Ballads of Suburbia (2 page)

December 1999

S
IRENS AND LIGHTS WELCOMED ME BACK TO
the suburbs of Chicago. It seemed fitting considering they'd also heralded my exit. And it couldn't have happened anywhere else: only a Berwyn cop would pull Stacey over for rolling a stop sign and cash in on her total lack of insurance, but not notice the underlying stench of pot smoke on us. It clung to Stacey's auburn ponytail, my freshly dyed black hair, and the clothing beneath both of our winter coats. I'll never know how he missed it. A rare stroke of good luck? The karma I was owed for agreeing to come home in the first place?

I'd been gone for over four years. Around the holidays Stacey always tried to guilt me into visiting. She'd remind me that my mom missed me or point out that there was no chance for a white Christmas in Los Angeles. She knew I never intended to set foot in the Chicago area again after everything that had happened at the end of junior year, but the girl wouldn't give it up. Finally, she resorted to playing dirty, name-dropping her daughter: “Lina wants you to be there for her fourth birthday. She wants to know why she's never met Mama's best friend.”

It was an underhanded tactic, but it worked.

“I don't know why I didn't think of it earlier,” Stacey congratulated herself.

“Because using your kid to get what you want is low even for you,” I joked.

“No, it's not!” Stacey laughed a hoarse, smoker's laugh. She gestured to the car seat in the back, bragging, “Do you know how many times I've used that thing to get out of a ticket?”

On cue, the whoop of a siren behind us.

“Shit!” Stacey slapped the steering wheel hard with the heel of her hand. “Don't the goddamn Berwyn cops have anything else to do?”

I gazed at the flashing red and blue behind us. I couldn't take my eyes off the colors, remembering how they looked reflected in my friend Cass's wide brown eyes the night I came to surrounded by paramedics in Scoville Park.

I'd said “Adrian,” and when Cass heard me over the commotion, her jaw clenched.

“He left you here to die and saved his own ass.”

“Good,” I cackled. “Good for him.”

The tears streaking down Cass's full cheeks turned to rainbows in the red and blue light. I closed my eyes, silently begging the heroin to drag me all the way under.

That was one of my last memories of home.

Stacey eased the car to the side of the road and turned down the radio. Old reflexes kicking in, I lit a cigarette in what I felt certain would be a failed attempt to cover the pot stink.

Stacey's litany of excuses began the moment she rolled down her window
and smiled flirtatiously at the frowning officer. “I was at Midway picking her up—my best friend who I haven't seen in over four years—and my husband paged me. Our daughter's sick.” She indicated the empty car seat.

Great,
I thought, tuning out her diatribe,
I'm in town for an hour and I'm already in trouble.
I did not want to spend my first night back at the Berwyn police station. Why had I agreed to Stacey's suggestion of taking “the long route” from the airport? I'd known it was code for stopping by her mother's basement apartment and getting stoned. Stacey's mom, Beth, had been smoking us up since freshman year of high school. Apparently Stacey had forgotten that I didn't indulge in those activities anymore.

Sure enough, Beth had answered the door with a bong in her hand, screeching, “Kara-leeeena! Kara-leeeena! You're finally home!” Both she and Stacey called me that even though I wasn't a Carolyn or a Caroline, just Kara. In naming her daughter Lina, Stacey had effectively named her after me.

The last time I'd been at Beth's was a mild June evening the summer after junior year. That was when Stacey told me she was pregnant and planned to keep the baby. She'd be moving out of her mom's house into prematurely married life. I worried about her, but I had serious problems of my own. Like heroin addiction. After I left Stacey's that night, I OD'd in Scoville Park.

My parents and I collectively decided that it would be best for me to live with my dad in Wisconsin until I finished high school. I hadn't come back for Christmas or birthdays or Stacey's wedding or Lina's birth. I stayed in Madison and held my breath that my poor grades from junior year wouldn't keep me out of USC's film program. After high school graduation, I went straight to L.A. and hadn't touched down on midwestern soil since.

Beth's house was still the same. After she gave me a long, bone-crushing hug, we followed her through the kitchen—the sink filled with dirty dishes as usual—down the short hallway—the floor strewn with clothes and junk mail—to the living room. Beth swept pillows and blankets off a futon mattress on the floor in the middle of the room. We plopped down and Beth handed me the bong.

When I declined, passing it to Stacey, Beth offered me a glass of wine. “You still drink at least, don't you? We should toast to your homecoming!”

“I don't drink much, actually,” I replied, adding, “but we're celebrating, right?” before Beth's grin could turn into a pout.

“Exactly!” Beth enthusiastically poured nearly half a bottle of wine into a large plastic cup. “Sorry I don't have proper glasses, but the wine's good. My boyfriend works at Whole Foods. He got it there.”

The wine was good and I drank it a little faster than I should have, but I wasn't used to being around Beth and Stacey without a buzz.

Beth, in particular, could be intense. She played with her hennaed curls and asked incessant questions about “la-la land.” What famous people had I seen? Had I really given up writing screenplays to work on movie soundtracks? Was there money in that? Didn't I know I was supposed to be writing a big blockbuster so I could move her, Stacey, and Lina out to my mansion in the hills? Beth breathed only when she inhaled pot and hardly gave me time to respond to one question before throwing another at me.

And this had gone on until Stacey declared, “We gotta get home before Jason gets pissed.” She grabbed her coat and I followed, waving to Beth.

“Now we can finally talk,” Stacey said, swinging her long legs into the car.

Back in grade school, Stacey and I had plenty of time to talk. It was just the two of us and we'd spend all afternoon chattering about silly kid stuff. Things changed when we reached high school. Stacey discovered boys and weed, so she was always busy and soon I was, too. We made small talk when we crossed paths at parties, but that was about it. We started to have more meaningful phone conversations after I moved away, but they often got cut short by Lina or Jason. So, Stacey learned to talk rapid-fire like her mother and mostly I just listened.

In the car, Stacey launched into the tale of her latest argument with Jason as she wove through Berwyn, past the greasy spoons that lit up Ogden, and then down the quieter East Avenue, peppered with brick bungalows and tall apartment buildings. Stacey's fights with Jason were generally minor—considering the odds against their teenage marriage of convenience and Stacey's feisty nature, they were doing quite well—but Stacey liked to dramatize things. Since both of us were absorbed in her tale, neither of us noticed her poor driving.

Then, of course, that stupid cop pulled us over.

I smoked two cigarettes while Stacey turned on the charm. But the worried-mother routine failed to impress.

“Do you have proof of insurance?” the cop asked, dark eyes unwavering.

“No…” Stacey replied meekly.

He went off to his car to do his cop thing. Stacey was so irritated, she didn't even talk. We chain-smoked in silence for ten minutes until he came back. She fished for compassion once more. “I don't know how we're going to afford this and my daughter's prescriptions. We don't have health insurance either, you know.”

The cop shrugged unsympathetically.

Stacey repressed her rage until he slammed his car door. “Jason is going to be so pissed!” she moaned, staring at the five-hundred-dollar ticket for driving uninsured.

“At least he didn't smell the pot. We totally reek.” I rolled down my window to toss out my cigarette butt. A cold wind grazed my cheeks. I shivered but enjoyed the novelty of it, since I hadn't experienced real winter for years.

“True.” Stacey wrinkled her nose and asked, “Do you have some gum?” As if that would make her smell any less like a stoner.

I fumbled through the pockets of my hoodie and offered her my last piece. After she took it, she stared at me, her aqua eyes burning into mine.

“What?” I self-consciously smoothed my short hair and tongued my lip ring to make sure it wasn't turned some weird way. My eyes darted from her finely plucked eyebrows to the freckled bridge of her nose and down to the familiar crescent-shaped scar indented on her chin—from a bike accident when she was six, a year before we met.

She shook her head soberly. “I fucking missed you.”

I smiled. “I missed you, too.”

Then she changed the topic again. That was Stacey; her thoughts moved at warp speed. “Soundtracks? What exactly is it that you do again?”

“I'm interning with a music supervisor who works for Warner Brothers. It's nothing glamorous. I don't hang out with rock stars. I just do the grunt work, but that's what most internships are, after all.”

She studied me quizzically. “And you like this?”

I nodded. I liked it better than my writing internship. I'd worked fourteen-hour days assisting the writers of a TV medical drama. The intensity of the job had almost led to a nervous breakdown.

“And now you want to be a music supervisor even though you've been going to school for screenwriting?”

I shrugged.

Concern flooded Stacey's eyes. “Why aren't you writing?” she implored. “You loved writing. You wrote screenplays in high school all the time.”

I worked on one screenplay junior year. With Adrian. And I talked about it once with Stacey at a party; her memory was a steel trap. Sure, I'd fallen in love with screenwriting that year, which had spawned the idea to go to USC, but it wasn't like I'd been aspiring to it for years. “I've always loved music, though. Besides, I realized I don't have any stories to tell.”

Stacey's facial expression changed paths like a hurricane. “You?” She choked back laughter, holding her gut. “You don't have any stories? Growing up here? Hanging out with the people you hung out with?”

“I don't have any stories.” I clenched my jaw hard and watched the cop pull out from behind us. He turned right onto Fourteenth Street without signaling.

Stacey got back on the road. “Okay, fine. Here's a song for your soundtrack, then.” She flashed me a grin and reached for the volume knob, turning up “Back in Black” by AC/DC. She rolled another stop sign and we both laughed.

We cruised across Roosevelt Road into our hometown, Oak Park. Stacey meandered this way and that toward her apartment, narrating the changes that had occurred in the past few years. There weren't many. Remodeled Walgreen. Condo conversion. Condo conversion. Condo conversion. We passed houses we'd gone to parties in—both the innocent kind with birthday cake and parentally supervised games, and the kind where parents were nowhere in sight and I left blasted with my underwear on inside out. We reminisced about getting high on that playground or making out with what's-his-name in front of that 7-Eleven.

These were all memories that felt good. Stacey swerved away from the
ones that wouldn't, like my ex-boyfriend Christian's house and Scoville Park. If I looked in the direction of those places, she distracted me with “Remember when we were eight…”

Before the last chorus of “Back in Black” ended, Stacey punched buttons on the radio in search of another good song to keep the buzz going. She practically blew out the speakers when she found Social Distortion. Our gazes collided as we shouted, “High school seemed like such a blur…”

Yeah, “Story of My Life,” Stacey knew it was my type of song. It's the ballads I like best, and I'm not talking about the clichéd ones where a diva hits her highest note or a rock band tones it down a couple of notches for the ladies. I mean a
true
ballad. Dictionary definition: a song that tells a story in short stanzas and simple words, with repetition, refrain, etc. My definition: the punk rocker or the country crooner telling the story of his life in three minutes, reminding us of the numerous ways to screw up.

As we zigzagged around Oak Park to Social D, memories of the wild times seduced me. I wanted to spend the whole week stoned. I wanted to call old boyfriends. I wanted to go to a punk show at the Fireside to meet new boys. I wanted to ride in Adrian's car, him taking the curves of Lake Shore Drive way too fast. I wanted to drink coffee at Punk Rock Denny's until dawn. I wanted to snort a line in Scoville Park as the sun rose.

It would be so easy to be the person I used to be. My life was like a song. L.A., working my ass off to do well in college and be a “healthy person,” just a verse, and the chorus was coming up again, the part where I fucked up the same way I always did.

The spell was broken when Stacey screeched to a stop behind her apartment building, the radio cutting out abruptly as she killed the engine.

“I can't stay,” I reminded myself curtly.

“What?” Stacey's brow knit in confusion. Apparently I said that aloud.

“I mean, after New Year's. I'm going back to school, back to L.A.”

“I know that.” She shook her head, shooting me a “you're insane” look before popping the trunk and getting out to grab my bags.

The heady combination of a little wine and a lot of nostalgia had me feeling dazed, so I stopped in the kitchen for a glass of water while Stacey dragged
my suitcase into the living room. I heard her greet Jason, but before “Hi” made it all the way out of her mouth, she asked sharply, “What the hell is he still doing here? I told you he needed to leave before we got back.”