Jake Lourim

It’s just after 9 p.m. on a Sunday night in my childhood home in Troy, Michigan. It’s a quiet, simple existence when I go home from school at the University of Michigan. My parents, 16-year-old sister and I eat a nice, home-cooked meal at our dining room table, then move to the couch and turn on the television. They stick to their sleep schedules — dozing off within a half-hour of turning on the TV — and I stick to mine, flipping channels into the middle of the night.

 

On this particular evening, my sister has just gone to bed, leaving me on the couch watching the University of Illinois basketball team finish off a win over the University of Minnesota. A fire burns in the fireplace, but otherwise all is peaceful. The trees stand still in the dark of winter, and rarely a headlight flashes outside on my street. My dad is outstretched on the living room carpet, fast asleep, and my mom is out, too, while sitting up on the couch.

 

It’s the first weekend of my school’s Spring Break, and tonight my parents and I have made plans to go out. Breaking what seems to be our cardinal sin of moving from the couch after 9 p.m., we’re planning on going to see my 19-year-old brother, Harrison, play an electronic dance music show at a late-night club in Ferndale.

 

My parents and I stick to this quiet, at-home routine pretty consistently, but my brother is the outlier. Just a freshman, he rarely comes home from school, preferring the faster college life. The only time he came home in his first semester was for Thanksgiving, and after three days he got antsy and was chomping at the bit to go back to school.

 

At least twice a month, his manager will pick him up at his dorm room and drive him to a club, where he plays a show in the middle of the night before his manager drives him back to campus. That life’s not for my parents or me, but tonight we’ve decided to give it a try. When I first texted my brother about the idea to go see him, I asked him if he had any shows over Spring Break, to which he replied yes, in disbelief that I meant I actually wanted to come to one. I asked where; he told me and asked why I was asking — still incredulous. Finally I told him my idea, which excited him.

 

“IM SO HAPPY,” he texted back (music, not punctuation, is his strong suit). “IT WILL TOTALLY WORK.” I wasn’t so sure.

 

“They’re future bass shows not trap so it’ll be a much calmer happier vibey environment and the music will be closer to Mario/ethereal brightness rather than the filthy trap goodiness you’re used to.”

 

Now he’s ventured off into his own foreign language. What’s future bass? As opposed to past or present bass? Did he make up the word “vibey”? Who’s Mario, and what’s ethereal brightness? And I’m assuming he means “filthy” in the colloquial, positive sense rather than the traditional, negative sense?

 

Here the differences between my brother and the rest of my family begin to expose themselves. There were at least a half-dozen words in that text message that meant nothing to me. In regards to music, I’ve had two regular encounters that come to mind: first, my brother’s deafening bass sound that vibrated through the floor in our basement growing up; second, the various upbeat songs that comprise the warm-up music before sporting events. That’s about it.

 

Somewhere Harrison ventured off the beaten path, adopting eclectic, high-paced music that befitted his eclectic, high-paced personality. And then he left everyone else in his dust, me with my buttoned-up, consistent routine, my parents with their normal jobs and suburban lifestyles.

 

Harrison isn’t far from us literally — Ann Arbor is about 50 miles from our home, and our entire family remains very close — but he is mentally. He’s always thinking, always moving and usually talking. He comes up with ideas I wouldn’t even think of. He once tried to prove to me that one plus one equaled one (sure, he was wrong, but he had the guts to try it). Exceedingly optimistic, he once exclaimed that he got an email telling him one of his songs would play on CBS radio, when in fact the email said if he sent in the song it might be entered into a drawing to have a chance to play on CBS radio. I can say with no condescension whatsoever that reality doesn’t hold him back.

 

The differences are accentuated in music taste. I don’t have a single song on my iPhone, except for the ones that sync through my family’s iTunes account, which includes a mix of my parents’ slow, peaceful classical music and my brother’s thunderous techno music. His underground trap scene is millions of miles away, but tonight we will journey into it — if I can pry my parents from their nightly slumber.

 

As I get ready to go to the show, I contemplate whether to wake them, but my movements decide for me. My parents slowly begin to stir, and when I tell them what time it is I ask if they still want to go. They do.

 

They spend a brief moment considering what to wear before deciding either that what they have on is fine or that they’ll be out of place no matter what they wear. Around 9:30 we pulled out of our circular driveway, passed the dead end next to our house on the left and started toward Ferndale.

 

I don’t know Ferndale well — my only prior memory of being there is covering a basketball game at the high school years ago. (I remember Troy beat Ferndale on a last-minute, game-winning shot by a diminutive guard named Larry Sylvester; I don’t, meanwhile, remember the last time my brother watched a basketball game from start to finish.) The club, the Grasshopper, is about 20 minutes away at 9 Mile and Woodward in a young, working-class area just north of Detroit. We arrive and park across an alley from the club.

 

“Are we sure about this?” my dad says.

 

***

 

We walk toward the door anyway, none of us willing to renege on our earlier promise. Most of the street is dark and quiet for the night. Just outside the club, two people are smoking next to a heavyset bouncer who checks our IDs. He draws a big ‘X’ in permanent marker on each of my hands (I’m only 20) and lets us through. Harrison has us on the guest list for the show, so we get in free. It doesn’t dawn on me until later that this is the first concert I’ve ever attended.

 

When we go inside, I immediately see a big screen on the opposite wall with the video quality of a department store security camera. It shows my brother playing in the basement of the club. He has just started his 10 p.m. set, my parents’ bedtime long since passed.

 

We cautiously inch down the steps, following the familiar music that used to reverberate through the walls of our house before Harrison went off to college. The basement isn’t unlike one I’d find at a friend’s ordinary college house party: drab, worn-down and uncarpeted. The room is pitch-black except for a few small strobe lights on the ceiling and a huge, fluorescent orange grasshopper lit on the wall behind Harrison. My brother wears his usual jeans and a T-shirt, this one with the number 808 on it in big lettering. What’s that? I wonder. Telephone area code, maybe?

 

My brother sees us and grins from ear to ear, then pauses to give hugs to all of us. Eight people are spread throughout the room, with no seats except for a couch in the back and another in the front near the equipment setup. Both appear to be for VIPs — one is roped off — but there aren’t yet too many Ps of any kind, so we sit down.

​

The sound, of course, is deafening. It doesn’t ebb and flow, either. There is no buildup or high point, only the bass drops and the upbeat tunes in between. I can literally feel the sound pulsating off my heart.

 

As I sit down next to my parents, I realize that the idiom “sticking out like a sore thumb” doesn’t even begin to describe what we’re doing there, even compared to the few people in attendance. Along with my light blue jeans and sneakers, I’ve unwittingly worn a navy blue sweatshirt with my college newspaper’s logo over a navy blue T-shirt with my college newspaper’s masthead — making my parents and me, for the duration of the night, the only people in the audience wearing solid colors.

 

I’ve brought my reporter’s notebook to take notes on my surroundings, so I jot down a few things while I’m sitting, though every so often I realize how stupid I look sitting in a club with a notebook and pen. My parents are content to sit on the couch along the wall in the corner of the room. I’m content to stand along another wall in the opposite corner of the room. The descriptor lame comes to mind. Boring, too.

 

I head over there to get a look at what Harrison is doing, but to be honest, I don’t even know what to write in my notepad. He’s got his computer in front of him with what appears to be a list of songs — though I haven’t yet noticed one song end and another begin — and a series of squiggly lines and dials. He’s got one mixing board-type contraction with a series of dials, switches and buttons. They all have vague labels: Cue, In, Out, Play, Sync and the numbers one through four. Again I’m confused. Cue, like the cue ball in pool? In and Out, like the directions? And Play? If he can hit Play, what’s he need all the other ones for?!

 

I stand on the wall, then inch toward Harrison, trying to ask questions and learn more without bothering him. Each time I remove myself from the wall, though, it feels like a magnet draws me back. I’ve seen this wall before, but in other places — little-league baseball camps, high school dances, even college parties with some of my best friends. The further away I am from the action, the closer I am to my comfort zone. Harrison is good on stage; I prefer it here.

 

Figuring I won’t be able to explore without disrupting, I walk back to the other side of the room and sit down next to my parents. My dad has bought a beer for himself and a glass of wine for my mom. (He later told me they only had one kind of wine, and it looked like it had been open for years.)

 

A few more people have joined the room. Right in front of us, one guy in his late teens or early 20s frantically twirls a string with light-up bulbs at the end. He wears his long hair in a ponytail, with a patchy beard and a black shirt with white letters reading, “CREW: No Hassles.”

 

My parents and I sit silently (we’re in awe of our surroundings, but we also wouldn’t be able to hear each other if we did talk). A few minutes later, a half-dozen people strut into the room and join String-Twirling Guy in an excited embrace. By this point, the crowd has at least tripled. Most of the audience members stand and bob their heads along with the music. I take that as a good sign. As more people stream into the room, the cast of characters multiplies. Almost all have long hair; some wear bandanas. All wear casual, baggy, multicolored clothing, most with unfamiliar designs, some tie-dyed. I think about going up to one of them and striking up a conversation, but I don’t know where to start. If I don’t have anything in common with another person in this club from the same gene pool as me, then I certainly don’t have anything in common with them. What school did they go to? Did they catch the basketball game earlier? What did they think of Rick Reilly’s Sports Illustrated cover story on the Golden State Warriors? I decided to stick to my couch.

 

***

 

It’s not that I’m not used to being out this late, just that I’m not used to being here this late. At 10 p.m. on any Sunday outside of Spring Break, I’d be working as one of the sports editors at my college newspaper, The Michigan Daily. The newsroom is much closer to my comfort zone, at least close enough that I don’t have to stay off to the side all night. There I’m in my element the same way my brother is in his at the Grasshopper. I show up at 6 p.m. with my friends and do my job. Around 1 a.m. our Editor in Chief makes a 10-second phone call to the printer, hangs up and exclaims, “We made a paper!” We stay in the newsroom and hang out, or we grab some late-night food, or we just go back to our houses and sleep. We show up at 6 p.m. the next day and start again.

 

It’s comfortable for me, and I can’t imagine the other extreme — spending an evening out at a club, dancing and singing, with no apparent plans for what to do the next night — but I can’t help but wonder if that’s what everyone else at the Grasshopper would think of me.

 

I tend to dress up more than I need to for work, show up compulsively early for things and in general play things close to the vest. Admittedly, while I don’t necessarily look down on people who do it the other way, I sometimes don’t understand them. Maybe that’s how the dancing, tie-dye-wearing, easygoing 20-year-olds in that club would feel watching me in my natural habitat. What’s the point in dressing like that? Showing up early is a waste of time! What are you doing at work at 1 a.m.?

 

I guess I don’t have an answer. The Daily is work, but it never feels like work. I have plenty of quirks and odd routines, most of which relate to being a perfectionist. At work, I have my own way of formatting my story list (capitalized sport name, colon, author). At home, I have my own way of making a turkey sandwich for lunch (turkey, cheese, turkey, cheese, turkey, mustard). At school, I have my own way of writing my notes (class, date, topic, with dashes — not slashes — in the date).

 

But they all feel right to me. They’ve always more or less worked for me, and I’ve never felt any strong urge to spend time far outside that comfort zone. I grew up like a normal kid with a normal family in an objectively normal city, and it suited me well enough that I was spending Spring Break in Troy, where the city shuts down around 10 p.m.

 

Maybe at some point, way back down the line, my brother was like that too. But unlike for me, at some point that stopped working for him. When he was 13, he began to suffer from an undiagnosed stomach illness, which crippled an otherwise normal, happy kid. After a while — by my estimation, somewhere between when he lost count of how many doctors had failed him and when he realized he might never be cured — it started affecting him mentally. When he wasn’t in the doctor’s office or in the hospital, he was downstairs in the basement, trying to find himself. Finally, his senior year, he caught a break and got into Michigan, where he’s a freshman now. While I found the Daily, he found the music school, and he’s happy there now. For me, the area around my house and my old high school are where I had some of the best memories of my life. For him, they’re where he struggled, and until that Sunday night I don’t know that I truly understood why. It just wasn’t for him. The Grasshopper was. That’s how we ended up there.

 

But my brother and I didn’t always hug as soon as we saw each other, as we did that night. Years ago, we hated each other. We bickered all the time, and we competed at everything. When we played on the same baseball team, I’d try to hit like he did on the baseball field, but I wasn’t nearly as strong; he’d try to think like I did off the field, but he didn’t know nearly as much about the game. It wasn’t until we were teenagers that we realized that we were just different, and that was OK, that if we just let each other do our own thing without judging, everything was easier. We’re extremely close now.

 

My childhood went pretty much as well as I could have asked. From the time my brother got sick, his never had a chance. When I covered sports in high school and then in college, I found my own place, one that was no one else’s but mine. When he played music in our basement and then in these clubs, he found something I wasn’t a part of.

 

In some way, maybe I had an accelerated version of that transformation with the other people in the audience that night. There was no bickering or competition, but I didn’t understand them, and they didn’t understand me and my blue Daily sweatshirt and my reporter’s notepad. I’ll admit at times I rushed to judgment — It’s Sunday night; don’t you have to work in the morning? — but everyone else there was just trying to find their own way.

 

For me, it’s words. I spend my time telling stories, sometimes of sports, but usually of the people involved in them, of their victories and defeats and failures and comebacks.

 

For everyone else there, it’s music. They stayed in that club for hours, dancing the night away without a care in the world. That was what they did for fun, what they did to express themselves, and it certainly appeared to work for them. And who was I to judge that?

 

***

 

 

More characters have arrived at the Grasshopper to pass their evening. A few people off to the side take turns smoking an e-cigarette. A girl in a short, light-colored dress balances a hula hoop. String-Twirling Guy No. 1 has handed off the reins to a new String-Twirling Guy with unkempt hair and mismatched clothes.

 

The crowd swells to about 50 at 10:45 and then about 80 at 11:15. Another guy started moving around the equipment area where my brother was playing, preparing to take over for him at 11:30. A few minutes before, he and my brother exchanged nonverbal cues. “One more song?” my brother mouthed. The other guy nodded.

 

Harrison finished up, and by that time, the place was hopping, with almost 100 people in a basement no more than a third of the size of ours at home. Harrison shut his computer, packed it into his backpack and left the equipment area. He walked toward my parents, who were sitting in the corner of the room, and they hugged him again. Everyone else went about their business as if nothing had changed.

 

A few minutes later, my brother’s manager, Trent — who had probably spent more time with Harrison than my parents had since the school year started — came over and joined us. He shook my parents’ hands, and they started talking with him as if he were their child’s new boyfriend or girlfriend. He looked more like a normal kid than most people in the audience, and he spoke well.

 

After they finished with him, I started asking questions, though mine were out of sheer interest. What does his job entail? He reserves musicians time to play at clubs around metro Detroit. How does he set up the times? The clubs he works with will pay him to bring in talent, and he’ll ask his clients when they want to play. How long has he been doing it? About five years. Where’d he grow up? Walled Lake.

 

There. Like me in some ways, a normal kid in a normal city. I think of my quirks and routines as “normal” because they’re familiar to me, and my friends might feel the same way about some, but now I wonder if there truly is a normal. These people are just trying to express themselves and enjoy themselves like I am.

 

“You like it?” I ask Trent finally.

 

“Love it,” he says. “It’s work, but it never feels like work, you know?”

 

Yeah, I do.

 

***

 

A few minutes later, my parents head out to resume their late-night slumber in our comfortable home. We drove separately, so I stick around for a while, finally able to talk with my brother about how it went.

 

We go up and join Trent on the VIP couch next to the speakers, and Harrison keeps up his trademark Harrison smile. He has fun, he tells me, and I ask him about what kind of music he played and how it compares to others. Tonight he played a kind of EDM called trap, which meant nothing to me. Trap is a defensive formation in basketball, not a kind of music.

 

As we sit together, he greets a couple of people he’s met in different places, exchanging various handshakes. While I’m a foreigner here, he’s a regular, even royalty — a VIP. It took him almost five years since he got sick, but he finally found a place like that. It’s been quite a night for me, but I start to yawn around 12:30.

 

At that point I make one more last-ditch effort. I lean over and shout in my brother’s ear that I’m taking off soon, and I ask him how he’s getting back to Ann Arbor.

 

As usual, Trent will drive him.

 

“You sure?” I ask. “Yeah,” he says.

 

“It’s safe?” I ask again. “Oh, yeah,” he says.

 

“Because I drove separately, and I can take you home or to Ann Arbor,” I say one more time. “No, it’s all right, really,” he reassures me.

 

That’s it, then. I give him one more hug, wade through the crowd, head up the stairs and leave the building. The cold air and silence hit me. Safe again.

 

I start the car, pull onto Woodward and drive home. I lock the car when I get there, then lock it again. I close the garage door, then double-check it.

 

I plop down on the couch and flip on the TV, finally back in my quiet comfort zone. Life goes back to normal quickly for me. I take the rest of the week off for Spring Break, then go back to work in Ann Arbor. Class, production, sleep. Class, production, sleep.

 

I text my brother when I get back to school, and he says he has a new job on campus at “Groundworks,” again slipping into a language I don’t understand. But I’m happy for him, and I tell him so.

 

We stop texting after a few minutes, and I go into work for the evening, lounging in my normal chair at my normal desk. Somewhere soon, in a place I don’t even know, my brother is in his own space, where the party rages on deep into the night.