Cash Ledger, Red River Street, Calendar Year 1999 (Incomplete, Damp)

"$5 — door guy said 'just give me five,' so I gave him five."

That's the first line. Blue ballpoint, slanted, a coffee ring bleeding through to the next page. I found the notebook Thursday in the bottom of an amp case I was trying to sell. The amp has a hum nobody wants. The notebook turned out to be the only thing in my house that has appreciated.

For reasons I can no longer reconstruct, twenty-four-year-old me decided to write down every cover charge he paid on Red River in 1999. My best guess is a budgeting phase. There's a page at the back headed GROCERIES that has exactly one entry: "tortillas." So the discipline did not spread.

He used shorthand, not venue names. He knew where he was. He didn't think he'd ever need to explain it to anyone. Anyway, the nicknames below are his, the bands are as he spelled them, and the venues are a smear of four or five rooms between Sixth and Ninth that have since been renamed, reopened, re-renamed, or turned into a lobby. I'm not going to pretend I can map any of it to an address. I can barely map it to a decade.

What I can do is the accounting.

Selected entries, with audit notes

There are forty-one entries in all. I'm not going to give you every one, because some of them just say "$5 — eh."

Notes on the ledger

January 9. The "door that sticks" shows up eleven times, more than anywhere else. Its door did not stick so much as resist, the way a cat resists a carrier. You put a shoulder into it. Everyone did. The fire alarm went off during the second band and nobody moved, because the alarm was clearly part of the second band. The cover was five dollars, and I remember the doorman making change out of a cigar box with a Polaroid of a dog taped inside the lid. I would pay five dollars today just to see that dog again.

January 22. Three dollars. The upstairs room was so hot that the drummer's bathrobe was arguably a medical decision. He sweated through it by the third song and kept going. I respect that more than most things I've seen anyone do professionally since.

February 13. A six-dollar cover, which was steep for a Tuesday, and the ledger says "patio w/ the bad bench," followed by an arrow pointing to "splinter, left thigh." That splinter was in there until roughly Easter. I'm counting it as a souvenir. The bench had been sanded once, by weather.

March, "SXSW-ish." Zero dollars. I had a friend whose cousin had a wristband, and the cousin walked me through a side door while explaining his screenplay. This is the only free entry on the ledger, and it is also the only entry where I didn't hear one note of music, because the screenplay ran long.

Lesson: nothing on Red River was ever free. It was just priced in cousin.

April 2. Four bucks to see a band called Dead Ringtone. In 1999 none of us had ringtones worth killing. They had a song called "Pager Don't Love You Back" that I still hum at the dentist. I looked them up Thursday night and found nothing, which is the correct outcome for a band like that. Some things should exist exactly once, in a room that smelled like a mop bucket full of Lone Star.

May 15. "No sign" was a place without a sign. You found it because a guy outside told you it was there, and then you paid five dollars to a different guy inside who said the first guy didn't work there. That night's entry just says "Margaret." Margaret was not a band. We were married in 2003. If you're keeping score, that's the best five dollars ever spent in Travis County, and I've bought breakfast tacos.

June 30. Seven dollars, and next to it in smaller writing: "AC??" Two question marks. Twenty-four-year-old me was being diplomatic. There was a window unit in the corner of that room, and I can tell you with confidence that it was on, because it was dripping onto a guitar case. That's all it was doing. It was a very expensive drip.

August 8. Two dollars. The cheapest paid entry in the book, and arguably the best value. The band broke up during the fourth song. The bassist said something about the singer's girlfriend into the mic, the singer said something about the bassist's van, and the set ended. I went to the door and asked, half joking, for a partial refund. The doorman looked at me for a long time and said, "You saw that." He was right. I had. I did not get a refund. I got a story, and I have told it at maybe forty barbecues.

October 31. Ten dollars, "anywhere," because on Halloween you didn't so much pick a venue as get carried down the street like a leaf in a gutter. I went as a 1970s tennis pro. I lost the costume contest to a guy who had taped himself into a giant orange envelope and wrote "EXPIRED" across his chest. In 1999 that was a joke about downtown parking. Now it's a documentary.

December 31. Fifteen dollars, the high-water mark. Y2K. Everyone was half sure the lights would go out at midnight, and the band timed their set so the last song would end right on the countdown, as if they were going to personally escort us into the void. Midnight came. The lights stayed on. The singer said "Well, damn," and kept playing for another hour. Best fifteen I ever spent that wasn't spent on Margaret.

The totals

Forty-one entries. One hundred and eighty-seven dollars for a whole year of live music, give or take whatever got smeared by the coffee ring.

That's about four dollars and fifty-six cents a night. For that, I got something like a hundred and thirty bands, most of whom never made a record, and a handful who made one great song and then took jobs at the water utility, which I respect. I also got one bad splinter, one wife, no air conditioning, and a working theory of the universe built mainly from feedback and spilled beer.

I'm not going to tell you what a downtown night costs now. You already know. You've watched the number climb from the passenger seat while somebody circled the block looking for parking. My complaint isn't really about the price. A cover charge was always a bet. You put five dollars on a stranger and a stage and a door that stuck, and most nights you lost a little, and some nights you came home with a story or a wife.

What I miss isn't cheapness. It's the odds. You used to be able to afford losing.

This town keeps building rooms where nothing goes wrong: perfect sound, clean sightlines, the bench sanded by a contractor and not by weather. Nobody walks out with a splinter. Nobody walks out with a Margaret, either.

The amp is still for sale. The notebook isn't.