Songs Only You Know

by Sean Madigan Hoen

  “Pull this thing over. You’re drunk.”

  Amazing that he hadn’t already smelled it on us, seen our ruddy eyes.

  Warden did some handiwork with the seat belts and soon had two or three hooked over various portions of himself.

  “You’re gonna be fine,” I said.

  “He’s throwing the guitar in the lake,” Scott said. “It’s the only way.”

  “The Gibson?” Warden said.

  “I’m done,” I said.

  “With what? The band?”

  “With all of it.”

  “That band’s all you’ve got,” Warden said. “You got a deal, man.”

  When we’d signed with the Californians, Warden threatened my well-being via telephone, saying I’d better steer clear or he didn’t know what he might do. All Conquer the World had done for me, for my career, and this was how I’d treated him.

  “It’s gotta go,” Scott said. “It’s gotta hurt, or else nothing’s gonna change.”

  He lit a smoke. We’d entered a shared psychology in which I didn’t mind him talking about destroying my property. Scott seemed to need to watch his prized guitar drown as much as I did.

  “You’re screwed,” Warden said. “Both of youse.”

  Ciggy in mouth, Scott dug through the bag of cassettes. I kept an eye on the foil-wrapped pill as he tossed the plastic cartridges onto the van floor.

  “Garbage, it’s all shit,” he said liplessly, before holding a cartridge up to the windshield, “Aha,” injecting it into the stereo and cuing it up. Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams.” That drippy, seventies heart thumper. We let the song play through and rewound it for another spin. Memories of our parents’ vinyl collections, Sunday mornings on shag carpets, a sepia-tinted era of simpler times: we were both seeing it, floundering in it. Mick Fleetwood’s snare drum clacked with an emotional meter, a sweet analog distortion.

  “It’s too much,” I said. “It’s too good. Why do we even try?”

  This brand of FM rock was the antithesis of our punk roots. Ten years earlier, it would have been deplorable to be found mumbling along with Stevie Nicks as she bemoaned an ever-trysting Lindsay Buckingham. Well-aged manna, now: the haphazard drum fills, the mournful fuzz guitar chirping through the verses. A song could tear a hole through the middle of the day, could widen the road as it ascended toward the sunlight.

  I jabbed the steering wheel. Traffic was a clutter of ordinary beings on their way to life. I kept losing track of the speedometer, edging toward ninety, but Warden hollered for me to slow down every few miles.

  “How did they do it?” I said. “That sound.”

  By the song’s fourth or fifth repeat, Warden began screaming, “Turn this hippy shit off!” but I was near to perfecting every drum roll, tapping along with my index fingers. I’d invented a harmony for the chorus, which I snorkeled out in a nasally falsetto.

  “Play it again,” I said.

  Two hours passed just like that, until Scott yanked the cassette from the stereo, midverse.

  “It’s making me feel funny,” he said.

  “You’re evil,” Warden said. “You’re completely sick.”

  Whatever promise Fleetwood Mac had been supplying us with leaked instantly from the vessel, and we discovered a new experience. The world outside was trees, woodland. A serenity that forced us to understand how far we’d come.

  “Look,” said Scott, pointing at a sign; we were an hour from Houghton Lake.

  “What do you think is there?” I asked.

  “Sailboats.”

  “Can we go swimming?” said Warden, revealing his ace: a way of forgetting all that had happened, even moments before. His life had been a timeline of shed miseries; with the change of station he’d entered a daffy new mood.

  “The guitar’s going for a swim,” Scott said.

  “We need trunks,” Warden said. “I didn’t even bring trunks.”

  OFF THE HOUGHTON LAKE exit we picked up a road that seemed to be circling the lake without allowing us to see it.

  Scott said, “Where is the damn thing? Why do they make it so difficult?”

  “Yokels,” I said.

  “Trunks,” said Warden. “You can’t swim without trunks.”

  A few miles later we came upon the town and pulled into the parking lot of a sporting-goods store, an old mucker retailer that sold bait and tackle and ammunition. Legions of fish flies clung to its windows. With no more than a glance, Scott said, “I don’t like this,” and I knew he was testing a scary margin of thought because I was, too.

  “If he wants trunks,” I said, “we’ll get him trunks.”

  It wasn’t until we stepped out of the van that I realized I’d been inside it for the better part of twelve hours. I was stiff legged, sweating liquor. The white shirt Scott wore had been steamed light brown by the endless cigarettes smoked.

  “Jesus H,” he said. From where we stood, the city of Houghton Lake was a nightmare version of one of those dioramas depicting vacations you might win on a game show. There were cinder-block ice-cream parlors and boarded-up diners, streets lined with rust-bottomed boats and four-wheelers with FOR SALE signs stuck to their handlebars.

  Upon entering the store, Scott made for the fishing poles, thwacking them with his forefinger as if analyzing their potential. Each second brought feeling back to my left leg, limping numbly astride the other. A bearded lumberjack species behind the counter made his distaste obvious by tossing down a magazine and eyeing us without a nod.

  “You got trunks?” Warden said.

  “What?” said the clerk.

  “Swim trunks.”

  The man stuck a finger toward a rack of T-shirts and reflective hunting vests at the far end of the shop as Warden tossed back his hair with a lascivious movement. “Come here,” he said to me. “Help me choose.”

  I stood beside him as he perused the mismatched articles on the circular clothes rack, twirling it and pausing before the scant selection of swimwear. He pulled a pair of trunks off a hanger—a jejune pattern of lightning bolts and zigzags printed on blue polyester. Warden spread the trunks wide, pressing them to my hips.

  “These’ll fit you.” He spoke at a careless volume. “Bet your legs are white. I’ve never seen you in shorts.”

  “Get your hands off me,” I said, trying to give the man at the counter the right idea about things.

  Worming my way over to Scott, I pretended to discuss bait casters, fidgeting with their levers and thingamabobs. “This fucking one,” I said, about the tallest of the rods, astounded by its complexity.

  “Get us out of here,” Scott whispered.

  Warden yelled through the shop, “Which way is the lake?”

  “Take a right,” said the man behind the counter.

  “That way?” Warden jerked a thumb in an indistinguishable direction.

  “Your other right.”

  SCOTT AND I TOOK shelter in the van, hoping Warden would follow. When he didn’t, we sat waiting as he continued to browse. From our position we could see his mouth running but had no view of the storekeeper.

  “They’re gonna put us in the drunk tank,” Scott said.

  “Warden,” I said. “Goddamn Warden.”

  When he finally emerged, minutes later, he grinned as though he were stepping from an airplane onto exotic soil. He’d probably not left the trailer in months. “Get in here, man,” I said. Warden labored into the van, griping, “That’s the worst selection of trunks I’ve ever seen.”

  Exiting the parking lot was going to require a few deft maneuvers I wasn’t game for: reversing from the parking space, a two-point turn in a slim area. As I turned the key, the lumberjack came to the store’s glass window and made no secret of watching us.

  “What’s he doing?” Scott said.

  “Be cool,” I said. “Keep it calm.”

  I reversed the van slowly, inching by a pickup truck mounted with hunting racks and spotlights. Off road tires. Confederate stickers.

  “Don�
��t hit it,” Scott said. “Check your mirrors.”

  Once I’d straightened the wheel, I coasted slowly toward the road.

  “Shit,” Scott yelled, with an eye on the passenger-side mirror. “He’s taking the plate. He’s getting our number.”

  I stepped on the accelerator, and the van roared out of the lot, cutting a sharp left.

  “Right,” Warden said. “He said turn right.”

  “He’s got us,” Scott said. “Go, go, go.”

  We were cruising hard. Mailboxes on posts whipped past. Miraculously, I could see the lake’s blue immensity gleaming through the blurring tree line.

  “There it is,” Warden said; we’d been yards away from it all the while.

  “Get us off this road. They’re onto us,” Scott said.

  “You’re so crazy.” Warden giggled. “You don’t even know where you are.”

  At the far end of town, I pulled into the gravel lot of a motel and cut the engine. It was shaded by a stand of trees, set back from the road. The sign said VACANCY.

  “This place?” said Warden.

  “This,” I said, “is the one.”

  Scott and I haggled over who, of the two of us, was in better shape to accomplish the rental of a room. “I’ll do it,” said Warden, prompting Scott to snatch a fistful of bills from the band’s gas kitty. He pulled down the visor and tried to make himself decent by pushing his hair around and scratching his beard, digging at the corners of his eyes with his fingernails.

  “How do I look?” he said.

  His skin was blotched. His face was too exhausted to complete certain gestures.

  “Pretty good,” I said. “Real good.”

  THE WOOD-PANELED WALLS WERE decorated with stuffed mammals, small game, nailed above the beds. Also a fish of unknown species. The television was a vintage appliance with a crooked antenna bending from it. Scott and I were trying to get a nap on the bed next to the window; Warden lay in his underwear on the other. The ’79 Gibson was the room’s centerpiece, enclosed in its hard-shell case on the shag carpet. Peeling up the window shade, I saw that the view from the room was level with the lake. I could see nothing but the water and the point in the distance where it met with the horizon. And a dock, with a small plastic craft tied to it, rocking in the tide. Every so often the shape of a tattooed, sun-weathered torso hovered by—so close to the pane that I dropped the shade.

  “Who’s out there?” Scott said.

  “Where are we?” I said. “What is this place?”

  We’d sent Warden out for food and swimwear, and he’d returned with a bucket of fried chicken and a pair of shorts for each of us. Gnawed bones dangled from the afghan bedspread of Warden’s nest. I held a bread-battered leg in my hand but couldn’t get beyond those delicate little bones, was just turning the greasy limb over and over above my head. Warden was an hour or so deep into a rant about the Federal Reserve, how our taxes were being used to fund the destruction of the free world. All the gold in Fort Knox had been moved to Switzerland and the U.S. dollar was backed by nothing but a globalist plot to overtake the universe.

  “You don’t pay taxes,” I said.

  “Exactly.”

  Scott came out of a dream, pleading, “Stop it. I’m on the verge.”

  “Let’s go swimming,” Warden said.

  He threw our trunks onto the carpet. I leaped up to snatch a pair.

  “Why do you get black?” he said. “Those were for me.”

  The remaining suits were despicable, fluorescent numbers, shades of yellow and green that did not exist in the natural realm.

  “Warden!” Scott yelled with an unknown purpose.

  Once we’d suited up, the three of us crept from the room, which opened onto a pathetic drift of sand intended to serve as a beach. A group of men sat in folding chairs, smoking in silence, turning to see us waddling barefoot across the dirt: two pale, shitfaced city slickers with abnormal haircuts. Warden, a chubby barbarian, visibly enthralled by what lay before him.

  He waded into the lake, opening his arms to the sky, nearly making love to it.

  “Ah,” he said, digging up handfuls of water. “Listen to this.”

  If we’d had our wits, we might have been scoping the Gibson’s burial grounds.

  “The paddleboat,” Scott whispered, lurching beside me, and we scampered for it, undocked, and climbed aboard the plastic craft. We chugged alongside the lengthy dock, at the end of which the tattooed figure who’d passed our window was waist deep in the lake, wrenching on a speedboat raised above the tide by a contraption of belts and levers. Its motor was running. His face was smogged behind a wall of fumes.

  “Faster,” I said. “Pedal faster.”

  We kicked so fiercely that at first the small plastic craft went nowhere as the man turned to us with a wrench in hand. Then we found a rhythm and went sputtering to open waters, watching Warden become little more than a black mange bobbing in the shallows, flailing his arms as if to stop us. We pedaled until the water turned dark beneath, so far from shore the paddleboat shook with each undulation of the gentle tide. For all the lake’s vastness, there wasn’t another undocked boat in the visible distance.

  “How deep is this thing?” Scott said.

  “Hundreds. Thousands, maybe.”

  We sat rocking on the water.

  Sometimes I like to think of that as the moment my life changed, or the moment at which I turned away from some alternate future that awaited me. Not that things were any different, once a storm blew over Houghton Lake and we pedaled back to shore, sweating and cursing in the heavy summer rain. It would be a few more years before I could claim any true progress as a human being. In fact, things got worse once I moved to New York and found myself awaking in hospitals or alone in a sleeping bag on the floor of a cruddy Brooklyn sublet, with burns on my arms or broken fingers or empty highball glasses on the nightstand from places I didn’t remember. By then Angela and I would be far beyond repair, blazing to an end no less intensely than we began, so thoroughly ruined that she’d question forever the truth of my love for her; and back home, Will would be dabbling in my father’s drug, and my mom would have a hard time relying on a word I said.

  No, it was going to take a whole lot more to right myself, but there on the paddleboat, skidding across the surface of Houghton Lake as Warden trudged through the rain to help pull us ashore, I’d gone out and turned around, carrying a spirit that began to bloom inside.

  Warden hugged me once we’d reached the dank beach.

  “That boat ain’t meant for that,” he said. “You could have drowned.”

  The rain came down hard, but beneath the motel awning stood the tattooed mechanic, unsmiling, watching us: three freaks, cuddling one another in the downpour. Scott was too expended to speak. We were all breathless, sogged to the bone.

  “Man, I’m tired,” Warden said. “I feel like I just screwed.”

  WE WAITED OUT THE storm inside the motel. When it cleared, we left the room a mess: three pairs of wet trunks hanging off the television and chicken bones on the bedspread. Warden piloted us all the way home. He’d gotten everything he’d come for and took on a perfect mood as the sun set. The rain had ended. There was a shimmering calmness about the wet trees and damp asphalt. You could smell it, coming through the open windows, displacing the stale smoke. From the backseat, Scott strummed the Les Paul that had been doomed for Houghton Lake. None of us said a word about it, though. I dug into the sack of cassettes to split the last pill.

  “Just this once,” Scott said, accepting the smaller half. “And never again.”

  He also had a long way ahead of him, out of his own trouble; but by the time his first child was born, three years later, he’d be clean shaven and toting around books on self-betterment, calling me on my yearly sober anniversary—so many days without a drop, a slip, or a sip. There are others—Will, especially—I’d like to see healed from the wounds of those days. Scott was the first to show me how to begin, one minute at a time, som
ething like that.

  We let Warden play whatever music he wanted, and he bobbed his head to his punk rock favorites, guiding us through a green nowhere. Scott closed his eyes and played along.

  Soon enough the hydrocodone softened the edges, and Warden, as if on cue, turned down the music and began speaking about his father, a drunk who’d lived his life in a trailer and had died that year. Who’d known? Warden had been one of a handful at the funeral. He said that when he’d turned seventeen his old man had offered to take him to a hooker, that he’d ditched him at a water park once when he was a kid. He spoke all this as if it were the simplest science there was, nothing to gloom about.

  Scott strummed the unamplified Gibson, a gentle scrape of the strings as Warden told it like it was. He didn’t have any particular message; he was talking as he always did, but we waited through the pauses, the way you do when you know you’ll never truly comprehend what it is you’re hearing. The sun was setting as Detroit’s suburbs began sprouting from the land. The billboards and subdivisions gathered, shaping into a tunnel that led the way. We still had miles to go, but Warden was taking it steady, guiding us home.

  FROM MY BED, I called everyone in the band and our manager to tell them I was quitting. Ethan said to take a couple days to think about it, and I agreed but said I’d be calling back with the same message. In a matter of weeks, I was on my way to New York, a city I’d never thought about one way or another. I had no business there just yet, other than Angela, but was relieved to sell off the van and my parents’ bed, condensing everything I’d need into a few boxes that could be packed into my station wagon. I turned Samhain over to the care of my mom, who had him declawed. Eventually, she’d claim the cat reminded her of me—his skittish, nervous way. Or how he always came back, after escaping the house though the back door.

  Mom had only seen New York once, for a single day, when she and my dad had sought my sister’s voice with the help of a spiritualist. I hoped I might disentangle from Caitlin once and for all, that I’d slip away from my past amid the crawl of the country’s most incessant place. I never wanted to forget her, only to outrun the memory of who I’d been as her brother.