Songs Only You Know

by Sean Madigan Hoen

  For his portraits Ozzy sat doped, wearing a red bow tie.

  Mom acknowledged the gaudiness of these tributes, but she didn’t care. “We have a special relationship,” she’d say. “He’s my little buddy.”

  Each night, she’d been clutching his hind legs to walk him up the stairs before heaving him onto their shared mattress. She’d laughed sadly, saying, “Some days he seems perfectly fine.” When she finally took the dog to be put down she didn’t mention a word of it until I came by one weekday afternoon.

  “Where’s Ozzy?” I asked, perceiving his absence the moment I arrived.

  I’d told her I wanted to be there when the day came, though she might not have believed me. She had little reason to believe much of what I said, but I’d had a plan of chauffeuring them to the vet, giving Ozzy’s head one last scratch, holding Mom’s hand as the needle punctured his hide. I’d wanted to take her for dinner afterward, where we’d laugh about the dog’s near-death exploits and cranky ways. His snooty avoidance of my dad. How he’d harried Caitlin, snatching her balled-up tights and gnashing holes in them.

  “Oh, I couldn’t tell anyone,” Mom said. “I wanted to say good-bye to him on my own.”

  Just like her, never troubling a soul. Which made it all the worse to think of her coming home to an empty house, alone with what she knew. So many nights she’d spent eating in her favorite chair as Ozzy awaited scraps at her feet. She’d spoken to him like a housemate; once he could no longer hear, she’d developed a system of tickles and taps that would have the dog slouching toward the back door or leaning into his bowl. He’d sit, unmoving, as she daubed his infections with ointment. His eyes glazed and cloudy, knowing she was there to guide him through.

  “He always liked you,” Mom said.

  “You kept him alive,” I said. “He had a good long life.”

  When I left, I noticed Ozzy’s bowls where they’d always been, at the foot of the garbage can in the kitchen. One filled with water—a little murky, a little gray. The other half full of kibble. Soon enough they’d be tossed away, but I’d always remember him there, raising his head as the back door opened, keeping a watch on things, waiting for the woman he loved.

  ANGELA HAD COMPLETED HER master’s degree that spring, a few months after she’d turned twenty-three. She’d also published her first story. By July she’d made plans to move to New York, a bold decision that made me suddenly aware that she didn’t need me as much as I thought she did. I’d taken for granted that we’d wind up in a quaint midwestern abode, battling it out until old age mellowed us. Her ability to shatter this expectation only raised my respect. Most of her things were packed by the time I drove out to help with her move. Kalamazoo would never be the same once she left, and I wanted to visit the cemetery and other places I might not see for a long while.

  Like the cluttered hidden-gem record shop on West Main.

  A few doors over was a Chinese place she and I enjoyed. A night on the town had often been two plates of noodles, then an hour browsing the aisles of CDs and albums, taking a long drive with whatever new sounds we’d acquired. Let us put aside the fact she was leaving and spend one last weekend as if nothing were about to change—that was my approach, and she rolled with it. Ignoring the boxes stacked in her bedroom, we headed for dinner early enough to assure that the record store would be open afterward.

  Driving to the restaurant, Angela said, “You’re not looking so good,” and it was true. My hair was shellacked by grime, my posture compromised by a variety of pains. Forget the look in my eyes. The night before, the band had played a Detroit festival, and during our set I’d felt a warm, syrupy guck moving through my jeans; my underwear clung to my legs, worrying me that I’d soiled myself. Between songs, quick scans of the crotch region assured there was no visible evidence, but afterward, in the venue’s toilet, I’d investigated my drawers to find them sopped with dark red mucus. A moment of reckoning, signaling, possibly, the closeness of the end. I’d come to worry that any cough or dizzy spell or spasm in my chest was the effect of all the bad thoughts I’d been smothering. Stress-born diseases. My body was not my own. Having crapped blood for the past half year, I could critique the mess each morning according to hue and volume. Now I was incontinent, a leaking wound.

  This was what Angela had missed, and I was glad for it.

  “How was the show?” she asked.

  “Good,” I said. “We played a new song.”

  I’d had to focus on the tiled wall to keep from fainting as I staggered to the bathroom’s sink. I’d slapped my face with water and stared into the mirror, thinking of her, no one else.

  Angela said, “What did you do after?”

  “Ack.” My mouth tasted of cat piss. “Not much.”

  Though by the time I’d made it to Jimmy Bang-Bang’s, I’d forgotten about the blood. His four-bedroom house was a deadbeat roost in heart of the city, the walls painted crimson and an enormous stereo in the dining room, where everyone gathered around a table and slobbered about rock and roll, about seeing the world. Angela would never meet Jimmy, but she intuited the depravity of people like him from the hesitant tone I’d use when pronouncing their names.

  What was I going to tell her, really?

  Jimmy, a local drummer, greasy coiffed and perpetually shirtless, always insisted his guests help him imbibe all the dry goods, so there’d be no leftovers. The night before, he’d overestimated the party’s spirit—people dispersed to the upstairs bedrooms, slipped out undetected in search of 4:00 A.M. pancakes. Early that morning I’d found myself alone with a mound of unfinished powder spilling across the table. In the coming months, Jimmy would make a point of asking, whenever he saw me, “Do you have any idea how much drugs you did?” No, I didn’t. No idea of the amount I’d snorted or how I’d managed to get home, nor how to convey a word of this, anything, to Angela. But once she and I were served our noodles, the first bites of lo mein set loose a cruel spasm in my stomach. I saw Angela watching with fearful eyes, holding her chopsticks like wands, just before I fainted onto the paper tablecloth.

  THE ER DOCTOR CHECKED my vitals and drew blood, explaining I’d need both a colonoscopy and endoscopy to get the bottom of things.

  “Whatever it takes,” I said.

  I had no insurance, but I spoke with certainty. My vigilance for self-preservation arose in the manic and costly fashion of people who regret their own inestimable self-abuse. I’d binge on vitamins and colon cleansers and herbal potions the way I did anything else. Run up a tab. To prepare for the scopes, I was ordered to a day of fasting and laxatives. From Angela’s couch, I called Ethan, asking him to put a hold on practice on account of I might possibly be dying.

  “This is terrible,” he said. “We’ve got a tour in a couple weeks.”

  Angela made a bowl of Jell-O—the only solid I was allowed to eat—as I spent a day creeping to and from her apartment’s toilet.

  She stood beside me the following morning as the anesthetist pumped me with sedatives. I knew the sight of me affirmed how right she was to be leaving, but I could tell she felt remorse. I squeezed her hand, thinking that if I lived, I’d make all the drastic changes. I’d start meditating, Tai Chi, soul-recovery stuff. The simplicity of what truly mattered—it fell over me in a silvery rinse as I nodded in and out, trying to hang on to the fantasy for another second before I slipped away.

  The sound of Angela’s laughter coaxed me back to life in a new hospital room.

  “Go on?” she said. “You were saying?”

  I’d muttered a delirious aphorism not a moment before, slowly emerging from an hour-long darkness that had passed with a single nod of my head. The words remained on my tongue, yet I couldn’t grasp my thoughts long enough to recapitulate them. When I stretched my fingers, Angela took my hand.

  “You’re cute,” she said. “I love you.”

  I had a mouthful of post-op grime. My throat was raw from the upper GI scope. Angela knew I was at her mercy, lying there in a paper gow
n. She shook her head, and we smiled. Lucid with anesthetic, I imagined living my final days in peace, so long as I felt that way: nodding in and out, forgetting what I said no sooner than it came from my mouth. I wanted to fall back under that spell for an hour longer.

  When the doctor entered, he barely looked at me, scribbling on his notepad. The gastrointestinal scopes, he said, revealed a number of ulcerations in the lining of my stomach, not to mention some trauma to my bowel—issues resulting, no doubt, from my binges, which the fear of death had inspired me to speak frankly about. “You’re hurting yourself,” he said, curtly and factually.

  “What about stress?” I said.

  “Well, that never helps,” said the doctor. “But someone your age? What are you stressed about? It’s the booze, the pills. You either quit, or it gets worse and you come back bleeding up to your esophagus, and then there’s not much we can do.”

  He actually raised an eyebrow.

  “I’ve seen it before,” he said.

  “My colon?” I said.

  “Clean as a whistle. Nothing but some hemorrhoids, for which I’ve written you a prescription for suppositories.”

  He winked at Angela, and she made a disgusted face.

  A formidable bill would soon arrive by mail. In months to come, there would be more doctors, conveying identical sentiments, not a word of which I’d take to heart. If only they’d have told me I was done for—that I might have believed. It was, I suppose, what I’d expected to hear. The doctor vanished without so much as bidding me a good fight as a nurse appeared with a handful of scripts, none of which I’d have filled.

  No—I left the hospital revitalized and contemptuous, with an angry urge to live, craving a gluttonous dinner and everything else.

  Mom couldn’t bear to think of a new dog. “Maybe someday,” she’d said, “but it wouldn’t be fair to Ozzy, just yet.” Though when I returned to Dearborn, there was a tameless black kitten scurrying through her house, attacking her plants and waking her early in the morning.

  “She’s a dickens,” Mom said. “A cute little thing. I named her Izzy.”

  She asked how I’d been, how Angela was feeling about her big move.

  “Good,” I said. “It’s all good.”

  “You look pale,” she said. “Skinny.”

  She was no meddler. She never pressed the matter when I insisted things were unremarkably fine. Her knowingness operated on a deeper register, triggering her chronic cough and antagonizing her phobia of the telephone. We were sitting at the kitchen table. It was so good and so painful to see her.

  “You’d tell me if something was wrong?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Nothing’s wrong.”

  And for every unpleasant detail I withheld, she, in turn, had a litany of undisclosed truths about my father. In this way, we protected each other. We acknowledged the weather; we spoke of cats and dogs. Mom lived on day-to-day appeals, praying for moments of peace: a tulip budding from the soil. And I resided in the gray areas of what she could and couldn’t stand to believe. I lived during the long hours she slept, once the sun went down, when I could imagine she was peacefully unaware.

  “Do you want me to cook you something?” she said. “You need to eat.”

  The kitten scaled its way onto the kitchen table and bounded toward her, touched by a joy that had something to do with my mother.

  “That sounds good,” I said.

  “Have you seen a cat do that before?” She stroked the animal as it burrowed into her lap. “Have you ever seen a cat like this?”

  A FEW DAYS LATER Mom knocked at my front door in the early afternoon, still dressed in her pajamas. Though she’d never seen us perform, she often slept in one of my band’s T-shirts; I could see our screen-printed logo beneath her blue fleece as I welcomed her inside. Her face let me know her wariness of what she might come upon, dropping by without warning.

  “I need to talk to you,” she said.

  I didn’t look her in the eye; it had been a while since I’d been able to.

  “What is it?” I asked. Which meant, How much do you know?

  Angela had called her that morning, laying out the hard facts about my hospital visit. She’d told Mom I needed help. I was scheduled to leave for another tour in a matter of days, and Angela dreaded what might happen. To drive home the seriousness of things, she’d described an unpleasant scene or two: nights I’d been bloodied or too loaded to speak. A time I’d been welted in a belt fight. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought she was trying to wash her hands of me.

  “What kind of trouble are you in?” Mom said.

  I’d slept on the couch and could hardly recall the previous evening or what I might have said if I’d talked with Angela. My ulcerated gut hadn’t stopped me from carrying on with the drinks, the blood in my stool a daily affirmation that I was still alive. Angela and I had once joked about not knowing which one of us was crazier, and it seemed she’d finally settled on an answer.

  “Don’t you lie to me,” Mom said. I felt the specter of Angela’s grief, could hear her urgency in the details Mom spoke.

  Taking a seat beside me on the couch, Mom coughed into a Kleenex. “I won’t go through this again,” she said. “Don’t you put me through this.”

  For everything Angela had confessed, I had a perfectly viable explanation. My stomach was shredded because I’d been eating too many peanuts and uncooked vegetables, drinking too much coffee.

  “I’m stressed,” I said.

  “You sound like your father,” Mom said. “You’re not like him, you know?”

  In ways this was true; in other ways I felt exactly like him, closer than I’d ever been. Though we sat inches apart, Mom kept a strange distance.

  “You’re smarter than this,” she said.

  “I drink too much.”

  “What about the drugs?”

  I claimed I didn’t have a taste for any of them, which relative to my lust for booze seemed almost truthful.

  Mom gazed about the house. The shades were drawn permanently to keep the neighbors from peeping. Clothes on the hardwood floor, CDs stacked on every surface, lyrics scribbled on napkins. The kitchen sink was filled with dishes and foam coffee cups. A knee-high plastic Christmas tree she’d given me seasons earlier stood propped in the corner. It was a mess, but I’d seen worse.

  “Your uncle Dennis died yesterday,” Mom said.

  “No,” I said. “Jesus.”

  “The family wants to get ahold of you. They’ve been leaving messages.”

  “Was it drugs?”

  “I think so. They found him in a garage, in his car.”

  Dennis had two daughters, one on her way into the army, but it was my dad I thought of foremost, how thoroughly the news of his dead brother would have pummeled him.

  “You see what this does to people?” Mom said. “You should know by now.”

  Her wrists and hands were scratched and nicked, bitten and clawed by her new pet. Her allergies had flared; her eyes were red. She kneaded her swollen fingers nervously. I could hardly stand to look, to think of her daubing blood from her wounds, alone with her kitten. Though I knew it took more than that to hurt her now.

  I MADE PROMISES TO my mother and swore oaths to Angela. As an act of penance, I resigned to carrying a cell phone so that I’d be reachable anyplace in the country. My road kit was packed with niacin tablets and detoxifying tonics and other blood-cleansing remedies, along with a prescribed bottle of Antabuse—enough to last for the band’s August tour. I’d experimented with the antidrinking medication a few years before. Ideally, you took Antabuse every day, so there’d be enough coursing through you to make even a sip of alcohol repulsive. A single drink might cause vomiting, delirium; a Pavlovian trick to wean a sick mind off the sauce. The doctors said you could die if you boozed while on this stuff, but I knew better. I’d learned that after taking a single pill I had three days before I could drink without breaking out in hives. On the road I planned to take Antabuse
every third day, leaving open the option to skip a dose in time for Los Angeles, where our record company would be waiting to see an inspired set.

  The band had a roadie aboard our latest expedition: Scott, the Wallside guitarist who’d aided my attack on Blaine a few years back. Blaine was now a junkie living in Las Vegas. Scott and I, however, had since become close friends, confiding earnestly and obliviously in the late, late hours. He was a genuine binge artist, just like me, and had sold me his prized ’79 Gibson Les Paul, a perfectly scarred relic that was easily imagined strapped over Jimmy Page’s lithe torso. Lately, Scott too was doing his best to keep clean. To encourage our good behavior, he drew a box chart on a scrap of plywood and affixed it to the back door of the van. He listed the names of everyone in the band and his own, printing them on a graph that accounted for each day of the journey.

  “The no-fun chart,” he said. “Anyone who has too much fun gets a check mark. At the end we tally it up.”

  “We’ll give out a prize,” I said.

  “The prize,” he said, “is sanity.”

  THE CROSS-COUNTRY DRIVES PASSED in a constant sober panic. Our demo had been repackaged and rereleased by the Californians, and if we kept our word, the next year of my life was a schedule of low-paying gigs. One day at a time, we were earning gas money along a trail that seemed to route us closer and closer toward defeat. Without the fanfare of Detroit crowds, I’d been resorting to dour screaming fits and partial disrobement during our set’s finale, hoping to leave any impression whatsoever on the few who watched us underwhelm their local stages. Each traveled hour felt erased from a purposed life I should be living. Such thoughts came with the job, anyone knew that, but without drink or sedative I couldn’t shake them. When not browbeating myself for losing Angela, I was thinking about the first taste of a drink and resenting anyone who was free to have one.