by Garth Stein
Upon seeing Evan, Ralphy pants and wags his tail so hard he almost knocks himself down (he has arthritic hips, and balance isn’t something he’s especially good at). He barks once, happily, and then pees on the floor.
“That’s why he’s locked in the kitchen, ” Evan explains to Dean. “Easier to clean.”
He steps over the gate, takes a mop out of the broom closet and quickly cleans up.
“He smells, ” Dean says.
Evan opens the back door and lets Ralphy outside, where he begins chasing imaginary flies, another of his quirks. Evan sighs. His parents stick by Ralphy, he has to give them that. They could have dispatched him a decade ago and saved themselves a lot of heartache and who knows how much money. But they wanted to see their project through. Ralphy is living proof that love can persevere through any hardship.
They go on a quick tour of the house, which basically means they walk through the rooms without pause. Upstairs, Evan opens one of the doors.
“This is my old bedroom.”
Dean peers in.
“It’s an office, ” he says.
“True. This is my brother’s old bedroom.”
“Wow.”
Evan knew that would get a reaction. It shocks everyone. Evan’s old bedroom is a generic and disused office space housing a desk and an outdated computer and not much else, while Charlie’s old bedroom is more like a shrine. Every single thing that Charlie ever did is on display. Every poster or photo that he pinned to his walls twenty years ago is still there. The bedspread is the same one he used as a child. The trophies he won for the debate society and school newspaper competitions are brightly polished and prominently displayed. The only recent items are his college and law school diplomas and his New York Times wedding announcement, all of which are elegantly framed and hung. It’s almost like the Whitman Mission. Evan wonders if his parents ever considered adding an audio element to the display. You know, put on headphones, press play and James Earl Jones tells the story of Charlie’s life.
Mention any of this to Evan’s mother, and you will get many easy explanations: Charlie has a son, and little Eric needs to see his father’s history; your room looks out over the street so I can see when the UPS man is making a delivery; the afternoon sun is too bright in Charlie’s room; you don’t really care about things like that anyway, but Charlie does—he’s so sensitive. Mention it a second time, and you’ll get a cold look. Mention it a third time, and she’ll stop talking to you for the rest of dinner. A fourth, and you’ll get a call from your father late one night asking you to please knock it the hell off, stop badgering your mother, with the bitter tag line: “Stop being such a shit.”
Dean, thankfully, doesn’t dwell on Charlie’s accomplishments, but, instead, ventures into Louise’s office. There, Evan’s clever child quickly finds the sole artifact of Evan’s existence. Neatly framed and hanging on the wall is an album cover.
“What’s Dog Run?” Dean asks.
“My band. It’s what I’m famous for.”
“You don’t look famous.”
“Almost famous. That’s an album my old band put out eleven years ago. It had a really good song on it that turned into kind of an overnight grunge hit. The rest of the album sucked. It’s not like it mattered. Our lead singer killed himself before anything good could happen. You can’t tour without a lead singer.”
“How did he do it?”
“What?”
“Kill himself.”
Evan hesitates, but he’s in too deep.“He crashed his motorcycle.”
“Into another car?”
“No, off the Alaska Way Viaduct. He just drove off and died. He was probably on drugs. He usually was.”
“Oh.”
“You want some juice or something?”
“Okay.”
They go downstairs and sit at the kitchen table drinking orange juice. They say nothing, and Evan regrets mentioning the suicide of Jeff Beasley, the ill-fated lead singer of Dog Run. It’s clearly not appropriate conversation for a kid whose mom has just died in a car crash.
After a few silent minutes of sipping and gazing out at the Sound, which sparkles beautifully in the afternoon sun, Ralphy scratches at the back door. Evan lets him in and gives him a dog biscuit. He rinses out his glass and puts it on the dish rack, then meanders over to the telephone desk and pokes around. His mother’s calendar book is there. He pages through it, finds today’s date, looks. Marty, 1:30–3:00. Hmm. Marty. Her golf instructor. Until three. Hmm. What time is it now? Three-fifteen.
Holy shit. Suddenly the magnitude of the stupidity of what he is doing crashes down upon him. His mother is on her way home. What the hell is he thinking? They have to get out of there, and fast!
“We should go, ” he says, scrawling a note: Stopped by to say hello. No one home. Call me. E.
He slips the note onto the kitchen table and snatches Dean’s half-filled glass away from him.
“Hey, I’m still thirsty.”
“We’ll stop at the Circle K.”
He quickly rinses the glass and sets it on the rack, then catches himself. That’s a clue for a good detective, which his mother is. He dries one of the glasses with a paper towel and puts it back in the cupboard. He pats Ralphy on the head and grabs Dean. He sets the alarm and hustles Dean outside to the car. She isn’t home yet, thank God. He pulls out of the driveway. At the end of the block he glances into the rearview mirror. Jesus. There she is in her silver Mercedes. What timing. Pulling into one end of the street just as he pulls out of the other. She’ll be able to feel the breeze of their leaving in the hallway. She’ll be able to smell them in the kitchen. It’s like going home and sensing that a burglar was just there, the cord on the window shade still swinging back and forth. Dangerous. What the hell was he thinking?
LATER THAT AFTERNOON, Ellen calls.
“Everything’s fine, ” she says.“You can bring Dean home.”
Home? Evan finds her use of the word slightly amusing. Where is his home? His home is in Yakima, not Walla Walla and not Seattle. So when she says to bring him “home, ” what does she mean?
“You have to understand that Tracy’s death took us both very hard, ” she says in response to his silence.“We were both very upset, Frank and I. He hadn’t slept in days, and the doctor gave him some medication which was supposed to help him sleep but just made him irritable and angry, and then he woke up and saw that Dean wasn’t there. . . .”she trails off.“Everything’s fine, ” she reassures both Evan and herself.“You can bring him back.”
He wants to be snide and tell her to fuck off, but then what would he do with Dean? He needs everything to be fine with Ellen and Frank. So, unfortunately, he has to root for her.
“I can’t bring him back right now, ” Evan says.“I have an important session at the recording studio tomorrow night that’s going to go late, and I can’t drive to Walla Walla and back tomorrow.”
“You could put him on a bus, ” she suggests.
“I could FedEx him, too, but I won’t.”
“Oh. Of course not. I didn’t mean . . . Well, you two can spend some more time together then. Are you enjoying it?”
“Yes.”
“Good. So when will you be able to bring him home?”
“Probably Sunday.”
“Oh. Sunday would be fine. You can stay for dinner.”
Evan doesn’t respond.
“We really miss him terribly, Evan, ” Ellen goes on.“Frank’s been painting his room for him. We have an old pool table—oh, it must be thirty years old—that we used to have for the kids, you must remember it.”
“I don’t recall—”
“We got it when the kids were young. It was in the basement.”
“I don’t recall ever being made welcome in your house, Mrs. Smith.”
“It’s in terrible shape now, of course. We’re thinking of having it re-felted. And the garage is a workshop—very nice, Frank did all the work himself—we’ll clean it out and set up
the pool table and Dean will have his own rec room so he can invite his friends over. It would bring us a tremendous amount of joy to have him here, especially after Tracy’s death. You understand. And you can visit whenever you like. You can stay with us, or there’s an inn down the street, a bed and breakfast, you know, for the parents of the college kids, when they come for commencement. We have a very festive spring here in Walla Walla, I’m sure you didn’t know.”
“I’m sure.”
“So, what time can we expect you?”
He stews. He doesn’t like Frank and he doesn’t like Ellen. And he doesn’t like how this whole thing went down, how they took Dean away as a baby and excluded Evan. But he has no choice really—realistically—he has no alternative.
“Around three, ” he says.
“Wonderful, ” Ellen beams.“We’ll be expecting you.”
THEY DRIVE ON a thin strip of pavement that is balanced high in the air between the impassive buildings of downtown and the hustle of the waterfront; past the way-too-cute stadiums—and calling anything that size “cute” has got to be a compliment; past rows and rows of revitalized warehouses; past the old Sears building—the new Starbucks headquarters; past the galleries and espresso shops and cleverly designed logos on neatly painted offices for Information Age technologies already obsolete; into the heart of SoDo, South of Downtown, an area that twenty years ago was a dangerous place to go after dark, where companies preferred razor ribbon over welcome mats, but has since become home of the hipsters and shakers, and home to Billy Marx’s recording studio, which is the ultimate badge of cool.
The Sound Factory. The place where any movie, commercial, music video, or album worth a damn is recorded. It’s a massive, squat three-story building filled to the brim with rehearsal spaces, Foley rooms, and high-tech studios jammed with millions of dollars worth of the latest digital gear that can handle just about anything anyone can think of.
Billy, the consummate nice guy, knows how the balance of power and money works in the recording industry: the labels have all the power and the money, the musicians don’t. So he has a floating rate scale. Hollywood pays a million dollars an hour, anyone who was cool enough to be with The Sound Factory guys when they started, over a dozen years earlier in a little building in Pioneer Square, pays a dollar. A modern-day socialism. To each according to his needs, from each according to his familiarity.
As soon as they enter the building, Evan relaxes. The lobby itself isn’t very inviting. It’s a hollow, stark-white room with high ceilings of exposed I-beams, industrial lighting with a purplish glow, and poured concrete floors. But everything else about the room is welcoming. It’s the perfect temperature. Not too hot, not too cold. The air circulates enough to keep everything fresh, but not so much as to create a breeze. There are no windows, no clocks, no indication of time whatsoever. Once inside, one loses all temporal reference; literally, one loses one’s ability to discern day from night. Like a casino, The Sound Factory is a biorhythmic obfuscation chamber. Time is not the issue at The Sound Factory. It’s never late at The Sound Factory. Work through the night. Work through the next day. Our staff is happy to serve you, and we have comfortable couches for you to nap on. Work forever. And please pay your bill within thirty days. Thank you.
Evan notices Dean’s mouth, which is agape at the spectacle.
“Pretty nice, ” Evan says.
Dean closes his mouth and shrugs like it’s an everyday thing in Yakima. We’ve got places like this on every corner. He coolly plants himself in one of the arm chairs and picks up a magazine.
Evan is too high to sit. He’s charged up and ready to go. He’s cleared the weekend out. (Evan, one of the best commissioned salesmen on the floor at Fremont Guitar, always gets the prime hours: Thursday through Sunday afternoons and evenings; times when guitar buyers are at their peak. So Angel, the new kid, was happy to take Evan’s spot in exchange for Evan working Angel’s graveyard days: Monday through Wednesday.) And Dean, who’s turning out to be a pretty cool, self-reliant kid—probably the result of growing up without a father—has been great. Evan told him he needed to practice for the session, and Dean, without so much as an eye roll, hopped a bus and spent the day at some upscale video arcade in a new shopping center downtown. He had a blast, and it only cost Evan forty bucks. Parenting ain’t that hard, but it can be expensive.
A doorbell rings, a pleasant electric chime. The receptionist, a pretty young blonde, glances at a video monitor set into her desk, and then presses a button. The lock clicks, and in comes Lars, toting his stick bag and cymbal case. Right behind Lars is Billy Marx.
Billy notices Evan, stops and smiles.
“Evbee.” He strides over and greets Evan with the obligatory hip-hop embrace. “I ran into Lars in the parking lot. I didn’t know you guys were coming in tonight. Why didn’t you call me?”
“He did the calling, ” Evan says, gesturing to Lars.
“I called, ” Lars says, “but I just talked to whoever was in scheduling.”
“You know better than that, Lars. If you want a first-class upgrade, you gotta talk to me, brother.”
“My bad, ” Lars says with a sheepish grin.“Next time.”
“Lars is all hot to make a demo, ” Evan says.
“Oh, yeah? You guys ready to break out?”
“Looks like.”
“Theo’s still talking about you, man, ” Billy says. “He said he wanted to lift one of your riffs, but he couldn’t figure it out. He said you have thumbs like Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix had the longest motherfucking thumbs!”
They all laugh, including Dean, who’s sitting in his chair paging through a copy of Billboard.
Billy points at him with his chin.
“Who’s that?”
“My son, ” Evan says. “Dean, come here and meet the smartest guy I ever met who I wasn’t related to.”
Dean jumps up and comes over, offering his hand, which Billy takes.
“Your son?” Billy shakes his head. “Fucking Evbee.” Then to Dean, “Nice to meet you, ” along with a regular white person’s handshake.
“Hold on.” Billy suddenly breaks off and crosses the lobby to the receptionist.
“Where are they, Sybil?”
“Studio E. All night.”
“Lemme see the schedule.”
Sybil, the receptionist, hands over a large ledger sheet, which Billy studies.
“Who’s free?”
“Mica is.”
“Mica? Why?”
“Pepsi canceled, ” Sybil says.
“Those crackheads. When are they gonna get their shit together?”
Sybil shrugs and smiles, as if to say “I just work here.”
“So Mica’s just sitting around eating carrot sticks and doing sit-ups all night?”
Sybil nods.
“The Van Sant movie’s in C. So put these guys in B, and give them Mica.”
He hands the ledger back to Sybil and looks over to Evan.
“Anybody paying for this, Evbee?”
“Just us, ” Evan says.
Billy turns back to Sybil.
“Straight up, then. No room charge and bill them at rate on Mica, no premium. I’m paying her to sit around all night, she might as well work for it.”
Billy returns to where Evan, Lars, and Dean are standing.
“All right, I hooked you guys up. The studio is on me, you buy the engineer. Cool?”
“Cool, ” Evan says, “thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.”
“Did you say Mica?” Lars asks.“Mica Morrison?”
Billy nods.
“Dude, you rock.”
“Don’t be intimidated, ” Billy says.“I’ll drop in on you guys later on.” He grins at Evan. “Evbee with a teenage son. Whack, yo.”
Billy thumps fists with Lars and heads toward one of the doors that leads to some inner sanctum. As he reaches the door, Sybil hits the buzzer and the door miraculously opens for him. Then he is gone.
“Mica Morrison. Shit. She can make anybody sound good.”
“Who’s Mica Morrison?” Evan asks.
“Your studio is ready, ” Sybil says with an appetizing smile, pressing some secret button under her desk and releasing the electric lock on yet another door. Evan, Dean, and Lars step through and head for their first-class upgrade.
STUDIO B. RUMOR has it that the Rolling Stones recorded a track off their last album in Studio B. Rumor has it that Kenny G, of all people, records only in Studio B. The studio isn’t any different than Studios A or C, but it is the favored studio of Mica Morrison, the famous engineer. A legend in her own time. A mythical figure in the Seattle music scene. Occasionally she works on an independent album as a favor or because she feels especially charitable, but for the most part, she sticks to the majors. Major labels, major artists. Apparently she’s pretty hot. Apparently she’s a lesbian. All of this information is offered by Lars as he, Evan, and Dean set up in the studio.
Evan appreciates Lars’s banter, and indulges him in his engineering fetish. Lars makes it his mission to know everything he can about engineering records. He memorizes lists of the top engineers, knows all the jargon, understands all the concepts, the mik-ing techniques. It’s his thing.
Lars immediately adopts Dean as his assistant, and they work together setting up the drums, with Dean doing the heavier work—fetching the pieces from Lars’s van. Evan hauls his amp in and places it on a felt-covered wooden box to get it off the ground. He brought his Fender Deluxe tonight, one of the first amps he’d ever gotten and still his favorite. It isn’t very big, but it weighs a ton, and it sounds just how he likes it. He takes his guitar out of its case, a ’68 Stratocaster, and straps it on.
