talandros

[talandros]

No one had ever called Tallahassee observant – for the most part, he was blissfully unconcerned with the world around him. The one exception, and it was a big one, was the record store. Same time twice a week he rolled around, and those two times a week, he was accustomed to the same faces. For the first time in what felt like a long time, there was a new one. He stopped short as she spoke, regarding her with a tilted head as though a different angle would transform her into the cashier who had recommended not one, but three of his least favorite albums of the year to him. He had decided it was personal, but not personal enough to stop saying ‘yeah, fuck it, let’s give it a go.’ 

This was a learning opportunity, he decided. And a way to get less weirdly specific experimental pop albums, the last of which sounded like exactly 43 minutes and 22 seconds of a fork in a garbage disposal. So he took a step closer to the counter, moment of consideration drawing to a rapid conclusion. “Hold on, hold on,” he said, holding his hands up like he was trying not to startle a wild horse. “Gotta get to know you first. See if I can trust you.” His expression shifted into a grin. “This is a safe space and there are no wrong answers, first thought, best thought or whatever.” It was a lie, there were absolutely wrong answers, and the odds were high that he was going to be weirdly judgmental regardless, but that wasn’t the point. The point was establishing trust. “Three questions. First question. Let me set the scene – you’re on a plane, and you know it’s about to go down. Headphones are already in and you’ve already accepted your fate, whatever it may be – what song are you listening to? Maybe you think it’s the last song you’ll ever hear, or maybe you just said ‘fuck it, this is going to be cinematic’ so you set the score. Second question, do you think Elvis is dead or alive? Third and final question, what’s the last song that made you cry? And I don’t mean you were already crying and some song started playing, I mean that shit came on, and it got you. What’ll it be?”

Open Starter

Location: Record Store

New towns were weird, and though she was used to hopping around, Lenny hadn’t gotten a feel for Fairford quite yet. It was like breaking into a new pair of Doc Marten’s. She knew it would get better; easier with time. But heartbreak had been such a resounding, hollow thing. And here she was running away from her problems as usual.

At least she would always have music. 

She thumbed through some of the sleeves of vinyls, before hearing the bell to see that someone had entered the store. Father John Misty was spinning on the deck, and she almost felt energetic.

“Looking for anything specific? Any tunes I can suggest?”

[talandros]

OPEN STARTER

“Yo, pal, I need you to settle a debate for me,” he said, abandoning his post behind the counter as he settled in gracelessly beside the person he’d decided to corral into his argument. “Los Angeles, or New York? This kid on Twitter is all over my shit because I tweeted Cat Stevens lyrics last night – don’t come at me about it, the dispensary’s got a new supply and I underestimated the power of the right album in the wrong moment. And because he didn’t get it, I had to double down on saying New York is a shitty place, but I don’t know if it’s a shitty place, because the last time I was there was in 2007 and on a lot of drugs. And now the kid has backed me into a corner where I’m defending LA, like it’s not also shitty. I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel here,” he said, extending his phone to her to display his very well thought out ‘Less rats  🐀’ response in a now twelve-reply deep argument. An argument that Tallahassee was so wrapped up in that he didn’t even consider the consequences of inadvertently letting another person have free reign of his Twitter account. Like it mattered, his last dozen tweets were either song lyrics (not his), or pictures of sandwiches (definitely his). “I can’t let him win. I’ve spent too much time on this to let...” he squinted over at the phone, immediately pulling a face. “Parttimekumdumpster24 – Jesus Christ – win.”

[talandros]

KYLA DONOVAN

WHERE: Centennial Mall

WHO: Open

While Kyla was the type of cheerful person that enjoyed the holiday season, she loathed fighting the crowds when it came to Christmas shopping. She had already placed various online orders for herself and as gifts for some of her friends and favorite co-workers. But there were always a few gifts that were always better to shop for in person, which was where the mall came in. After driving around the parking lot for what felt like hours searching for a decent spot, an already frustrated Kyla strutted inside. 

Her first stop was her favorite candle shop. Whenever you’re in doubt about what to get someone as a gift, get them a candle. That was the motto she lived her life by, knowing just about everyone loved candles. The only hard decisions she had to make were between Winter Cranberry or the classic Vanilla Sugar Cookie. She held both candles in her hands while sniffing them to compare scents. She turned on her heel to face the first person she could find. “If you had to choose between these two scents, which would you choose?” She held out both candles, proudly displaying them for the person to help decide.

.

It took so much for Tallahassee to admit that he was out of his depth – the better part of thirty-five years has been spent coasting (with varying degrees of success) on unearned confidence. But as he stood facing a wall of candles, he was staring down his own personal Everest. A tall, weirdly scented Everest. He had, he thought, picked up and put down every single candle, and he no longer thought he understood the smell of anything, and may never understand it again. The question from the woman beside him was a lifeline, and he was going to grab it with both hands. “Sugar cookie, always. Not even a question. There is one single time of the year when anyone’s place should smell like cranberries, and it’s over,” he said, objectively too self-assured in his statement to have been standing in the exact same spot going through his own person ringer for the last half hour.

“Now. Your turn – hypothetically, if you had a kind of will they/ won’t they situationship with a much older and very emotionally unavailable woman, would you get her a candle called..." he paused, pulling a face as he looked at the row in front of him. “Okay, Summer Wish is not a smell. Objectively, it’s just not. Have you ever walked outside and said ‘ah, yeah, it smells like summer wishes.’ No, because it’s nonsense.” Tangent seeming to his mind free of the two option he’d narrowed it down to, he frowned. Tal nudged the offending candle back so he could focus on the rest. Just as quickly, he accepted that it was better to outsource the task entirely. “Help,” he whispered, flashing Kyla a grin that was draped in wide-eyed desperation. 

[talandros]

CHARACTER INFORMATION:

FULL NAME: Tallahassee Andros

NICKNAMES: Tal

FACE CLAIM: Peter Gadiot

PRONOUNS AND GENDER: Cis man, he/him

BIRTHDAY: September 27,1987

BIRTH PLACE: Tallahassee, Florida

HOW LONG HAVE THEY BEEN IN TOWN?: Eight years

SEXUALITY: Fluid

HOUSING: Coral Coast

OCCUPATION: Freelance songwriter

TL;DR:

TRIGGER WARNING(S): DRUG USE, DRUG ABUSE, BLOOD MENTION, ALCOHOL ABUSE

has-been washed up musician in a band that comes back on throwback playlists and people go ‘oh hey what happened to them’ (the goal and the vibe is like… del amitri meets nine days meets a much less successful third eye blind)

(really though absolutely no one is gonna recognize this dude for that anywhere ever lmao) but don’t worry he will tell you all about it. sometimes he has the grace to hold off until someone asks why he was like 150k followers on twitter [after saying it’s because he’s really funny and insightful]

florida native who left home when his band got signed after years and years of playing dive bars, bowling alleys and birthday parties

minorly and mostly peripherally successful but that was all tallahassee needed to absolutely rip his life to pieces

developed a drug problem on tour, got carted off to rehab (twice). the second time was the last straw and he was kicked out of the band. (that he named and started, but whatever, he swears he’s let that go)

moved to fairford for a fresh start roughly eight years ago and my dude has done NOTHING with that

living a good and california sober life, which suits him just fine

he is genuinely annoying but maybe in a way that’s endearing in select circles

FUN DUMB STATS:

Birthday: September 27,1987

Zodiac Sign: Libra ☉ | Sagittarius ☽ | Gemini➶  

MBTI: ESFP

Enneagram: Type 7w6

Temperament: Sanguine

Moral Alignment: Chaotic neutral

Element: Air

WANTED CONNECTIONS:

absolutely anything

ESTABLISHED CONNECTIONS:

tbd

FULL BIOGRAPHY:

OKAY THIS IS THE FULL BIO BUT FOR THE LOVE OF GOD YOU DON’T HAVE TO READ IT it’s here for posterity

All Tallahassee Andros’ life had been a vacillation of falling in love. First, it was music. The instant his uncle had put a guitar in his hands, that old Fender with nicks and dings that could barely hold its tune, a part of him never put it down. It was all he thought about during school days and baseball practices — getting home and playing that guitar. For a long time, the sound was unbearable, something only made worse by his tenacity. But he started to get better. Started to understand how to wrap lyrics around a melody — stupid little songs about missing the bus and hating homework and loving the girl who sat in front of him in math. He had heard his uncle say music brought him peace, but that wasn’t the truth for Tallahassee. Tallahassee felt this frenetic need for it, an all-encompassing, jonesing sort of itch. Later he would learn it was in his bones to need things, and music would be his bridge into the land where no one ever said no.

He started his first band when he was 14. A garage band with neighborhood kids who didn’t have much skill between them, but they were still willing to spend every day writing and rehearsing and trying to make something of themselves. Even the members remained in a sort of flux, one kid tagging out and dragging another in. By the end of it, they had only played at the bowling alley and the pizza shop across the street, and the only member who had stayed was Tallahassee  Andros. He was, after all, the front man. A position he both decided on, and clung to. He wrote the songs, after all, and his parents cared the least about a ragtag group of kids playing discordant noises late into the night. Tallahassee’s parents were two people who, at best, tolerated each other – but wanted to do right by their kids. Doing right meant a lot of letting them do what they wanted, as long as they were out of their hair. That meant, for the Andros family, a lot of late nights and loud music.

By the time he graduated high school, their still unnamed band consisted of   Tallahassee on vocals and guitar, his lifelong best friend Will on drums, a friend of a friend from down the street called Kurt on drums, and his brother Dover on rhythm guitar. They weren’t great, but they had been featured in the paper, and their gigs paid. It was barely enough to gas up the van to get there and back, but money was money, and that made them feel real. A real band needed a real name, and after spending months kicking around the first thing that came to mind, the landed on something. They were all sitting around the garage smoking — shitty, dirtbag weed that Dover had pocketed from their uncle — when they landed on something. Far more pretentious than an early 2000′s bowling alley band had a right to be, but they didn’t know it at the time. Kurt had been flipping through a Nat Geo magazine, one his dad had left from his days of hoping to be a wildlife photographer, when he started reading about this cluster of sharks off the coast of San Diego. Requiem sharks, the author called them. The Wild Requiem.

As much as the boys agreed on anything, they agreed on that name. Later, people would ask how they’d decided on it — and every time, every member of the band came up with a different lie. Tal liked the sound of it — liked that experts seemed to be torn on whether the name came from the French word for that old final rest, or the word for a grimace that showed teeth. It didn’t match their sound, not really —  but he liked that too. They started to work on an EP – their best songs to shop around to any label they had the gas money to get to. They burned it onto CDs and slid them unceremoniously under the door of every record shop and radio station in a 50 mile radius. They all had to get other jobs, real jobs, while they waited for something that felt like a break. They’d gotten a few bites, and continued to play in bars and small venues, but they weren’t successful — they weren’t paying bills.

Not until her. Their final addition, the one that would elevate them from a shitty little band to something with potential, was Laurel. She saw the Wild Requiem playing at a basement party, and she immediately started giving them advice as soon as they were off stage. She was pretty, so Tallahassee  pretended to listen. She was also smart, so Dover actually listened. It was a mercy Tal Andros had stars in his eyes, or he would’ve kicked up a fuss at receiving unsolicited advice from someone who had only heard 23 minutes of their material, and what did she know, anyway? A lot, as it turned out. Laurel’s dad was the head of Guilty Pleasure Records, and even if she didn’t have a foot in the door, she was a talent on her own.

Finally getting bored of her advice, Tallahassee asked her to prove herself. At their next practice, the room felt impossibly cramped with the new body, and he’d never realized how messy the garage was until there was a pretty girl standing in it. Laurel cast a disdainful look around the place, nudging an empty beer can out of her way with her boot as she stepped inside. He knew right then, she wasn’t going to try and blend in with them. She was going to try to change them —  fix them. He wanted to stand in front of her and say this had all been a mistake, they didn’t need help, and they didn’t need her. He would’ve been wrong. She sang for them, a song of her own that was far more eloquent than anything they’d managed to write. She guided them through playing it behind her. She and Tallahassee fell into a harmony, and the room seemed to come alive with it. With her, their sound changed entirely. They were firing on all cylinders. They needed Laurel in the band, and Laurel wanted to prove herself in her own right. They put together a new demo, and despite her connection, they were not picked up by Guilty Pleasure. Instead, they were scooped by one of their competitors — a nothing little studio that spawned out of GP Records, and picked up the studio head’s daughter out of spite. That was alright by the Wild Requiem, and more than alright by Laurel.

They spent almost seven months on that first album, every second that wasn’t spent writing was spent recording. For all their differences — and Tallahassee was learning there were a lot —  he and Laurel knew how to make a certain kind of magic together when it came to music. She knew how to get on his goddamn nerves, but she also knew how to fine tune his ideas. The album, for all it’s faults, was a success in a way none of them prepared for. They had received a fair amount of local buzz, but being excited about the neighborhood band that kept you up with their late night practices was nothing in comparison to what they would get. Required Listening was a sort of alternative rock, pop rock album that was easy. Windows down, singing with your friends on a July afternoon music. It wasn’t what any of them wanted to be in the end — but they knew it was a sound that would give them a beginning.

And it did. They were booked as an opening act for a three-band tour, and their set time was roughly all of fifteen minutes, but that was fifteen minutes they got to perform in big cities all around the country. They were out of Florida, and onto a lifestyle that was entirely different than bowling alleys and dive bars. When he read about how rock stars lived, how freely drugs were passed around backstage, Tallahassee believed it, but in a distant way that he didn’t think he would have to learn to deal with. He gave into it, at first not wanting to look like an amateur, like some Florida dirtbag who was out of his depth. First it was coke, and that could’ve been enough for him. It should’ve been. How quickly it sunk its teeth in, and how much more alive he felt was something he couldn’t ignore. Before he knew it, he was staying awake for days at a time, one city blurring into the next, the second leg of the tour becoming nothing but a feeling. In that time, he and Laurel had started sleeping together. She was only a half step behind him on the blow, both of them letting long nights of hooking up turn into writing songs that were nonsense in the daylight.

Their album had started to chart during that tour, and even if most of the country didn’t know they knew the Wild Requiem, they would find themselves humming their songs. No one was coming to shows for them, not really, but they were still getting attention. Tallahassee’s recreational drug use had started to turn into a habit, and they all knew he was going to have a problem by the end of the tour. He had started taking uppers in the mornings, and needed downers to get anything close to sleep. He had started to balance a combination of them during the day to keep himself running at a level, riding that high. But if anyone cared, that was eclipsed by how worried they were about Laurel. At the start of the tour, she had been right behind him. But she had surpassed him somewhere between Tempe and Seattle, and she was already getting into the shit that came from street dealers in dark alleys. Her family was intervening, and they were setting her up for a rehab stint at the end of the tour. The end of the tour was important, because despite getting in their own way, despite being on a bender reserved for business veterans, they had written some solid music. The band agreed, the label agreed. The tour would end, Laurel would get clean, and they’d meet up in four months to start on the next album.  

Tallahassee wasn’t worried about her. Not even when she would wake up with dried blood under her nose, and she had long since stopped feeling like the level-headed decisive woman he’d encountered just a few short years ago. They’d all changed on that tour, though. Shy, quiet Will had a different groupie on the bus every night. Where Tallahassee had given in to the harder substances, Dover had started to get just short of falling down drunk before every show. Tallahassee himself had, by almost all accounts, become an absolute dick. Before his tenacity had been to the band’s benefit, but somewhere in the time he started snorting Dexedrine, it was to their detriment.

They were still a fairly small band. They didn’t have room for his ego.

The tour ended, and The Wild Requiem was still riding high. Laurel was carted off to rehab, and the rest of them went their separate ways, for the time being. The band had already agreed on a house outside of Los Angeles for when recording time rolled back around. It was this ramshackle place in Pomona, five bedrooms and one bath. It was a dream home for none of them, but they wanted to grind their sophomore album out in the right place, in record time. Tallahassee headed there instead of back to Florida, living out those three months ‘networking’ for the band. It was during that time that he did heroin for the first time. Bad shit, he knew, and the one thing he’d promised himself he wouldn’t fall into. It had been a bad look on Laurel, even he’d seen that.

That, it turned out, to be his second great love. And oh, how it eclipsed the first. Music was secondary to that feeling, to the extent that he wondered how he had ever loved it at all. By the time Laurel got clean, he was anything but. Recording their second album came with none of the ease of the first. She couldn’t be around him, and he was having difficulty tolerating her sanctimonious attitude. All of the fun of the first album turned into grit, but it didn’t suit their sound. It was sand in your clothes after a day at the beach grit, and it was hard to salvage, even with the push of the label. Their second album felt like a draft, and their label had even less faith in it than the band did. There was maybe one single worth listening to on it, but that single pushed them through. It even charted, and got them their own headlining tour. No big venues, no sold out arenas, but it was enough. They just needed to work through the rockier parts. By the time they left, Tallahassee was all rocky parts. No one told him how short the high lasted – how everything after turned into that need. When he wasn’t using, his blood felt like battery acid. He woke up with his teeth clenched, every part of him crying out for it. It became survival.

He and Laurel had long since split, if they’d ever been together in any real capacity at all. But they couldn’t stand to be around each other. They started to travel on two separate tour buses. Even in his addled state, he knew this would be the end of the Wild Requiem. Their album was critically panned. Two albums in, and crowds already demanded their ‘old stuff.’ What Tallahassee didn’t know was how it would end. He overdosed in Phoenix, but not before taking a nasty header off the stage in Austin. He thought he would get a grace period to work through it himself – he hadn’t. His team put him in a rehab facility, tour be damned. Dover stepped up and took his part, and they hired a new guitarist.

At the end of his 90 days, the tour had ended – and so had his time with the band. He pretended to understand it. Pretended right up until the moment he got high and tore their Pomona house to pieces with his bare hands – doors off frames, furniture in the yard, holes in the walls. He was a one-man wrecking ball, and when he came to in the yard with bloody knuckles and surrounded by debris, he checked himself back into rehab. Another 90 day jaunt for Tallahassee Andros, and a new album for the Wild Requiem.

They could’ve at least changed the name, he thought. He wondered if he had grounds to sue. Probably. But his only visitor had been his brother, and when he saw the worry in Dover’s face, he knew they thought they were saving him. And saving the band. The new album was good. It wasn’t great, but nothing they’d done had ever been great. It returned to the easy sounds of their first album, and Dover thought they had the start of something. Tal did too. He decided then, to let it go. He wasn’t meant for that life. He’d lived it for three years, and it had all but turned him inside out. The other thing no one mentioned when you got sober, is how much goddamn time you suddenly have. He stayed in California for a while, moving up the coast to San Francisco. In San Francisco, he tried to be a lot of different people. So many hobbies under his belt, all because he needed to replace one addiction with the next. Woodworking, gardening – the worst of them all had been when he decided to be a runner. That one lasted until he tore his ACL, because Tallahassee still hadn’t learned to do anything moderately.

While he was healing, he dared to get back into songwriting. That tapped into the very center of him, releasing something he hadn’t known he was still holding. His guitar remained untouched, gathering dust in the attic where he didn’t have to look at it, but the idea of setting something to music was enough. He left California when he turned twenty-eight. After all, he’d been a has-been by the time he turned 23, by 25 he felt like a relic. He tried Seattle for a while, but Seattle felt like Los Angeles in a suit. The novelty of ‘aren’t you that guy?’ wore off quickly, and he was craving a sort of anonymity. It was only then that he remembered the town in Washington that felt like a unique little something. Maybe it was a need for something peripherally familiar without being familiar at all – the feeling of being a strange man in a strange land.

For weeks he tried to remember the name of the town, and for weeks he landed on nothing. He looked at old tour schedules, old pictures, anything. He finally relented and texted Laurel to ask. The band had broken up, and last he’d heard, she’d gotten married. Some British dude that Dover said was an asshole. Laurel, instead of answering, asked to meet for coffee.

They met up in Redding, California – the almost midpoint for them both. The first and last time they ever agreed to meet each other halfway. She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, just as he’d known she wouldn’t be. Their meeting was filled with apologies and awkward reminiscing, something he hadn’t considered when he imagined how it would go. The terrible thing about them both being sober is they had no choice but to be present. She admitted only after they’d slept together that she was still married, she had just wanted to see if there was still a spark. Neither of them were sure if there had been. She told him the town had been called Fairford, and she only remembered because they’d impromptu played a gig at a dive bar while they were there, and because of Tallahassee, they’d wound up paying damages instead of actually getting paid.

She wished him luck there, as though his bags were already packed. Maybe they all but were. She was glad they’d had this last time, she said. He supposed she wanted it to feel like closure, but he didn’t think it had. It felt like opening up a book he’d once loved, but only remembered the high points. Still, he smiled and agreed.

He did pack his bags. He spent two months living out of motels and hotels while he tried to figure out if this was, indeed, the life he wanted. He liked the pace of things here. Liked the person he felt like when he went for his early morning run, followed by a coffee on the way back. He liked that the nights were slow and quiet. Most importantly, Tallahassee liked the person he felt like he could become here. He started to find his way back into music, even if it was no more than playing his guitar at sunset. The way the soft chatter in the down the hall would fall a little quieter if he managed something that sounded like he’d once been someone with talent. He would stay, he decided.

He moved out of the motel, opting to buy a house. The kind of roots that could, in darker moments, reach up and wrap around his neck if he weren’t careful. He was, after all, still in the business of replacing addictions, and he had gone a long way from anyone who was willing to stop him. He hadn’t relapsed since moving to the Washington, though he had adopted a California Sober lifestyle. And after 10 years, Tallahassee learned to stop changing the station when the Wild Requiem came on the radio – even if he gritted his teeth at being called a one-hit wonder.

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