“Divorce?” I couldn’t believe how much of Cal’s life I’d missed. “You were married?”
“Not for very long.”
“Please don’t tell me you have kids.”
“No kids,” he said. “Anyway, I dropped the price of the property so that she was basically stealing it from me, under the condition that she let me take her on a date. I really wanted to hit it out of the park, so I whisked her off to Mexico City because she told me she loved Frida Kahlo, and there’s a Frida museum down there. I rented out the whole place so there were no crowds to bother her, and it was all epically romantic until she got food poisoning from some street tacos we had for lunch. The rest of the trip was me taking care of her for two days while she puked into a wastebasket beside the bed because she was too sick to make it to the bathroom. That’s how I got her to fall in love with me. By holding her hair back while she barfed.”
“Chris. Stop.”
“Come on. You love this story.”
“So, you moved back here then?” I asked him. “From New York?”
“Technically, he still lives in New York,” October said with a tone.
“Not true.” He ruffled her hair. “I still have my place in Brooklyn, but when I’m not on the road I’m mostly here.”
October stood up suddenly and said, “I need to go lie down.”
Cal wrapped her up in his arms. He was so much bigger than she was, and he engulfed her. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I have a headache.”
Cal kissed the top of her head. “OK. Go lie down. Harp and I are going to catch up.”
“Chris,” she said nervously. “I’m sure Joe has stuff to do. And you must be exhausted.” She turned to me. “He took the red-eye in from Chicago.” Then she looked back to Cal. “Don’t you want to rest or something?”
“Rest?” he shouted. “I’ve just been reunited with my long-lost best friend. How can I rest at a time like this?” He narrowed his eyes at me. “You don’t have any plans today, do you? Tell me you don’t have any plans.”
I looked to October for an answer, but her face was blank.
“No plans,” I said.
“Fucking Harp,” he said. “Fantastic. Follow me.”
ELEVEN.
Fourteen years had passed since Cal and I had seen each other. In a way it seemed like a lifetime, and yet after five minutes together it was as if no time had passed at all. We picked up right where we’d left off.
Blood brothers.
After October wandered off to nap, I followed Cal to the garage. It turned out the garage was a small recording studio, which explained why all the windows were covered up and it had been padlocked since I’d moved in.
Cal said the equipment was state of the art, but I know very little about recording; when I looked at it, all I saw were three large computer screens and a console with lots of knobs and buttons. However, the studio feature Cal was most excited to show me was the wall of guitars just outside the live room.
“Check it out,” he said, presenting the wall to me like a game show host revealing the big prize.
There were over a dozen of them, each one more beautiful than the next. The real-life version of our childhood bulletin board. Our Wall of Dreams. And the dream belonged exclusively to Cal.
One particular guitar ripped my heart out. The 1953 butterscotch Fender Telecaster hanging in the center, just like it had on the corkboard in my bedroom. Cal saw me eyeing it and started grinning.
I looked at him, wide-eyed and in disbelief. “Don’t even tell me that’s a Micawber…”
He nodded like crazy. “Go ahead. Play it.”
I couldn’t even reach for it. The guitar rendered me starstruck.
Cal took it down and handed it to me. “There is no one in the entire world I would rather hear play this than you.”
I ran my fingers up and down the neck and held it in my arms for a while, feeling its weight, admiring it, absorbing its energy before I felt ready to pluck a note or strum a chord.
Cal laughed. “That’s exactly what I did the first time I touched it.”
“I can’t believe you have this.”
Allegedly, Keith Richards had named the guitar Micawber after a Dickens character, and back when Cal and I were first discovering different makes and models, we thought the Tele sounded too country for us—until we listened to Exile on Main Street a couple dozen times and Keith set us straight.
Cal sat on the chair near the console and I sat on the couch across from him. He was eager to relay the story of how he’d come to acquire this instrument. “There’s a shop I go to on Broome Street in SoHo. They’ve got all these old, incredible guitars. I mean the place is a gold mine. One day about two years ago, I walk in, and that’s the first thing I see. No kidding, I literally begin to shake and sweat at the sight of it. My buddy who owns the place, he hands it to me, and for a while I don’t even play it, I just hold it like you just did, wondering who else had touched it and how it had ended up in my arms. I could tell it had been around the block, you know? I mean look at it. It has a history. A life. A soul. Finally, I plug it in and, well, you’ll see. I dabble in guitar. I’m not a player like you. But when I play Micawber it’s like I’m a fucking prodigy.”
I still couldn’t believe I was holding it. “How much did this cost?”
He chuckled. “Well, that was the thing. I asked my buddy the price as I’m cradling it in my arms, and after he told me I remember thinking, This fucking thing costs more than my mom made in a decade, and I decide right then on principle that I can’t buy it. I just wanted to hold it a little while longer.” Cal leaned in, animated. “October walks in a minute later. She’d been in a clothing store across the street, and she comes over and puts her arm on my back for a while—you know, does her thing—and she says, ‘Wow. I guess you have to buy that guitar.’ I asked her why and she said, ‘I can feel how much it means to you.’ She asked me what was so special about it, and you know what I told her? I swear to God, Harp, I told her it reminded me of you.”
I looked down and focused on the neck of the guitar, trying to keep his words from getting too far down inside me. This is one of my biggest character flaws. I often feel things much deeper than I let on.
“You know what?” Cal said. “October asked me that day, as she and I were leaving the store, why I didn’t look you up. She said I talked about you so much I should just find you and reach out, but I never did. I don’t know why. You’d stopped returning my calls so long ago, I guess I didn’t think you wanted to be found. But she ended up bringing us back together anyhow. Crazy, huh?”
I couldn’t even begin to chronicle the absurdity.
Cal nudged me to play the guitar. He was insistent, like the moment was getting too heavy and we needed to shake it off with some sound.
“Go on. Show me what you’ve got.”
I confessed that I had only recently started playing again after a long hiatus. I pulled off my shoes and socks, and Cal laughed at that in a sentimental way that made me feel happy and sad at the same time. Then I plugged in the guitar and dove into “Tumbling Dice,” and it didn’t matter that my fingers were sore and my timing was off. Cal was right. The guitar was magic. It practically played itself. And with the exception of the night I’d just spent with October, sitting across from Cal and playing that guitar was the single most satisfying experience of my adult life.
Cal and I spent the rest of the day in the studio. He showed me how the Pro Tools rig worked; we played with all the different guitars and jammed to all the old songs we used to play back in high school. In between songs we were memory banks of stories, the two most common phrases we repeated that afternoon being: “Remember that one time . . .” and “How about when . . .”
When it started to get dark, we realized we hadn’t eaten all day and decided to go down to town and
grab some food. Cal ran back to the house, hoping to talk October into joining us, but he returned alone a few minutes later and said she didn’t want to come.
Cal didn’t know how to drive. He’d never gotten his license when we were kids for two reasons: One, he couldn’t afford a car and figured there was no point in having a license if you couldn’t have a car. Two, he said New Yorkers didn’t need to drive, and in his heart he was already a New Yorker.
We hopped in my truck, and as I shifted into reverse, Cal said, “You obviously spend a lot of time with October. Has she seemed off lately?”
I shrugged, instantly uncomfortable. “Off, how?”
“I don’t know. Quieter than usual, I guess.”
“I’m not sure I know her well enough to answer that,” I said, hoping it sounded believable.
He nodded. “Yeah. Don’t take it personally. She can be a hard nut to crack, which is pretty ironic when you think about it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, you know; she’s so good at honing in on other people’s feelings, but not as great at talking about her own.”
I remember thinking that Cal’s description of October didn’t correspond with my perception of her at all. She didn’t seem like a hard nut to crack to me. On the contrary, she seemed split wide open.
“Between you and me,” Cal went on, “Rae called me yesterday and told me she was worried about October. She was the one who suggested I come back. I canceled a bunch of radio promos to get home for a few days, which did not make my label happy. I expected October would be glad to see me, glad I’d made the effort, but when I walked in this morning she seemed more spooked than excited.”
Fucking Rae, I thought. What a yeah-saying, feet-shuffling, raisin-and-almond-eating buttinsky she was.
“Did she say anything else?” I asked nervously. “Rae, I mean.”
Cal shook his head. “October gets like this when she’s overworked. Super-introverted. Doesn’t like to be around people. But I’m usually an exception to that.”
“She has been working like crazy the last couple of weeks.”
“I’m sure that’s it,” he said.
Cal and I went to a local brewpub for burgers and beers. At first we were seated near the window, but Mill Valley is a small town. Cal kept getting tapped on the shoulder by people who knew him and wanted to say hi or knew who he was and wanted to meet him. Especially women. He still clearly commanded—and enjoyed—the attention of women.
I found it amusing and fascinating that so many people recognized my old friend. Of course I was aware of how successful he had become, theoretically anyway, but I’d never considered how that success might play itself out in his daily life. I’d never even imagined Cal in Mill Valley as an adult. I’d always imagined him wandering the streets of New York, cool, carefree, and invulnerable, a force field around him like a rock star superhero.
It was touching for me to see how well he handled the attention. Despite all he’d accomplished, he was the same person I’d known in high school—funny, talkative, focused, and flirty. Success hadn’t seemed to change him in any overt way. If anything, it had loosened him up a bit. He finished his first beer before I finished mine and asked for another round before we ordered our food. The teenage Cal would have stopped at one and lectured me about discipline. The adult Cal was a lot more relaxed.
After a pushy man with a sweater tied around his neck came over and insisted Cal take a photo with his son, Cal chatted up the hostess, who agreed to move us to a reserved table in the back of the restaurant where Cal could sit facing away from the room; we weren’t bothered again.
“Wow,” I said. “You’re really famous.”
He ignored the remark. Then our food came and we both ate like we hadn’t eaten in a week. Minutes passed, and there was quiet between us for the first time all day. But it wasn’t quiet in my head. I was thinking about all the things I had imagined I would say to Cal if I ever saw him again. This was something I’d imagined a thousand times in a thousand different ways. Now here he was, sitting across from me. I had to start somewhere.
“Fuck, Cal. I’m sorry.”
He looked up, burger in hand, mouth full. “Harp, no. It’s fine.”
“It’s not.” I was on beer number three and stirred by liquid courage. “Just hear me out, OK?”
He wiped his hands on his napkin and gave me his full attention.
“Here’s what I want to say. You did it. You did everything you said you were going to do and more. Seriously. Everything. I’m proud of you. And I’m sorry I let you down. I’m sorry for dropping out of your life. I’m sorry for not being there for you. I’m sorry for so many things.”
He drained his beer and peered at me through a wispy chunk of hair that had fallen across his eye. But he didn’t shake me off or contradict anything I said. He just listened.
“This is hard,” I admitted. A lot of emotions were hitting me at once. I thought of all the years of Cal’s life that I’d missed. I thought of Terry dying, and I thought about the night I’d spent with October. Sitting there with Cal, realizing what I’d done, I swore to myself that nothing else would happen between October and me. I didn’t care what kind of free-love shit they had going on or how I felt about her, I could see right away that he loved her, and I wasn’t going to get in the middle of that.
“The thing is,” I said, “I’m just so fucking sorry.”
“You don’t need to keep saying that.”
“I do. You don’t even know.” I shook my head and felt myself getting shaky. “You got married, Cal. You fucking got married and I wasn’t there. You got divorced and I wasn’t there. Terry died and I wasn’t there. You won a fucking Grammy and I wasn’t there.”
“None of that matters now.”
“I don’t understand why you’re not pissed at me.”
“We were kids, Harp.”
“But I bailed on you. I made you promises, and I didn’t keep any of them.”
There was a small votive candle in the middle of our table. Cal reached out and put his finger on top of the flame, and at first I flinched, thinking he was going to get burned, but then I realized the flame was fake, plastic, battery-powered.
He said, “I figured you had your reasons for not coming with me. And I knew you well enough to guess at what those reasons were. You wrestle with your demons in a different way than I wrestle with mine. You always have.” He shook his head slowly, contemplatively, rubbing his chin. “I was never mad at you, Harp. I want you to know that. I was just super fucking bummed, for a really long time, that you weren’t along for the ride.” He leaned across the table, his eyebrow arching sharply, devilishly. “It’s been a fun fucking ride, bro.”
Despite how much we’d already had to drink, when the server came over and asked us if we wanted one more round, we both nodded.
“Catch me up,” Cal said. “I want to know what you’ve been doing all these years. Figured you’d be running the family business by now.”
“Yeah, well, that didn’t pan out.”
Cal wanted details, and I explained to him about how when I first started at Harper & Sons, I spent years in the actual construction part of the job. “It was hard but really satisfying work. Building things is like moving meditation. You can forget who you are and what you feel when you’re using tools and making things. And when you’re finished, there’s something to show for it. A tangible object that represents your time on the planet.”
“Kind of like making music,” Cal smirked.
“Kind of,” I said sadly. “Maybe that’s why it suited me. But Bob refused to let me stay in that role. If I was going to take over the company someday, he insisted I start climbing the ladder. And once I moved into the office, every aspect of my job depressed me. Inputting data for time cards and cost codes, filing invoices, preparing liens, validating insurances f
or subcontractors, the hours I spent commuting in and out of the city every day, my gray cubicle. And let’s not forget Bob’s constant, condescending tone regarding my lack of leadership skills. I couldn’t please him, no matter how hard I tried, and I swear, each day shaved off a little piece of my soul.”
“So, what? You quit? Good for you.”
“Oh, it’s better than that.” I took a long pull of my beer and smiled sarcastically. “I got fired.”
Cal’s brows rose.
“You heard me. Bob fucking fired me.”
I stuffed a couple fries in my mouth, shrugged, and then told Cal the whole story, beginning with the argument that had resulted in my termination. “I’d been cross-checking a set of invoices and discovered that Bob had purchased and charged one client for building materials—considerably more than the project had called for—and then used those extra materials on another project, while overcharging the second client too.”
“That dirty dog.”
“I confronted Bob about it and he shrugged it off, said it was no big deal, that everyone did it. But I refused to send the invoices like that. It was the first time I’d ever really stood up to him, and it didn’t go over well.”
“What happened?”
“He said, and I quote, ‘Christ, Joe. You’re as much of a pussy now as you’ve always been.’ I told him being a pussy was better than being a crook, and he took a wild swing at me.”
“He hit you?”
I shook my head. “I ducked, and he missed. And then I laughed because I knew that would piss him off even more. After that, he told me to clean out my desk, get the fuck out of his office, and never come back.”
Sorrow Page 10
