The Bad Decisions Playlist

by Michael Rubens

  “Shane here?”

  The bored glance, the gesture with his head to go on in. Rock on, dude.

  I get to the door at the end of the hall. I knock a few times but no one answers, so I turn the knob, open the door, and peek in. There’s an anteroom, and then another door with a circular window like a porthole in it. I peer through the window and see a dimly lit audio-monitoring room, the mixing board glowing like a massive control panel in a spaceship. The board faces a big window into what I assume is the recording studio.

  It takes a second for my eyes to adjust enough to see that there are two people in the control room​—​Ed the engineer and Shane, both listening to something on headphones. Ed is nodding his head. Shane is shaking his.

  As I watch he takes his headphones off and tosses them aside, then slumps way back in his chair until he’s practically facing the ceiling, rubbing his eyes.

  I open the door and step inside the room. Ed looks at me, surprised.

  “Hey,” he says. “What’s up?”

  “Who is that?” says Shane. His eyes are still closed.

  “It’s me,” I say.

  He opens his eyes and tilts his chin down to look at me, then straightens up in his chair.

  He doesn’t say anything for a bit. Then he says, “You want to go fishing?”

  “Fishing?” I say.

  “Yeah, fishing. Isn’t that what fathers and sons do?”

  “Shane,” says Ed, “we have a lot of work to do here, and you’re about this close to Barry losing his patience and pulling the plug on you.”

  Shane looks at me.

  “What do you say?”

  What do I say? I say, “Sure.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  So my dad and I go fishing.

  First, though, we descend upon a Target and power-shop for fishing gear: rods, reels, a massive tackle box, a random assortment of grotesque lures to fill it, every “Do we need this?” from me met with a firm “Absolutely.”

  “Hats,” says Shane, so we try on all sorts, me settling on a straw cowboy hat, Shane getting one of those bucket things, and then we both get huge wraparound sunglasses.

  Before we left the recording studio, I texted my mom:

  Hey, sorry ran into a friend will meet you at home

  She texted back, What? You are such an asshole.

  Then, I am so angry at you.

  Rick is very disappointed.

  You owe me a big explanation.

  And so on, until I turned off the indicator so that it doesn’t buzz each time a new threat arrives.

  I ride in the giant red shopping cart. Shane pushes me at a near sprint. He hops on the back. We nearly plow into a very ample lady. Unhappy store manager in red Target vest voices polite disapproval. Sincere apologies are offered, somewhat undercut by stifled giggles. Items are paid for, Shane shoplifts a candy bar, we make our escape.

  A drink run. A six-pack of soda, two six-packs of beer that we place on ice in the cooler​—​another Target purchase, very reasonable price.

  “Um, where are we going?”

  “Well, where would you normally go if you were playing hooky?”

  “I guess I’d go to the place we call Whitmore’s.”

  “Can you fish there?”

  “Yeah, sure, I guess.”

  “Okay, let’s go to Whitmore’s.”

  As we drive we talk about music. We talk about guitars. We talk about artists we respect and shows we’ve seen and who we wished we’d seen. We don’t talk about the other night or about anything that might point us in a direction leading to tears or anger or not talking.

  We park the truck near the path and lug the rods and tackle box and cooler and Shane’s acoustic guitar through the woods. When we get to the spot, Shane looks around and says, “Well, we got us a river and we got us some train tracks, and if that ain’t the stuff of music, I don’t know what is.”

  So now we’re settled against a thick tree upstream from the railroad trestle, a hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of fishing gear mostly forgotten in the long grass by our feet. Instead we talk a little and drink beer (“You can have one,” said Shane, I think because he was trying to seem responsible, but pretty soon I noticed that he wasn’t keeping track). Mostly what we do is take turns playing Shane’s guitar and sing songs together.

  For hours.

  Do you know that Carter family song, “Long Journey Home”?

  I’ll teach you.

  Do you know “Wild Horses” by the Stones?

  Of course.

  “Wish the Worst” by the Old 97’s?

  How’s that go?

  That’s really good, says Shane, or Let me show you how to do that better, or Here’s something you might want to work on . . .

  Like, you know, a dad would do.

  Hours drifting by, Shane and me, the creek swirling and changing color as the sun sinks lower, trains passing, clouds forming and dissipating.

  We talk about rivers and trains in music, all the references, the delta blues. We sing “Take Me to the River,” “Watching the River Flow,” Joni Mitchell’s “River.” We talk about Jeff Buckley wandering into the Wolf River in Memphis, Tennessee, and drowning, and Shane sings me a beautiful song about that by another Amy, Amy Correia, a song called “Blind River Boy.”

  That’s beautiful, I say, and he says, Yeah . . . Off somewhere, thinking about something. “I knew him, you know,” he says.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. When he was down in Memphis. I was a lot younger, just getting started.” He thinks some more. “You know, you do this stuff, Austin, you create something, I think you have to be on good terms with the devil. But don’t ever think you can be friends with him.”

  We’re in a sunlit patch, warm, but I shiver.

  Then he says, “Dat’s some deep stuff, right?” and throws back his head and laughs, dispelling the shadows, and launches into “Friend of the Devil,” and we have more sing-along time.

  Being there with him, singing and talking and just sitting in silence watching the dancing eddies of the creek, I feel a sort of contented happiness that I’ve never felt before. And also a sort of terror. Like someone has said to me, There’s this thing called oxygen. You breathe it and it keeps you alive. Now I’m having oxygen for the first time and it’s so basic and so good, but now I also realize how much I’ve always needed it, and how I will go on needing it, and I don’t want it to go away.

  When it gets late in the afternoon, the sun down behind the trees, Shane says, “Let’s get some food. But before we go, I want to hear something by Austin Methune.”

  “What?”

  “Sing me something of yours.”

  “No, I can’t. I don’t have anything.”

  “Nothing?”

  “I just have pieces of things.”

  “So play me a piece of something.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Austin,” he says, “here’s the great part. It can stink​—​I mean absolutely stink—​and it’s okay, because it’s just me.”

  I think about that. He smiles at me and passes the guitar over.

  So I start strumming, then quietly sing something that came into my head last night during my under-the-covers songwriting session. “Oh, Josephine, Josephine / hear my plea / Someone has got to love me / and it can’t be me. / I’m a liar and a deceiver / I can’t stand me neither / But if you leave / well that’s the end of me”

  Then I stop.

  “That’s it?” he says.

  “That’s all I have. That’s about as far as I usually get.”

  He’s smiling, nodding.

  “What?”

  “Josephine​—​she’s the girl from the other night,” he says.

  Again, not so much a question as a statement.

  “Yes.”

  He nods again.

  “It’s not about her,” I say. “Or me.”

  “No, right.”

  “I’m just using her name for the song.�
�

  “Sure. It’s a good name.”

  I wait.

  “So . . . what do you think?” I say.

  “I think you’ve got something really special there. Something really promising. Keep working on it.”

  “The song?”

  “The song. And the girl. C’mon, let’s go get some food.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  We drive to Uptown, me a bit buzzed, Shane not showing any obvious effects from the numerous beers he downed. Which, yeah, I’ve been the unwilling witness to a fair bit of parental drinking in my time, and maybe there’s a tiny red flag being waved somewhere in my mind. But this is different, because it’s Shane.

  We eat at some hipster place that’s half restaurant and half bowling alley. I take a break to use the bathroom and check the by-now-impressive number of affectionate, supportive texts from my mom, the last of which suggests that I had better goddamn well be dead, because that’s pretty much the only excuse for not responding that will cut it at this point. So I text her back and tell her, Yes, I’m dead, I’m texting you from beyond the grave and I bet you feel pretty awful right now, and my ghost is having dinner at Devon’s and will be back later on and I still love you even though you hate me, your poor dead son.

  When I get back to the table, Shane is fiddling with the check, pen hovering.

  “The other night,” I say, “that was the first time I’ve ever been able to get onstage and perform.”

  He lowers the pen. “What? You’re kidding.”

  I tell him about my whole problem with audiences.

  “I don’t know why,” I say.

  “I do,” he says, and starts scribbling on the check.

  “So?”

  “Because,” he says, distracted as he adds numbers, “you think it’s the only thing in this life you love to do, the only thing you can do, but you’re afraid to find out that you really can’t. Because if you can’t, what have you got left?”

  He signs his name with a flourish, then looks up at me, offers me the pen. “Here, you should be writing all my wisdom down. This stuff is priceless.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  On the way to the car he says, “Speaking of performing, Amy’s leaving tomorrow for a bit to do some shows in Chicago. We’re having some folks over tonight, and she’s going to sing some stuff, I’ll sing, other folks will sing, we’ll all sing together. It’ll be a regular good ol’ time hootenanny. You want to come?”

  “Sure.”

  “You can bring someone, you want.”

  So I call Alison.

  “Austin!”

  “Hey there. Listen, there’s this party thing tonight . . .”

  We make a plan that we will swing by and pick her up at eight p.m.

  “Here,” I say to Shane when we reach her house, and Shane pulls over and stops.

  Then I sit there in the passenger seat without moving.

  “What?” he says after about thirty seconds.

  “Actually, can we stop somewhere else instead?”

  “Sure. What’s up?”

  “I just realized who I really want to invite.”

  I thought that you were someone else /

  I thought that I was too / but maybe if you were with me /

  we’d both be someone new

  “Hi. Jacqueline, right?”

  “Uh . . . yeah?”

  “So good to see you again!” I say.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Austin.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She’s standing in the doorway, looking at me with the same amused contempt as before. I smile warmly back at her. She has makeup on and she’s fiddling with her hair, doing those occult things girls do. A date tonight, I imagine.

  “Might I add that you look particularly ravishing this evening?” I say.

  “What do you want?”

  “Is your sister available?”

  She snorts. “Hold on.” She leaves.

  Fidget. Pace. Turn a full circle. Phone buzzes. Another frowny-face emoji from Alison, who has sent me, like, five of them after I texted her and said I had to cancel because of a Mom thing.

  “Hey.”

  I jump, quickly putting the phone away. It’s Josephine, standing in the doorway, her expression cautious, confused.

  “Hi! How are you? Are you okay?” I say.

  “Yyyes . . . ?”

  “Great. Great.”

  “Is there​—”

  “Do you want to go see some music?”

  “What?”

  “Music. Music. Want to come?”

  “Now?”

  “Yes. I mean, it’s more like a party, but people are going to sing and all. Me and Shane are going. Shane and I.” I gesture to the Range Rover waiting at the curb behind me.

  “Oh. Thanks. I don’t think so. Thanks. No.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah, thanks. It’s sort of late.”

  “Back by midnight. Maybe one.”

  “Thanks, no.”

  “Is there some rule? Against fraternizing with your former tutees?”

  “No, I just can’t. Curfew. I’d get in trouble. I’m already kind of in trouble from the other night.”

  “Right.”

  Shane taps the horn.

  “Okay,” I say. “You sure?”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  “Okay.” My gaze flicks past her. Her sister is standing at the far end of the hall that leads to the door, arms crossed, watching us, not even trying to hide it. Smirking.

  Josephine turns to see what I’m looking at, then turns back to me.

  Our eyes meet.

  “Let me get my phone,” she says.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  This is a disaster.

  We’re in Shane’s car, me in back, Josephine in the front seat, and we’re all nearly dead, suffocated by the toxic awkwardness that has displaced all the oxygen in the vehicle.

  Things began going downhill the instant we started walking down the path from her house. Josephine took three steps and got a text and immediately started texting furiously back. I was trying to figure out if I was supposed to be walking next to her or not and ended up sort of splitting the difference, walking just ahead of her, twisting once to say, “Should be a fun party.”

  She didn’t say anything, just glanced up from her phone to give a brief, grimacey smile, and right then it was plain: all she had wanted to do was stick it to her family, prove to them and herself that she was independent. Not actually be independent. But she was trapped with her choice now, heading off to some weird party with me, and like we’d both said, we’re not actually friends. It’s okay, you beat them, you can go back to them now, I was thinking of telling her, but by then we had reached Shane’s car and he was opening the passenger door for her, expansive and welcoming.

  “Hi there. I’m Shane,” he said, hand extended.

  “Hi,” she said, polite, but nervous and watchful. When she climbed in, Shane glanced at me questioningly and I gave a little shrug. Shane put the car in gear and did his best to engage her: You like the show? You see a lot of music? You in school with Austin? Josephine answered in nervous monosyllables and then fell silent, still fielding texts on her phone.

  Shane glanced at me in the mirror. Again I shrugged.

  Now I’m rifling through every drawer in my brain, trashing the place, hoping to find something to say. Shane drums on the steering wheel. I jiggle my foot. I’m watching the anxiety reflected in Josephine’s left hand, which is resting on her left thigh but is squeezed into a slowly churning fist, clenching and unclenching like she’s kneading a small ball.

  “Mind if I . . . ?” says Shane, indicating the radio.

  “No, please, great, sure, great,” Josephine and I rush to say, and Shane switches on the radio, a merciful bolt gun to the temple of this wretched moment, putting it out of its misery.

  Amy welcomes us at the door of the house, a two-story near Uptown, and she hugs Shane, hugs me, ignores Josephine’s
proffered hand to pull her in for a squeeze too. “You’re friends with them, you get one of these!”

  “Why don’t you give them a tour of the house?” suggests Shane. He seems somehow amused, enjoying the awkwardness.

  “Sure,” says Amy.

  “Here, first you have to touch the horseshoe,” she says without any explanation, indicating a beat-up horseshoe nailed to the front door, so we touch the horseshoe before stepping inside.

  Then she shows us the upstairs, the downstairs, keeping a cheerful patter running the whole time, and takes us out back to the unused granny apartment over the detached garage, leading us up the ladder-like stairs to the mini-home with its tiny fridge and one-burner stove and Isn’t it adorable? she says, and we agree, and frankly I’m grateful to her for giving us an excuse not to talk.

  When we come back into the house it seems that everyone is arriving all at once, Shane giving embraces, backslapping, laughing, that same intoxicating aura that he had in the bar, the all-is-splendid-with-life-and-the-universe glow. People touch the horseshoe as they step in, one guy with neck tats saying, “Aw, you brought it!”

  “Always,” says Shane.

  I recognize many of them from the show, some of them recognizing me back, saying, Hey, great job the other night. I even see the bassist from the first time I went to Shane’s studio, Rob, the one who had stormed out, and he gets the same treatment from Shane, like the screaming argument never happened.

  “Isn’t that . . . ?” I say to Amy.

  “Yeah,” she says. “Everyone loves Shane. Just not in the studio.”

  Shane makes sure to introduce us around: Alex, this is my son, Austin, and his friend Josephine; Becky, this is my son. . . . I don’t think I’ve said three words to Josephine since we got in the truck, and I feel like I can see us from above having parallel party experiences, attending the same event but not with each other.

  “Okay, everyone, we should head out back,” announces Shane, so we all head through the kitchen to the backyard. Josephine is texting as she follows the herd. Shane puts his arm around me.

  “Doing okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah, all good.”

  There are Christmas-style lights draped along the wooden fence and in the overhanging branches of the trees, stars visible beyond. People crowd onto three old picnic benches and an assortment of lawn furniture and indoor chairs that had long ago become outdoor chairs, everything arranged in a rough semicircle, Amy tuning up her guitar in the middle of it.