by Sara Lewis
The first time I heard Layla was at a party. I was fifteen. My brother, Jack, was there too. He was two years older, a senior. Jack was my hero and had been since we were little. We were in a band together, but Jack was the one with real talent. I was just in the band because I was his brother. He could play anything he heard, and he could write original lyrics that, I believed, were better than anything we heard on the radio. The band was called Elements of Danger. He made that up, and I still thought it was a great name for a band.
At the party, I was sitting on the floor between two stereo speakers with the album cover resting on the knees of my new denim bell-bottoms. They didn’t look new; that was the point. They were faded and soft, as if I had been wearing them for years. I loved those pants. I thought they elevated me to a level of cool that I could not have attained on my own. I was staring at the painting on the album cover and listening to the first song. Near the end of the first song, I saw my brother go outside. The song stopped, and I heard his car start.
At the time, I wondered why he hadn’t taken me with him. I considered getting up, running out, saying, “Wait!” But I knew my brother had been drinking. He could be a jerk when he drank, and I didn’t feel like a confrontation. Besides, I wanted to listen to the rest of the album, and then “Bell Bottom Blues” came on and I decided to get a ride with someone else. I turned my attention to the chords of the song and its lyrics’ connection to my new pants.
I didn’t know yet about Eric Clapton’s own substance abuse problems. In those days, I hadn’t even heard that term. It would be years until I learned about substance abuse and even longer before it occurred to me to apply this term to my brother. But when I did find out, it didn’t make anything any easier; it didn’t make me able to listen to the album or to forget any of what I didn’t want to know.
A friend drove me home from the party. I was in bed asleep before midnight. I assumed that my brother was too.
Later, around three, our parents came into my room to tell me that my brother was dead. He’d taken a curve too fast and flipped his old Dodge Dart over the edge of a canyon. No one had been with him at the time.
My sister, Ellen, came home from college. There was a funeral and lots of visitors. Girls came out of the woodwork. Guys I’d never seen before stopped by to give our mother song lyrics Jack had scribbled on sheets of notebook paper, lunch bags, napkins from Denny’s. Some of these kids had tapes of him singing either his own songs or other peoples’. Oceans of tears were shed over the loss of Jack Good, who lived only seventeen years.
Although I’ve spent much of the subsequent thirty years listening to music, I had never purposely listened to any part of Layla. And whenever a song from it came on somewhere unexpectedly, I tried to turn it off or move away as fast as I could. It’s a shame, really, because I was exactly the kind of person who would have appreciated that album and all of its significant reverberations at the time and since.
• • •
I picked up the phone and dialed Ellen’s work number again. My sister answered on the first ring. “Hi,” she said. She knew it was going to be me.
“Ellie?” I said. “The boy? She named him Jack” My voice cracked on the last word.
“Oh, Tom,” she said softly. “God. Why did she do that?”
I said, “She didn’t know. I never told her about him.”
“What do you mean you never told her? You guys were together for—”
“I don’t talk about it. It’s a rule I have. I don’t discuss it.”
“Tom, that’s a very bad rule!” she said sharply. Other people in her office must have heard her, but she did not tone it down. I was annoying enough for even my levelheaded sister to blow up at me at work. “How do you expect people to know you or feel close to you unless you let them in on your life? You just can’t ask people to—”
I didn’t hear what else she had to say on the subject because I hung up.
eleven
My sister was right, of course. Secrets can be toxic, but sometimes it was hard to know where to begin telling what you’ve been holding back, and once you did, how to stop.
I called Diana again. She didn’t answer. I left a message. “This is Good?” I said, as though I were trying to guess who it might be. “Could you call me? Please?”
I waited around. I took the phone into my closet and tried to play songs I knew by heart but didn’t make up myself, Bruce Springsteen songs or Steve Earle songs that were about situations way worse than anything in my life. I knew about a million songs, but that night I just couldn’t think of the right one. I started a lot of songs, but I never got to the end of any of them.
I called again and left another message. “Diana? Are you there? It’s Good. Again. I think I need to talk to you about some stuff.”
I waited. She didn’t call.
It’s a law of nature that if you want someone to call you, if you desperately need to hear from someone, you have to be away from your phone. I went out.
I was locking my door, and my neighbor Robin stepped through hers, which was right next to mine. Her keys were in one hand and Ray, her youngest, sat on her hip.
“Hi,” she said, nodding. We didn’t have much of a relationship, so it was always awkward whenever I found myself face to face with her unexpectedly this way. She had a round face with pink cheeks and amazingly straight brown hair that was cut off in a sharp, even line about halfway down her neck. She had a cushiony, soft body, and she usually wore overalls or jeans with big, loose shirts. I didn’t have anything against Robin, but we seemed to have nothing to say to each other. I had the feeling that I made her nervous, and I could understand her point of view on this. I worked weird hours and not many of them. The rest of the time I lurked around my small apartment, unoccupied, as far as she knew. We kept our distance from each other. In the several years she’d lived here, we probably hadn’t exchanged more than ten sentences.
The three other kids were coming down the stairs from Jeanette’s apartment. Robin said, “Did she like the magazines?”
“Yeah,” Elise said. “She said to tell you you’re ‘an absolute angel’ ”
The kids laughed about this.
“And she gave us gross candies!” Mike said.
“Shh,” Robin said. “You don’t want to hurt her feelings. Let’s see.”
Elise and Mike opened their hands to display butterscotches from grocery-store bins, Maddy spat something into the bushes.
“Yeah, well,” Robin said. “She’s just saying thank you.” She turned to me, “Say hello to Mr. Good.”
“Hello,” we all said without looking at one another. Then I left for 7-Eleven.
I was waiting to pay for my sunflower seeds. I was fine with what they were playing on the radio. I could have stood there all night, listening to Sugar Ray singing “Fly,” which didn’t mean anything to me. But then my luck ran out. The woman ahead of me realized she had forgotten half-and-half, and while she was getting it, Sugar Ray faded out and another song came on. Just who decides what songs to put with what? The song that came on was “'Let It Be,” for God’s sake, which reminded me again of my brothers death and more specifically of my subsequent depression and hospitalization, because it happened to come out at about that time. It’s just not a song that should be playing when you’re waiting in line at a 7-Eleven.
Jack and I had gotten a lot of attention from Mr. Smeltzer, our music teacher at school. We hung out with him in the band room, and we even went over to his house sometimes. He always made us promise not to do drugs or drink. We promised. He cited famous people who didn’t get to “fulfill their potential” (he was a teacher; he talked this way) because of their use of alcohol and/or drugs. Even before Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and the rest, there were already plenty of examples of excellent artists whose work had been cut short.
I kept my promise. Even now, I had never had so much as a beer in my life, though I often wondered about the benefits of my abstinence. I completel
y understood, people’s attraction to drags. It was a protective coating, a shield between them and the world. What did I have? My closet and my choice of guitars to hold in front of me.
Mr. Smeltzer wasn’t old, and he wasn’t young. Now that I think about it, he was probably about my age, the age I was now, in his mid- to late forties. He was married to an elementary-school teacher, and they had no kids. He called me after Jack died. I wouldn’t talk to him; I wouldn’t even come to the phone. I didn’t want him to hear me cry. I didn’t want to cry at all. Mr. Smeltzer would have understood what it meant to lose Jack. At the time, I thought Mr. Smeltzer might have been the only one who did, and I just couldn’t face that right away, his complete comprehension of the depth of my grief. I was pretty sure that he got that I adored Jack. Mr, Smeltzer would have understood, too, about Jacks drinking. He would when I explained it to him. He would understand how hard it was when my brother got drunk and acted like a jerk and wouldn’t practice. He might even understand that our band had recently broken up and that I was angry about this. Any minute, I had expected my brother to return to normal, for things to improve between us. I was picturing us working on songs together. I was seeing Jack on lead guitar, playing a solo, with me backing him up on rhythm guitar. In my future image of us, Jack was singing lead vocals into a microphone, and I was stepping up to harmonize. We were sharing the same mike, the way John and Paul used to do.
Certainly, Mr. Smeltzer understood that it wasn’t my fault that Jack was dead. And at the same time, he would know that I might have prevented Jack’s death. I was there that night, after all. I could have grabbed his keys and run, I could have let the air out of his tires. I could have called our father. And Mr. Smeltzer would know that not one of these scenarios had occurred to me at the time Jack left the party, because I simply had no idea that anything that bad could happen to Jack. If I had known what was going to happen I would have tried anything to stop it. Anything. But I didn’t. I should have known, which made my brothers death my fault. Sometimes, though I was furious with my brother for getting drunk and dying. He had ruined everything! Mr. Smeltzer got all that. I’m pretty sure he did.
I planned to visit Mr. Smeltzer when I felt better. I planned to try to straighten some of this out with him. Eventually. I planned to tell him a few things about my parents too. Mr. Smeltzer was at Jack’s funeral. Several people told me, I didn’t see this myself because I did not attend. I was at home, lying on my bed, holding a guitar across my stomach, looking at the ceiling, as I had been for most of a couple of days. A neighbor had to be called in to baby-sit me, in case I chose the moment of Jack’s funeral to find some creative way to kill myself. All the obvious potential methods had been removed from the house—pills, razors, even my dad’s radio had been taken out of my parents’ bathroom. They really didn’t get it. I was far too stunned, too inert, to take that kind of decisive action.
The neighbor, Francy, came in my room twice to check on me. I heard her feet approaching on the carpet, and I closed my eyes. She opened the door, stood there for a few seconds, went out. When my parents and Ellen came back, I heard Francy say, “He’s fine. He’s still napping.” Can’t you just imagine how eager she was to get away from there? I can. I was feeling it myself.
A few days later, I was even considering going back to school, just to be away from the house and my sad parents. They weren’t asking me all those questions without answers anymore. But the quiet sobbing, staring into space, and drifting from room to room were even worse.
Then all of a sudden, Mr. Smeltzer had a heart attack and died. Just like that. It wasn’t completely out of the blue, though, I learned. It turned out that he had a history of heart disease, and he smoked. All that talk about drug abuse, and he smoked. But again, in those days, people knew so little about addiction. I don’t think it was more than ten days after Jack’s death.
I wigged out. I crawled into my closet and slept almost constantly for two days, curled up on the floor. My parents couldn’t get me to eat, drink, talk, bathe, or do anything else for several more days. Then they checked me into a nuthouse. A nice nuthouse, but it didn’t seem that way to me at the time.
In the hospital, I spent a lot of time being “uncooperative.” The way it seemed to me was that a bunch of assholes and dorks were sticking their faces into my face every other minute, asking me how I was feeling and inviting me to talk about my brother and Mr. Smeltzer, whom they had never even met. I couldn’t stand to be around people, I couldn’t be in a room with another human being for more than a minute or so. There was a therapist I had to see every day. For many days, I sat in the chair and stared at the Kleenex box. Once I shredded Kleenex for the full fifty minutes and then, at the end of my session, brushed it all off my pants and walked out. I was a lot of fun. When I came into his office one day, there was an album by, well, let’s just say someone I didn’t like on his desk. We’ll call him Singer-Songwriter X. I blew up. How did anyone expect someone who liked Singer-Songwriter X to be able to help me? How was it possible that someone with that kind of hideous taste would even know what to say to me? He listened silently for a long time. Of course this was the most material I had given him to work with in all the days I had been coming to him.
When I finished ranting, he asked me what songs I liked. I said, “I like my brother’s songs! My brother wrote good songs!” I yelled this at top volume. “Anybody could write better songs than Singer-Songwriter X. Even I could.” Of course, I didn’t realize what kind of a trap I was falling into. If I hadn’t been nuts at the time, I would have seen this. But I was.
All he said was, “Really. Well, I’d like to hear one.”
That was the end of the session. So before the next one came around, I had a song ready. I pretended it was one of hundreds. Really, it was all I had, and I had written it just for him. It was “Self-Destructive Tendencies,” which, as you know, still gets played on the radio. It’s all about being crazy, and it’s sort of funny in a dark, serious way. You think of therapists as these reserved guys who don’t react much. Not this one. He laughed and bounced his head during the song. When it was over, he jumped out of his chair and came over to pat me on the back. “That was great!” he said. “You wrote that? God, that was good!” He probably would have hugged me if I hadn’t smelled so bad at the time, and if he weren’t afraid he would set me way back on my so-called journey.
I didn’t smile or anything. I couldn’t give him that much.
I had another one ready for the next session. I saw right away that songs were my way out. How crazy could I be if I could write a song, complete with a bridge, a hook, and a chorus you could sing along with? It worked. After five songs, they let me out.
They weren’t real songs. The therapist wouldn’t know this, because, as I saw it, well, he didn’t know anything. After all, he listened to Sing-Songwriter X and couldn’t even see the obvious dull phoniness of that guy. My songs were exercises I had to perform to extricate myself from my prison, the hospital. I realized also that if I didn’t start to act normal, I would never get out of this place, and people would never stop asking me how I was feeling and if I wanted to talk. I started to talk. I talked about my brother and Mr. Smeltzer.
I said that my brother got drunk sometimes, but even so he was the best person I knew in the world. I said that he had been just about to stop drinking forever. Our band was going to be famous, I told him, and we were good—really—and we had been planning to make it. Like the Beatles, I said. And now it was over, I said. (I didn’t mention that the band had broken up before Jack died or that I was mad at him.) Now I said that I would miss him and Mr. Smeltzer for the rest of my life. Here, the therapist disagreed with me. He said that grief gets easier to handle over time. I thought, As if you know anything! This will never change, ever. This will not even shrink to the slightest, tiniest degree! I said, “OK. I sure hope that starts soon.” I was faking everything.
Faking my recovery was a lot of work. I started eating and m
aking my bed in the mornings. I took showers. Even though I could make myself do these things, there seemed to be a thick sheet of glass between me and the rest of the world. The front of my brain seemed to be packed with wadded, wet cotton that muffled and slowed my thinking. But I knew what to do to make myself appear to be recovering.
When he came to drive me home, my dad turned on the radio. He probably did this out of nervousness and because he couldn’t think of what to say to me. And even now, waiting for my change in a 7-Eleven, I couldn’t hear “Let It Be” without remembering the movie that went with it, the Beatles breaking up, the events that led to my hospital stay, and all the details of my time there. Sometimes I am amazed by how much emotional complexity you can load into a few rhyming verses, a melody, and a chorus.
twelve
When I got home, there were no messages.
I called Ellen again. By now she was home. I said, “Sorry I hung up before.”
She said, “It’s OK, I was pushing. Sorry.”
“No you weren’t. You were right.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I left some messages for her. I’ll get together with her again. I’ll try to talk to her.”
“I see,” she said. “Well, take it easy, though. She might not want to. She might need some time to come around.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I will. I’m not going to be obnoxious or anything.”
As soon as I hung up, though, I called Diana again.
This time, she answered. “What?” she said. “Am I going to have to have my number changed?”
I swallowed. “I Just want to talk to you, that’s all. In fact, I was just discussing this with my sister, and she suggested that maybe I should have been more communicative with you years ago. Maybe I should have, you know, talked more way back then. I wasn’t, um, at my best then.”
