by Sara Lewis
Clothes: I only wore certain clothes. In my early twenties, I developed a kind of uniform that didn’t vary too often, the pocket T-shirts from Kmart and Levi’s and cotton sweatshirts from Miller’s Outpost. I did my clothes shopping in one day, once a year. I did not own a pair of shorts, pajamas, a bathing suit, or a raincoat. These were extra things that I did not need.
Food and drink: I drank flavored instant coffee that came in a can. You could get it in vanilla, hazelnut, and chocolate mint. I liked chocolate mint the best. For breakfast, I had frozen waffles with syrup. There were a lot of vitamins in those. They added that. For lunch, I bought sandwiches from different places. If I wasn’t working, I ate a frozen dinner. There were spinach lasagna, tofu meat loaf. There’s a lot of really good stuff out there these days. That was my diet. Oh, and orange juice with ice cubes. I thought it was varied enough. Occasionally, someone—my sister or a woman I was seeing—opened my fridge and had a fit about how little was in there. But what was I going to do—buy a whole bunch of stuff that was just going to go bad? Anyway, it didn’t happen that often that someone opened my fridge, which brought us to…
People: My social circle was small. Tiny. Ellen may have been the one person I saw on purpose in those days.
At least I was aware of it. And when you’re aware of something, you can change it, right? It’s just a matter of deciding you want to.
Working in The Club wasn’t all I did. Being a bartender was just a minor part of my existence. The rest of the time I played guitar. I wrote songs. That’s the way I spent most of my time, as a matter of fact.
I used to be in a band. Not just a band, a band you’ve heard of, a band you know, a band almost everybody knows. It was possible that even Jeanette, my elderly landlady upstairs, had heard of my former band. It was Point Blank. I didn’t usually talk about this. I avoided the topic as much as possible. Occasionally, a rock journalist or an avid Point Blank fan would hunt me down and feel convinced that they deserved answers to their questions about my life as a reward for their effort. But they were wrong. I didn’t have to tell anybody anything. So they described me as “reclusive.” Ha! The reclusive bartender.
You know the song “I’m Losing My Mind,” right? Maybe you know all the words because at the time it was big, you were in love with your math teacher. Or you had just broken up with someone, and it fit so perfectly. Or maybe they played it at your wedding. Or you heard it last week on your parents’ oldies station. Or you heard it in a couple of movies. Anyway, I wrote that song. And what about “Self-Destructive Tendencies”? You might be familiar with either Point Blanks version or maybe Aerosmith’s. They were the first to cover it, and theirs was considered a “classic,” if not an original. Then Sting did it, followed a few years later by Gloria Estefan, at which point the song reached a new audience, and so did Gloria. It was also in a bunch of movies that I’d never seen. And then there was “Worse Than Ever.” As soon as you thought that the world had heard enough of that one, someone else covered it in some different musical genre. Last year, Clint Black did it. That one’s mine too.
These songs and a few others had given me some income over the past twenty-odd years. I never added it up for a grand total, but you might be surprised at what a popular song can do for a person. I had a lot of the money still. I didn’t do anything with it. What would I spend it on? I didn’t need anything.
A long, long time ago, I left Point Blank, a band I had started myself. I quit. This was before they were famous, but things were just starting to come together. All the hard work was finally paying off. Their biggest gig at the time was playing The Club. Ironic, isn’t it? I had gone no further.
Don’t ask me what happened.
There had been lots of stories about it. I was a drug addict and/or a boozer, and the band threw me out. Or I was this egomaniac who insisted on having the band named after me. The Tom Good Experience, maybe, or The Good Band or something. Or there was a woman involved, and Adam Blackburn, the lead singer, and I were both in love with her. He won. He got the woman and the band. Or I got the woman, and he got the band. Wrong. Not true. None of the above. I didn’t drink, and I’d never done drugs. I truly did not care what the band was called. Adam had been with the same woman since ninth grade, and I’d never settled on anyone in particular.
I had been asked why I left the band so many times that the faintest possibility of this question coming into a conversation caused me to grit my teeth and clench my fists. How could I give it all up? I just did, that’s all. I quit. I didn’t want to be in that band anymore. “So, why don’t you write some more songs?” you probably want to ask. I did write songs, all the time. I wrote them and I played them and I recorded them. I had all the tapes. I worked on them every day of my life. In my music-studio closet.
“Why don’t you start another band?” you probably want to know too. And “Why don’t you choose some of your songs and play them all around the country and make a million dollars?” Or, “Hey, you work in a club! Why don’t you play there?” You know, I’d been over this stuff with all kinds of people for years. I didn’t do those things. Period. I played every day. I practiced, and I wrote songs. It wasn’t a career; it was something I did. Alone in my closet. With the door shut. I liked it that way.
I met Diana at The Club, and we were together for a couple of months. I was crazy about Diana. Just hearing her move the water in the bathtub in the next room was a thrill that could give me goose bumps. I wrote about a thousand songs about Diana. OK, maybe it was more like eight directly about her and another twelve or so with portions she inspired. What can I tell you? I loved her. The band sent me two tickets to the Grammy Awards that year.
After we had that big fight, I came back to the apartment after work one night and there was a note, just like in a movie. It said.
Dear Good,
It won’t be a big surprise to you to find out that I’ve decided to go. This is not working for me, as I’ve told you many times. I don’t believe my future is here. Take care!
Diana
It was a surprise, of course. A more sensitive, less self-absorbed individual than myself might have seen it coming. I did not. Sure, we were arguing about my not having a “real” job or even ambition, my not having a “real” house, clothes, vehicle, etc. But that wasn’t at the center of what was happening with Diana and me. At the core was this: I could have been perfectly happy just looking at her every day for the rest of my life, watching her drink ginger ale through a straw or tuck her hair behind her ears. For that, to earn the right to look at her, smell her hair, and see her toes disappear as she put on her socks, I was willing to do just about anything. Anything. I would even have been willing to rake over my past and rethink some of those “patterns” that she found so offensive.
The night I got the note, I had looked in the two dresser drawers I’d cleared out for her to put clothes in—empty. I looked for her bike, which she kept locked and leaning against the side of the house—gone. I searched in the bathroom for her toothbrush— not there. I did find a few traces, which as I’ve mentioned, I put into a paper bag. She would have to come back for her things, I had told myself. I repeated these words many times for many weeks, finding them less and less convincing. As it turned out, conditioner was not a thing you come back for in a situation like this. Time passed, and I was glad that she left a few belongings, or I might have thought that I’d made her up. I didn’t know where Diana went when she left, because she didn’t get in touch with me again.
She left because she was pregnant. Ah. I saw that now. I did. All those discussions about whether I was ever going to do anything differently were about the baby she was going to have. Yeah. OK. It made sense now. She knew that being a father was not on my to-do list. She kept asking if I would ever buy a car. And here I was thinking those discussions were about, well, whether or not I wanted a car.
eight
Apparently, I did fall asleep again, because I dreamed that Diana came to see me
at The Club, but it went differently than it had in reality. She said, “I came back because I need help. I don’t have any money, and Eddie needs a father.” I woke up sweating from this dream. I didn’t know what the kid’s actual name was, though I was fairly certain that it wasn’t Eddie.
The dream convinced me to get in touch with Diana again. The meeting we had was unsatisfactory. I hadn’t said anything. I hadn’t asked to see the kid’s picture. I hadn’t gotten his name, I could do better; I knew I could. And for some reason, now that I knew that Diana didn’t want anything from me, I found that I was determined to give them something. I called information. “At the request of the customer,” a machine told me, “that number is unpublished.” I couldn’t call her at work, of course.
Great. Just great. Now I would have to call Kevin. I really didn’t want to talk to Kevin. “You’d better get a lawyer,” he would tell me. Or, “She’s not going to want to talk to you.” Or maybe he already knew that she had come to see me, “She wants you to leave her alone.” Or, “She said she didn’t want anything. What are you harassing her for? What do you want from her anyway?” Kevin would demand to know.
I wanted to see the kid. My kid. My son. I wanted to see my son. He had my DNA; I was at least entitled to have a look at that cowlick.
Before I called Kevin, I rehearsed my possible responses to his comments and questions, explanations of my actions, excuses for my behavior. I got all sweaty thinking about it and put off calling. Then I realized that I could just say it was none of his business. I could say, “I’d prefer not to discuss it.” Yeah. I didn’t have to explain anything to Kevin. I braced myself and called him at work. He answered right away. “Hey,” I said. “It’s Good.”
“Oh,” he said. “Good.”
I didn’t know if he meant it was good that I called, or he was just confirming that it was me. This happened often. Without any preamble or small talk, I just said, “Could you give me Diana’s phone number? Home number, if you have it?”
“I’ll get it from Cathy and call you right back,” he said, A minute later, the phone rang. He read me the number, complete with area code, which was the same as mine and the same as his.
“Thank you,” I said.
“You’re welcome,” he said. “Take care.” And he hung up without asking any questions or making any comments.
I put the phone number on the kitchen table next to my pile of unpaid bills I was planning to pay.
I went into my closet and closed the door. I practiced guitar solos from famous songs, “Day Tripper,” “Born to Run,” just whatever came to mind in no particular order. I like to think I can play anything if I listen carefully and practice a lot. There have been very few days since fourth grade that I have not picked up a guitar.
The only problem with my closet was that there was no ventilation. After two hours of playing, my hair was wet, my shirt was sticking to me, and I had to keep wiping my slick hands on my pants to keep them from slipping on the strings, I walked out, and the air felt cool, chilly almost, against my wet skin.
At 5:30, I dialed Diana’s number. She answered right away.
“Hello, Diana?” I said.
“Yes,” she said slowly, carefully. I hadn’t thought about her voice, what it sounded like, when I saw her before. But now it did something to me. My legs felt watery, and my heart started thumping.
“This is Good.”
There was a pause, a pretty long one.
“Oh…,” she said. “I thought we were done.”
“I, well, no, I guess I wasn’t. Done.”
“OK,” she said. “What?”
“So, OK, so… how are you?”
“Fine.” She didn’t ask how I was.
“Glad to hear it. OK. Well, so anyhow, if you want to, you know, reach me, I’m at the same number as before. Maybe you don’t still have it. Let me give it to you. It—”
“That’s OK, I still have it.”
“Oh, you do. Well, OK. So if you need anything, or you want to talk to me or anything, you can just—”
“Good?”
“Yes?”
“I don’t. I’m sorry. That sounds mean, and I didn’t mean it that way. It’s just that I’m fine. I have a job I like and a nice place to live. I’m all set, and I don’t want to mess it up now. And don’t worry—I’m not going to come knocking on your door one day and ask for money or something. I’m not going to ask you for anything.”
“Worry? I wasn’t worried. I just thought—maybe you’d like to, you know, get together. For dinner or something. To talk.”
This wasn’t what I’d planned at all. It was going all wrong! I was supposed to ask her to mail me a picture of the kid. I was going to mail her back a check or something. But now I found I couldn’t ask for a picture. I didn’t know why.
“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” she said.
Instantly, I felt my whole body slump in disappointment. “You don’t? Why not?”
“I didn’t move back here to resume my old life. Really. I moved here because I thought it would be a great place for Jack to grow up. And there was a job, and—”
“Jack?” I said, as if two hands were squeezing my throat. “Who is Jack?”
“My son. Who did you think Jack was?”
Jack? She named him Jack? My mouth dried up. Now my legs felt shaky. They were actually trembling. Why had she named him Jack? I had to sit down.
“Oh,” I said.
“Now, was there anything else?”
“Oh. No.”
“I have to go. I wish you all the best, really I do,” Diana said.
“Well, thanks. Same to you. Really.”
“Good-bye.”
“Bye.”
nine
I dialed Ellen’s work number.
“Are you busy? Are you right in the middle of something?”
She said, “I have a few minutes. What’s happening?”
“I saw her,” I said, “Diana. She came to The Club.”
“How did that go?”
“Fine, She didn’t want anything. She just wanted to tell me that she didn’t even want to talk to me.”
“Well, you’re safe then. You have nothing to worry about.”
“Safe, yeah,” I said. “She kind of yelled at me. She thought I might sue her for custody or something.”
“Oh, no. So you reassured her. You told her you had no such intention.”
“I don’t know. I guess. She sort of stomped off and I—I don’t remember what I said, to be honest. But then, then later, the next day, which is today, I called her. Just now, I did.”
“You did?”
“Yeah. See, I wanted to ask for a picture of the boy. I wanted to see what he looked like.”
“How did that go?”
“Go?”
“Tom.”
“Oh, sorry. Yeah, it went—well, she doesn’t want anything from me, that’s for sure. She keeps saying that,”
“You must be incredibly relieved.”
“Oh, yeah. Sure, Of course.”
“What about the picture?”
“I sort of—I don’t know—I sort of chickened out on that. I asked if she wanted to get together, though.”
“You did?”
“She said no. So I won’t have to do that. Either. So that’s a relief, loo.
“Is it?”
“What?”
“Tom. A relief! Is it really a relief that you aren’t going to have anything to do with Diana and her son?” She waited, gave me time to say something, but I didn’t. “Or are you disappointed?”
“Disappointed? What—that I don’t have child support payments draining my bank account? Am I disappointed I don’t have to put up with a lot of recriminations about not taking responsibility?”
She didn’t say anything. Then, “Are you?”
“Listen, I didn’t even know about this! You can’t blame me! I wasn’t in on her little plan. She got pregnant and left. Without tellin
g me! Therefore, she took full responsibility for it. Him. If you don’t even tell someone that he has a kid, how can he do anything for that kid? Tell me that! She doesn’t need me. Or want me. Why does everyone think that she’s going to come after me and take me for everything I’m worth?”
“You don’t feel you’re missing out?”
“Missing out? On what?”
“On the kid’s life?”
“Oh. Well. No. I mean I—no. I don’t.”
“OK, then. So… great. That settles that.”
We didn’t say anything for a couple of moments. Then I realized she was waiting for me to say the next thing. But my thoughts had moved on from our conversation. Still, it was my turn to talk. “I just called to let you know that everything is fine. Perfect. Nothing to worry about.’
“Glad to hear it.”
“Everything can go on as before. The same. Exactly as it was. No changes.”
“Right. Sure,” she said.
“What? It can.”
Ellen said, “Good.”
“What?”
“No, I mean, that’s good. That everything is the same.”
“Oh, yeah. I see. OK, I have to go.”
“Fine,” she said.
“Talk to you soon.
“OK, Tom.”
We hung up. I got a Coke out of the fridge and popped it open. I sat down on my bed and took a sip.
ten
I turned on the radio then, just to try to erase everything, and wouldn’t you know? “Layla.” That’s the song that was playing on the radio at that moment.
My brother ruined the Layla album for me. I don’t mean he scratched my record or left it in a hot car. I mean, every time I hear a song from it, all I can think about is the series of events that started the night I first heard that record. A lot of people my age love Layla. Many consider it brilliant: a flagship album that captures a whole era. For all I know it might have been one of my lifetime favorites. As it was, I switched stations as quickly as possible anytime it came on, which I did right now, and which didn’t help, as a music-induced flashback was already in progress.
