The children’s mother nodded as they opened their presents: that season’s popular dolls for the two girls and, for the boy, a pastel, machinelike squirt gun capable of serious battle. Taped to the walls were crayon drawings of black Santas descending to a puke-colored abode.
“Santa asked us to deliver these for him,” my mom said. “He’s busy this year.”
“Oh, no,” said their mother. “Santa’s stopping by. He’s comin’.”
“Four days away,” Mom said, by way of recovery.
The boy clutched his toy, mimicking the sounds of gunfire as the girls waved their dolls’ limbs at Caitlin. She waved back. I knew what she was thinking because I’d begun to think it, too: how impossible it seemed that there was not a thing more we could do. As we drove away, waving from the station wagon, Caitlin began crying without a sound. Though I knew they’d meant well, it was easier to pity my mom and sister for their sloppy goodwill than it was to extend my own feelings. Evergreen Road passed outside the windows. Mom set her palm on my knee, squeezing gently, as if meaning to console my sister, who sat weeping in the backseat and just out of reach.
THE FOLLOWING MORNING I climbed the basement stairs with a full-body ache, twitching each limb and rotating my neck to assess the damage. My arms were dotted with welts, my lips swollen with bite marks. Postshow mornings felt like I’d been mugged, and I reveled in each twinge, as if it fulfilled the idea that I could not be easily destroyed.
Our year’s-end gig had gone savagely well.
A punk in a Santa Claus hat had roamed the crowd, the red triangle of his cap sharking amid the bobbing heads. I’d done what I could to eject my soul from my body, and between songs Repa pulled a buck knife to carve his forearm—two or three slashes. Iggy Stooge, David Yow, GG Allin—the maim-yourself routine had been done, but what hadn’t in the name of rock and roll? Later someone told me that with each crack of Repa’s drumstick, the blood that had drained onto his snare was sent flying, speckling the audience. It could have happened. What’s certain is that before our final song, once the time was right, he’d licked his wounds and made it known that the taste—it was good.
In the kitchen, the coffee was still warm. A note taped to the pot, the one place I’d see it: Out on errands. Love, Mom. I drained a mug and took a second to the upstairs bathroom for a marathon shower. Once the water went cold, I pulled open the curtain to find nothing to towel off with. I shouted for Caitlin. When she didn’t answer, I limped naked into her bedroom to scavenge in her laundry hamper.
There was a note placed on her bed. I snatched it, the stationery darkened by my wet hands. After the first few lines, I understood.
Tugging my jeans on over damp legs, I charged through the house, calling her name. Ozzy ran in circles, yapping while I checked every room—the basement, the closets. Outside, Caitlin’s car was nowhere to be seen. I passed through the kitchen, slapping the garage door opener on my way out the back door. Fresh snow had fallen. I was shoeless, shirtless, still damp as the aluminum door rolled up to reveal Caitlin’s white Escort. The exhaust pipe vented blurry fumes as the car idled. The driver’s seat was reclined, but I could plainly see my sister. She wasn’t moving.
I yanked opened the car door.
“The hell you doing?”
“Nothing,” said Caitlin, perfectly alert. Pure embarrassment crossed her face. The kind of expression you see in someone who’s been caught lip-synching pop songs in the mirror.
“Go back inside,” she said.
“Hey,” I said.
She knotted her face, glaring, annoyance being the sole emotion she was an expert at faking. Blonde wisps escaped from a stocking cap pulled tight over her head. She’d bundled up. Mittens. She appeared wholly rational. We might have been arguing over a carton of leftovers I’d devoured without permission.
“I found your note.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t do this anymore.”
I reached across her and cut the engine.
“Don’t tell Mom,” she said, huddling into the seat.
“This is selfish,” I told her. Then I aimed for something profound, making a lame speech about all those who had less than we did, limbless and crippled people, starving, in other parts of the world.
“You don’t think I know?” she said. “I think about that all the time.”
She was looking past me and toward an escape from this day. It must have seemed easier to sleep forever than to carry whatever diagnostic branding she’d been given, whatever humiliating dormitory episodes were playing in her mind, and to begin reintegrating into the wide, wild world. My wet hair hung in my eyes. I decided that, if it might make her happy, I’d let her trim it any way she liked.
“You want my coat?” she said.
“I want you to knock this off.”
“You don’t know what it’s like. Everything comes easy to you.”
I laughed the way you do when nothing useful comes to mind. She saw it that way—my easy life—and she might have been right.
“Everything hurts,” she said. “I hate it.”
“What’s so bad? Nothing’s that bad.”
Even now, nearly eighteen years on, I’m not immune to fantasies of revising the past and altering the course of things to come. I envision myself there with Caitlin, filled with the knowledge of everything I was helpless to understand then. I’m able to fix her without a word. And she sees it in my eyes, the irreducible love that I’m no longer afraid to give—even if it would mean reliving those strange days one by one, starting from that moment in the garage.
Next she told me something awful that had happened to her, swearing me to secrecy before I’d steadied my pulse. “Promise you’ll never tell,” she said.
And I did.
A vow I’d never break, which made me feel as though the weight of all she’d said had landed squarely on me.
I went brutish; it was all I knew. I grabbed a hoe and gnashed several times at the cement. There were unpacked boxes on the ground, and I booted them around until Caitlin slammed the Escort’s door and began to cry.
“Don’t,” she said.
“All right. I’m sorry.”
“You’re not gonna tell,” she said.
I slung my arm around her. My skin was a sheet of warmth, immune to the cold. I hugged Caitlin to my ribs, and she clutched herself as her head pressed against my chest. She refused go limp in my arms, but I felt her elbow beneath her jacket, her hair on my bare shoulder—proof she was there with me. We waddled together into the house, where she sat at the kitchen table as I prepared lunch. Turkey sandwiches, a bland, scarcely garnished specialty I’d perfected.
Caitlin stared at the stack of bread and cold meat on her plate.
Did I actually think she was going to enjoy this?
An Advent calendar stood in the center of the table, a cardboard structure housing twenty-five perforated rectangles marking the days leading up to and including Christmas. Behind every numbered flap were small plastic trays of candies, most of which had already been torn from the calendar. I punctured the paper seal that read 23 and gobbled the pebblelike confection in an attempt to make her smile. It cracked between my teeth. I opened another panel, the one for Christmas Eve, stuffing tomorrow’s treat into my mouth.
Caitlin shook her head.
As though she were on another, unreachable channel, she said, “I wish I knew guys like you and your friends.”
I couldn’t tell if this meant she wanted to tag along with my band or if it suggested her hopeless crush on Andrew, whom she’d always adored. But we were wrong, I thought, all of us: me and my friends and my band. Wherever my sister belonged in the world, I believed we should come no nearer to it than I was at the moment: grinding the sugar from my teeth, fingering the crusts of her sandwich and urging her to take a bite, thinking it might be enough to renew her.
The first day of a new life.
9
I OPENED THE DOOR of our rehearsal room, and there
was Repa swinging a claw hammer, pounding out a rhythm on a piece of sheet metal. Three or four salvaged televisions flickered behind him. Ethan sat on a garbage-picked couch, nodding along to the performance. They were waiting on me. My minivan had stalled countless times on the way over, poisoning my mood and leaving my fingers cold and brittle. I’d need a minute before my hands would be able to fret a guitar.
“All right,” Repa said, whanging the metal sheet, “Kristopher fucking Kringle.”
Christmas Eve rehearsal was symbolic, a test of our commitment. We were also sorely in need of fresh material. A new label had arranged to release our album-in-progress, news to which Warden had responded by calling us traitors, defectors from the CTW cause.
I blew into my hands, relieved to be inside our windowless room. The space was bare of the inspirational knickknackery most bands enjoyed. Adorning our white-plaster walls were scribbles of psychotropic poetry and a xeroxed photo of Warden, his forehead marked with a pentacle. A liquor-store clerk we’d named the Christ Figure had been visiting us with plastic jugs of vodka and econo-sized bags of peanuts. Empties and crushed nutshells littered the floor. We’d been admitting select colleagues into our rehearsals: Repa’s anarchist admirers who’d rechristened themselves things like Squirrel and Star; an unequivocally likable paraplegic who bore Iron Maiden tattoos and insisted we call him Gimp; a half-Irish, half-Japanese longhair who played along on an unamplified guitar, occasionally exposing his pierced urethra. After three months there we’d barely written a minute of new music, but we were still drawing an audience. One fifty in Detroit, a hundred or so in Chicago, ten to forty people anywhere else. They came for the antics: Ethan mauling his amplifiers. Repa pulling his buck knife.
He hooted with each drop of the hammer.
Ethan sat, eyes closed, absorbing the sounds in a spiritual fashion. This was Repa’s new music—farther and farther from anything you’d call song.
“All right,” I said. “Fucking hell.”
“What?” he said. “You don’t like it?”
It was a titanic noise that cut straight for the bowels. I was jealous that I’d had no part in its inspiration. Repa stooped to lift one of the televisions to his chest, then heaved it to the floor. A crash and a scream: the inevitable finale.
“That was wild,” Ethan said.
Repa stared at the wreckage. His arm was bandaged where he’d knifed himself two nights prior. “There’s no more booze,” he said, thrusting forward a mostly empty forty-ounce bottle as if it evidenced a crime. “Let’s frickin’ practice.”
He walked to his drums, swallowing the last of his beer and then urinating in the bottle before taking his throne. Ethan and I plugged in our guitars. Mine was rigged with duct tape, encrusted with blood I’d never clean because I thought it looked rugged. Without another word Repa clicked his sticks, and we began a song we’d rehearsed hundreds of times. Among our sector of musicians, Repa was alleged the best drummer in Detroit, but tonight his signature beats stupefied him. His hair had grown into a shawl of dark waves, veiling his eyes as he struggled to keep time. Before we hit the second verse he leaped up and shoved over the vintage ’83 Pearl customs he’d once polished daily. He flung his crash cymbal across the room like a discus.
Ethan and I carried the tune a measure or two longer before letting our guitars dangle. Repa had taken us by surprise, which was something of a coup. Knowing this, he lifted his warm 40-ounce bottle to his mouth, making a show of a long, gurgling slug.
“Gotta be alcohol in there. I’ve been drinking for days.” After another pull from the bottle he coughed a spray of urine. “Tastes horrible.”
If he couldn’t carry a beat, Repa was prepared to give us a thrill. He tugged down his jeans, grunting and lofting his buttocks over his drums.
Ethan laughed. “Man,” he said. “Man, oh man.”
We’d taken pride in these moments, even as they were occurring, believing they proved our band was deranged, legitimately. “Let’s take this shit to outer space,” we used to say.
Here we were.
“Nothing,” said Repa, squatting, craning his neck to witness any turds he may have achieved. “I got nothing.” With his pants at his ankles he clambered over the spill of drums, mumbling, “Gotta be some liquor in this place.”
He was in character, Repa the Terror, tossing empties and stomping the floor. His eruptions were nearly joyous, freeing him of pains he’d carried years too long. He had a way of screaming and laughing in an entwined, circulatory torrent, and this was the sound he repeated. I’d witnessed it all before, in half the states in the country, yet he now seemed over the edge—gone in a performance that couldn’t be switched on or off at will.
And it was beautiful, and horrible, and wonderful.
“Not a drop to drink,” he said. “On Christmas Eve.”
“Try the garbage cans,” Ethan told him.
Our rehearsal room was one of a few dozen in the building. Many renters were metal bands or lowlifes who’d moved in with junk-store guitars and used the spaces for narcotic getaways. Across the hall, a wrestling company had filled a room with a regulation-sized ring. Beastly, shirtless men in tights stalked the hallways, asking you to get inside the ropes with them to see for yourself how fake it was. The bathrooms were often puked upon. The garbage bins lining the hallways—large knee-high drums filled with the waste of a hundred low-rent hobbyists—were presumed toxic.
Ethan swung open the door.
Repa crawled out toward the nearest receptacle, nosing through it for bottles before stuffing a handful of discarded French fries into his mouth. He turned to us with the yellow mash between his teeth.
“Aha,” he said. “That’s right.”
The hallways were unusually quiet. Not a note was being tuned. The only sounds were Repa’s snarls as he dug deeper through the trash, so when a tattooed guitarist we knew rounded a corner at the end of the hallway, he came into view like some preyed-upon species.
The guitarist slowed his stride, squinting as if to validate what he was seeing: Repa’s jeans rumpled around his shins, black underwear thonging his buttocks. I sensed him winding up for a blitzkrieg of pent expression so awesome it would threaten everything we’d worked for. Not now. Not tonight, but soon.
“Watch out,” Ethan said.
Repa faced the intruder on all fours, growling and crawling as fast as he could. The guitarist turned and dashed while Repa scrabbled up the hall, hands pattering, rounding the corner like some malfunctioning toy. Once he’d vanished, I locked the door of our room and told Ethan we were going to need a new drummer.
He laughed at me as if I’d suggested matching haircuts, zoot suits.
“It’s Repa,” he said. “No one can play like him.”
10
Two or three jabs landed on my shoulder before I awoke with the realization this was no dream but a real fist. The room came slowly into focus, and standing above was a familiar presence, out of place in my basement domain but exuding unmistakable energies. Another soft punch and I was almost conscious, just a twitch or two away from offering up a word.
“Merry Christmas,” Dad said. “You’re living like hell down here.” He smiled down at me. “I could smell you from the kitchen.”
Decorating my room were posters of punk rock heroes and jazzmen from the sixties. A Black Flag flyer depicting a cop with a gun inserted into his pouting lips. Dad glanced at the empties, the cables and snapped guitar strings, with a wary concentration that suggested he knew he was trespassing. Two years earlier he’d have had me at attention for a lesson in self-presentation. Things considered, his touch had softened.
And get a load of his tan suede jacket, new for the season, a middle-aged sleekness he’d never before experimented with. His hair was trimmed. A decent-looking man. Friends’ mothers had told me so, but only now that I observed him with a tinge of postrehab, postdivorce sympathy did I recognize how he’d weathered in a becoming way. Coronary surgery, his many scrapes with
life—these hadn’t stolen the natural dignity in his face.
He didn’t look like an addict. You’d never guess.
“Let’s go, Bozo,” he said.
Following last night’s foiled practice, I’d visited Will at the upper flat, where we’d spun records until the sky turned green. Afterward came three, four hours of sleep—something like that.
“Life’s in session, boy. Suck it up.”
I’d not seen Dad for weeks. To hear that he could still joke like this was a comfort. He snatched at the bedspread, attempting to tear it off in a single motion, and I fought to keep covered. I’d gone to bed naked for no reason other than that I disdained doing laundry, which left me with little more than the pair of jeans I’d toss beside the bed each night. There was a brief tug-of-war, during which I used all my strength, until Dad laughed and said, “We’re waiting on you.”
YEARS BEFORE, DAD WOULD have been up late Christmas Eve sanding and hammering, gluing together the last seams of wood. Before dawn, Caitlin would have awakened me to creep beside her into the living room, where we’d find his homemade presents: A gymnast’s beam. A hockey net. A clubhouse replete with screen door and shingled roof. We’d tested their construction, running our palms along the sanded grain while Dad sipped coffee, watching over a leaf of the Free Press. So many hours he’d spent drafting plans, leveling the beams, stapling shingles and fastening the hinges. His gifts had an aura—his touch. Mom’s would be hidden in the branches of an ornament-cluttered Douglas fir, and we’d pretend to be unaware until the moment she said, “I think I see something in the tree.”
She’d always enjoyed a good-hearted disdain for artificial Christmas trees, wincing at the idea of these gaudy impostors. “Plastic trees,” Mom would say. “It’s just not the same.” Yet upstairs in her new home stood a fresh-from-the-box synthetic green imitation, its branches plugged into an aluminum rod. Caitlin was zoning on the television when I emerged. Dad sat beside her on Mom’s flower-print sofa, appearing out of sorts. Mom worked the kitchen stove, calling, “Almost ready,” with the impenetrable courtesy she’d perfected dealing with special-needs students.
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