So much had happened since that night a summer earlier when he’d gone missing with Caitlin’s Escort. The only bit I told Repa and Ethan was that I’d had a gun pulled on me. I juiced up the scene to make it sound like there’d been a hair-raising showdown. The truth was that after Dad returned from the Wyandotte rectory, we’d thought he’d been cured. But he’d vanished again and again throughout the fall. Mom took calls from relatives who’d heard from him, and I found lipstick-smudged cigarette butts in the ashtray of his car. Mom confiscated his credit cards. Caitlin suspected he’d swiped money from her purse.
Our father …
Suddenly his eyes were dead circuits, an unknown catastrophe going on behind them. The past October he’d arrived at a wedding manic happy and tweaking, sweating through his dress shirt. Pale. Clammy. Mom and I whisked him to a nearby movie theater, where we’d bought tickets to whatever was playing. Dad sat between us, lit by the flickering of an action film, kneading his arms in a Technicolor comedown. At least Caitlin hadn’t been there. By late November Mom had checked him into the Atlanta Recovery Center, a facility known for curing the tough cases. Unlike Brighton, the Atlanta asylum kept patients for an indefinite time, as long as it took. After a few weeks, Dad’s left arm went numb, and he’d fainted, winding up in a cardiac unit and calling to tell us he’d be undergoing quadruple-bypass surgery three days before Christmas.
And when these memories began to haunt me, I’d crank the volume on the boom box, making my attempt to get personal with the road, the rolling plains and wind turbines. Wild dogs on southern backstreets. Ghost towns. The van so small beneath the sky. I’d analyze our songs, how to better fret the chords the next time we took the stage. When in need of a real distraction, I’d ask Repa to recount a dream from which he’d woken up bellowing one night, about a giant house of flesh, with steel handles bolted to its supple exterior. “I was making love to it. I hope I dream it again,” he’d say, and I’d see it rippling above him, a faceless mound of sex, as we laughed, on and on, making our way to the next show.
WITH THE ORGASMATRON PARKED outside a small Houston club in an old cantina, Repa and I opened the back doors and unloaded our crates of albums. We’d do this upon arriving at each destination. In Houston, Repa unboxed a single twelve-inch, groaning with the realization our vinyl platters had been warped by the southern heat. “This frickin’ sun,” he said. “They’re going limp on us.”
With a few hours to kill before sound check, we began sliding the misshapen discs from their jackets, attempting to bend them back to form. We’d recorded our nine-song album in a flurry of first takes over a single afternoon, and it felt like the sole accomplishment of my life, the most honest thing. Yet when I was in another mind, the pride I felt was erased by my shame over our songs, the mad sadness I knew no other way of expressing—it made me protective of our records, one hundred of which were pressed on limited-edition orange vinyl.
“If we sit on them,” I said, holding a deformed twelve-inch to the sunlight. “Maybe then.”
The parking lot was crabgrass and cracked asphalt, on the outskirts of something.
“Warden used the cheap stuff,” Repa said. “Horseshit vinyl.”
“What did you expect?” said Ethan.
Mike Warden was an irascible character with a knack for flying his ambitions to the edge of triumph, only to giggle when they went ablaze shortly thereafter. Weeks earlier, he’d released our album on his label, Conquer the World Records, established 1992. Though he’d barely turned twenty-five, Warden’s punk fanaticism and jackass business practices were already scene legend, made notorious by bands and fanzines who’d accused him of death threats, of fudging numbers and ordering unauthorized reprints. A Florida hardcore act had recorded a twelve-inch bearing the title Warden Can Suck It. He was dimpled and curly haired, a media mogul, Detroit-style. His infamy trailed us everywhere. Promoters refused to book us due to our CTW affiliation, but Warden’s earnest insanity endeared him to me from the start. He was genuinely deranged and made no attempt to hide it—a blunt honesty I longed to be near. Ethan called him Conquer the Colgate because he’d once caught Warden masturbating with toothpaste inside an RV full of touring musicians.
“Total piss.” Repa grunted.
He had no respect for Warden, any of this.
One by one he smacked the warped LPs against the Houston blacktop. Even in the Southern heat Repa wore black denim and motorcycle boots. Ethan sat on the Orgasmatron’s fender, using a Sharpie to black out the CTW logo on the salvaged albums. I set one aside for myself, the most warped I could find.
“Think anyone shows up tonight?” I said.
“Hell no,” Repa said, driving home a point: Warden had booked this gig.
I’d had a private desire to see the CTW logo on a record I’d made, knowing Warden would distribute them to lands we’d never reach on our own. He talked about Europe, saying, “We’ve gotta get you overseas. The Germans will love it.” So what if the vinyl melted? There was still Germany, and a thousand more promises Warden had made—one being that Houston would be a big gig, a scene awaiting our arrival.
“Anything Warden,” Ethan said. “I told you it’s a mistake.”
“Get Colgate on the horn,” Repa said. “Tell him we want a hotel tonight.”
The deal we’d struck with Warden was that we’d be paid in albums, ten percent of each pressing. CDs, too, but who cared? Before leaving town, I’d gone to fetch our copies from his lair, where he’d answered the door cloaked in a blanket and holding a flashlight. He lived in Detroit’s bowels, in a house that had once been a hub for subcultural activity. A family of ferrets had also resided there for a time, along with several vegan anarchists, one of whom gave free tattoos in the attic. All but Warden had since deserted, but not without first smashing the front windows and looting the joint.
“You better sell a lot of records,” Warden said, by way of inviting me inside.
Having maxed his credit paying for our albums, he hadn’t been able to cover the bills. His electricity had been disconnected. I’d followed him to the kitchen, led by the beam of his flashlight. There were empty pizza boxes and a mangled cage where the ferrets had slept. A warm stench radiated from decomposing fruit on the countertop. Warden moved at the stove to light a burner with a match, pressing his face near the flame. “At least there’s still gas,” he said.
“Christ, man.” I’d yanked up my T-shirt to mask my nostrils. “That smell.”
He turned toward his refrigerator. “Look at this,” he’d said, opening it and slapping a sack of vegetables to the floor. Then he got an arm around the back of the contraption and, with the door hanging open, wrestled it from the wall. Contents spilled forth—condiments and rotted tofu, green bread and Styrofoam containers. After hauling it halfway across the room, Warden attacked the fridge’s interior, for a moment gracefully, with the style of a martial artist. Then he lapsed into troglodyte barbarity, swinging his arms like clubs.
“I’ll get rid of the smell,” he said, reaching to open the back door.
Leveling his spine against it, Warden attempted to shove the monstrosity through the crumbling wooden doorframe. When he gave up, the fridge was lodged in the doorway: half in, half out, going nowhere.
“I guess you want your records now,” he’d said. On his way to the attic he snatched his flashlight, wiping his nose as the stove’s burner hissed blue—and not much later, our albums were in my arms.
COME SHOWTIME WE PLAYED to the barmaid, the promoter, and the headlining band—San Diegans, who all the while bounced a racquetball across the dance floor. Our songs echoed back at us from the far wall of the room, but we played fiercely through it, whatever was there.
Once we let loose, it didn’t matter how many people were watching, whether we were in Houston or Bad Axe, Michigan. Repa closed his eyes. Ethan played facing his amp, convulsing with the low end. We did what we’d come to do, which was to forget where we’d come from. I dropped to my knees and h
owled any which way but into the microphone, keeping true to the lyrics nonetheless. One line went Sing the recovery lie / I’ve got the cord tied / To thin the bleeding / Old flame clean me tonight, and another song screamed The lie is in the wind / So breathe it to me until my vision began to tunnel and my lungs crumpled together.
And then one of the San Diegans caught the racquetball on a bounce and held it.
As they neared the stage, the bartender turned her stare our way, and the soundman returned his unlit cigarette to his ear in order to—why the hell not—see this moment unfurling. Ethan walloped his strings with a fist, and Repa dragged out the last song longer than anyone could bear. With nothing left to scream, I let the volume smack my head in any direction. My hands went numb, but I heard my fingers making sense of the guitar, until the three of us locked eyes and stopped perfectly in time.
“Yes!” shouted the promoter. “Badass.”
He clapped loud and fast, as if to arouse some invisible audience to applaud the thrashing we’d given ourselves. All others present had yet to relax their wincing faces, thankful only that it was over. The promoter must have felt guilty about all this, because afterward he led us to his parents’ house, where we were each assigned our own room, to lie naked on fresh sheets as our clothes spun in the wash. A tremendous southern estate, though you’d never have suspected it from the guy’s tattooed neck and the silver-dollar-sized earrings punched into his lobes. He even offered to gas up our van the following morning. All he wanted in return was a record.
“So I can say you crashed with me, way back before anyone knew who you were.”
4
Copper bedposts. A ceiling fan. Track lighting, but no clock. It took a moment to remember what state I was in and why I was lying naked in a queen-size bed. I watched the sun illuminate the drawn shades until from somewhere in the house came the digital explosions of a video game.
Signs of life in Houston.
Outside the bedroom door, my laundry sat folded in a tidy pile. Stepping through the home, I began to dread all things family—I remembered I had one. It must have been the framed pictures in the hallways: the promoter arm in arm with suntanned people looking too much like him to be anything but siblings, smiling with a sort of conspiratorial mischief Caitlin and I hadn’t shared since we were children. That’s how I missed her, in flashes of guilt. I’d mailed a postcard to Will but had yet to call home since the band left Michigan.
“Help yourself,” the promoter said, about the phone, hardly bothering to turn from the video screen.
A few rings. Then Caitlin answered with a midmorning rasp. “You’re not causing trouble,” she said, “are you?”
My sister was not above irony. For my November birthday, she’d given me a mauve sweater with an oversize golf ball embroidered across the chest, a canny nod toward my previous status as a hateful, underpaid scooper of fairway goose shit. As I’d opened it, she’d laughed herself to the floor—a rare burst of glee amid the family sorrows she’d been taking so hard. The cable-knit atrocity must have cost twenty bucks, and she’d wrung every penny out of the joke, gesturing for me to try it on. This was her humor—rarely spoken. When it came to words, Caitlin was heat seeking, impossibly literal.
“Doing anything stupid?” she said.
“I’m fine.”
“You better be careful, brother,” she said, passing the phone to Mom, who explained that things back home were basically copacetic. Caitlin was working extra hours pouring coffee, saving her tips, preparing to live in the Michigan State dorms. Dad, three months out of rehab with four new valves in his heart, was making it to Ford Motor every day, rising to his usual 5:00 A.M. alarm.
“He’s upset, though,” Mom said. “Ford gave him a bad performance review for the first time.”
Each morning, before heading to work in Dearborn’s schools, Mom had been attending mass. Now that summer vacation was here, she might have been putting in extra hours at the pews. I watched Repa pecking though the estate’s record collection, shaking his head with each flip of the album jackets. I heard a shower running—Ethan making the most of the home’s plumbing. Our host thwacked the controls of a pixelated go-kart that sped across his giant television.
“Be careful out there,” Mom said. “Don’t make me worry.”
“We’re good.”
“Where are you?”
“Texas.”
“Is it hot?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Real hot.” And when I said, “I love you,” I said it low enough that Repa, pulling an album he approved of from the stack and checking for scratches, couldn’t hear me above the promoter, who shouted, “Outta my way!” again and again in a fit of virtual road rage.
IT WENT LIKE THAT: van sleep in truck stops to posh suburban bedding. The excitement of never knowing what came next. Anarchist communes; outdoor riverside stages; crowds too narcotized to stand; crowds of drug-free youth dancing violently with giant X’s marked across their fists. Houston to Austin, through Fort Worth, and northward to Denton, where we pulled up to a ranch-style house with a lawn of dirt. On the porch, a gaggle of black-haired kids sat with beers between their feet. According to our itinerary, we’d located the place—the evening’s gig.
“This it?” I said. “Who’s the promoter?”
Ethan consulted our rumpled spreadsheet of dates and addresses and contacts. “Spider,” he told me. “That’s what it says.”
The trees lining the street were infested with gray sacks, nests of some kind, sagging from the branches. Repa walked to a tree and pulled out his lighter, reaching for the lowest of the cocoons.
“You don’t wanna do that.” A shirtless Texan in a black mesh hat stepped out of the house, wagging a finger, a black widow tattooed on his breast. “Hell, nah.”
This was the place, all right.
The porch dwellers flashed us the stink eye, parting apathetically as we carried our equipment into the house. The usual rub: locals sizing us up as we rolled in our speaker cabinets. None of us were punk rock protocol. Me, barefoot with my home-cut locks. Ethan in cock-printed shorts and a five-dollar Caesar he’d commissioned from an Ohio barber. Repa was sallow and jowled, a dark horse ready for any apocalypse that might rain down.
An audience usually made its decision within the first thirty seconds of our first song. They’d either wince and head for the door or begin stamping their feet, bobbing their heads. Whatever. We played as if the sunrise depended on it.
“Paying the dues” was how Ethan put it.
Despite its ghastly trees, Denton was on our side. By the time of the show, forty or so belligerents had crowded into the living room, some stripping naked as we tuned our instruments. The walls were painted an unthinkable red-pink. Spider had removed the furniture, if there’d been any, and Repa arranged his drums so that he’d play with his back to everyone. At the first smash of Repa’s cymbals, the front row bonded in a flesh-toned rendition of the running man dance, jogging in place as their genitals wagged to the beat.
We burned through a song, then another. Someone leaped from a windowsill and was passed over raised hands, hydrating the room with a beer mist. When the neighbors complained, Spider ordered the show into an empty bedroom, and our noise resumed, half the audience watching through the doorway, the heat reaching toward the thousands. Packed somewhere in a shoe box is a picture of me, midscream, framed against that bedroom wall. I barely recognize myself in the magenta-faced young man, eyes bloodshot, a glistening artery protruding from his neck. Yet, seeing the photo, I can almost feel again what it was like to be free of everything, screaming for my life.
We played every song we knew. By the end, only a few stood before us, naked and sweating, pleading for another.
“One more,” Repa said.
“We already played ’em all.”
“Then make it up.”
We improvised a five-chord pattern, six-eight time. A leg breaker—never to be recreated, scalded once and for all into the plaster of that
Denton bedroom. If only for a moment, we’d taken the reins of a sound we’d been chasing. Repa, I could tell by his rolled-back eyes, was finally satisfied. So was I. Say nothing of the crowds, the records sold or not sold, we would return to Michigan triumphant, carrying something that could not be taken back.
Repa kept the rhythm slamming, even as Ethan and I sat cross-legged at the foot of our switched-off amps; when he’d finished, he walked out of the house to a smattering of applause. Spider passed his mesh hat through the house, pestering the crowd to cough up a buck for the entertainment.
“What’s the name of your band, again?” he said. “That’s right. Yeah, yeah. Y’all was crazy. How about a beer?”
Repa took night duty in the van. While the party continued, Ethan and I spread our sleeping bags across the bedroom floor we’d sweated upon just hours before. Not much later, we were lying in the shadows of our amplifiers. From the room’s doorway, Spider touched the brim of his cap to bid us good night. “I saw a wolf spider in here earlier,” he said. “Gotta keep an eye on them. They’ll spin a web in your mouth as you sleep and pinch your nostrils till you suffocate.”
IT WAS AFTER OUR best performances, just before sleep, when the tones of home began calling loudest. I’d rest my head on a strange floor and hear Caitlin weeping, hear phrases spoken in my mother’s gentle, worried voice. The force I employed to avoid thinking deeply about my family might have been used instead to propel me toward a life of profound usefulness had I only been able to transfer the ungraspable powers of denial. Everything I did was shaped by a desire to escape the truth: that we—myself and the people I loved most—were on a horror ride. But once Ethan began to snore, I’d close my eyes and soon enough begin reliving the time six months earlier when I’d slept on a cot the night before my dad’s quadruple bypass.
Songs Only You Know Page 5
