Songs Only You Know

by Sean Madigan Hoen

  “No fun,” I’d say, each morning.

  “Not one bit,” Scott replied, marking the no-fun chart accordingly.

  “We keep this up,” I’d say, “we’ll live forever.”

  I’d heard countless people claim that music had saved their lives. In my case, I do believe that to be true. I know also that the power of music began turning on me the minute I’d compromised my love for it. For next to nothing, I’d sold it to California, had even sweetened our sound and fussed over our image with the hope it might pay off with an entirely new existence. Thousands before me had copped out—some grew rich doing it, but I’d known better. Once my head began drying out, I heard what was missing in the chords, in the screams I’d placed so carefully, for dramatic effect, at all the likely moments.

  As we traveled from town to town, I couldn’t keep the past from rising into every silent moment. I’d done so much thinking about the bad things. The good things, though, were what really stung, and in small doses I was being led back to them. Memories of the morning walk my sister and I made to the bus stop for Stout Middle School. Along the way, there’d been a corridor of tall shrubbery, taller than either of us, always webbed by the spiders that had spun their way to and fro the night before. Neither of us had ever wanted to go first, to have our faces catch the webbing. Holding hands became our strategy: her and me, gripping tightly, laughing as we ran together through the invisible tangles.

  “What are you thinking about now?” Scott would say.

  We’d be passing through Arizona. Through Oregon. Places I’d never seen that reminded me of my sister and father, the people they might have been had we one day made it there together. I’d smile, the image looping again and again, repeating the instant Caitlin and I reached the threshold, just before we’d wipe the webbing from our hair.

  “Nothing,” I’d say. “I’m not thinking about anything now.”

  “Then how about tomorrow?” he’d say. “What about ten years from now?”

  BY THE TIME WE reached Seattle, I’d gone two weeks without a single drop, a feat that convinced me I had less of a habit than anyone suspected. With time to spare before the show, I walked alone through Seattle’s rolling streets, wondering where the rabble of the nineties grunge explosion had settled. Avoiding the club until it was time to perform, I took a seat at a bus stop. Minutes later, the cell phone startled me with a rude jangle inside my pocket. Mom’s number incoming—a rare thing. A stride against her phone phobia. If she was trying to reach me, it was for good reason.

  I ducked into an alley, bringing the device to my ear.

  “Oh,” she said, and I could tell she’d been crying. “I’m glad it’s you.”

  I dreaded instantly what might come next. She was sick. Or someone had died, even closer to home than Uncle Dennis. I’d need a ride to the airport and money for a flight. The band would schlep our gear across the continent without me. The unrelenting hours traveling alone, with no option to drink at the airport bar. I’d taken my Antabuse that morning.

  “I did something bad,” Mom said. “Why does everything turn out this way?”

  She’d never spoken like this to me, and it could mean so many things.

  “Are you okay?” I said. “What is it?”

  The earpiece was a distortion of harsh wheeze. Something had finally broken; she was so upset she couldn’t manage to cough.

  “Everything I touch … I can’t do anything right.”

  “You can tell me,” I said. “What happened?”

  She explained that when she’d come home after work her new kitten had escaped from the back door, and such relief coursed through me that I slumped against the alleyway brick. Even sober, Antabuse might induce nausea, and I felt my mouth sweating, the nearness of retch, but we weren’t talking about terminal illnesses or funerals.

  “Okay,” I said. “It’s okay.”

  She’d spent a long while in the garage, attempting to coax the kitten from beneath her car. “Izzy wouldn’t come, and I was so hungry and tired. I just thought I’d shut the door and leave her there until I could eat something.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “I pressed the button, and the sound must have startled her. She bolted out just as the garage door was coming down, and it killed her.”

  Mom sniffled into the receiver, hiccupping the word “I, I, I,” like a tear-blind child trying to describe the source of a throbbing new injury. Her pain, as deep as it ran, was not devoid of the sweetness that permeated all she did. I surprised myself when I began bawling. Traffic passed. Seattle was an overcast bluff. It looked like a hundred places I’d been, and I wished I were home.

  “I killed her.”

  “No,” I said. “You didn’t do that.”

  “She was so tiny. I tried sitting here for a while, but I keep seeing her crushed little body. She was staring up at me. She was still alive.”

  Her voice, shaking and speaking these words, was the saddest sound I’d ever heard. I saw the squashed kitten, and my mom enduring the sight alone, blaming herself. The driveway, her late-summer garden—I knew every aspect of the scene. A purely sober moment: I felt more sensation than I had in years and unclenched my jaw, allowing it to goddamn tremble if that’s what it wanted to do.

  “It’s not your fault,” I said. “This could have happened to anyone.”

  “I tried and tried, but she wouldn’t come to me.”

  “She didn’t know any better.”

  There was a break in our talk, a stretch of a half minute or so where we cried to each other, two thousand miles apart. “I miss Ozzy,” said my mom, once she’d found her breath. “He was such a good friend.”

  We were talking about cats and dogs; but then again, we weren’t.

  “I know,” I said. “I miss him, too.”

  9

  Five of us were in the van, parked beneath a gigantic action movie at the Ford-Wyoming Drive-In. A special place, the last of its kind. Pigeon-infested dirt lots near the Dearborn-Detroit border, from which an array of tattered movie screens angled toward the sky. Beyond the metal poles stemming crookedly from the earth and rusted speaker boxes dangling by wires were the industrial vats of a factory that butted against the northern end of the premises, everything enclosed by a corrugated metal fence. It was a place people went to get frisky, to get loaded. Rumors of shootings and stabbings over the years. You could feel it when you were there, wrapped in the flicker of an enormous film—that somewhere, not far away, there was mischief.

  Tonight’s second feature: the latest version of Superman.

  The band had been back a few days. Hours earlier we’d gigged downtown, an early September homecoming from our cross-country tour. Our equipment was packed in the van’s rear, but Ethan and the drummer had made off for other adventures. Scott sat shotgun. I had a bottle between my legs, having tossed my Antabuse in Los Angeles, where I’d forfeited the no-fun competition in a single night immeasurable by any chart. Scott concentrated on the movie, syncing up an appropriate soundtrack on the stereo. Behind us, sprawled on the bench seats, were three friends who’d all but passed out.

  “Lightweights,” Scott said.

  He and I had spent time at the drive-in, either boozing or trying not to. He was the only person I knew who thought about quitting and one of the only ones who’d flame all night and into the next day with the sole purpose of losing himself. Unlike Will, Scott would never slip off into a coma. I had thirty pounds on him, but his insides were stitched together just right for that sort of living. He claimed it was his Croatian blood. He said, “You should hear the stories about my uncles.”

  If they saw us, the drive-in employees didn’t care that we snuck in through the exit without paying. We watched the blockbusters all night. The features showed right up till 4:00 A.M., about the time the sky lightened and birds descended en masse to scavenge hot-dog buns and popcorn littered in the dirt.

  Like everything else—the record stores and dollar movies and doughnut shops—
I was waiting for the drive-in to close any day. There was a war on. A recession had begun, and you saw right away what it did to a town like Dearborn. The drive-in’s all-night projections kept us company and soothed our fears. Or made us feel we were part of something, watching and waiting, straddling the edge of the city.

  “This,” Scott said, “is my favorite place on earth.”

  DEARBORN’S SCHOOLS WERE STARTING up, and I hadn’t worked since they’d let out, which left me wondering how my dad might have addressed my laggard ways. Like him, I believed a man should be putting in twelve-hour shifts in order to make something of himself. He’d shown me that, at least: an unwavering work ethic. But I could barely clean the litter box for the stray I’d picked up outside the band’s rehearsal space, a feral black-and-white kitten I’d named Samhain, who slept at my feet and climbed into the drop ceiling to stalk me from above.

  I’d poured him a mound of food, never knowing when I might return.

  I dreaded going home and being spotted by my neighbors.

  Their two-bedroom home next door was a seat of judgment, surveillance. They’d seen me urinating out windows and sleeping in my backyard—I suspected they’d seen just about everything. When we weren’t on the road, the van was left in my care. Stern and official, large and white, a vehicle fit for a workman. I’d been parking it at the curb in front of my house, making sure to give it a spin now and then, hoping the neighbors might get the idea I ran a business. Some mornings I’d carried Dad’s old briefcase out the door with me, talking into my cellular phone, though no one was on the line.

  Whatever cover I’d managed had been blown a couple days earlier. Some friends had been celebrating my return: Repa—home after a cross-country trucking job—and a small crew who’d passed out on the living room floor in various stages of nakedness. I’d slept an hour or so when Repa appeared above my bed, shirtless with an unlit smoke in his mouth. “Ay,” he said, and Samhain scattered from the mattress. “Dick next door wants you to move your rig.”

  I’d awoken straight into anxiousness, yet I could barely hold my eyes open.

  “You answer the door like that?” I said.

  “That cat’s paranoid,” Repa said. “Just like you.”

  “Did my neighbor get a look inside?”

  “Aw, man,” he said. “He got a real nice look.”

  Stumbling through the living room, I saw a scene like the aftermath of an infestation that had been fumigated. Anyone peering in would have glimpsed a wreck of tattooed bodies and strewn albums, secondhand smoke hanging in the air. The coffee table held a formation of empty bottles with cigarette butts crushed into their mouths. Though I’d made a personal vow against drinking in Will’s company, he was facedown on a couch. Someone else had curled against the wall like a pest that had crawled off to die.

  Well past noon, an end-of-summer cooker.

  I’d walked outside to fire up the van, making way for my neighbor as he backed a well-worn RV down the street. Unable to fit the rattletrap in his meager driveway, he’d needed the van’s curbside parking space. He had every reason to wish I’d never arrived on his block, but he’d never shaken his fist or called the cops when the music got loud. Did the scrutiny I endured have anything whatsoever to do with him? His children were airing a pup tent on the lawn, chattering like nothing was amiss. After he’d parked in a way that satisfied him, the man yanked up a garden hose and began spraying the RV’s paneled exterior, never giving me the chance to wave.

  ONCE THE LAST MOVIE ended and the birds had repossessed the drive-in, Scott and I drove our passengers home and parked the van at a gas station on Ford and I-94. We’d spent enough hours inside that vehicle, on the move. The tour had gone through Georgia, rambling up the seaboard, toward New York, where Angela saw the band and I’d spent the night in her Bensonhurst apartment, deep into Brooklyn. At this early hour, it was likely she was preparing to ride the subway to Midtown, where she’d landed a job working on books. People liked her everywhere she went, though she couldn’t yet see it. All those miles and states between us only intensified our refusals to part. She said I could join her in New York anytime I wanted, that everything would change if I’d just leave Detroit behind.

  “What now?” I asked Scott.

  “What now,” he said.

  Scott rented a room in Mexicantown, his homestead only in that he had his stereo and records arranged on a floor there. After a rough one, he’d usually crash at my place. Having spent nights sleeping beside each other on tours, we didn’t think it the least bit strange when I’d offer him one side of my parents’ old mattress, where we’d lie fully dressed in the clatter of the box fans. I believed the neighbors might have seen that, too.

  The sun was ablaze. Scott lit the millionth cigarette of his twenty-five years. “What day is today?” he said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “We could go anywhere. Why are we even here?”

  I’d burned through a good deal of my dad’s savings, but there was enough left to keep me treading. The band was a good twenty thousand in debt—recoupable expenses, payable to the Californians. A doomy feeling: knowing I’d one day soon reckon with the fact of all I’d squandered. I had ideas about flying to Mexico, seeing the world on some last-ditch escapade. Somewhere out there on the road I’d given up on music, a surrender that was nonnegotiable and vaguely relieving. I wanted to think it came from inside, a survival instinct telling me I wasn’t cut out for that life. Really, I knew whatever talent I’d possessed had crashed and burned. Minutes earlier I’d played Scott a tape of songs I was working on and had asked for the truth.

  “It’s good,” he’d said.

  And I’d said, “But not that good, right?”

  He pulled a dog-eared road atlas from the glove box and opened it to the page that showed the Michigan mitten.

  “Right there,” I said, stabbing my finger at a blue spill in the middle of the Lower Peninsula. “We’ll drive out there.”

  He squinted to read the location.

  “Houghton Lake. A place like that—they don’t like our kind.”

  “I’m gonna throw my guitar in,” I said, gesturing to the back of the van.

  “The Gibson?”

  I had a couple of stage guitars, but Scott knew I meant his old ’79 cherryburst Les Paul. Fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of vintage maple and resonant tone.

  “I’m done living this way,” I said. “I need to make a statement.”

  “Something that hurts?” Scott said, knowing exactly.

  He and I talked about getting clean or dying from too much fun. A couple of celebrities had recently kicked the bucket while mixing spirits, and it flabbergasted Scott to read about the toxicology reports. “If that were me,” he’d say, “I’d be dead a hundred times already.” We often talked like this while we were snorting one thing or another—morphine pills, Adder-all—chopping the tablets with a razor and pressing the back of a spoon on the chunks, rolling it over until there was a fine powder. Scott and I got along because our personalities had little in common, other than that we loved our mothers, and music, and were afraid of who we were.

  It was 6:00, 7:00 A.M. I’d been drunk long enough that the alcohol sugars had given me a squirmy, paranoid charge. You can drink so much that it becomes impossible to sleep without chugging cough syrup or crushing a Valium. There were nights I’d lie down after not having slept for days and be amazed to feel my limbs were electrified, every cell awake on glucose.

  “We need some pills,” Scott said. “Or I’m gonna blow a gasket.”

  “All right, now,” I said. “I can find some.”

  Warden’s phone was disconnected, but we pulled the van right up to his mom’s trailer and banged on the plastic windows. The past few years, I’d come upon him like that to catch him in many states of compromise: with his back turned, masturbating to his computer screen, or yakking to his pet canary, Jingles, whom he’d recently found belly up in the trailer’s toilet bowl. This morning a beds
heet was tacked up like a curtain. After a few more knocks, Warden groaned and peered out through a crack.

  The first I’d seen of him in months.

  “What time is it?” he said.

  “We’re going on vacation,” I said.

  Warden pressed his sleep-worn face to the Plexiglas, and Scott smacked it hard, saying, “This is the chance of a lifetime,” afterward examining his reddened palm like it was a perfectly good magazine he’d used to swat a mosquito.

  It took a little finagling and some stealthy maneuvers toward the trailer’s medicine cabinet, where Warden’s mom kept her painkillers, but not much later we had what we wanted. Warden was strapped into one of the van’s bench seats, clutching a bag of tortilla chips and cleaning his teeth with a napkin. A two liter of cola sat between his feet. His hair had grown into a ruthless vegetation, cascading in bizarre layers over his face. He wore a T-shirt displaying the moniker of a band he’d promoted ten years earlier.

  How old was this man? This champion? Closer to forty than twenty.

  “You see this shirt?” he said. “Old school.”

  We’d managed only three pills from his mom’s stash: puny, ten-milligram Vicodins, two of which Scott and I had gobbled while still in the trailer, convincing Warden that Houghton Lake was a wonderland of bikinis and summer sport. “I haven’t been in the water since ’97,” Warden said. I’d wrapped the third pill in the foil from a cigarette box, setting it in a grocery bag of cassettes that sat between Scott and me in the van’s cockpit.

  We took I-75 north, that vertical trail snaking all the way from Florida through the Upper Peninsula, into Sault Sainte Marie, Canada. By then, I’d driven every inch of it. A case of warm beer was left over from the drive-in. When Scott cracked a pair, Warden began screeling.