Songs Only You Know

by Sean Madigan Hoen

  The feeling of being holed up in a courtesy room for out-of-town families at Piedmont Hospital, North Atlanta. Mom and Caitlin lying feet away, sharing a bed. December 22, snowless in Georgia. The room was decorated to look like a hotel, wallpapered and outfitted with a television, none of which altered our awareness of the institution’s fluorescence looming just beyond the door.

  And beyond that?

  On the cot, I’d had nightmares of being onstage, my hands mittenlike on a guitar I couldn’t remember how to play. Caitlin had thrashed in the sheets, stealing most of the bedspread as Mom made not a sound, and by the time we’d entered the cardiac unit the next morning, my dad was already wired to machines. “Good,” he’d said, unwrapping the Christmas gift I’d brought him, a Beatles CD anthology of outtakes and false starts. “I need some music.”

  Some trips exhaust you long after they’ve ended. Mom couldn’t smile, and I’d seen the signs of fury and forgiveness cycling through her. A crusty, magenta third-eye boil had risen from her forehead and would remain there for weeks. Caitlin was gaining weight and losing it again in a span of days. I’d been having spells of breathlessness that I believed were caused by throat nodules, wounds owing to my pterodactyl vocal style. We’d all stared down at my dad lying there in a green paper gown, weak in the face, supine on a gurney.

  They were about to carve his chest open and graft arteries onto his heart, a fact that brought my attention to the glugging beat of my own.

  “Thanks for being here,” Dad said, gripping my hand as a nurse shaved his chest to prep him for the incision. Dark blood leaked from a razored mole. He twitched his jaw, searching for a funny line that would settle our nerves.

  Barely 8:00 A.M.

  He’d stared at me with an awful sobriety in his eyes, which were faintly blue, very much like Caitlin’s. He was bargaining with unknown forces, cutting deals and making vows, and I’d felt an old pride resurge, faith in a superpowered father capable of small miracles. “You’re a good son, in case I haven’t told you lately,” he said while the nurse wiped his blood and shaved hairs with a sanitary napkin, slapping on adhesive EKG electrodes.

  Caitlin’s bleached hair, a darker blonde at the roots, was a slept-upon mess, tumbling over my dad as she bent toward him and whispered. A moment before, she’d told my father, “I hope when you’re better, you’ll learn your lesson.” But she began crying as he held her, saying, “Cait, Cait, Cait.”

  She and I wandered to the cafeteria, letting our parents say whatever they needed to. When Mom reappeared, Caitlin followed her to the hospital chapel. I walked to a bus stop to scribble in a notebook until the hours blurred and dusk fell on Atlanta, by which point my dad was conscious enough to relay the news.

  “The doctor said it’s good for about twelve years.”

  He’d been stoned, blissed out from the best of the pharmaceutical best. His torso was bandaged, and he’d barely had the strength to lift his head and peer down at his reassembled chest. The next day was Christmas Eve: Caitlin sleeping against my shoulder on a quiet flight home. Dad left behind in the hospital, pumped full of morphine and back to square one in the rehabilitative process, with brand-new music but no means of tuning in.

  “IT WAS PERFECT.” REPA toed my ribs with his boot. “Slept like a baby.”

  Through the bedroom windows, the sun lit his Cro-Magnon face. I’d never been happier to see him. Once the heat inside the van became too much, he’d walked Denton’s streets to swipe his debit card and enter a twenty-four-hour ATM vestibule, where he’d sprawled in its AC until a patron startled him awake. “Good as new,” he said. “But you should have seen that lady’s face.”

  For me it had been a baked, grimy slumber. My hair was damp as I rose, scratching at clusters of small red welts across my back and ribs.

  “How’s it look?”

  “Real sick,” Repa said. “Like scabies.”

  Ethan groaned, half asleep, scratching himself with both paws. He, too, had been gored. Bite marks about his neck and face—attacked in the night by the Texan beasts of summer.

  “Hell,” said Repa, meaning: Enough, already, of this dirtass scene.

  We rolled our amplifiers through an assemblage of sleeping punkers in the living room to load the Orgasmatron beneath the cocoons hanging in the tree branches. The sun was up, and my thoughts were emptied of everything but a gladness to be leaving one place for the next—the best I’d felt in a while. Before we made for the highway, Repa pulled a drumstick from the van, giving one of the nests a good smack, and then we were off, having earned just enough money for coffee and gas to the next city.

  BY THE TIME WE hit Philadelphia, we were road crazed. The three of us sprinted down Lancaster Avenue, chasing a gimp dog until we’d cornered the animal inside a fenced lot. We hugged one another as the mutt hobbled after pieces of jerky we tossed it. I’d lost track of what day it was and how long we’d been gone, but it felt at once like a day and a decade. We’d knocked over Atlanta and done the same with Tampa and Gainesville and so on. Now we felt Detroit’s gray magnet pulling us homeward. The dog was as magnificent as anything I’d seen.

  “We should take it with us,” Repa said.

  “Champ,” Ethan said, cooing at the mutt. “He’s a champ.”

  When it came time to play, we drank throughout the show and then some more. Over the weeks, I’d felt my tolerance rising to where a full-on drunk took more beers than I could keep track of. Repa’s Philadelphian plus-one was a vagrant in a Hawaiian shirt named Leroy. He passed bottles with us after the show, impersonating celebrities as Repa fed him quarters. We stood outside the club, a half block away.

  “I love you,” Repa said. “Do Dangerfield.”

  “I love you, too.” Leroy laughed. “But what I really love is some crack.”

  I was in the early phase of a blackout, where just enough blood to the head can give you back to the world for moment.

  “Gimme a buck,” Leroy said, and I grabbed him by the collar. I hadn’t known I had this in me or where it came from. Lit with booze, I felt serenely violent, smelling Leroy’s breath as he hooked his fingers around my arms. A bottle fell to our feet. I whispered to him—some foul, unspecific thing about what I thought of his kind. The look in Leroy’s eyes: No, not this again. He growled, dribbling onto my wrists, until Ethan charged me with a shoulder, railroading me to the van and urging me into the backseat.

  “Hell’s wrong with you?” Repa said. “He was a nice guy.”

  Ethan peeled the Orgasmatron’s tires.

  Leroy had vanished into the evening, up in smoke.

  Philadelphia’s night traffic moved swiftly. A few blocks up Lancaster, I realized I’d jarred something loose: the sensation pooled in my chest, rose up my throat and welled my eyes. At a stoplight, just before the tears came, I slid open the van’s passenger door and leaped for the street, where I ran through the avenue, crying and laughing. Ethan paced me in the van, slowing traffic. Cars honked. I put it on for them, dashing up a grass embankment and somersaulting down as Ethan grumbled from the window. Repa was chirping, Get ’em, get ’em, and I knew he was calling to me and not about me.

  “Get ’em.”

  At the next stoplight I crawled into the van, having freaked away the tears. Then we were moving again, and not a moment of this felt out of step with the fits we threw onstage. I was drunk enough that I might have confessed, told them my story from beginning to end so that they’d know exactly who I was and why I was beside them, but I was years away from that kind of language.

  Repa composed himself, snapping open a beer.

  “You get it all out?” Ethan asked as Repa said, “Aw, you know there’s lots more where that comes from.”

  And we were off—to the next thing—without having bothered to get paid.

  AS THE ROAD SHORTENED between Detroit and our traveling show, the van became a quiet vessel. We’d changed, all of us, and weren’t certain how things would be once we returned to our old lives. We’d tir
ed of our cassettes and opted for the sound of the engine. Everything I’d sought to outrun was rushing forward to meet me. Driving north out of Knoxville, we took I-75, the highway I’d traveled with my dad three months before I headed for Detroit by way of Atlanta. Mom had sprung for me to fly down and chaperone him to Michigan in a rental car.

  I’d always remember what he said, the moment I met him in the rehab lobby, a suitcase, literally, in his hand.

  “I didn’t get their stamp of approval. But I learned what I need to know.”

  Headed north, we played the Beatles CD I’d given him. He’d asked about the chords, the way the songs were put together, and I’d answered as though I knew: there’s verses and a repeating chorus and these things called harmonies that most people tended to enjoy. At some point I would realize we’d never actually had conversations, exchanges of words and ideas that truly advanced our mutual understanding. We spoke clipped phrases punctuated with “I guess,” buying time between words by clearing our throats, sighing. I’d lost any handle on how to be with him because my role was changing, empowered by his shame rather than anything to do with honor. I’d tried imagining I was in training for the band’s tour, which at that time had been merely dates on a spreadsheet. I wanted to be ready for the all-night drives, the long hauls. It was midnight in Kentucky when Dad told me to pull over.

  “Let’s get a room,” he said.

  “I’ll drive it in one shot. Save money.”

  “Your old man’s tired.”

  A mute television flashed over us as we shared a motel bed. When Dad rolled onto his back to occupy the better part of the mattress, I’d curled near the edge, worrying that one wrong move might shake loose the vein work that had been done inside his chest. Taking I-75 north the next day, we let the CD spin on repeat as Dad did his best to tell me about his new friends: doctors and truck drivers and gay men, all with the same incurable disease. “Good people. Trying to do the right thing.”

  The music played: three botched takes of “I’m So Tired,” a Lennon-less run-through of “I Me Mine.”

  “I guess even they screwed up sometimes,” Dad said.

  At the drive-throughs, he ordered diet sodas, chicken instead of hamburger. Chewing my fries, the smell of grease and the salt on my fingers, I’d felt guilty enough that I didn’t enjoy a bite. Dad snatched several from the bag, chomping before he could think any more about it, saying, “Just one … just one ain’t gonna kill me.”

  THE ORGASMATRON PASSED THE same Ohio landmarks, scenery my dad and I had glimpsed a season earlier. I wondered what I’d tell him about the tour, and whether, during my time away, he and my mom were back to holding hands the way they once did. I thought of Caitlin leaving for college, and of Lauren, that I might visit her dorm room once I’d caught up on sleep. I hadn’t outrun anything, but even the past felt changed, somehow reduced in size by the new experiences I’d added to it.

  We crossed the Michigan state line at the hour of the crows, so tired we’d begun to hallucinate. Ethan swore he saw a wolf pack scatter across the road, and Repa was out of clam chowder—the empty tins rattled beneath the seats. A strip of sunburned flesh had turned to scales on my forehead. As daylight rose, we unloaded our gear into Repa’s basement.

  “All she wrote,” Repa said, fingering a scraggy new mustache as Ethan counted our loot, saying, “We’re two hundred bucks ahead.”

  Enough to get us started on the next mission—which was soon to come, I hoped.

  As I drove to Ridgewood Hills, my car’s steering wheel was unfamiliar. And so was the sight of myself, bearded and rat-skinny, in the bathroom mirror. The softness of my own bed and the look on Caitlin’s face when she woke me later that day to explain that Dad had moved in with his parents, that he’d relapsed while I was away, and that our house was going on the market—I was, after all, returning to a new life.

  5

  Summer of ’97 was a seller’s market, and the house went in no time. My parents listed it at a bargain price, and by early August it belonged to a family of four I’d never met. As for Ridgewood Hills, I’d never been so eager to ditch a place. After three years of lying about where I lived, I’d once again be able to honestly claim Dearborn—its doughnut shops and dollar movies, the Rouge River’s toxic shimmer—as my home. One of Mom’s brothers tipped her off about an affordable place on Dearborn’s west side, which she’d snapped up from an elderly lady who was on her way to a nursing home. “Must’ve been meant to be,” Mom said. “I can fix it up.”

  She gave me the address, and I drove past one afternoon. A simple brick two-bedroom, painted white, tucked in the corner of Telegraph Road and Michigan Avenue. At the edge of the lawn stood a small oak, its late-summer leaves green and fat. In the backyard was just enough space for gardening, a quiet passion Mom referred to as “my music.” Head east a few miles on Michigan Avenue, and you’d be at Will’s; three minutes farther and you’d reach the Detroit city limits. Blocks away was a record store where I could see myself working. The band had just rented a practice space a short drive north on Telegraph, before Seven Mile Road.

  I was a twitch embarrassed to be nineteen and living at home, but, seeing the house, I figured I might as well crash there until the band went international. Many musicians holed up in their mom’s basement, saving for vintage equipment while biding their fameless days. A recording advance, publishing rights, and residuals: I would have told you I didn’t have that fantasy, but I did. Not of music videos and stadiums, but of a sustainable living.

  Caitlin had been silently protesting our parents’ divorce. She’d never revered our hometown the way I had and took a dreary interest in Mom’s new place. She’d begun skipping shifts at the coffee shop. One day she lopped her hair into a punky, boyish mop I thought looked just great. Mom worried it was a cry for help. Though Caitlin would be leaving for Michigan State in a matter of weeks, Mom offered her the second bedroom; she wanted her to have a place to come home to. Bedrooms, a sense of home—these things mattered terribly to my sister. I’d get the basement, which suited me perfectly.

  Back in Ridgewood Hills I began packing straightaway, discarding anything that wouldn’t serve as a muse or ruse for my musical identity. I shed years of clutter—Day-Glo T-shirts, baseball caps, and yearbooks—destroying evidence of who I’d been, while harboring a secret vision that my life’s debris might one day fascinate a cult of music aficionados. Here was the chance to do away with incriminations: baseball cards, my baptism candle and hockey trophies. All that would be left to identify me would be my records.

  What I’d salvaged from my bedroom could easily be hauled away in my latest ’mobile, a turd-brown ’87 minivan with a smashed back window. The only things Mom insisted on keeping were family photo albums, a few of which she’d yet to locate.

  “Where are those albums?” she said. “Find those albums.”

  She wanted nothing to do with our old furniture; my dad could keep it. He’d been staying not far from Ridgewood Hills in the basement of a condo his parents had moved into after leaving the Dearborn Heights home they’d owned since the 1960s. My parents had lived their teenage years directly across from each other, on a street called Evangeline. Dad long ago caught his first glimpse of my mom beyond the newly paved road. Mom’s folks were still there, in a cavernous four-bedroom that now faced a family of Arabs who’d repainted Dad’s old house and done away with the ever-present American flag.

  As children, Caitlin and I had stared out the windows of my dad’s old home, pining for the alternate universe—about thirty yards, door-to-door—across Evangeline. The flags on porches and trimmed shrubbery, the geometric baby-boom architecture, gave the impression that the neighborhood would never change. It had seemed perfectly logical then that my parents had lived within spitting distance, and we’d referred to the two sides of Evangeline Street respectively: Dad’s side and Mom’s side.

  On holidays, tradition was that Dad’s side came first, where inside the front door we met the frag
rance of baking ham and dozens of relatives. Dad’s eight siblings and their spouses. Our cousins—multiplying so quickly they became hard to remember. In the living room were crucifixes and needlepoint tapestries. Above the mantel were graduation photos of all nine children, the last few smiling. My dad, the third oldest, stared intensely out from the past in a black-and-white portrait, artificially pigmented so that his eyes were sky blue, his hair a pastel yellow.

  We’d be there a couple of hours on Christmas and Easter. Grandma might take to the piano for a seasonal number, while Grandpa watched The Lawrence Welk Show, a drink in his hand, until the time came to carve the meat. Sometimes he’d hum along to Grandma’s playing, reminding us he’d been a crooner—the Frank Sinatra of Buffalo, as my dad told it. Based on Dad’s accounts, my grandfather had been a number of things: A minor-league baseball pitcher. A jujitsu expert, who could paralyze a grown man with a swift Vulcan-like grip of the collarbone. He’d owned gas stations and doughnut shops, was a man of renown at the local Knights of Columbus Hall.

  One thing everyone agreed on was that Grandpa had been orphaned, abandoned early in the century by Irish immigrants. My last name was an adopted syllable belonging to a stern German woman who’d taken him in and put him to work.

  “A street kid,” Dad would say. “Your grandpa was in Irish gangs,” though I never got close enough to the bald liver-spotted man in the La-Z-Boy to test these legends. Dad often said that Grandpa had given it to him worse than I’d ever know, reminding me of it each time he took a belt to my bare ass. Seeing Grandpa clicking the remote and grinding cigarettes—how quickly his face changed from grin to scowl when someone obstructed his view of the set—I could believe it.

  No place demanded better manners. Dad used to rake a harsh comb over my scalp as we proceeded up the driveway. “Please” and “thank you” would not suffice. His command was not to “give one-word answers” to questions posed. He’d once offered an ice-cream reward in return for my carrying on a sufficiently coherent conversation with my grandfather, but the old man’s presence canceled every trace of my personality. I went blank. I could not—did not want to—be found.