by Sara Lewis
Diana said, “You have a sister? I didn’t know that.”
“I have an excellent sister,” I said. “And I think we should get together. You and me. I think we should talk.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Really. This is important. I can see why you wouldn’t want to, but I would really appreciate it if you could do this for me. Please.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me you had a sister?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “Could you Just think about it?”
“I guess, but I’m pretty sure—”
“I know, I know. But this is really important. Just think about it.”
“Fine.”
“How long do you need to think about getting together? How about I call you tomorrow?”
She sighed. “No.”
“The next day, then.”
“Is she older or younger?”
“Older. I’ll call you day after tomorrow.”
It wasn’t the first time my sister had saved me.
• • •
When I came home from the hospital, Ellen came home from college. She took a leave of absence. We went to a lot of movies. Our parents probably thought this was callous, but TV and movies were the only analgesics we had available, and we made liberal use of them.
I never returned to high school. But when we weren’t watching movies, I did all my homework. Ellen looked it over for me. It was home school, but we didn’t have that term then. My sister took the work in to my teachers and got more for me. (My mother was in some kind of nonfunctioning state of her own in those days.) The teachers talked to Ellen about what I was supposed to be learning. I took all my tests at home with a retired teacher sent over by the school district. I didn’t see my friends or even talk to them on the phone. When anyone called, I had Ellen say that I would call back, which I did not do.
Ellen transferred to UCSD, which hadn’t been open all that long. She hadn’t applied there originally. The whole point of college for Ellen had been to leave home. She had been looking forward to it since she was little. She wanted to live somewhere with snow. She came back for me, I knew, to provide a shield between our parents and me, between me and myself. When Ellen went to classes, I sat at my desk with my books open and a pen in my hand. What I was really doing was waiting for her to come back. If my mother came in, I’d hunch intently over my homework and not look up. Other than the time she spent at her classes, Ellen and I were together almost always. To pay her back, I took extra courses for the next two semesters and graduated half a year early. When I think about Ellen, I have very few memories of her when we were young kids. It was only after Jack died that Ellen came into focus for me.
Meanwhile, I had hardly picked up a guitar for a year. When I did, it was to move it to the garage and hang it on a nail by its strap. I remember just wanting it out of my room. It seemed to be watching me, refraining from comment. I didn’t even put it in a case. Somehow I had come to think of this one guitar I had at the time as my enemy, my harshest critic. I’m not sure why. I hoped it would become covered with dust and cobwebs, like a chandelier in a haunted house, I hoped its strings would get rusty and the whole instrument would disintegrate into dust.
Ellen graduated and applied to law school. She was accepted and packed her things to move to Pennsylvania. Before she left, she asked me eight thousand times if I was going to be OK. Every single time, I said, yes, I was. Fine. Then she was gone, and I had nothing to do. I didn’t go to the movies anymore. I didn’t even watch TV.
I started to go crazy again. I could feel it coming, and I could see it reflected in the way other people looked at me. “How are you?” my father started to ask again. “Tom?” I would hear my mother ask, “Tom, are you feeling all right?” “Do you want to talk about it?” One night, I curled up in my closet to sleep. I felt a little better there. In the morning, I didn’t feel like coming out. I pictured what was about to happen, the alarm bells that would go off in my parents’ heads, the therapists I would have to endure, the long silences and endless debates with myself about what I should or shouldn’t say to make them think I was fine so they would leave me alone.
When I crawled out of the closet the next day with a stiff neck and rug designs on my face, my brain was scrambling for an alternative to going nuts again. All I could think of was to get my guitar out of the garage. Now, I had an idea that the thing that had seemed to be my enemy was the very thing I should put my arms around and embrace. I needed something in my hands, and it was a bonus that I thought of something that made noise. People are less likely to ask you how you’re feeling when loud chords are blasting out of your amp. In the unlikely event that they ask you anyway, you can easily, convincingly act as though you haven’t heard the question.
I picked up the guitar again out of an overwhelming wish to avoid attention and concern. My playing wasn’t from any innate talent or creative drive. Honestly, I had no desire to make music ever again. I was just using it as a smoke screen, a diversionary tactic. I started a band, the sole purpose of which was to make people think I was getting over Jack’s and Mr. Smeltzer’s deaths, that I was moving on with my life. I had to create the impression of emotional stability by appearing to be occupied.
It was a fake band. I made up a fake name for it, Point Blank, and wrote some fake songs. It worked. I held auditions at my parents’ house. You could almost hear this collective sigh of relief in my family as guys (mostly guys; there were a few girls, but not many) I knew, sort of knew, and didn’t know at all showed up by appointment to our garage to show me what they could do.
I picked a lead guitar player, a bass player, a drummer, and a keyboard player. I saved rhythm guitar for myself. I didn’t want to play lead, didn’t want to be in the spotlight. My musician selections were pretty random. I didn’t pay much attention to the auditions. But I made sure that no one I picked had known either Jack or Mr. Smeltzer. The other guitar player and the keyboard player could both sing. We worked up the songs I’d written pretty quickly, which probably shouldn’t have surprised me, as I was very demanding of everyone’s time. Whenever someone had a time conflict, I would say, “Do you want to be in the band or not?” Instead of telling me to go to hell, they cancelled their other commitments, stopped seeing girlfriends who objected to their neglect, quit jobs they couldn’t squeeze into nonpracticing hours. We started playing around town.
People fell for it. Before you knew it, we even had a little following, a group of kids who showed up everywhere we went and offered to help us set up and break down our equipment. Girls wanted to go out with us. Some of them even wanted to go out with me. I kept wanting to say, “Don’t you people get it? This isn’t a real band. I made all this up! It’s a fake! Don’t be so gullible!” But no one, not even the other band members, saw through it. Obviously they didn’t, because, as you know, the band still exists and builds on its popularity, its universal respect, with every CD, every music video, every Letterman and SNL appearance, every annual music awards ceremony. But the band had served my purpose before all that started to happen, and I got out after the first three years.
When I made my announcement at the start of practice one day that I was quitting, that I was finished with Point Blank, the other guys just looked at me for several seconds. They were trying to figure out if I was joking. They didn’t believe me. I had to repeat it a lot of times and a lot of different ways before I convinced them. As you know, the songs went on without me. Songs have lives of their own. I didn’t know that then. Maybe it’s a little like having children; you can never have complete control over them, even though you imagine that you will. As soon as you’ve performed a song for people, even once sometimes, it can be off doing its own thing, and you couldn’t stop it if you tried.
Those songs have brought me an extra income that is very helpful for a bartender. I haven’t used much of the money, though. I’ve bought sound equipment that I couldn’t have afforded otherwise. I’ve had a couple of
emergencies now and then, wisdom teeth and that kind of thing. Ellen made me open an account that’s managed by someone at one of those big investment firms. If I ever need money, I guess I’ll use it. If it’s still there. I don’t keep track as much as I should.
In addition to the money, those songs have brought me a lot of grief too. I can’t tell you how many conversations about them have ended with someone saying, “You wrote those songs? You? So what are you doing here? Man, what happened?” This is the question I hate more than any other. A lot of potential friendships have ended with that question.
• • •
Now playing guitar and writing songs were my substitute life. I fully acknowledged that to myself. I worked on them compulsively every day. A song could focus on anything from a small emotion—say, embarrassment at saying the wrong thing—to a whole life of a made-up person. These life-story songs were done in series, I had one set called “Annie McCampbell” that consisted of twenty-five songs, written over a period of two years. (I pictured it as a double-album set.) Annie McCampbell was a waitress I invented. The story started as a daydream I had on a slow night at The Club. Annie grew up in Las Vegas. She wanted to be a singer/actress/comedian. The story started off with a song about her tap-dance lessons and recitals. There were a couple of songs about her school years. And then there was a song about her relationship with an older blackjack dealer who dumped her. The next song picks up with her in Los Angeles, waitressing and auditioning. It goes on; she makes it big on a TV sitcom. Anyway, you get the idea. A big story in songs that work both independently and as a group. I have another series about a guy named Ricky who wanted to be an astronaut and ended up a math teacher. You can see my recurring themes, just from these short descriptions: dreams of a larger life, either realized or unrealized; disappointment; death. I could make myself cry, almost, but as I’ve mentioned, I have a shortage of tears.
Not all my songs were installments in epic sagas. Some were just fictionalized versions of things that happened to me, an annoying encounter at the post office, or deciding to change my life because I was worried about some life-threatening illness, then reverting back to my old ways after the problem cleared up. I thought of the songwriting as occupational therapy, like weaving lanyards or making jewelry boxes out of Popsicle sticks. It was something to do. I mean, you have to do something with your time, right? And, as you’ve seen, there was not a whole lot going on in my life that took up a lot of my time.
thirteen
On our mother’s birthday, a Saturday, Ellen was picking me up for the visit. It was a ritual we acted out for every family occasion. We preferred to drive up to Alpine together to visit the parents. This year she was seventy-four. That sounded pretty old. I had this very same thought every year.
While I was waiting for Ellen, I called Diana. I left a message. “Hello, this is Good. Give me a call. Thanks.”
Ellen had bought the present. I gave her half the money, another tradition.
Now I said to Ellen, “Tell me again why we’re giving her walkie-talkies.”
“For the mall,” Ellen said, as if this were the most obvious thing in the world. “And you know, the gardening.”
I looked at her.
“OK, they go to the mall and lose each other all the time. So this way, they can stay in touch as they walk around, arrange a time to meet. You know?”
“Do you think she’ll be able to work them?” Our mother still had trouble with some of the trappings of the modern world. So did I, for that matter.
“I don’t know, Tom. Maybe this wasn’t a good idea. Let’s see—what was your idea again?”
“No, I didn’t mean—I wasn’t criticizing or anything. I’m just saying that she’s not very technical. It takes a lot of concentration for her to switch channels with the remote.”
“Trouble is, they have pretty much everything they really want. Let’s just hope for the best, OK?”
“We’re not going to stay long, right?”
“Tom, do we have to go over this every single time?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Yeah, we do. How long are we staying?”
“We will stay an hour.”
“Promise?” I had to torture her; there were certain rituals we both found comforting.
We pulled into the driveway, and there was this sour, squeezing feeling in my stomach. Another tradition.
Before I could even open my door, Mom was on the front walk, waving as if greeting an ocean liner docking after a dangerous passage.
We got out.
“Good to see you, dear.” She kissed Ellen on the cheek and hugged her.
Then it was my turn. Fumes from her hairspray and Vaseline Intensive Care Lotion enveloped me. “How’s my boy?” she said, squeezing me. It was one of those questions not requiring an answer, my favorite kind. She stepped back and squinted up at me in the bright sun. Our mother is small and appears to be growing smaller. She is very proud of the fact that she buys most of her clothes in Nordstrom’s children’s department during one of their annual sales. “This sweater,” she’ll say, as if she’s gotten away with something, “was only twelve dollars!” Right now, she was wearing a purple T-shirt with a pair of those pants women are wearing lately that appear way too short, white socks, and a pair of purple sneakers. Sometimes it is all too apparent that our mother buys her clothes in a children’s department.
Our dad lumbered outside. Dad is as large as Mom is small. He favors plaid shirts, gray chinos (the kind a high-school Janitor might wear), and work boots. He always looks as if he is about to go chop something down or weld something together. The top of our mother’s head reaches the top of his shirt pocket. He nodded and shook my hand, hugged my sister briefly.
We went inside and followed Dad into the living room, while our mother made a side trip to the kitchen. It’s one of those living rooms that people hardly ever sit in. You couldn’t relax in there because everything looked too nice. There was a couch and matching love seat covered in white fabric with occasional pale flowers scattered across it. I never sat there. I worried that I would leave some kind of stain on it, a big dark smudge that would ruin it forever. There was a pale pinkish orange chair. That one was covered in velvet. Its fabric had a “memory,” my mother once commented. She meant that your butt leaves a print. Also not for me. I got a ladder-back chair from the dining room, the way I always did.
“Tom, you got about fourteen places to sit in here. What are you bringing that in for?” our father said.
“My back,” I said. I didn’t say there was anything wrong with it; I just said, “My back,” and then I sat down on the unupholstered chair that I was less likely to wreck. Conceivably, it could splinter into small pieces, or I could rip out the wicker seat, but these were unlikely possibilities.
This wasn’t the house we grew up in. The parents sold that one quite a few years ago, and I was glad I would never have to go there ever again. Our parents had lived in five or more houses since then. I had lost track. Each successive house felt as remote and unrelated to me as the previous one.
Our mother brought in a tray. “No coffee for me, Mom,” I said, before she had a chance to ask.
“Oh, all right,” she said, a little pouty, as if I didn’t decline the coffee every single time I came. She offered me a plate of cookies, homemade.
“No, thanks,” I said, “Just had lunch.”
Ellen took a cookie and a cup of coffee.
“So what have you two been up to?”
Ellen groaned softly. “Just work.”
“Now, dear,” said our mother, “you’re doing a wonderful job. Think how many people you’ve helped, all those lives you’ve improved!”
Ellen nodded. She took a bite of her cookie. “Ooh!” she said. “Coconut!”
“Like it?” Our mother smiled. “And, Tom, what’s new in your life?”
I didn’t look at Ellen. “Just, you know, same old stuff, Mom,” I said.
My mom couldn’t say much about th
e people I’d helped by handing them Heinekens and tequila sunrises and taking their money. So she said, “Well, as long as you’re enjoying yourself!”
I know Ellen was thinking the same thing I was. When confronted with her two mildly miserable adult children, our mother said something upbeat. Our father didn’t talk. He just took a cookie.
Ellen said, “So happy birthday, Mom.” She handed Mom the present.
“Well, now, isn’t this nice? What could this be?” She opened the flowery pink paper. “Oh, heavens, what’s this?”
“Walkie-talkies, Mom. So you and Dad can find each other in the mall.”
“Oh, now, isn’t that something? How thoughtful. Look, Chuck. One for each of us. That’s a lovely gift, kids.” She took them out of the Styrofoam form inside the box. “Now, do they—hmm— do they need batteries? Or what?”
I looked at Ellen. See? “They need batteries,” I said.
“But I already put some in!” Ellen said, “So they’re all set to go. Tom and I will demonstrate.” Ellen grabbed one of the little radios out of our mothers hand. “Tom, go out in the driveway.”
I looked at her; Do I have to?
“Go!” she said, handing me the walkie-talkie.
I got up and walked out of the house. I switched on the walkie-talkie.
“Come in, Tom. Tom, do you read me?”
Oh, God.
“Hi,” I said.
“See that, Mom, it works!” Ellen was saying. “Tom, what is your location?”
“What? I’m out in the driveway, like you told me!”
An older man walked by with a dog on a leash. I didn’t want him to see me talking into the radio in my parents’ driveway. So I turned the thing off and went inside.
Into the radio, Ellen was saying, “Go all the way to the corner and then say something!”
