Sorrow

by Tiffanie DeBartolo

  “Everyone thinks that.” He pointed to the guitar. “Seriously, though. Why are you so good?”

  Practice, I wrote. I drew a smiley face next to that word, because it was such an understatement it made me laugh.

  Cal gestured toward my Dr Pepper. “You gonna drink that?”

  I took another sip. It was warm, and I handed it to Cal because it seemed like he wanted it more than I did. He was staring at the food and I handed him a sandwich too.

  “What’s your name? I go by my last one. Callahan. You can call me Cal.” He ripped the crusts from the bread and stuffed them into his mouth. “I go to Tam High. Well, I mean, I’m starting there in September.”

  Me too! I wrote with an embarrassing amount of enthusiasm. Then I scribbled my name across the page. Joseph Robert Harper.

  Cal asked me why I was there by myself and I added a couple of lines about how it was my birthday and my dad had ditched me; Cal said, “That sucks” in a way that made me feel better.

  “At least you have a dad. Mine left before I was born. I’ve never even met him.”

  Cal grabbed the drumsticks from his back pocket and started playing a beat on the edge of the picnic table. Then he nodded toward my guitar and said, “Wanna jam?”

  I wasn’t sure how to do that, but I picked up the guitar and played the chord progression from an old Doug Blackman tune. Cal continued to play drums on the table, humming a melody over what I was doing, and pretty soon we had the makings of a song. Not a good song, but a song nevertheless.

  That’s when something started happening inside of me. It was as though the world was changing right in front of my eyes. I was changing. I know most of the time people describe monumental moments of their life as taking shape, but it’s the exact opposite for me. I’d spent the last two years in a sharp and silent world, playing guitar by myself, and as Cal and I played together, I felt all the jagged edges inside of me start to soften and blur into something warm and ecstatic. My life suddenly seemed more bearable than it had in a long time, and I was glad Bob had bailed on me.

  Cal and I stayed in the woods and made up songs all afternoon. When it started to get cold, I put my shoes back on, and we packed up and headed toward my house.

  On our hike home, Cal asked me what I was up to for the rest of the weekend; I wrote that my mom was gone until Sunday night. She thought I was going to be with my dad, so she and Chuck had gone to Tahoe, and I hadn’t bothered to tell her otherwise.

  Cal suggested that he and I go back to my house, listen to Chuck’s CDs, and learn more songs.

  Cool, I wrote.

  As we were crossing Panoramic Highway, Cal looked over at me and said, “Yo, what do you want to be when you grow up?”

  I’d never given it much thought because Bob had already decided for me. I stopped and wrote, My dad says I’m going to take over his company. U?

  “Duh,” Cal said. “I’m going to be a musician.”

  Until Cal said that, it had never occurred to me that I could choose to play guitar as a profession, but it suddenly seemed like what I was born to do.

  Me too, I wrote.

  Cal spun around and walked backward, glaring at me with his little owl eyes as if he were a strigiform truth detector trying to measure how serious I was.

  “For real?” he asked. “You swear?”

  I wrote I SWEAR on my palm and held it up to him, nodding frantically at the same time.

  He spun back around, once again took his place beside me, and we continued down my street.

  So many new thoughts and dreams were rippling inside of me.

  “Harp,” Cal said. “I have another serious question.”

  I tried to curtail my smile because it didn’t seem cool to smile as much as I could feel myself smiling, but no one had ever given me a nickname, at least not a nickname that wasn’t an insult, and I felt as if Cal had just uncovered the real me. I stopped walking and tried to look serious, even though I suspected I was still smiling like a cartoon character.

  “Do you want to be in my band?” Cal said.

  It was as if all the stuff inside of me was about to gush out.

  “I mean it’s just me right now, but I need a guitar player, and not only are you the best guitar player I’ve ever met, but you’re pretty decent looking too—girls like cute guitarists—and we’re going to be in the same class, and that means we can practice all the time and grow up to be the Campbell and Petty of our generation. What do you say?”

  I whipped out my notebook and was about to write YES! as big as I could fit it on the page, but that didn’t seem emphatic enough. I wanted Cal to know I was more serious about this than I’d ever been about anything.

  Cal was waiting for my answer. And I don’t think he ever truly understood the significance of what happened next.

  I looked him in the eye, took a deep breath, and said, “I definitely want to be in your band.”

  It was the first time I’d spoken in over two years.

  “Cool,” Cal said with a casual shrug.

  He took my notebook from me and wrote up a contract stating that he and I were now best friends and bandmates for life. We both signed it, and then Cal folded up the paper, put it in his pocket, and followed me up my driveway.

  SEVEN.

  Cal and I were inseparable all through high school. His mom, Terry, used to call us the Reese’s Twins on account of an old commercial for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups that went two great tastes that taste great together or some such thing. She said that, much like chocolate and peanut butter, we were pretty awesome on our own, but that as a duo we were unstoppable. She actually used that word: “unstoppable.” I’m sure she only said it because she was trying to be nice, because nothing about my personality screamed unstoppable, but she and Cal were both good at making me feel like I was worth something, and that meant a lot.

  Every day after school, Cal and I would go back to my house and do our homework. Despite our obsession with music, we were both excellent students. I worked hard because Bob threatened to take away my guitar if I didn’t maintain my GPA. Cal worked hard because he said slacker musicians were a cliché, and he refused to be a cliché. “Except with girls,” he clarified. “One of the reasons I’m doing this is for the girls.”

  Once we finished our homework, I would fix us dinner, which varied between spaghetti, frozen pizza, mac and cheese, and canned chili. And by us, I mean I cooked for the whole house—myself, Cal, Ingrid, and, while he was around, Chuck.

  I hope this doesn’t give the impression that Ingrid was a bad mom. She wasn’t. She was just heartbroken. That’s what she used to say to me when I would find her fully dressed in her big, empty bathtub, staring out over the valley. I would ask her what was wrong, and she would say, “I’m heartbroken, Joey.”

  She’d lost a son and then a husband, and she didn’t know how to heal from that. None of us did.

  At any rate, if I hadn’t cooked, we wouldn’t have eaten, and that was that.

  My mom and Chuck went out a lot after dinner, and Cal and I often had the house to ourselves. But even when Ingrid and Chuck were home, the house—a beige-hued Mediterranean-style monstrosity up on Edgewood Road that Bob had built himself—was big enough that we could do what we wanted and not bother anyone.

  After dinner we would have band practice, which was just me and Cal working on songs in the garage. Then we’d watch movies or study guitar magazines until we fell asleep. We had a gigantic bulletin board on a wall in my bedroom—we called it our Wall of Dreams—where we tacked up pictures of all the guitars we fantasized about owning someday. Micawber, the Fender Telecaster made famous by Keith Richards, was the big one in the center, and all the other guitars—a Fender Esquire, a Gibson Les Paul Goldtop, a Martin D-18e, a Gibson Firebird, a 1961 Danelectro, to name a few—hung around it like moons orbiting Jupiter.

 
Once in a while Chuck would give us some pot, but Cal didn’t like Chuck or pot, and he rarely smoked with me. “Pot is for boring, unambitious people,” he’d decided early on. “I’m neither of those things. And anyone who can play guitar like you shouldn’t be either.”

  Occasionally Cal and I switched it up and ate dinner with Terry when she had a rare night off, and she’d spend the whole meal asking us questions about what we’d been up to, what songs we were learning, and what we were studying in school.

  Terry had been a teenager when she’d had Cal and was still young when Cal and I were in high school, but you wouldn’t have known it by looking at her. Whereas even in her grief, Ingrid still looked like your typical, well-to-do Marin County mom—nice hair, good clothes, good shape—life had robbed Terry of her youth before its time. She lived paycheck to paycheck, smoked Marlboro Lights, and was always frazzled and exhausted. The blue shadows under her eyes never went away, and the corners of her mouth appeared to be trying to pull her whole face down to the ground.

  Terry worked as a waitress at a steakhouse near US 101. She and Cal lived in a small apartment in Marin City, in a building that could have passed for a rundown motel. The place had a cinderblock half wall that divided the family room from the kitchen, there was an electric burner on the counter in place of a stove, and the room Cal slept in was the same size as the closet in my bedroom. The shitty kids in our school called Marin City the ghetto, and I felt bad for Cal when they said it, but that kind of stuff didn’t faze Cal. He would peer down at them with his beady eyes—he was the tallest kid in our class and towered over everyone—and remind them that Tupac had once lived in Marin City. Cal never doubted that if Tupac could make it out of there, he could too.

  Every other weekend I stayed with Bob on his houseboat in Sausalito. Bob didn’t like commotion, so I wasn’t allowed to bring my guitar. Never mind that he lived at the end of the dock where there were no trees and nothing to do except look at the water. Most of the time Bob did let me bring Cal, though, and for a while I thought this was a symbol that Bob cared about my happiness and was being a considerate father. Then Cal and I overheard Bob tell Debbie, the woman Bob was dating at the time, that he liked it when Cal tagged along because it meant he didn’t have to babysit me.

  “It’s not called babysitting if you’re the dad,” Cal huffed to me, as if he were an expert on the subject. “It’s called parenting.”

  Bob’s take on music was even more appalling to Cal. As far as Bob was concerned, music was part of the background noise of the world, not an art form that deserved to play a major role in a person’s life.

  “Never trust a man who isn’t moved by song,” Cal reasoned. “It means he’s dead inside.”

  One particular weekend, Cal talked Bob into taking us to the big Tower Records in the city on Friday night because Bob was having a party and we didn’t want to have to sit around listening to his guests get drunk and babble about how much they’d spent on their houses. Bob had agreed, but he punctuated his consent by saying, “There’s something wrong with two teenage boys who have nothing better to do on a Friday night than go to a record store.”

  “We don’t think there’s anything better to do,” Cal replied on both our behalves, as he was wont to do.

  “What are you, his lawyer?” Bob barked. “You know what I was doing on Friday nights at your age? Chasing girls.”

  “Harp and I don’t have to chase girls. Girls chase us.”

  That was only marginally true. Girls chased Cal, he picked his favorites, and then he made sure whoever he was dating had a cute friend for me.

  Back then, Cal wasn’t what most people would call handsome. His face was too birdlike, all of his features too small to be considered traditionally attractive, and he was built like an I beam. But his confidence and charisma overshadowed all that. He was a player. And more often than not, he had the coolest girls in the room swooning.

  On more than one occasion, Bob made it a point to tell me I was empirically better looking than Cal, as if this were something I should value or exploit. But I was one of the smallest kids in class, and I was shy and self-conscious around normal people, so you can imagine what I was like when I was in the vicinity of a girl I liked.

  As the car pulled in to the Tower Records parking lot that night, Bob said, “You two better start putting as much energy into getting into college as you put into getting albums.”

  Cal caught my eye and I shook my head, silently begging him not to say a word. Early on in our friendship, I made Cal promise not to mention our Brooklyn plans to Bob until the time came for us to go. He had agreed, but I think he found it disappointing that I wouldn’t tell Bob the truth.

  When we got out of the car, Cal said, “Sometimes I question your commitment to our dreams, Harp.”

  “You don’t understand. Bob would flip if I told him. He’d probably lock me in the house and homeschool me. And I know for sure he wouldn’t let me hang out with you anymore.”

  That kept Cal quiet, but he was skeptical, and right to question my dedication. Unbeknownst to my best friend, I had already taken the SATs and ACTs and was working on applications to numerous California universities. I told myself I was just doing it to placate Bob, but there was a part of me that wondered if I was going to have the guts to go to Brooklyn with Cal.

  I eventually applied to Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA, and UC Santa Cruz. Stanford rejected me, but I got into the others.

  “You’ll go to Berkeley, just like your old man,” Bob declared during the winter of my senior year as he stood over me in his kitchen.

  I knew it was now or never, and I told myself to come out with it. After pacing around the deck outside and then calling Cal for advice, I walked back into the kitchen and asked Bob if I could talk to him about something important.

  He made direct eye contact with me, and I started glancing around the room, looking for something distracting on which to focus. Bob’s kitchen looked like a dungeon. Everything was charcoal gray and blackened steel. The architecture of doom. Nothing calmed my nerves.

  “Sit,” Bob said.

  I sat at one of the tall stools flanking the breakfast bar and knew immediately that I’d chosen the wrong location. My feet didn’t touch the ground from there, and that made me feel already defeated.

  I rested my arms on the cold countertop while Bob made himself an espresso. With his back to me, he said, “You’re not about to tell me you’re gay, are you? You and that Callahan?”

  It was not the first time Bob had alluded to this possibility, and I suppose it wasn’t so far-fetched from the outside looking in. Cal and I spent virtually every moment together, and kids at our school called us fags all the time. I didn’t care. It was Bob’s tone that hurt me. He sounded like he was already against whatever I was going to say, and how was a kid supposed to have a heart-to-heart with his dad if his dad came to the table with such a bad attitude?

  “No,” I sighed.

  I was looking at the piece of art on the wall behind Bob’s head. It was a painting of three jockeys on horses, all racing toward a finish line. The two horses in the lead were neck and neck and were both painted dark gray, the same color as everything else in the dungeon kitchen. The horse on the far left of the canvas, a couple of lengths back, was red. I wondered why the artist had chosen to paint that horse red, especially because it was losing. It was the only splash of color in the whole room.

  “Go on, then,” Bob said.

  I hunched over the counter and mumbled, “It’s about Berkeley.”

  “What about Berkeley?”

  I can’t remember what I said after that. Something about how I was thinking of deferring for a year so that I could move to New York and get a job and live in the real world before I spent four more years in school. I tried to make it sound like I wanted to get some life experience, and for a brief moment it seemed to be working.
/>   “What kind of job?” Bob asked.

  Graduation was still a few months off, but Cal already had a lot set up in New York. We were going to crash with Terry’s brother Bill until we could afford an apartment, and Bill had promised us jobs at a bakery he ran in Williamsburg. In the meantime, Cal had been working part-time for a local landscaping company and had saved up enough money to buy a plane ticket.

  Ingrid told me she’d buy me a plane ticket too. Her exact words were, “Follow your dreams, Joey, or you’ll end up a bitter old asshole like your father.”

  “Well, what then?” Bob asked.

  My stomach was a washing machine on spin. I couldn’t think of any good lies, and I kept hearing Cal’s voice in my head. When I’d told him on the phone that I was going to have the talk with Bob, he’d read me an inspirational quote about how a person’s success and happiness in life was directly proportional to the amount of uncomfortable conversations he or she was willing to have.

  “You can do it,” Cal assured me. “He’s not the boss of you. Not once you turn eighteen, anyway. Just tell him.”

  “Joseph,” Bob said.

  “It’s like this. Cal got us jobs at this bakery, and we’re going to—”

  “Cal?” Bob shouted. “I should’ve known this had something to do with Cal. Forget it. Cal can work in a bakery all he wants. You’re going to Berkeley.”

  “But Dad, we—”

  “The answer is no. You’re not going anywhere with Cal.”

  I hated the way he said Cal’s name, as if Cal were a rapist or a pedophile.

  “You’re going to college, Joe.”

  “You won’t even let me explain. We want to start a band. For real.”

  “You think that’s going to convince me?”

  “Please. Just listen.” Tears blurred my vision and I wanted to punch something, but I tamped all my feelings down like trash in a compactor and stared at my hands while I spoke. “Just give me a year. That’s all I’m asking. If nothing happens, I’ll come back and go to Berkeley.”