recently punched. Self-preservation won. By six, the day should have been over. We should have gotten in my car and driven home with the windows down and the radio on and the memory of a day that was chaotic and fun and nothing more.
Instead, I Rot had arranged a meeting with Andy Hurley. One they were used to.
I don’t know where. I don’t know how. I only know that at seven p.m., I Rot appeared at my elbow with the specific incandescence of a woman who had been handed a backstage pass by someone with forearms and a drum kit, and she said, “I’m going to his hotel room.”
“What?”
“Take me to his hotel room. Like, now. Like, immediately.”
Lex was sitting in the car with a wet cloth on her forehead, recovering from the heatstroke with the grim determination of a woman who refused to let a medical event prevent her from having opinions.
“Are you fucking serious,” Lex said.
“I don’t need your bullshit. I need a ride. Just drive me to the hotel we passed.”
I drove. Tori sat in the back texting with the frantic energy of a person negotiating terms. When we arrived at the hotel, she was out of the car before I’d put it in park.
“Wait here,” she said.
“For how long?”
She was already inside.
I waited in the car with Lex for forty-five minutes. The sun was setting. Lex had opinions about everything — the concert, Tori MIA for 90% of it, the heat, Pete Wentz, the quality of the food options at the food truck — and she delivered them with the relentless authority of a woman who believed that volume was a substitute for accuracy.
We smoked weed and waited.
Tori came out looking like a person who had just been handed something she’d always wanted and was already calculating what it would cost her.
The drive home was two hours. Tori sat in the back and told me my singing voice was garbage. Not once. Not as a joke. She critiqued it — my pitch, my tone, my breath control, my range — with the methodical cruelty of someone who needed to diminish another person in order to metabolize what she’d just done. She forced me to sing lines repeatedly. Even when perfect. She’d slept with the drummer of Fall Out Boy and she was sitting in the back of a car that wasn’t hers taking it out on my vocal cords.
Lex rolled her eyes at everything Tori said. They disagreed. Lex said I could sing. I can. I Rot said I couldn’t sing enough like Panic! At the Disco. That I was the weakest link in Malibu Stacy. That my voice cracked on the high notes and my breathing was wrong and I should stick to writing.
Spoiler. I’m not Brendon Urie. But I did make out with him once.
I drove and said nothing. The highway was dark and the radio was playing something by Taking Back Sunday that none of us acknowledged.
Three months later, Tori found out she was pregnant. Andy Hurley’s. She told me on the phone the way she told me everything — as a fact, without context, delivered at a speed that suggested she’d rehearsed it. She cried. He blamed her for planning it. She didn’t. She was just careless.
I said something I’ve never been able to take back. I called it throwing away a lottery ticket. I know. I know how that sounds. I know what it makes me. But I was twenty-two, she was just another of my abusers, and I understood fame the way I understood love — as a thing that happened to other people that you could maybe catch secondhand if you stood close enough and held still. A baby with a semi-famous father was, to my twenty-two-year-old brain, the closest she was ever going to get to the life she’d been pretending to live. I stick by it. She was cruel to be cruel. Never a true friend.
She didn’t keep it. I felt nothing for her after all the abuse. Tori was closer to a mild zephyr — a force applied from one direction until the only remaining option was to fade. I didn’t hold her hair either. I wouldn’t have even considered. Malibu Stacy broke up that winter. Not officially. We just stopped answering each other’s calls. Lex and I stayed friends, but the abuse got worse. Tori disappeared. I got a different magazine and then a different city and then a different life, and none of us ever played a show. Ever.
Only ever handed a demo to indie bands who probably laughed heartily. I saw 3OH!3 on TV two years later. They’d made it. Miley’s brother hadn’t. Katy Perry married and divorced and married again. Pete Wentz became a father. Andy Hurley kept drumming. Gabe Saporta retired from music and went into fashion. William Beckett made a solo album I listened to once in a rental car and then forgot about. Over a decade later, our reconnection wasn’t how I imagined.
Being warped never ended. I just stopped fighting it.
Camellia Peebles’s work has appeared in Maudlin House and Expat Press.