Before you embark into the depths of darkness where avocado toast goes to rot, you’re required to put on the MILLENNIAL UNDERGROUND SPOTIFY PLAYLIST.

Start this chapter on “TILL WE GET THERE.”

Read the previous chapter here. See all chapters here.

…

Jedi parked in Amoeba’s underground lot, which was completely empty. Our footsteps echoed as Jedi lead us to the door.

“Are we allowed to be here?” I asked. It’s not that I didn’t trust Jedi — well, that wasn’t true. I definitely didn’t trust him.

“Relax, Misty,” he said. “This is your best bet for tracking down Keke.”

We ascended the sticker-lined staircase up to a dark and seemingly empty Amoeba Records, the sacred store for vinyl record enthusiasts.

As we made our way into the maze of a store, the smell of vinyl and vintage cardboard covers soothed my soul.

Then, a spotlight illuminated the DJ booth with a single turntable that stood like an alter at the back of the store.

A woman with giant retro headphones and blue hair stood at the alter. She thumbed reverently through a case of records behind her before she found the one she was looking for.

“Jedi…?” I started to ask, but he shook his head and continued to lead us toward the alter. I glanced at Trigger, but he was going along with this whole thing.

The woman stopped on a record, and then gently withdrew it from the stack. She held it up high — kinda like she was showing off Baby Simba to all the land — and then unsheathed it, gently laying the record on the turntable.

With surgical precision, she picked up the needle, and gently laid it on the turntable. With a CRACKLE it came to life, and suddenly bass started vibrating through the store. The woman at the alter started swaying and gyrating as if the sound was moving through her.

It was almost as if the shadows around us started dancing to the music in tandem, as if the vinyl had resurrected the spirits of dead artists that inhabited the stacks of records around us.

But then a shadow actually moved, and I yelped in surprise.

All around us, figures in black robes holding a single vinyl record each descended upon us, forming a circle.

“The Order of Amoeba,” Jedi whispered to me with a grin.

“If this is some sort of fucking Scientology bullshit — ” I started, but then the music abruptly cut off.

The woman at the alter bowed her head as one of the hooded figures holding a Pearl Jam album stepped forward.

In a booming voice, he said: “what brings you to approach the Order of Amoeba?”

“What the fuck –” I said, over this vinyl occult nonsense.

“We’re looking for our friend,” Trigger cut in. I shot him a glance, but he looked still shaken from our near-miss earlier as well as the situation we’d found ourselves in now.

“Who is your friend?”

“Keke Dewitt,” I said. “She’s a singer/songwriter and she’s gone missing. She invited us to a show at the Green Door that didn’t actually exist, and now we’re being followed — “

Suddenly, the hooded figures broke out into low murmurs of alarm all around us.

“What?” I asked, looking around. The hooded figures, once ominous, almost seemed to shrink back.

Then, a figure holding an old edition of The Killers’ Shadowplay tossed off her hood, revealing a woman sporting a short pink pixie cut and sunken eyes. “Your friend Keke is in grave danger,” she said. “This is the third songwriter to have disappeared at that venue this week. We fear the worst.”

“The worst?” I asked, suddenly feeling dizzy. Jedi tried to put his arm reassuringly around me but I pushed him off.

The Pearl Jam figure stepped forward. “It’s best for you to run. Far away. Give up the hunt for your friend — she’s long gone.”

I looked around. “Are you kidding?”

The hooded figures looked back at me in a heavy silence that communicated they were decidedly not kidding.

“Listen, I don’t know what your jurisdiction is as keepers of a dead music format, but here in the land of the living we don’t abandon our friends.”

The Pearl Jam figure cut in — “It’s not technically a dead market, the resale value on some of these albums make the collector items –“

“Well go back to collecting your pieces of plastic! Let’s go, guys.”

I pushed past the ring of hooded figures, stomping toward the stairwell that lead to the parking garage.

Fuming, I ran to the car. I knew there was a reason I didn’t like that hipster store —

“Wait!”

I turned back, and saw the girl with pink hair running after me, her black robes swishing in the wind.

“What? Are you here to tell me turntables are a more textured sound than Spotify?”

“Say what you will about the Order of Amoeba, but we’ve been tracking every lost soul and rising singer/songwriter from the moment they step off the bus from Nowhere, Idaho and become a bonafide Angeleno. Every starving artist thinks they starve alone, but that’s not true. We know where every ukelele-playing coffeeshop barista is at any given moment, and we’ve been tracking Keke. Here is her last location.” She pressed a crumpled piece of paper in my hand. “I’m giving this to you because I can tell you’re brave. If anyone can stop what’s happening, it’s you.”

I looked down at the crumpled ball. “But how — “

But when I looked up, she was gone. Frowning, I uncrumpled the piece of paper, smoothing it out on the hood of the car.

When I saw what was written, I gasped.

Nowhere was so hated, so dangerous, so perilous as —

The Lowes on Pico.

…

Eaten Alive by the Millennial Underground is a multimedia fiction series written daily by writer Amy Suto for National Novel Writing Month. Check out the rest of her blog here for more about her nocturnal excursions and writerly pursuits. Read the full Millennial Underground series as it’s coming out in the month of November at: AmySuto.com/underground, and be sure to subscribe via email so you don’t get #cancelled.

Before you embark into the depths of darkness where avocado toast goes to rot, you’re required to put on the MILLENNIAL UNDERGROUND SPOTIFY PLAYLIST.

IMPORTANT: Put FOG AND FEAR on REPEAT for the duration of this chapter.

Read the previous chapter here. See all chapters here.

…

That night, the rain gave way to a rare covering of November fog, slinking into the streets like a sultry ghost as we drove to Amoeba.

As the fog crept across the pavement, distant memories crept into my mind, like a black-and-white film, the flicker of nitrate and condensed water blooming into specters of the night.

…

“Will this feeling go away?”

Tear-stained, I asked my best friend this question in-between throwing up into a toilet in the Barney’s Beanery bathroom stall, which was covered floor-to-ceiling in stickers. In the background, we could hear the drunken strains of midnight karaoke.

My best friend sat on the floor beside me, brushing my hair out of her face. She was my oracle: she always told it to me straight.

“You drank too much. You’ll get over that. The other stuff? I’m happy to put a hit out on him if you’d like. But it’s going to hurt for awhile.”

In that moment, the shame of my heartbreak and the fact that I was trying to fill the void with shots of cheap vodka in scratched plastic glasses made me burst into tears.

“What did you even see in that loser? He didn’t deserve you. He’s a caricature of a caricature.”

I sat back, leaning against the stall behind me. Now was good a time as any.

“That fucking idiot saved my goddamn life and now he’s gone.”

She could tell something was wrong. She gently brushed the hair out of my eyes, wiping away my smeared mascara. “What happened, Misty?” She asked, softly.

So, on the grimy floor of that dive bar, I told her about the worst night of my life.

…

In the meshes of the dying afternoon, it was raining as light bled into night.

I had just moved to Los Angeles and was learning to navigate the concrete maze all by myself. No one from my hometown had made it out: I was the lone survivor attempting to plant a flag in the soil of opportunity.

I had been invited to a jam sesh in Venice by a musician I had met at a coffeeshop who had been scrawling lyrics on the back of a napkin:

you were soft and gentle and I was so misled

what do I do when you have my only heart?

letting you take it all wasn’t very smart

The words gently dug claws into my heart, and I found myself agreeing to meet him at the party.

The streets were rain-slicked when my Lyft dropped me off at an unassuming house on the dark street. I didn’t really know if I was at the right place, but I pushed open the front door…

…and immediately found myself in a room pulsing different color lights, a hodgepodge of booze laid out in front of me.

I heard the music now, deeper in the house. I snuck past hipsters lounging in the tiny kitchen, went down a set of tiny stairs, and found myself in a garage covered in Persian rugs and amps with guitars and mandolins and odd instruments strewn everywhere, the room stuffed with people sitting in every corner as the musicians shuffled in-between sets on the makeshift stage.

I squeezed into a corner next to two friendly and very high humans as the musical chairs of the jam sesh continued: people swapping instruments, picking a song to cover or picking their own, and then just diving in.

As the musicians continued to joyfully riff off one another, it was like I was witnessing a magical entropy of the heart.

Eventually I made it out to the back of house, where people were playing beer pong or doing shots by the airstream trailer parked there, the smell of weed gently wafting over us like the fog was.

“Ya made it!” I turned and was almost hit by the musician as he stumbled into me. He reeked of booze and sweat.

“I– yeah,” I said, taken aback. “You invited me.”

“I invite lotsa girls to these things, doesn’t mean they actually come,” he said, slurring his words.

My heart sank. Oh. The crassness of him didn’t line up with the poetic soul I’d met in the coffeeshop. Alcohol had ruined his poetry, exposed his base desires where women could be swapped out like variables in an equation as long as the output was one of them leaving with him at the end of the night.

“Let me getcha a drink,” He said, sweeping a heavy arm around my shoulders, and I stumbled under the weight.

“I don’t think so,” I said, trying to disentangle myself.

“What?” He turned to me, confused. “Don’t you drink?”

“I–”

“She doesn’t,” I looked up, seeing a new stranger eclipse the spotlight creeping out from the half-open garage.

I recognized him. The boy from the bodega. The boy from my bed. Jedi.

I pulled myself away from the musician, who looked hurt. “Well, fine,” he said, put off. “Find me when you get fun.”

The musician stalked off, leaving me with Jedi, again.

“So, want a drink?” he asked with a smile.

“I guess I could break my many years of sobriety just for this one night,” I said, smiling with relief.

We wound our way back inside, and sifted through the jungle of booze until we concocted our own combinations of chasers and hard liquor until we found our way to the porch.

The rain had stopped, leaving the air thick, damp, and dark.

“How have you been?” I asked. It had been awhile: he had gotten busy with work, and we’d stopped hanging out or whatever we’d been doing for the past few weeks.

He sipped his drink, his gaze going to the flickering street light a few yards away. Figures shifting through the night, pushing shopping carts or stumbling home drunk.

He thought about his answer as he always did — never just responding “good” or another automatic pacifying response, then turned to me.

“I feel like I’ve been asked to hold my breath and just keep swimming and I’m about to run out of air,” he said, finally. “And when that happens, I’m afraid I’m just going to sink to the bottom of the ocean. But instead of feeling fear, I’m looking forward to how quiet it’s going to be.”

I stared at him, processing. “Jedi…”

He laughed, trying to break the sudden heaviness. “Maybe that’s why I like being on-stage so much. Feeling the bass in my bones. The vibration of the soundwaves so strong that they keep my heart beating so I don’t have to.”

“You need to see someone.”

“I don’t need to see anyone as long as I can hear the music, and others can, too. One day I’m going to create music that heals people the way we need to be healed.”

Jedi, I realized, was someone who was willing to bleed out for the sake of his art. He’d strap his feet to weights and wade out into the soft shore until the tide took him under if it meant he could create the vibrations that recalibrated someone’s soul.

If you were in this city, you were desperately trying to create a gift: a gift to help someone else heal the way you were never able to.

“I worry about you,” I said, at last. I know it wasn’t “cool” — it was never cool to show the cards in your emotional hand. But I did. I thought about him as I sat on the floor of my apartment, sketching the designs of my next neon creation and dreaming how the light would flow through the glass… and how I hoped he’d maybe get to see what I created.

“Don’t,” he told me. “Live a life worth telling stories about later.”

“I… I was actually thinking we could go on a proper date sometime,” I said, mustering up the courage. I never asked anyone on a date — perks of being a woman, I guess — but there was something special about him. An intangible uniqueness I couldn’t quite name. We had started to collect memories together: at parties, between the sheets, but they were memories created at an arms’ length required of these LA flings.

In that moment, I wanted to bridge the gap. Be more than a passerby at parties. To let down my guard.

But when I looked over to see his reaction, I felt my gut twist into a knot.

“Misty, I just started seeing someone.”

“Oh,” I crumbled, suddenly starting to feel out of place at this party

“I had fun with you–“

“No, don’t,” I said, standing, swaying. “I don’t want to hear it.”

I didn’t want to hear all the ways I was wrong for this man, wrong for this city, wrong for this life. I didn’t want platitudes or promises of being called back or anyone to try and soften the blow of

not

being

enough.

And I was stumbling off the porch, down the street, feeling my way through the dark shadows as I tried to get away from here, away from my disappointment as he was running after me, calling my name as I twisted around corners around rundown houses around fences —

And then I was running through an alleyway, so dark and damp I slipped.

I cried out, tumbling to the ground as my ankle

That’s when a shadow shifted a few yards ahead of me.

I looked up, and the shadow was suddenly hurtling toward me —

— and I saw what looked like to be a glimmer of a knife in the foggy night —

— I pushed myself backwards, trying to get to my feet but my ankle giving out as I collapsed again on the slippery pavement —

— the shadow coming closer, a man with eyes wide in a drug-induced frenzy, anger stirred by a city that had left him to die —

“MISTY!”

Jedi slipped as he turned the corner into the alleyway, and the man stopped.

His eyes flickered to me, and I saw him contemplate lunging at me, diving for my bag on the ground beside me…

…but as he looked up at Jedi, he saw something that made it not worth it. He turned and ran away, in the opposite direction, slipping back into the cold night.

Jedi ran to my side, and I burst into tears that I hated myself for. I hated myself for not being able to fight off the dangers of these streets by myself, hated that Jedi was seeing me like this, hated to be reminded of how helpless I really was.

“Let me get you home–“

“No.” I fumbled with my phone, my shaking hands calling a Lyft to get me out of here. Jedi waited by my side, putting an arm around me which I didn’t resist.

I wiped away my tears and hobbled into a car that would whisk me into the night, back to my shoebox, back to brief memories of intertwined bodies in the glow of neon and affection. Back to the fleeting feelings of being wanted by what you want most.

Jedi kept calling me but I kept silencing it. Watching the shadows and the streetlamps pass by my windows.

I need love, but love is what brought me here…

Will this feeling go away?

Will this feeling go away?

Will this feeling…?

…I know I’d do it all again…

next

…

Eaten Alive by the Millennial Underground is a multimedia fiction series written daily by writer Amy Suto for National Novel Writing Month. Check out the rest of her blog here for more about her nocturnal excursions and writerly pursuits. Read the full Millennial Underground series as it’s coming out in the month of November at: AmySuto.com/underground, and be sure to subscribe via email so you don’t get #cancelled.

Before you embark into the depths of darkness where avocado toast goes to rot, you’re required to put on the MILLENNIAL UNDERGROUND SPOTIFY PLAYLIST.

Start the playlist at “TIME” for this chapter. Do not put on shuffle unless you want to ruin a perfectly timed playlist!!!

Read the previous chapter here. See all chapters here.

…

In the the haze of the dreamy, plant-lined millennial museum pop-up maze, Trigger and I dodged the men who were after us in the artificial light of the artificial life exhibit.

There was one neon sign that saved us, though:

It was hidden amongst the neon, so much so that the untrained eye could miss it.

That wasn’t mine. I pulled Trigger toward the hidden door, and we stumbled out into the LA night.

The streets were slicked with a light rain that had begun to fall, and we looked around frantically.

“We should call an uber — ” Trigger said.

I shook my head, in panic mode. “No, let’s catch a bus — ”

We heard a CLANG of another door and a yelling of the men who were after us, far away. It would be moments until they found us. Moments until we were swallowed up by Trigger’s debts and those who were sworn to bring him to the kind of “justice” that happens in the courtrooms of alleyways and warehouses.

We were prepared to fight for our lives with what little real skills we had. Nowhere in our liberal arts degrees had we learned krav magaw, and Trigger’s beat poetry was useless here. You can’t speak truth to power when your teeth have been knocked in.

That’s when I heard it.

The pounding of a bass.

The sizzling beat of a remix.

The siren song of…

“JEDI!”

…a DJ’s sound system.

Sure enough, there he was, Beats headphones unnecessarily around his neck as he screeched over to the side of the road, pushing open the passenger side door.

“GET IN!”

We sprinted over to his tricked-out used Escalade with its souped-up speakers, jumping inside just as —

BANG. BANG. BANG.

Gunshots rang out as we slid into the rainy night.

“You abandoned Dance Yourself Clean?”

“Those hipsters will dance to anything,” he said. “Besides, I heard through the disk jockey Slack channels shit was going down and the nightclub overlords are after you guys.”

I sighed. Somehow, Jedi had a knack for simultaneously making a really cool entrance followed by saying something like “disk jockey” or “nightclub overlords.” Also, I was perplexed that Los Angeles DJs shared a slack channel —

“To share remixes. That’s what the slack is for,” Jedi clarified, seeing the questions written on my face.

“Out of all the things you just said, that’s the thing you wanted to clarify for me?” I said, teasing him just slightly. He shrugged.

“Where are we going?” Trigger said. “They’re going to find us if we go back to The Satellite or any of our apartments.”

“To regroup at the only safe place in town.”

“Where’s that?” I asked, skeptically.

“The hallowed halls of Amoeba Records,” he said. “A few friends are waiting.”

I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to know yet. I shivered in the cold of the 60-degree rainy night, and Jedi saw. At the next stoplight, he shrugged off his sweater. Before I could protest, he threw it at me.

“Buckle up Misty, Saturday night traffic makes for a helluva long ride.”

It wasn’t that long, but I just smiled, putting on the sweater. Smelling his annoying — but familiar — cologne.

In the back of the car, I caught Trigger on the rearview mirror rolling his eyes. I didn’t care.

A remix of Sam Sparro’s Black & Gold came on over the speakers, and I turned it up. Surrendering to the sounds, for just a few minutes.

Next.

…

Eaten Alive by the Millennial Underground is a multimedia fiction series written daily by writer Amy Suto for National Novel Writing Month. Check out the rest of her blog here for more about her nocturnal excursions and writerly pursuits. Read the full Millennial Underground series as it’s coming out in the month of November at: AmySuto.com/underground, and be sure to subscribe via email so you don’t get #cancelled.

Before you embark into the depths of darkness where avocado toast goes to rot, you’re required to put on the MILLENNIAL UNDERGROUND SPOTIFY PLAYLIST.

Start the playlist at “GIVER” for this chapter. Do not put on shuffle unless you want to ruin a perfectly timed playlist!!!

Read the previous chapter here. See all chapters here.

…

Where do you hide in the underground?

Where do you go when you don’t want to be be found?

Trigger and I took one look at the bus stop across the street and knew what we had to do: ditch the car, take public transit.

In a culture obsessed with cars, the bus and metro system was a way to slip undetected around the city.

It was also one helluva way to get lost.

Trigger swerved into an overpriced parking garage —

“If my car gets towed — “

“You’ve got bigger problems,” I reminded him, and he spun into a parking spot.

We ditched the car, running outside.

As we did, we passed a sign painted on the wall that made me falter.

Where had I seen that before? It was if the eyes within the star were staring off to something behind us… something in darkness…

The sound of footsteps snapping against the pavement brought me back. Trigger tugged on my arm.

“We gotta go, sis,” he said, trying to be upbeat and endearing but I could see the fear in his eyes.

We hustled to the bus stop. In that moment, I felt exposed in the darkness, as if I was standing naked on the street and the heavyset eyes from the star were eating into me, rendering me helpless.

Down the street, a bus was approaching.

“Oh thank God,” Trigger breathed.

Shouts could be heard from down the street. I saw the men who were after us in the sedan lock eyes with us, and started sprinting toward us.

shitshitshitshitshitshitshit

Trigger grabbed my arm, fear in his eyes. That’s when I saw it, spilling red light across the concrete, like a beacon:

A millennial art museum, right down the street.

The same one Keke had posed in front of earlier.

“IN THERE!” I said, hauling Trigger with me as we sprinted toward the shifting light.

Behind us, I could hear the men closing in, fast and dangerous, a swiftness only evil intent can embody.

We pushed past glass doors, stuffed cash at the attendant, and disappeared into an exhibit labeled:

THE MILLENNIAL GREENHOUSE

And I felt my breath catch in my throat. All around us were fake plants, in a kind of glory beyond what photosynthesis could produce: neon plants, plants made of multicolored stringlights, a kind of jamboree of lights and color that made you want to spin slowly in front of it all and take a video to capture and share for posterity.

It was a place that transformed images into art, thoughts into poetry…

Luminous Lights of Eternal Plants, A Poem

the luminous lights

of artificial life

light up my life

as we run to save it

here to hide amongst the influencers

influencing our choice location to stowaway

hide your light in the weeds of crippling art

hide your mistakes behind the wrapping vines

choking you in the aesthetic

of vampiric culture

or commerce that swallows culture

selling it back to you

but dear god hide

from the footsteps

from the tourist traps

and the thirst traps

hide

until

you

make

it

out

knowing only

you can’t kill what’s already dead inside.

Next.

…

Eaten Alive by the Millennial Underground is a multimedia fiction series written daily by writer Amy Suto for National Novel Writing Month. Check out the rest of her blog here for more about her nocturnal excursions and writerly pursuits. Read the full Millennial Underground series as it’s coming out in the month of November at: AmySuto.com/underground, and be sure to subscribe via email so you don’t get #cancelled.

Do not put on the official playlist.

Do not pass go.

Just take a moment.

Remember, the last moment you felt young. Alive. Vibrant. Like you could run out the clock on the jetfuel of your endless ambitions.

Now remember that with every breath you’re aging. Growing older.

How are you spending your youth?

Spend it wisely. Next.