by Dave Bry
“Clearly,” Emily said, agreeing more quickly than I’d expected. “She’s lost much too much weight much too fast. She has an eating disorder.”
That had not occurred to me before, but it was true. Deb had a long struggle ahead of her. She’s doing better now.
Luckily for us, you guys are avid travelers. Emily and I have had other opportunities to spend time with you. You are exceptionally enjoyable people to spend time with. Family is something that I have taken for granted too much in my life, too often paid too little mind. Having made the choice to marry, and now with a young child of my own, I see importance in things that I could not before. I need to be more attentive.
Dear Seventy-Year-Old Man in a Leg Brace,
I’m sorry for not being able to change a tire on my own car.
It was hot that day, late summer 2003, on that desert highway in Wyoming, an hour or two outside of Cheyenne. And it was a rental car, actually, the convertible Mustang my wife and I were standing next to when you pulled onto the shoulder and parked behind us. Did that car look fast? It was. Could it go 130 miles per hour on a straightaway? It could. Should I have pushed it to that speed? I should not have.
The car had started to clunk and jerk a few miles back. We were down in the double digits by that time. (Thank god. I’m sure we would have burst into flames had anything happened at a buck thirty.) I’d kept going for a while, hoping to make it to a gas station, but it quickly became clear we were riding on the rim. I pulled off the road, stopped the car, and got out.
We were on vacation, driving the vast open spaces of the American West. The Rockies, Yellowstone, Devil’s Tower. (That’s the big rock from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, as I’m sure you know.) It’s beautiful country. But I’ve never felt more like Woody Allen, standing there frowning at that shredded tire—out of cell-phone service range, tumbleweed and cattle skulls littering the sunbaked landscape, vultures circling in the sky above. (Were there in fact vultures? I think there were.) I didn’t know what to do. There’s a reason I live in New York. I can barely change the filter in our humidifier.
I’d read somewhere that it’s safe to drink one’s own urine for up to seven cycles in a dehydrative emergency. Still, we were very happy when we saw your pickup coming toward us on the road.
Getting a first look at you through your windshield, I figured you’d drive us to an auto shop in the nearest town—or that you’d have a CB radio and could call a tow truck for help before mountain lions and coyotes came to eat us. You were small and wizened, and I certainly would not have expected you to be able to fix a broken car. You asked what the problem was and I told you we had a flat tire, and you asked me if I needed something called a jack. I was embarrassed to tell you that I didn’t know what that word meant. I was more embarrassed when you opened your door, swung out your left leg, which was encased in some sort of medical brace with bolts and metal hinges, hopped down from your seat, and hobbled your way over to the Mustang.
I heard my father’s voice in my memory. I’d always been mechanically disinclined. He used to tell me that I should at least learn the basics of auto repair, if only for instances such as this. “You shouldn’t be driving if you don’t have at least a little understanding of how a car’s engine works,” he said. He bought me Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when I was a teenager. But I never read it.
It’s no great Freudian leap to imagine that I resisted proficiency in this area precisely because it was important to my dad that I achieve it. That I kept myself so ignorant and incompetent as a sort of rebellion, in defiance of a standard of masculinity that I felt he had tried to push on me. I could accept that that might be the case, even if it was largely subconscious. (Although it could very well just be that I don’t have the head for it, that I was born without the acumen. I can’t follow directions to assemble my kid’s Lego sets, either. I start to hyperventilate at the first sentence of any instruction manual. It feels like the letters of the words are falling off the page, like when Sylvia Plath has her first mental breakdown in the Bell Jar. Did you read that one?)
Under the rug in my trunk, as you showed me, there was a clever hidden compartment containing a spare tire, an X-shaped tool, and, lo and behold, a jack—which turned out to be an accordion-like mechanism with which a seventy-year-old man in a leg brace can lift two thousand pounds of metal off the ground. Magic, in other words.
My kid will probably grow up to be an underwater welder for oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. I would be happy for that. (Well, I mean, except for the danger, the explosions, and sharks and stuff.) I would be happy if he didn’t find himself in situations where he felt helpless and out of his element. I would like him to feel more of a sense of mastery over the physical world than I do, more comfortable with machines and technology.
Before I could figure out something to say or do that might have been in any way useful, you dropped to the ground, flipped over on your back, and slid yourself under the back of my car. “I should really be doing this part,” I whispered to Emily, who nodded, as you disappeared. But then, I had no idea what you were looking for. I watched the brace drag tracks in the sand and imagined how uncomfortable it must have been to have such a thing strapped over your dusty blue jeans in this heat. I was wearing shorts and flip-flops.
But everyone feels helpless and out of his or her element sometimes. No one can master everything. I remember the look on my father’s face one day when a trailer he’d hitched to our car came unbolted on the road. Part of his horror was the surprise—the failure of an expertise he’d trusted in himself. I wish he could have been spared the feelings that that look betrayed. Might a bumbling incompetent like myself have an easier time handling those moments when life spins out of control? If only for having more practice? That’s an argument for irresponsibility, I realize—and craven; a beta wolf living off another’s hunting. And if followed to its conclusion and applied across the spectrum, one that would lead to a smaller, sadder world.
Once you’d found the right place to put the jack, you cranked up the chassis and had the new tire on and road ready in a matter of minutes. You let me spin the X-shaped wrench a couple times, more for the sake of humoring me, it seemed, than anything else.
There must be a happy medium. I hope my kid can tackle tasks at which I throw up my hands, only to tell self-deprecating stories about later. But I hope he doesn’t judge himself too harshly when he fails.
You didn’t say much. Just smiled and nodded when I thanked you a hundred times. And refused to take any of the money I offered for your trouble. You were like a cowboy hero come to life, like the Lone Ranger. I was so lame.
Dear Stephen Malkmus,
Sorry if I came off like a stalker when I told you that I’d named my child after one of your songs.
It was strangely warm the day we met in fall of 2005. I was wearing a sweatshirt and sweating in it as I stood at the corner of Houston Street and Avenue A with a heavy bag of groceries in each hand. You walked up pushing a baby stroller and waited there, five feet away, for the crosswalk sign to change. I got a giddy rush when I saw you. You are one of my all-time favorite rock ’n’ roll heroes.
Not that I hadn’t seen you in person before. I worked at a music magazine, and my roommate from college used to help put on those Tibetan Freedom Concerts you used to take part in. I interviewed your bandmates Scott Kannberg and Steve West once while you sat at the next table over, being interviewed by Lynn Hirschberg for Rolling Stone. And I’d seen you backstage at the concerts and at parties and stuff. Most recently, I’d seen you in my local coffee shop. Full City, the place was called, right across the street from the building where I lived on the Lower East Side. Full City got their coffee beans from a place in Portland, Oregon, according to a sign by the counter. You lived in Portland, I knew, so at first I wondered whether you were particular enough about your coffee to have found the one place in New York that carried your preferred product when you were in town for work. But then
Natalie, the proprietor of Full City, told me you’d in fact moved to New York, to the neighborhood—you’d moved in with your girlfriend, who lived right down the block.
I didn’t know you had a kid, though. I was surprised to see the stroller. This was maybe why I decided to say hello when I hadn’t the other times. I don’t usually approach a famous person when I see one on the street. I figure people don’t want to be bothered. But I was a new father myself at the time; my son had been born ten months earlier. We were standing right next to each other. It almost felt weird not to say something.
“Excuse me, Stephen?” I said, turning toward you. “Hi. My name’s Dave. I just wanted to tell you how much your music’s meant to me. It’s meant a lot.”
“Oh, thanks,” you said in the same slack, slightly off-kilter voice I knew from listening to your records a gazillion times.
“That’s all,” I said, starting to turn back away. “I just wanted to say hello.”
“So, what’s up?” You smiled and shrugged and sounded friendly. Friendlier than I’d expected.
I was taken off guard. You wanted to talk to me?
“Oh. Umm.” I was extremely psyched. But I didn’t have anything else to say. “I don’t know.” I nodded down to the bags I was carrying. “Doing some shopping.”
The light changed. You nodded south and asked if I was going that way. I was. We crossed Houston and started walking down Essex Street together. You asked where I lived and I told you and you told me you’d just moved into the neighborhood. I didn’t say, “Yeah, I heard that,” because I thought that might be weird, but I did tell you that I’d seen you at the Full City coffee shop a couple times. “Oh yeah,” you said. “They have good coffee there.”
My sweatshirt was much too warm and zipped up, and I couldn’t unzip it or wipe the sweat off my forehead because my hands were full of the very heavy grocery bags. I was sweating a lot. It was like Albert Brooks in Broadcast News. But if you noticed, you didn’t say anything. We talked about local real estate, which is about the most boring thing you can talk about, but was about the coolest thing I could imagine that day. Me and Stephen Malkmus, boring, local-real-estate-interested thirty-somethings—together! I cited a statistic I’d read recently and you said you’d read that, too. “We must have read the same article,” you said. I suppressed a teenybopper’s giggle.
We passed Stanton Street and came to Rivington. You were turning east. I turned, too. I could’ve kept going south and turned later; I didn’t have a set route. But I did eventually need to turn east. I was enjoying the conversation. Were you? I doubt that you were enjoying it as much as I was. That would’ve been hard to imagine. But you didn’t seem to be not enjoying it. So I turned with you. After a couple more steps, I looked down into the stroller you were pushing and saw a baby girl. “What’s her name?” I asked. You told me and I said that was nice. (It was.) I asked how old she was, and when you told me, I said that I had a little boy around that age at home. We exchanged congratulations and then condolences, agreeing that the difficulty of this first year would mean that our children would be only children.
“What’s your little guy’s name?” you asked.
Sweat streamed down past my ear onto my neck. “Well, it’s kind of funny,” I said, and coughed a laugh in confession. “Because it’s actually a name that I know mostly from one of your songs.” I told you my kid’s name and you said, “Oh yeah,” and recited the line from the song. This felt very weird to me, like parts of my life were coming together in ways I never thought they would, and I wondered how it felt to you. I wondered whether you were regretting your decision to strike up the conversation or that you’d told me where you lived and your daughter’s name.
“We really just liked the way it sounds,” I said, hoping that might reassure you.
You seemed unbothered. “I’ve always liked that name,” you said. “I’ve always associated it with the Old South for some reason.”
We walked and talked past Norfolk and Suffolk Streets. You were nothing but nice the whole time. But when we came to the corner of Rivington and Clinton, you nodded to Caffe Falai. “We’re gonna stop in there,” you said. “Okay,” I said. I decided not to stop with you.
“What did you say your name was again?” you asked. “Dave,” I said. You smiled a small, half-embarrassed smile and you indicated yourself. “Steve,” you said, shrugging again. You were just being polite. You knew I knew your name.
You’ve since moved away. Back to Portland with the family. I just learned you did wind up having a second kid. So congratulations and condolences again. I never saw you at Full City anymore after that day. I sort of wonder why. I sort of have a hunch.
Dear Step-Nephew,
I’m sorry for cursing at you at Thanksgiving at our aunt’s house.
November 2005. You were fifteen at the time or sixteen. Regardless, I used words that were very inappropriate for me to use in that situation. I was thirty-four.
We were in the kitchen at our mutual aunt’s house in Boston. I’d just arrived, after a long drive with my wife and not-quite-one-year-old kid and my mother. You and your folks had gotten there the day before. We were both up from New York, but I hadn’t seen you in a few years. Not since you were much shorter and much less opinionated about the city’s neighborhoods and socioeconomic matters. Or at least less colorful in the expression of your opinions.
We were catching up, making the sort of small talk I thought pretty normal for a pair of extended family members who only see each other every few years at Thanksgiving.
“So you’re in high school now,” I said. “Cool.”
“I see you’ve grown your hair long,” I said. “Cool.”
“Oh, you play guitar?”
I probably used the word cool too much. And you probably thought I was trying too hard to relate or whatever. I don’t often talk to teenagers these days. But I remember being one. And I was enjoying how fully you lived up to type. The bored, weary tone of voice, the skull with snakes coming out its eyes on your T-shirt, the put-upon half sneer in which you held your upper lip. You were totally awesome.
And, I’m sure, totally miserable. Trapped in Boston with your parents for four days instead of smoking pot with your friends and masturbating in the privacy of your own bathroom. I know I would have been.
I asked where in New York you lived and you told me Brooklyn and a neighborhood I can’t recall. Then I was taken aback when—after you asked me the same question and I told you that we had moved to the Lower East Side of Manhattan—that sneer curled a bit higher and you called me “fucking bourgeois scum.”
I’m not sure exactly what the appropriate response would have been. Maybe a more responsible adult would have gone and told your parents. Perhaps, in times past, someone in my position would have simply smacked you across the face or marched you over to the sink and washed your mouth out with soap. But thinking back on it, it was less the language that offended me than it was the accusation. Bourgeois?! Me?! (Moi?!) I saw Jane’s Addiction headline Lollapalooza in 1991! I guess I thought (without really thinking, of course—again, it had been a long drive) that cursing back at you would send a message. My knee-jerk intent was to shock you, to prove that I wasn’t too old, or too stodgy, or too bourgeois to use bad words.
I know better now. You were at a difficult age. And “suck my dick, you little punk” is really never the right thing to say to one’s nephew. Especially at Thanksgiving.
Dear Rory’s Parents,
I’m sorry if I conjured a disturbing image for you at Jack’s birthday party.
It was a few years ago now that we found ourselves talking by the bowl of ranch dressing dip. Jack was turning four. I was there because my kid was in Jack’s preschool class. You’re friends with Jack’s parents, I believe. One of you works with one of them or something. Anyway, you have a son who was at the party, too. Rory.
Being that four-year-old birthday parties are geared for the entertainment of four-year-olds,
they’re generally not so much fun for grown-ups. Even less so when the birthday boy is a classmate of your kid’s, as opposed to, say, the kid of one of your friends. I didn’t know any of the adults who were there very well. Still, even though I would have rather been sitting in the corner with headphones on, watching the episode of Star Wars: The Clone Wars that was being projected on the wall, I made an effort to have a conversation.
“Rory’s a nice name,” I said. “It’s Scottish, right?”
You didn’t know. Neither one of you are Scottish, it turns out. You just liked the sound of it. You asked me if I was Scottish. I said no but that I always thought of Rory as a Scottish name because I knew it mostly from a song by a Scottish band I like. I should have stopped talking right before I said that, but I didn’t. “The Vaselines,” I said. “Do you guys know them?” You didn’t. I didn’t expect you to. They’re kind of obscure. “They sing that song ‘Jesus Doesn’t Want Me for a Sunbeam’ that Nirvana played on the MTV Unplugged thing.” You did know that song, you said.
“What’s the song with Rory in it?” one of you asked, perfectly friendly.
That was when I knew I should have stopped talking earlier.
“Oh,” I said, feeling the pores in the skin on the top of my head open up. “It’s actually, umm, in the title to the song.”
You waited.
I should have lied. How hard would it have been to make up a song title with Rory in it? “Rory Be Mine.” “Hey, Hey, Rory.” “Rory Wants a New Pair of Shoes.” Whatever.
Instead, I gritted my teeth and, in the most casual, least creepy voice I could manage, told the truth. “Rory Rides Me Raw,” I said.
I could tell from the looks on your faces that you hadn’t heard of that one.
We didn’t talk much more after that, though the party was a long one. They waited for the balloon-tying clown to show up before serving the cake. It felt like forever.
