by Garth Stein
Ring, ring, ring, goes the phone. Then the machine in the bedroom picks up and his mother’s voice calls to him. “Evan? Evan? Evan?” Now Evan really feels sick.
“You gonna get it?” Dean asks. “Some guy named Lars called earlier.”
Lars? He picks up the phone.
“Evan? Are you all right?”
Mom? No, Mom, I’m not. Not really. I’m scared. I just lost an entire day and I have no idea where it went, and there’s this kid here who says he’s my son, and I’m having seizures and I’m really scared. Can you come and hold me?
“Yeah, Mom, I’m fine.”
“You were screening?”
“Yeah, Mom, I was screening. What’s up?”
“We were worried.”
Evan feels her worry unload through the phone line. Just hearing his voice is enough to satisfy his mother, who is forever worried about him. As she probably has a right to be. Even though Evan is thirty-one, to his parents he is still a kid with epilepsy. They call him twice a day without fail. If he isn’t home for a few hours and they don’t know where he’s gone, they panic and call the local hospitals. They treat him as if he were still in high school, still living at home.
Evan used to feel weird about his parents’ concern. Then he got used to it. He even felt at times that if he were suddenly to be rid of his epilepsy and his parents stopped worrying about him all the time, he might actually miss it. It was kind of like a permanent hall pass or diplomatic license plates on your car. Evan was allowed much greater latitude than he would have had if he weren’t afflicted.
“But you’re okay?”
“Yeah, Mom, I just was out yesterday. No big deal.”
“Good. Well, your father wants to know if you’re free for dinner soon. He’s buying.”
Yeah. Like Evan has ever offered to buy.
“I’m pretty busy.”
“We haven’t seen you in a while.”
“A while” in Louise-speak means about two weeks.
“Maybe I’ll drop by, ” Evan says, and almost laughs at his own joke. He could drop by with his teenage son and blow his parents’ minds. That would be a good one. He knew he was in their will. Murder by shock. Who would suspect?
“That would be nice, ” Louise coos. “Oh, Charlie said he was trying to reach you, ” she adds casually.
“Really? I didn’t get any messages.”
“He said he’s left a few, but you never call back.”
“Huh, ” Evan replies, “maybe my machine is broken.”
“Maybe it is. Could you call him?”
His little brother Charlie had, in fact, left five messages, each one ignored. Why? Because whenever Charlie called five times in four days, and Louise called to tell Evan that Charlie had called five times in four days, that meant something good had happened to Charlie—possibly something great—and Evan was supposed to jump up and down with joy and say encouraging and enthusiastic things and proclaim his love and unconditional support. And he was supposed to do it without gagging. I passed the bar. I’m getting married. I got a raise. I bought a house. I screwed my wife. My wife is pregnant. It’s a boy. Come on, doesn’t anyone else get tired of it?
“What is it this time, Mom, they name a street after him?”
Louise takes Evan’s crack silently for a moment—but only a moment.
“I don’t understand, Evan, ” she says regretfully.“Why can’t you be happy for Charlie? What did he ever do to you that was so bad?”
Evan smiles. Now that’s a complicated question. What did Charlie do? How about this: he cried. One soggy evening, many, many years ago, Charlie stood there crying and Evan had to act like an older brother, and because of that Evan’s life was changed forever. That’s what Charlie did that was so bad.
“I’m happy for him, Mom, ” Evan says. “I really am.”
“Then why do you seem so sad?”
Evan glances at Dean, who looks back expectantly, as if he’s waiting to be introduced. Because my son is standing next to me but I’m afraid to tell you about him.
“Evan?”
He could do it. He could tell her. Which son? she would ask. My fourteen-year-old son, he would answer. It would be easy, actually. Like jumping out of an airplane. Starting is the hard part. Once you get going, you kind of fall by yourself.
“Hey, Mom? . . .”
Tell her.
“Yes, honey?”
Jump. Jump. Jump.
“Never felt better, Mom.”
“Oh, ” she says, not believing him for a second. “Okay. Well. When do you think you might stop by?”
“Soon, Mom. Real soon.”
“Okay. Well, we love you, Evan.”
“I love you, too.”
We love you. Of course they love him. They have to. He’s their son, after all. But Evan knows it’s a disappointed love. They love him like they love their retarded dog who eats rocks. They feel bad his teeth get broken, but the dog is happy, isn’t he? They love that dog, but they won’t think twice about putting him down for his own good as soon as he becomes incontinent. No “Doggie Depends” in Ralphy’s future. Just you wait and see. One puddle on the kitchen floor and Ralphy’s gig is up.
Ah.
When Evan announced to his parents that he wasn’t taking the SAT because he wasn’t going to college, they tried to keep straight faces. They didn’t want to fight him any more. They knew he had no place in college, so why should he bother? Evan left them in the kitchen and went to his room to play his guitar.
They thought he couldn’t hear them. They had to think that. There was no way they would have said what they did if they knew he was listening.
“Poor Evan, ” Louise said as she cleared the dinner table.
“What a waste, ” Carl answered her.“What a waste.”
HE FEELS BAD that he didn’t tell his mother about Dean, but he just couldn’t do it. There’s too much going on, his head is swimming and he feels uneasy and confused. He and Dean both fidget uncomfortably.
Evan can see where Dean dragged the easy chair over to the window so he could sit and look out at Lake Union. Dean had probably spent the entire day staring out the window without uttering a word; he probably hadn’t even rummaged through the refrigerator for food because he felt so out of place that he didn’t know what was acceptable behavior in Evan’s world. Who was to say that Evan didn’t have a violent temper, and that one of his quirks was to sleep until six P. M. every night, and that even the slightest sound could result in corporal punishment? It wasn’t out of the question. So he sat there, all day, not making a sound, not breathing too loudly, for fear of disturbing his new host.
Evan wants to explain why he was so late in rising, he wants to apologize for not being up earlier to tend to Dean, but that would mean he’d have to admit his flaw—a truly tragic one—and he isn’t sure he can do that yet.
“You must be hungry, ”Evan says.“Did you get yourself any food?”
Dean shrugs.
“You want something? I’ve got cereal, but that’s about it.”
“A guy named Lars called, ” Dean reminds him.
“Oh, yeah? What did Lars say?”
“He wondered if you were still going to the show tonight.”
Oh, shit. The show. Lucky Strike is playing in Belltown. Evan forgot all about it.
Dean digs a crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket.
“He made me write it down, ” he says. “He said he assumes you’ll be there unless you’re a ‘total fucking douche-bag fuck, ’ in which case he’ll have to ‘rip your balls off and stuff them down your tear ducts’ the next time he sees you.”
Evan laughs.
“Is he your friend?” Dean asks. Evan can’t tell if he’s serious.
“Yeah, pretty much, ” he says.
He scratches his cheek. Damn. He loves Lucky Strike. They’re more jazz than rock, and Evan isn’t a big jazz guy. But they’re a New York band well known for their exceptional chops, and Evan
is a fan of their leader, Theo Moody, a saxophonist who has a reputation for mixing it up with record labels.
“Did your mother ever take you to see music?” Evan asks.
“No.”
Can he take Dean to see Lucky Strike? Is it something parents do? Or is it the ultimate mistake, the first step down a path that leads to drug addiction and deviant behavior?
“I think they let kids in, but you couldn’t sit at the bar or anything. I don’t drink, so it wouldn’t matter anyway.”
Dean hesitates.
“So you want to go?”
“Um, okay, ” Dean shrugs even though Evan can see the excitement in his eyes. “If there’s nothing else to do.”
HE GATHERS HIMSELF together and gets dressed in what he deems appropriate musician’s garb for a Lucky Strike show: normal-guy look with a touch of cool. He doesn’t want to stand out, just come across as a little bit hipper than the rest of the audience so as to be identifiable as part of the musician’s tribe. So, in addition to his basic uniform of jeans and T-shirt, he selects a loose-fitting sharkskin shirt he picked up at a vintage clothing store in the Market. Shiny, but not too. Noticeable, but not ostentatious. It shows that he cares about his image, but only casually. He’s a guitarist, after all, not a lead singer. His music tells more about him than his image.
He checks himself in the mirror. He’s slightly taller than average. His blue-gray eyes are in contrast to his dark hair, which he wears short since, despite his best intentions, his hair does what it wants and sticks together in strange clumps that he has never come to understand. He’s thinner than his mother would like. He’s less muscular than he would like. He’s been told that he was built for fame—the wiry body of a rock star. He never put much store in the idea, but, deep down, he hopes it’s true.
They wait for the cab in the drizzle outside Evan’s building. They’re cabbing it because, for one, it’s generally easier than looking for a parking spot, and, two, Evan’s seizure activity is something of a concern. He knows he should call his neurologist, Dr. Melon, but he really doesn’t want to. Dr. Melon is cool and all, but he’s still a neurologist. And, though he’s a proponent of alternative therapies (the use of marijuana was his idea, not Evan’s), when push comes to shove, he still writes a prescription or ups a dosage or calls Evan in for a quick EEG just to “check under the hood.” And Evan doesn’t need any of that right now. He needs to be cool and calm, cut out the dairy and the wheat—which act as triggers for seizures in rough times, something to do with toxic load, Dr. Melon maintains— and keep a joint with him at all times. Easy enough.
“How about Chinese?” Evan asks. Steamed chicken and rice.
“I hate Chinese.”
“What do you want, then?”
Dean shrugs, his trademark nonverbal reply.
“Anything but Chinese, then, ” Evan says.
“Yeah, anything but Chinese.”
“How about Greek?” Grilled fish and rice.
“How about American or Italian?”
American or Italian. Great. Evan’s trying to tame his seizures by staying away from wheat and dairy, and his kid only wants to eat hamburgers and pizza.
“Okay, ” Evan says with a smile, “you got it.”
IF THEY’RE GOING to do it, they’re going to do it right. Evan takes Dean to Dick’s Drive-In up on Capitol Hill. He chooses Dick’s because Dick’s is a part of the Seattle experience, but also because Evan knows they don’t dust their fries with wheat to make them crunchy, like every other burger joint in the world does. And while he eats his three bags of limp fries and drinks his water, he envies Dean who is in the middle of inhaling two Deluxe burgers and sucking down a giant milkshake. The sacrifices we make for our children.
It’s crowded at Dick’s, as it always is, but the evening is too young for it to be really raucous. The hardcore drunken and stoned Dick’s eaters won’t arrive until much later. Evan and Dean stand at the outdoor counter eating and watching the people pass by on Broadway. Their conversation is almost nonexistent, but they are spending time together, which Evan figures is just as good. People talk too much anyway. Sometimes just standing next to a person is better than making a contrived effort to communicate with him through language.
After they finish dinner, they walk around a while, stopping long enough to watch a guy get his lip pierced in the window of a tattoo shop. Evan, clever father that he is, remembers that there’s an Urban Outfitters in the mall on the north end of Broadway, so they go and buy some clothes. Dean changes out of his uniform of protest and paradox and into something more appropriate for a contemporary Seattle teenager.
They hop another cab and head down to Belltown. When they arrive at Jefferson Bank, an old bank building converted to a night club, Lars is waiting on the street. Lars Hero, a six-foot-four Swede, is the drummer of Evan’s band, The Last. Amazingly dexterous with drumsticks but almost comically clumsy without, he is a very large, thickly built, platinum-blond man, who, it’s been said, is slightly retarded due to a childhood blow to the head he received courtesy of his hammer-wielding brother, Berg. Evan suspects that Lars was slightly retarded long before the blow to his head, since the blow occurred thusly:
Lars and Berg, fifteen and thirteen respectively, were working in the yard, breaking rocks for the Japanese garden their father was building, which, when completed, would boast a twelve-foot waterfall and an impressive collection of immaculately groomed bonsai trees. Lars and Berg argued. Berg, the younger, threatened Lars: “I’m gonna knock your head off with this hammer.” Berg gestured with the heavy clawed chipping hammer in his hand.
Lars, not to be intimidated by his little brother, responded: “You’re gonna have to pull it out of your ass first.”
Then, Berg, being a man of his word and a bit quicker than the hulking Lars, swung the hammer and connected with Lars’s head just above his ear. The sound was similar to the sound made when uncorking a bottle of wine. Pock. Not loud, but disturbing nonetheless.
There was blood, screaming, a trip to the hospital, a skull repaired with a hard plastic disk and some baling wire. But no lasting damage, thank God, except that Lars had problems comprehending his math homework after the incident. But, apparently Lars had problems comprehending his math homework before the incident, too. That the incident occurred at all suggested to Evan that there was a certain chemical deficiency in the Hero family.
“Hey, Ev, ” Lars calls out, waving frantically, as if a giant albino with a dent in his head is hard to pick out of a crowd.
Evan and Dean make their way toward him. There’s a larger than normal mob of young Bohemians gathered on the sidewalk. Evan never would have thought Lucky Strike was that big a draw.
“Hey, Lars.”
“What’s with the kid?”
“This is my son, Dean. Dean, this is Lars.”
A look of panic sweeps over Lars’s face. His hand instinctively goes to his mouth, he chews at the tender flesh around his thumbnail, a nasty habit.
“I didn’t know you had a kid, ” he whispers to Evan through his thumb.
“I do, his name is Dean. This is him.”
“You didn’t have a kid last week.”
“Well, I do now, ” Evan confirms.
While Lars digests this new information, he tears a piece of flesh off of his thumb and chews on it with his front teeth, grinding it up, gnashing it, pulverizing it. When it’s gone, he licks at the bloody wound he has just created.
“They’re sold out, ” he says.“Do you have a ticket for him?”
“What?”
“The show is sold out.”
“You’re kidding me!” Evan cries.
“Nope.” Lars stuffs his hand in his pocket, apparently overcome by a sudden feeling of guilt at the profuse amount of blood flowing from his thumb wound.
“How could they be sold out?” Evan asks, dismayed.
“Someone posted on the Internet that Tom Waits was showing up. I guess they all figure if Tom
Waits shows, Jim Jarmusch might show because he’s shooting a film in Portland, and they figure if Jim Jarmusch shows, Johnny Depp can’t be too far behind. So, therefore, you get all these loser artfags going to a see a band they’ve never heard of before tonight.”
“Oh, that makes sense.”
“So what do you want to do? I mean, I can go inside with him—what was your name again?”
“Dean.”
“I can go inside with Dean and you can try to worm your way past the bouncer, I guess. Because you know I’m not giving up my ticket and I know you don’t want Dean standing out here alone all night. If you don’t make it in, I’ll just take him to your place after the show, right?”
“Right, ” Evan sighs.
“See you, sucker, ” Lars chuckles.“Come on, Dean.”
Evan watches them walk away together.
“What happened?” he hears Lars ask Dean as they head toward the entrance.“Your old lady get sick of you and tell you to go stay with Dad for a while?”
“No, my old lady got killed in a head-on collision with someone driving the wrong way on the freeway.”
Lars doesn’t respond for a moment. Then, “Really?”
“Yeah.”
“That fucking sucks, man.”
“Yeah.”
“Fuck that.”
And then they are too far away for Evan to hear.
NO ONE IS scalping on the street, and the doorman won’t budge. It’s nine forty-five, almost fifteen minutes past the scheduled start time, and, though he doesn’t hear any music from inside, he knows it’s too late for him. He’s about to pack it in when he hears a familiar voice:“Yo, Evbee!”
Evbee? Evan turns around quickly to see who it is. Walking toward him is a stocky black man with close-cropped hair and a broad face, wearing black leather pants and a black leather motorcycle jacket.
“Yo, Evbee. Wassup?”
It’s Billy Marx, one of the founding partners of The Sound Factory, the hottest recording studio on the West Coast.
“Hey, Billy.”
Billy strides up to Evan and shakes his hand in the cool hip-hop way, a handshake with which Evan was never quite comfortable but always felt he could bluff his way through: slap hands, slide into a thumb-wrestling grip, then, palms together, lean in and give a poundy with the left hand—a quick thump to the hollow of the back of your co-greeter with the flat of your fist.
