Daron's Guitar Chronicles: Volume One

by Cecilia Tan

  I probably said something like sure thing.

  “That’s right, I’ll take you with me. We’ll move to the city and go out every night of the week.” I can see him saying it in my mind like a movie that I can rewind and play again and again. Stupid, I thought to myself, what kind of promise is that to make to an eleven year old kid? And what kind of stupid are you to still be thinking about it? I doubt my memory of it, even. In the movie of my memory he’s still wearing a brown suit jacket and tie, the tie all loose around his neck, white dress shirt unbuttoned, the clothes he wore to work in the shoe store. But he usually took them off before we went out—he was usually out of that stuff before dinner time. I don’t know. Maybe I’m making the whole thing up, but I don’t think so.

  I tried to remember if he’d ever said anything like that again, but I don’t think he did. He never talked about leaving Claire in front of me after that, though he argued with her all the time—no, not argued, they fought but it wasn’t really like an argument with some kind of point that could be won. Maybe that night they’d started fighting before dinner, and he’d tuned her out by parking himself in front of the TV set. Maybe he didn’t even eat dinner with us, just sat there like a zombie, not answering her, not acknowledging anyone, not bothering to go upstairs and change his clothes or anything, until after we were put to bed and she was asleep. That wouldn’t have been the first time, if it was. But I don’t have a clear memory of the evening’s events before that moment in the bar, the foam of the root beer tickling my nose and the smell of booze on Digger’s breath as he conspired with me.

  Sad to think that was the closest we had ever been. For a couple of years the sneaking out was our secret; after Claire would mudpack her face or whatever and get in bed with earplugs on (because he snored, she said), Digger would get me out of my pj’s and into jeans and we’d walk down to the main road where Remo or some other friend would pick us up, or we could walk all the way to town center, past the shoe store, to Maddie’s. Yeah, when I was eleven, I thought my dad was the coolest. But by the time I turned fourteen or so, we stopped getting along so well.

  I went around to the back of a brick building and unlocked the door to the Aquarium, punched a few numbers on the alarm pad (5-4-42, Bud, the owner’s birthday) and went in. The lights were off and the clock radio on the reception desk glowed blue: 3:05. I untied my sneakers from the handle and slid the Strat case into the hall closet. I thought about leaving Bud a note that I’d have to take a couple of weeks off, but I could just tell him tomorrow. It’s not like he had money to pay me most of the time anyway. Not that I wouldn’t have taken steady pay if it had been available, but I needed the experience.

  I was tempted to phone Bart from there, to tell him about the gig and what all else. I went around to the receptionist side of the desk, which was fairly well-tiled with colored squares of paper with notes written on them. I didn’t know if they were the sticky kind or if they’d all move if I accidentally swept my arm across the desk. I sat in the chair without disturbing anything. I hadn’t talked to Bart for like two weeks, not since he’d gone to Cape Cod with his father and step-mom. I might have called if it hadn’t been quite so late and if I had been sure I remembered the number. I wanted to ask him if he’d give me a ride to the airport, too. It’d have to wait until tomorrow.

  If I started home right away, I’d be there by 3:30, but somehow once I sat down behind the desk I didn’t want to get up. I changed into my sneakers and laid my head carefully on top of Candy’s many notes.

  Digger could be kind of hostile to anyone who crossed him—Claire, his cronies, gas station attendants—depending on his mood. Sometimes he was hostile when he was drunk, sometimes only until he got drunk. Sitting there, I started to feel angry again.

  The day I’d left home had been one of those television-in-a-tie kind of days, when something Claire had said when he got home, or maybe even something grandad had said at the store, had set him off. He was drinking in the house, which was rare, sitting on the couch with a bottle of Scotch on the coffee table and a juice tumbler, leaning forward every now and then to pour a measure of Scotch into the glass in this very deliberate way. Then he’d sit back and sip and watch, his eyes never leaving the TV screen like the thing he was watching was so important to him that he couldn’t bear to look away from it. I don’t think he even changed the channel: commercials, news, sitcoms, he sat through it all. Claire had long ago given up trying to penetrate his resolve once he got like that. She was in the kitchen cooking something I wanted no part of eating. If I remember it all correctly, my goal was to start walking to the bus station before Janine came home from her job. My other older sister, Lilibeth, was already at college. I don’t know where Courtney was. Maybe Claire had signed her up for some class or something. I don’t know. I put my stuff together, the Strat in its case, clothes and some of the stuff I wanted to keep crammed into a duffel bag, and piled them by the front door.

  Digger never looked up once. I stood by the couch, waiting for him to look up. I pretended to be watching the show with him for a few minutes. When a commercial came on, I turned to say something, but he was staring with a clenched-jaw intensity that made me not. I went to the kitchen.

  I said to Claire, “I’m going.”

  “What do you mean, you’re going? We don’t eat for another half an hour.” She had her long chestnut hair in a tight bun at the back of her head. I’d seen her hair down maybe twice since I was ten years old.

  “Mom, I told you, I’m going on a bus at 6:15.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t leave without sitting down to a meal with the family.” Claire had this way of ignoring reality she didn’t like, like the fact that none of my sisters were home, or there was no way Digger was sitting down to eat with any of us that night, or the fact that I was not going to, at the last second, turn into a dutiful son that she could love instead of treating like a tenant. (Did I mention she’d tried to charge me rent that summer?) “What will people say.”

  “They won’t say a damn thing if you don’t tell them.” This was as close to a conversation as she and I had come in months. “Really, Mom, it’s time for me to go. So you can quit worrying about what the neighbors think of me.”

  “Well, thank goodness for that,” she said, her face pinched. “Maybe with only one of you around here there’ll finally be some peace.”

  I sagged. There was something unfair about the fact that just when I’d stopped getting along with Digger, Claire had decided that I was “turning out just like him” and had considered us partners in crime from then on. “Whatever you say, Ma. So glad I could do you a favor.”

  She muttered something I couldn’t hear and couldn’t guess and turned her back to me, ostensibly to stir something on the stove.

  I went back to Digger. The muttering was contagious, I guess, because he had started muttering at the television. The news was on, which meant I really had to get moving to catch that bus. He was watching one of the local cable stations, channel 68 or something, local news. I recognized a shot of my high school. “Hey man, I’m outta here,” I ventured.

  A TV news announcer was describing something about funding cuts in the local school systems, as they showed footage of two school teams I didn’t recognize playing soccer. “Aw shit,” Digger said to himself, or to the television, “stupid fucking faggots can you believe that.”

  “I gotta go.”

  “What are you, stupid? You can’t cut sports programs, end up with a bunch of nervous nellies.”

  This was a pretty weird thing to hear Digger, whose only sport was poker, say. “Dad,” I finally said, “I gotta say goodbye.”

  He usually yelled at me for calling him Dad. This time he didn’t even look up. The next news story was about a local fire fighter who was forced to resign when they learned he was gay. I did not stay around to hear what Digger had to say about that. I picked up my bags and I was gone.

  And I guess eventually he had done the same, if
what Remo said was true. I sat up because I was starting to laugh and I was afraid to mess up Candy’s papers. At that moment it struck me funny that I might, really and truly, never hear from him again. I was pissed at him but laughing at the same time. Maybe he had finally pulled off a con that was big, maybe he’d finally cleaned up in poker, maybe he’d finally had enough and took off without a penny. I didn’t care, and it felt good not to care. I moved from the desk chair to the couch and sat there staring at the dark ceiling instead of going home to sleep. In two weeks I’d be on a plane to Los Angeles. And we’ll move to the city and go out every night of the week.... It sounded like a line from a song.

  Jet Airliner

  If I thought everything would be smooth sailing, or flying, from that point on, I was wrong. Bart and I had a hell of a time pulling up to the terminal because of the weird clusterfuck of road and driveway at TF Green airport, but I hadn’t even begun to realize the hassles that awaited a nineteen year old with overlong hair and no driver’s license or passport trying to travel. Maybe it was just something about me, but the airline folks decided they wanted proof that I was who was named on the ticket, and were unable to comprehend that not everyone takes Driver Ed when they’re sixteen. And besides, I’d grown my hair since then and if I’d had time that week I would have changed my fucking name, anyway.

  Eventually a supervisor’s supervisor decided my expired RIMCon student ID was good enough and gave me a boarding pass. I went and sat down in the waiting area, at the end of a row of weirdly colored seats, waiting for my flight to take me to LA. A big man in business suit and cowboy hat squeezed by me, his garment bag hanging over his back like a tortoise’s shell. Two adults with two children attached stopped in front of me, then circled back the way they came. A loudspeaker overhead called out a string of names, numbers, and cities, all meaningless.

  I have dreams sometimes that I am in an airport, or is it a shopping mall? I’m a small child, lost, looking at everyone’s knees. It’s never the same place twice. Maybe that’s why I hate airports. No, that’s not why. A uniformed airline employee made an unintelligible announcement into the microphone at the counter. I looked up to see her changing the departure time on the board under ’Flight 235: Los Angeles’ from 9:20 to 10:30. I sank down lower in my chair.

  I hadn’t even reached my seat yet before I got into an argument with a flight attendant over the guitar. His gold name tag read ’Carl’ and from his tan skin and blond hair I guessed he must be from Los Angeles. Mr. Neatly Groomed insisted I send it down to be checked with the rest of the luggage. I insisted that it be placed into a compartment in the cabin. "Look, this plane is a DC-10, isn’t it?" People were beginning to back up in the aisle while we argued, and I glanced back to see a lot of eyes searching ahead for row numbers and rolling up in heads.

  "Yes. But I don’t..."

  I put on my best grownup voice, my best I’m-not-a-total-idiot voice. "Then I know you have a compartment this will fit in. I booked onto this flight because of that." He pursed his lips at me. Helpless, I resorted to joking. Being aggressive has never gotten me very far. "Look, Carl," I resisted the urge to touch him on the sleeve. "I’m sorry I’m not a trumpet player."

  He put both hands around the black case, and gave me half a smile, half a wink, and a motherly pat on the shoulder. "Alright. But let’s not have any more trouble out of you, young man."

  I sat down hard in my seat. Did I imagine that, or was that a come on? I watched him maneuvering away down the aisle, the black bulk pressed between his hands. I gnawed my thumbnail and tasted salt. I pulled an undersized airline blanket around me and let my hair fall over my face. With my head against the oval window shade, I feigned sleep.

  I was not good at ascertaining a man’s interest of level in me. Maybe it was a skill that would come with practice. It had been a couple of weeks since I’d last tried to get laid, a difficult affair that involved a tricky bus excursion to Providence’s one and only gay bar, a hopeful but fruitless trip to a Brown University dorm, and a long walk alone from College Hill down to where I lived. I’d leave it up to Carl and his suntanned smile, I decided, as the plane moved toward takeoff and I drifted into real sleep.

  I Love L.A.

  Someone once told me everyone is friendlier in warmer climates, and they might have been right. At the terminal Carl pshawed my idea of taking a cab into LA, and told me I was riding with him into town. He drove a white convertible VW bug and lovingly strapped the Strat into the back seat.

  With the top down it was impossible to talk so I just soaked up the sun, palm trees, a lot of stuff I’d seen on MTV. I couldn’t believe Remo lived in this town and I found it weird that Los Angeles really did look the way it did in movies. Maybe Carl was taking me a particularly scenic route, but I didn’t know. When we got to Carl’s place he invited me in. His apartment was nowhere near as anally neat as I’d feared it would be. Still, besides a few scattered magazines and unfolded laundry it lacked the clutter of a bachelor pad, as if here on the Left Coast everything had less substance and would evaporate when left unattended. He hung his uniform duds in the closet, and pulled me onto the bed.

  If this all seems sudden, that’s because it was. I didn’t really give myself time to think about fucking it up and for once, let it happen. He didn’t want to chit chat once I got my shirt off, things went really fast after that. Or maybe I lost track of time. It wasn’t until after we were done that I realized Remo might be wondering where I was. I told Carl I had to get going and he didn’t seem surprised or dismayed by my hurry to leave.

  A little ways down the street I found a phone on the outside wall of a bar. The sun was setting somewhere on the other side of the building, and I pumped change into the phone and waited. Remo picked it up on the third ring and heard the hum of something in the background like a vaccuum cleaner.

  "Hey, Reem, it’s me."

  "Hey ’me,’ how was your flight?"

  "A little delayed, but I’m here now."

  "Didn’t I give you the address? Just catch a cab and I’ll pay him when you get here."

  "What if they won’t take me?"

  "What, do you look homeless or something? Call me if there’s problem." The machine sound got louder.

  "Right." When I hung up, I noticed a sticker for a cab company half-peeled from the phone and dialed them next. All around the bar, separating the parking lot from the walkway, were round concrete posts. I sat on one and watched the sky turn purple, and for a few minutes, I was satisfied.

  Look At Little Sister

  I spent most of the next two weeks in and around Nomad’s rehearsal studio, getting reacquainted with the music, learning their set up, and getting to know the guys all over again. Years had passed since I’d last seen any of them, so I wasn’t sure what to expect when I saw them again, or more precisely, when they saw me, I should say. I shouldn’t have worried. Martin, the drummer, with his giant hands and deep set eyes had wrapped his long arms around me, crushing me tight like I was a long lost cousin rescued from a shipwreck. The Mazel brothers, Alex and Alan, settled for a handshake apiece. By the third or fourth day, when Remo brought in two backup singers to flesh out the lineup, I felt almost like we’d never been apart.

  The only person I wasn’t sure about was Waldo, the road manager. Waldo was a heavy man with uneven sideburns whose constant vice was chewing gum. Remo had introduced me to him with the vague title of "the new guy." Waldo took him aside, like I wasn’t standing right there listening.

  "He’s how old? Nineteen? Jeezus, Remo, has he got insurance? And I don’t suppose he’s union, no of course not. What do I look like, a babysitter?"

  Remo put a firm hand on his shoulder. "Waldo, he’s on my payroll. My payroll. Just see to it he gets a per diem and that you’ve got room for one extra covered in all the reservations." I didn’t believe for a second that they hadn’t discussed this ten times before. Waldo nodded, but that suspicious look crept into his eye whenever he looked at me.


  The hardest part about being with them was knowing what to do when. Matthew, as it turned out, was Remo’s full-time guitar tech, and until we got on the road there wasn’t a lot I could do to assist him but once in a while wind strings or tune. Remo arranged the set with me playing on three songs near the end, and the encore pieces. He said there wasn’t time to learn more. But he was wrong. I could have learned the whole set in two weeks without straining myself. But it was Remo’s show and I was grateful for what chance I was given. So, I spent a lot of time sitting on my ass, not sure what to do with myself. I ended up hanging around a lot with Waldo’s assistant and niece, Carynne.

  She had wire-straight red hair and cultivated this sort of hippie look with long strings of beads and vests. She latched onto me the first day Waldo had brought her up to rehearsal. Nomad rehearsed in a gigantic studio tucked in the back of an industrial park outside the city. (Actually, I was never sure where the city began and ended; it was kind of all one big sprawl.) The place was like a home away from home for the band, complete with kitchenette, fold-out couches, and an armed guard at the door. Carynne showed me around the building while she told me about other bands she and Waldo had toured with.

  "All those bands from the seventies that are trying to make big comebacks now, they’re all pigs. Rowdy, obnoxious, and smelly. Although I hear Aerosmith are really nice, now." The guard at the main door waved as we went out into the parking lot. "Robert Plant was okay, too. British guys are very polite and all. He always said ’thank you.’"

  I didn’t know whether to believe her and I wasn’t that interested. I wanted to know what day to day on the road was going to be like. But Carynne didn’t want to talk about the work. She wanted to know all about me. We were sitting in the grass outside, enjoying the sun. The sky here was a different kind of blue than we get in the northeast, more uniform. She leaned back on her elbows and squinted. "So how did you get hooked up with Nomad?"