The Gatekeeper – Audrey Weisburd

January 26, 2026

He doesn’t know my name. He is my best friend. I know what we is trying to say better than he knows what he was trying to say. I should be his manager. His agent. Hell, I should be him. No. If I was him, I couldn’t be me, experiencing him. And experiencing him is better than being him, or managing him, or even knowing him at all.

Sometimes, something is so special that it is not meant to be seen by the world. By the mainstream world. The major portion of the world who lives by the clocks and votes in elections. Us, the disengaged, are far more engaging.

I remember the first time I heard his music. It was like someone was plugging me right into God. It was like-it was like-it was like being dipped into a river of raw syrupy truth. Truth, you see, is not meant to be experienced by everyone, or else the rules of gravity would fail to apply, and we’d all just be floating and aimless. Seriously. All of the shops would close and corporations would collapse and water would spray out of every fire hydrant and sirens would be ripping through the air every second. Everyone would be sick and free and there would be no more doctors.

I, Jeremy Rhinestone, am one of these truth seekers. I think it’s because I have all this time to think. That, inherently, makes me, Jeremy Rhinestone, better. I can see things clearly because I am less distracted. I get to spend all my time experiencing things. Experiencing music, mainly.

My parents, Todd and Brenda Rhinestone, are not the ‘experiencing things / music’ type. Todd is an accountant and Brenda is a nurse. I am their only child, and ever since The Incident in High School, all they want is for me to be happy, so they obeyed my only request. My only request is to live completely alone in Bushwick, meditate, and seek the golden truth. Todd said he’d cover my $800 monthly rent under one condition: that I call Brenda every Sunday, tell her everything I ate that day, and share some of the thoughts in my head.

Todd and Brenda never understood the thoughts in my head. I think as Todd balds more and more, the more open-headed he gets, the less open-minded he becomes. That’s just a theory I have. I have a lot theories. I have a theory that men and women speak fundamentally different languages, and will never be able to fully understand each other. I have a theory that everyone in the world either looks like a PHINEAS or a FERB. I have a theory that every generation has a small handful of Human Vessels who are the chosen ones of sorts, selected before time to save us all through their gift. I am certain that Samuel Cross is one of those vessels.

I found the music of Samuel Cross whilst twiddling my thumbs in a sterile dentist waiting room on 51st street. The journey was terrible. I had to take a glass elevator up thirty floors to get here, overlooking the masses of Midtown, the clumps of tourists, the painful flash of advertisements ricocheting off each other. The tall building was a ladder of offices stacked on top of other offices, one of those liminal hellscapes that swallow up time.

I was at the dentist because my teeth started feeling like cotton balls. I kept complaining to the rest of the group (Beck, Dylan, and Rob) that my teeth felt like cotton balls every time we drank, or smoked, or did ketamine on the roof, or ate Sweetgreen. One morning, my teeth just started feeling like cotton balls all the time. This is something I assumed would go away on its own, but Beck told me that kind of thinking is how people die. I rolled my eyes. But, at the end of the day, I am not ready to die. I may not be the happiest lad in the haystack, but I have enough to live for: my 3 friends, my studio apartment, my Marshall headphones, my thick tattoos of swords and dragons and crosses, my job at the local record store, draft IPA, walking and walking until my legs knees buckle and give out on me, chuckling to videos of monkeys on my Explore page… things like that.

I have this secret. I have this gut feeling that my life is going to be cut in half. I can’t explain it. I’m going to try. I don’t try enough. I let things be. Here I go. When my mid-thirties roll around, I have this feeling that I am going to be a completely different person. So, I am savoring this identity of being Jeremy Rhinestone, truth-seeker, slow-thinker, record-store employee, because, I have this conviction that he is not going to survive this modern world much longer. My body isn’t going anywhere. It’s my soul. I have a feeling that a new soul is going to drop into my body, perhaps in my sleep. This is a soul that will no longer want to be friends with beck and dylan and rob. This soul will suddenly want to [GET A REAL JOB.] This soul will want to [FALL IN LOVE.] This lurking soul that plans to possess me in my sleep will want to be a father, and one day, I will show my sons and daughters photographs of their pops, Jeremy Rhinestone, at 25, and I’ll throw my head back and say: “I was a different person back then.”

Beck texted the GROUPCHAT that he was doing ketamine on his roof if any of wanted to join. But it was a Wednesday, and I wanted it to feel like a Wednesday. Either this new soul was testing me, or my frontal lobe was betraying me, but I didn’t really want to do ketamine on Beck’s roof that day. I didn’t want to get lost inside the deep caverns of my body, with nothing but their deep New Jersey voices to guide me home. I wanted to feel tethered to time and space and figure out what the hell was wrong with my fluffy teeth. I switched on DND and decided to play a game.

On a quest to find new music in a new way, I decided to type a name into the search bar only using my surroundings. I picked up a copy of GQ magazine sitting on the rack. The shiny paper cut my finger so I put it in my mouth. My brown cargo pants were huge and drew craters on the pilly blue carpet. I closed my eyes, shuffled to a random page, drew my finger down and stopped when the voice in my head shouted STOP! I opened my squinty eyes slowly, lo and behold, my finger was covering the left eyeball of a portrait of Samuel L Jackson. I chuckled to myself, and the plump receptionist, Denise, looked up at me through her pearled glasses like I was a delinquent. I typed the name “Samuel” into the search bar.

To determine what last name I should enter, I closed my eyes and scanned the room, bouncing around like a bobblehead. I’d type in whatever my eyes landed on first once they opened. I was having such great fun, you see, I amuse myself greatly, but I also make myself dizzy. I opened my eyes, and everything blurred into a cross on Denise’s neck. I think she thought I was eyeing her wrinkly cleavage, because once my eyes came into focus, she was glaring at me. She pulled her cardigan tight over her chest.

Samuel Cross. I completed the search and could not believe my eyes. There was a musician named Samuel Cross. He only had 250 monthly listeners and one single. An excitement fluttered from the bottom of my spine, a sensation I could only imagine was similar to the way it felt to be an astronaut, locate a lost and nameless comet, hold a star in your arms. It was like meeting a stranger in a dream, but a part of you knew that this wasn’t actually a stranger, and that you physically can’t meet strangers in your dreams. This person was you from a past life, or your best friend, or your father. Either way, in this waiting room, Denise still hiding behind her cardigan, sounds of drills drilling into teeth one room over, in my own private world, I had stumbled upon an answer. Answers are precious. People mine answers like gold, and then try to sell them, and then they become these cheap placid questions again. I would protect every shimmer of truth I was lucky enough to find.

I am so certain that Samuel Cross is the answer, because when I listened to his only released single, TO BREATHE WITHOUT LUNGS, hot tears started streaming down my face, and my teeth stopped feeling like cottonballs, and my eternal headache stopped pounding, and my racing thoughts slowed down. This has only happened to me once before: in the basement on Thanksgiving, when my cousin who got in a car accident at 18 played me Thom Yorke. Samuel Cross has the voice of an angel and a demon mixed together, the intersection of light and dark, beauty and ugliness. His voice is the ultimate equilibrium state. It is the balance that we are all so desperate to reach. In all of my seven months of working at Indigo Records, of placing needles on records for fellow gentrifying hipsters like myself, of shoving headphones over people’s ears, I had never been so certain that a single song was the truth. I had found my answer. I had found my tranquil certainty.

–

As it turned out, I had nine cavities. Three dentist visits later, I am all fixed up. I have listened to Samuel Cross’s single 738 times in the month since I found him in the waiting room. I would listen to the single as the glass elevator rose and fell over midtown. Samuel Cross felt like my narrator and my secret. After my final cavity was drilled and healed, soaring over Manhattan one last time, I realized it was time to share Samuel Cross with Beck, Dylan, and Rob. I trusted them enough, and they too are deep-thinking truth-seekers. Right? Maybe not like me. But if I didn’t share my discovery with just one person, I thought I might explode.

I met Dylan and Rob at a Laundromat turned Listening bar in the neighborhood. All of the laundromats here are something else. There is the Rave Laundromat, Chess Club Laundromat, Sex Club Laundromat, Poetry Reading Laundromat, Comedy Club laundromat, third spaces on top of third spaces, going viral after viral, compounding on themselves until they are no longer third spaces at all and you need a $300 Membership Card to enter. I only have a membership card to the Listening Bar Laundromat. I told Todd it was for the hot water bill.

Dylan and Rob were sitting at the Listening Bar Laundromat, and I could tell they were hearing what I was hearing. One could argue that everyone in the room was hearing the same thing, but you and I both know that isn’t true. Just because something is playing on the speakers, doesn’t mean everyone in the room is hearing the same thing. I sat down beside them and we dapped each other up and now we have spent every day together for the last six months. Beck, on the other hand, I met him because he came into Indigo Records wearing a DJ TONIX graphic tee and I nearly pounced on him. I was so starved for a person to call my best friend. We didn’t necessarily need to be best friends. I just wanted to be able to say I had one.

I decided to only share my discovery with Beck. He was laying on the floor of my windowless bedroom, speakers on both sides of his head. His bright blonde hair looked like snow against the black carpet I snagged off the side of the road. I looked at his blue eyes close in preparation, pressed play, then left the room like a ghost. By the end of the first verse, I couldn’t help but peek an eye through the crack in the door. Sparkling tears drew soft lines down his face. I closed the door again, smiling. By the end of the second chorus, I had to look again. Beck was in fetal position. Sobbing. I re-entered my bedroom, my physical form, and laid down across from him. We looked up at each other, nodded, and then pressed play again, laying side by side on the dirty black carpet, pretending to be anywhere but here.

–

The seasons were changing. Winter turned to spring much faster than anticipated. Even that rodent on TV said so. By late February, cardinals were singing and yellow flowers freckled the trees. All January, Beck, Dylan, and I sat around listening to Samuel Cross, on the roof, in the park, in our succession of dark bedrooms. Sometimes, we would even hold each other as we cried and sang. It was the best month of my life. On February 1st, something happened that would change everything: Samuel Cross released an EP, and his 250 monthly listeners multiplied exponentially. I would sit there, watch the numbers crawl up, and try to imagine these faceless numbers discovering my friend Samuel. My inside joke with God. My answer.

I was with Beck, sitting on a stranger’s stoop smoking bright yellow American Spirits, when Samuel Cross released his EP. I cannot explain this, but before feeling excited like I normally do when an artist I love releases more music for me to enjoy, I felt terribly nauseous, swollen with panic and fear. This was a mistake. I knew this would ruin Samuel’s life. I was sweating out a mixture of dread and jealousy, biting my nails off as Beck tried to pull me back into my body. Samuel Cross was going to become a cheap placid question. He was going to spend his whole life chasing the way he felt before anyone knew who he was. He was going to sleep in bathtubs and bars and beds of shrieking fans. He was going to dissolve at 27. I was the only person who could save him.

–

By March, Samuel Cross had 376,000 monthly listeners. Magazines were asking him about his bagel order. He was doing these photoshoots in his underwear underwater. He made a music video of him walking backwards on a highway at night. He had a TEAM. He had a publicist and a manager and an agent and he signed to a record label. He put a bloody diamond through his nose. He was slipping away, selling out. Meanwhile, I was exhausted most of the time. I had a relentless cough and my dreams were only of strangers. My teeth were fine, but now, it felt like there was a metaphysical layer of cotton balls simply separating me from the rest of the earth. Indigo Records had it up to here with my calling out sick. What did it matter if they were open or closed? No one actually bought the music anyway. No one was hearing things as they were meant to be heard.

It was Sunday. I was somewhere between awake and asleep, somewhere between daylight and saving, when the vibration of my phone against my head yanked me back into the world. It was my weekly call with Brenda. I imagined my mother on the other end of the line, drinking her chamomile tea in her pink slippers. I imagined with every ring that passed, her heart beat faster, wondering where I could be, if I was okay, if things had gotten bad again. I imagined Todd, somewhere in the background, drifting through the rooms of a house that belonged only to them.

The house that belonged only to Todd and Brenda used to belong to me too. It held my childhood bedroom, untouched. I had navy blue walls and colorful instruments from the Goodwills of suburbia’s past. I can still go back to that place, the place where my fingers were always calloused, where there was paint on all my t-shirts, where elementary music teachers used to smile at me when no one was looking, like I was the only one who could possibly understand. I can still go back to the place where I was special. I can still go back to the places where it didn’t matter. I would sing in the shower and hug my mother. I would jump up and down because there was ice cream in the freezer and superheroes on the TV. I sent Brenda to voicemail and fell asleep, a sleep that could have lasted hours, days, or months. It’s hard to tell. I have no windows in my bedroom.

–

I wake up to dozens of missed calls from Beck, rubbed my eyes and rang him back.

Yo, I say.
Dude, where have you been? Beck asks.
Sleeping. What day is it.
Friday.
Oh. That’s not that bad.
Have you been sleeping since Wednesday?
Guess so.
Ok, Beck said. Whatever. You’re gonna want to hear this.
Hear what? I grumble.
Samuel Cross is going to be the musical guest on The Late Night.

I shoot up in my bed. Well, air mattress. Air mattress with a pillow and a sheet.

When?! I ask.
Saturday night, Beck sighs.

I spring up like hot oil on a pan and start pacing the living room. How could this possibly be? Last week’s musical guest on The Late Night was a pop country musician named Billy Heartbreak. Is Samuel being coerced? Is he in danger? How could someone as rare as Samuel sink to the depths of such a mainstream, sell-out, crapshow? I run out into the afternoon street and breathe my first breath of fresh air. Slouching boys in beanies cross the street. The twin brothers from the corner deli step outside for a smoke. A baby drowning in her own squishy cheeks rolls by in a stroller, and I swear, she gives me a quick smile. The entire sky is a sheet of stormcloud, but as I look up, the sheet splits in half, revealing a zig-zag crack of blue, all for me.

–

It is Saturday night. Samuel Cross is asleep on my couch. I didn’t expect him to snore, but he snores. Loudly. I didn’t expect him to sleep with his mouth open. I wrapped him in my favorite blanket, one from home, straight from my indigo bedroom. He is coccooned in the blanket that held me as a boy: a black night sky with yellow stars.

He was very easy to find. I was expecting more of a struggle. His TEAM doesn’t do a very good job of hiding him. I didn’t like telling him I was one of the producers for The Late Night, and that I needed him for an emergency fitting. I didn’t like lying to the person who filled my life with so much truth. I didn’t like putting the crushed-up sleeping pill in his Fiji water. But I knew he would thank me later.

Samuel Cross is supposed to appear on late night television in 45 minutes. My phone has been dead for 2 hours, but last I’d checked, no one had reported him missing. No one was worried. I knew no one cared about him the way I did. It had always been that way. I had been worrying about Samuel Cross long before anyone knew his name. Outside, the city was warming itself up. Dress rehearsals rehearsed, audience members lined up like sheep. Real people slipped into trains from their offices. Midtown churned on like a machine.

Samuel Cross is asleep on my couch. Samuel Cross is dreaming before my eyes. I am keeping him safe. I placed a glass of water on the slab of cement I call a table near his head, just in case he woke up and didn’t know where he was and needed proof that he wasn’t alone. He would never be alone, and neither would I. I sat on the floor, my back against the wall, knees curled into my chest. After I got him in the car, and I saw him drifting into sleep, I told him the truth. I told him who I was, his 251st and most important listener. He didn’t fight. He had come willingly. That part felt important. When he was right in between awake and asleep, right in between daylight and saving, he mumbled that one quiet night wouldn’t be so bad after all.

Samuel stirs. He shifts onto his side, pulls the blanket closer to his chest. For one moment, I feel a familiar swell of purpose rise up in me, warm and convincing. This is good. This is right. This is what it means to care. Samuel Cross will remain forever obscure, protected from the corrupting force of visibility. Every laundromat is something else. The record stores aren’t selling any more records. My friends are falling deeper into their bodies. Todd and Brenda do their taxes. I clear the cotton balls clean.
–
I wake to a flash of morning sun shooting rays into my face from a glass square. Have I always had this skylight? My apartment is bright and dustless, I breathe a full deep breath from these new healthy lungs. I shuffle into the polished bathroom, look into the mirror, and strangely enough, I like what I see. Have I always had such a symmetrical face? Have I always had so much potential? For some reason, I look in the mirror and I smile because I am alive.

My phone is somehow plugged into a charger in the wall. It is Monday morning. I woke up at 6am, with the rest of the world. My childhood blanket of the night sky is folded neatly at the edge of the sofa. Just then I remember: Samuel. I feel dizzy with guilt! What a bizarre thing to do! To steal him away from his life? His autonomy? Who am I to choose anything for anyone else? What do I want to choose for myself? What do I want to do today? Something new has taken hold of me, a new pattern of thought, a new feeling from the inside out. It happened somewhere in my dreamless, songless sleep.

There is a note from Samuel by the sink.

Hey man, he said. I am just going to forget this happened.
I don’t want to get you in trouble.
I didn’t want to wake you.
You were talking in your sleep.
You said your soul was leaving your body.
It gave me an idea for a song.
This whole experience, actually, gave me an idea for a song.
Please, take care of yourself.
I know you think you know me, but you don’t.
Or maybe you do. Who knows.

Good luck, brother.
–Samuel Cross

I clutch the note to my chest and then toss it down the garbage disposal. I think I want to get a a haircut. I sit in the chair of the local barber, and I ask him about his son. He says his son never calls anymore, that he has a life of his own. There is a heavy weight lifted off my neck. There is music from another country playing from the speakers. I have never been to another country. I have never been much of anywhere.

I bring sandwiches to Beck, Dylan, and Rob. Didn’t realize I had their orders memorized. I knew I could find them on the roof, disengaged.

We’ve been worried about you, man.
You don’t need to worry about me anymore.

I ask them for a hug. They laugh, but I stand there with my arms open until they dive in. They smell like grease and weed and the past. My best friends are beautiful. They know my name when I forget it. I’ll meet them again, in another phase, another dream, another place, or another life.
        I pack a suitcase of the necessities and sprint to Grand Central. I make the next train back to New Jersey just in time. I’m on my way to my own front door. I’m on my way to hug my mother. I will make her tea, and tell her everything I ate, and tell her all of the thoughts in my new clear head. I slide into the red patent leather seat. Everyone is plugged in, listening to something, hearing their own version of an answer, their own version of the truth. I take the first train home, and I listen to nothing.