Beautiful Music for Ugly Children (13 page)

Amy Winehouse is the New Elvis
because Drugs Weren’t Nice to
Her Career, Either

Friday morning, maybe eight thirty. My phone vibrates next to my head.

R u there, sexy?

I laugh. Give me an hour, my chest binder, and my Mango. Then we can talk about sexy. I text back.

I’m here.

I have to take it back. I can’t talk to her. But the electrons are gone, speeding through the air. Then I’m more excited than a kid at Christmas. A beautiful, luscious, gorgeous girl thinks I’m sexy. Then I’m petrified. Then I want to laugh. Then have a heart attack.

Of course I can’t go back to sleep. When I go downstairs, the paper is spread all over the dining room table like it is every morning, but my dad’s still there, eating eggs. Pete’s there too, eating a bowl of cereal, the milk and a box of Peanut Butter Captain Crunch in front of him. Mom’s drinking a cup of coffee and scanning the front page.

I go find a bowl and bring it back to the table. My dad glances up. “How are you today … Elizabeth?”

“I’m Gabe. How are you?”

“Just fine.” He finishes his eggs and leaves, giving my mom a kiss on the way. The door bangs as he goes into the garage.

“Pete, what’s new?” I pour milk on my cereal and pull a section of the paper toward me.

“Nothin’.” That’s a long sentence for him in the morning. His cereal is gone, so he picks up his bowl and heads into the kitchen, taking Dad’s plate with him. The dishwasher opens and closes, and then I hear him going back upstairs.

“Is he going to work?”

“He’s going to bed. He’s back in the baby phase.” My mom doesn’t look up.

“What?”

“Eat, sleep, poop, and repeat. That’s about all he’s good for right now, except for trips to Target.”

“I had no idea.”

“I think it’s just teenage boys that go through it. You never did.”

I could take it personally that she reminded me I’m not a teenage boy, but I play it cool. “Maybe it’ll happen later. You never know.”

She realizes what she’s said. “Well, um … maybe in college. That’s a good place to sleep all the time—once you’ve gone to class, that is.”

I hear the oven ding, and Mom gathers up the paper. “Cookies are done.” She heads into the kitchen.

“Can I have one?” I follow her in with my empty cereal bowl. The radio’s tuned to one of the less-talk-more-music stations from the Cities, something that’s supposed to be for women. Boring

She spreads the paper on the counter. “Get away. No. They’re for work.” She works at a daycare in the afternoons. She gets the cookie sheet close to the counter, sliding the cookies onto the newspaper.

I grab one of the warm ones and shove it in my mouth. “Mrgfswrw.”

“Elizabeth, that wasn’t nice.”

I swallow the cookie. “My name’s not Elizabeth.”

“Legally, it is.” She’s lining cookies up in neat rows. “So I should still be able to call you Elizabeth.”

It’s too freaking early in the morning. “That may be true, but I’d prefer you call me Gabe.” I keep my voice calm.

She’s washing cookie sheets. “It’s just … hard. You have this sweet little baby, and then, all of a sudden, she tells you it’s a mistake. We created a mistake.” She’s scrubbing a hole in the metal.

“What?” I have no idea what she means.

“Dad and I made you, and you said that being a girl was a mistake.”

That’s what I said when I told them about Gabe. “Not like that!”

She’s dried off her hands and is rearranging the cookies with her spatula, shoving them around like hockey pucks on slick ice. “You don’t talk to us. You don’t eat with us. You don’t answer your cell phone. You spend all your time with John and Paige, or working. Yesterday I needed you to go get milk, and you wouldn’t call me back.”

“I’m sorry. I’ll work on it. And you wanted me to get a job!”

She retrieves the second cookie sheet from the oven and shuffles the cookies to the counter. When she turns to wash it, I see a tear on her cheek.

“Mom?” My mother doesn’t cry.

“This is my fault!” Now she’s sobbing, slumped against the counter, dishtowel pressed against her face.

I don’t know what to do. “What could be your fault?”

I hear a little snort. She lowers the dishtowel. “Somehow our genes screwed you up, or something went wrong when I was carrying you, so this is my fault. Gabe is my fault.”

I’ve probably hugged my parents less than five times in the last five years, but if there was ever a time to do it, it’s right now. I go to her and put my arms around her. “It isn’t anybody’s fault. It just happens.”

She hugs me hard and pulls away. “It’s not anybody’s fault
but
mine. You marinated in my body for nine months.” The tears keep coming. “And you didn’t tell us what was wrong until the end of your senior year! What kind of crappy parents are we that we pushed away our child?”

They’ve always stressed the “we’re here for you” idea, so me not sharing is a huge deal. They have no idea I haven’t been sharing since middle school. I always found something to tell them when they asked what was wrong, but it usually wasn’t the actual thing.

“It was just … complicated. And I did try to tell you, when I was a kid. But you thought I was making things up.”

She studies me, leaning against the counter with her red eyes. Her look is daggers now. “Do you trust me?”

I have to look away from that fierceness. “Yes. As much as I can.”

She sweeps her arms wide and hits the dirty bowls and measuring cups from making cookies, which crash into the sink with a huge noise. “Nothing you could do would make me not love you. Nothing!”

I’ve never seen my mom like this.

“I know I’ve been a crappy mom for the last couple months.” She takes both my hands and looks me square in the eye. “But no matter what, no matter how strange it is, you are still my precious baby. I’m your first defender and last champion. Forever. Even if I don’t always call you by your new name.” She bursts into tears again, so I hug her some more while she sobs, but she pulls it together pretty quickly. I don’t think she wants me to see how sad she is.

When she finally looks up, she squeezes my face between her hands. “It’ll be fine. We’ll be sure it’s fine.” Her look is fierce, and I don’t know if she can see what’s happening to me, but all the tears she cried are threatening to fall out of my eyes, too. I don’t deserve this kind of love.

Nobody says anything for a second. Then she kisses me, lets my face go, picks up a warm cookie, and hands it to me. “Go do something useful, all right?”

“You got it.” I hug her again. Now I’ve hugged my mom three times in the last ten minutes, so I’m covered for the next two years. “Thank you.” I whisper it into her ear.

“That’s what parents are for.”

I leave with my cookie before she decides to take it back. Any of it. All of it.

There’s another text:

Want 2 meet up?

I text back:

For real? Or r u just flirting?

We’ll see what she says.

If Paige got crabby when she learned about Mara, she would lose it over this. At least I hope she would.

When I look out the window, John is puttering around in his yard. By the time I make it over there he’s pulled a bunch of weeds in a flowerbed.

“Hey, John.”

He whirls around like I’ve smacked him. “Holy smokes, Liz! Don’t do that!” Then he corrects himself. “Gabe. I mean Gabe. Sorry.” His face tells me he really is sorry.

“Want to help me plan a show for tonight? Or we could work on the Vibe show.”

“Whichever.” He wipes his hands on his shorts. “I’m not helping these flowers out anyway.” He sets a sprinkler to rain on them and we go inside. After he washes his hands and gets us Pepsis, we go back to the music rooms.

“So what strikes your fancy?”

“I have no concept.” And I don’t. It’s only ten a.m.

“Why not do an Elvis show tonight? Honor your rock and roll hero. The world would be a whole different place without him.”

“That’s what you always say about the Beatles.”

“Them, too. But Elvis is different.” He clears a space near his computer, then grabs a bunch of stuff from all the different rooms, including a shoebox. The stack must be three feet high. “This will get us started. Do you have to work today?”

“Nope, but we’ve got to be at the station in thirteen hours. That enough time?”

He grins. “It’s not like we have to listen to it all. But why not?”

By hour two, we’re hungry, which makes sense, since it’s lunchtime, so John calls Domino’s and they deliver while Elvis is singing “How Great Thou Art” at the top of his lungs. The guy gives John the fish eye when he gives John the pizza and says, “Gross.” John says, “Better music than will ever come out of your pie hole, sonny,” and the pizza guy goes away.

While we’re eating, Paige calls, and I tell her about our Elvis festival and would she like to come with us to the station tonight? She’s been bugging me again. She says yes, and hangs up after she reconfirms that we are the biggest dorks in Maxfield and she’d rather read right now, but pick her up at 11:30.

By the end of four hours, we’ve listened to six of the seventy-two RCA albums, all the Sun singles, and all thirty extended-play singles, and I’m a little sick of Elvis. It’s useful to know you can overdose on a good thing. At some point, I started flicking my Zippo every time the song changed, and when the songs are two minutes long that’s a lot of lighter fluid, so I’m almost out.

Finally I can’t stand it any longer. “I think I’ve had enough of the King. How about you?”

John is blissed out on his couch, looking like a very happy dead man. “We haven’t done any live albums.”

“Can we switch to Elvis Costello, at least?”

“That might be acceptable. But just early stuff.” He gets up, and Elvis is cut off in the middle of “Mystery Train.” It wasn’t helping that John was going from fifties Elvis to seventies Vegas Elvis then back again, which can make you seasick. Then “No Action” blasts from the speakers, Costello’s first song on
This Year’s Model
, one of the best albums in the history of British punk.

“Better?” He doesn’t seem happy to have lost the real Elvis.

“Much.” I start slam dancing even though there’s really nothing to slam into, just for fun and because I know it annoys John.

“Cut it out. You’ll skip the album.” John is stern about skips. “Come in here. I want to show you something.”

I gently slam into his shoulder as I hop through the door. “What is it?”

“Why should I tell you when I can show you? You may never tell another living soul. And stop that hopping stuff. Right now.”

I stand still. “Yes, sir.” He’s serious.

John goes around to the counter by his laptop and picks up the shoebox he brought in four hours ago when we started getting our Elvis on. “I don’t get it out much. Like once every ten years. Can’t let anyone see it.”

“Must be pretty rare.”

“You have no idea.” John’s digging through the box, and he comes up with what looks like a napkin. He hands it to me. “Be gentle.”

The napkin says,
To the best DJ in town, keep your show Red Hot and Blue. Your friend Elvis
.

I read the words again and again. “This isn’t real. It can’t be.”

“The hell it’s not. July 1954, Memphis, Tennessee, ‘That’s All Right,’ flip side ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky,’ and when I interviewed him, I said, ‘You, boy, are gonna be big. Sign this, will you, so I can say I knew you when,’ and he did. And there it is.”

I can’t stop staring. “You could sell this for a thousand dollars. Maybe more.”

“Why would I do that?” He takes it away from me. “When I die, you can sell it or frame it or whatever you want, but right now, it’s the only piece of my youth I have.”

A little flare goes off in my brain. “The 45 I have is the same one you played that night?” I knew it was an original pressing, but I didn’t know it was that exact 45.

“You got it.”

“That’s worth way more than the autograph—ten thousand dollars, at least!”

“So sell it when you need some cash.” John doesn’t put the autograph back in the box. Instead he pulls out a piece of paper and unfolds it. “I’d forgotten this was in here.”

It’s a child’s drawing of a house. Around the house it says, “I love you Dad.” It’s clear John doesn’t want me to look at it, because he folds it back up pretty quickly.

“From your daughter?” I know he has at least one daughter, because he’s got a picture of her in his kitchen, a tiny little girl in a pretty dress that looks like it’s from the sixties.

“From my son.” He won’t look at me.

“You had a son, too?”

“I still have a son. Patrick. He’s forty-five and lives in Seattle. My daughter Margaret is forty-eight and lives in Chicago. Their mother passed away about fifteen years ago.”

This is almost as amazing as the Elvis napkin.

Elvis Costello is frenetic in the background, but he’s so out of place I shut him off. “How old were your kids when your wife left you?”