How Evan Broke His Head and Other Secrets (5 page)

“I think they let kids in, but you couldn’t sit at the bar or anything. I don’t drink, so it wouldn’t matter anyway.”

Dean hesitates.

“So you want to go?”

“Um, okay, ” Dean shrugs even though Evan can see the excitement in his eyes. “If there’s nothing else to do.”

HE GATHERS HIMSELF together and gets dressed in what he deems appropriate musician’s garb for a Lucky Strike show: normal-guy look with a touch of cool. He doesn’t want to stand out, just come across as a little bit hipper than the rest of the audience so as to be identifiable as part of the musician’s tribe. So, in addition to his basic uniform of jeans and T-shirt, he selects a loose-fitting sharkskin shirt he picked up at a vintage clothing store in the Market. Shiny, but not too. Noticeable, but not ostentatious. It shows that he cares about his image, but only casually. He’s a guitarist, after all, not a lead singer. His music tells more about him than his image.

He checks himself in the mirror. He’s slightly taller than average. His blue-gray eyes are in contrast to his dark hair, which he wears short since, despite his best intentions, his hair does what it wants and sticks together in strange clumps that he has never come to understand. He’s thinner than his mother would like. He’s less muscular than he would like. He’s been told that he was built for fame—the wiry body of a rock star. He never put much store in the idea, but, deep down, he hopes it’s true.

They wait for the cab in the drizzle outside Evan’s building. They’re cabbing it because, for one, it’s generally easier than looking for a parking spot, and, two, Evan’s seizure activity is something of a concern. He knows he should call his neurologist, Dr. Melon, but he really doesn’t want to. Dr. Melon is cool and all, but he’s still a neurologist. And, though he’s a proponent of alternative therapies (the use of marijuana was
his
idea, not Evan’s), when push comes to shove, he still writes a prescription or ups a dosage or calls Evan in for a quick EEG just to “check under the hood.” And Evan doesn’t need any of that right now. He needs to be cool and calm, cut out the dairy and the wheat—which act as triggers for seizures in rough times, something to do with toxic load, Dr. Melon maintains— and keep a joint with him at all times. Easy enough.

“How about Chinese?” Evan asks. Steamed chicken and rice.

“I hate Chinese.”

“What do you want, then?”

Dean shrugs, his trademark nonverbal reply.

“Anything but Chinese, then, ” Evan says.

“Yeah, anything but Chinese.”

“How about Greek?” Grilled fish and rice.

“How about American or Italian?”

American or Italian. Great. Evan’s trying to tame his seizures by staying away from wheat and dairy, and his kid only wants to eat hamburgers and pizza.

“Okay, ” Evan says with a smile, “you got it.”

IF THEY’RE GOING to do it, they’re going to do it right. Evan takes Dean to Dick’s Drive-In up on Capitol Hill. He chooses Dick’s because Dick’s is a part of the Seattle experience, but also because Evan knows they don’t dust their fries with wheat to make them crunchy, like every other burger joint in the world does. And while he eats his three bags of limp fries and drinks his water, he envies Dean who is in the middle of inhaling two Deluxe burgers and sucking down a giant milkshake. The sacrifices we make for our children.

It’s crowded at Dick’s, as it always is, but the evening is too young for it to be really raucous. The hardcore drunken and stoned Dick’s eaters won’t arrive until much later. Evan and Dean stand at the outdoor counter eating and watching the people pass by on Broadway. Their conversation is almost nonexistent, but they are spending
time
together, which Evan figures is just as good. People talk too much anyway. Sometimes just standing next to a person is better than making a contrived effort to communicate with him through language.

After they finish dinner, they walk around a while, stopping long enough to watch a guy get his lip pierced in the window of a tattoo shop. Evan, clever father that he is, remembers that there’s an Urban Outfitters in the mall on the north end of Broadway, so they go and buy some clothes. Dean changes out of his uniform of protest and paradox and into something more appropriate for a contemporary Seattle teenager.

They hop another cab and head down to Belltown. When they arrive at Jefferson Bank, an old bank building converted to a night club, Lars is waiting on the street. Lars Hero, a six-foot-four Swede, is the drummer of Evan’s band, The Last. Amazingly dexterous with drumsticks but almost comically clumsy without, he is a very large, thickly built, platinum-blond man, who, it’s been said, is slightly retarded due to a childhood blow to the head he received courtesy of his hammer-wielding brother, Berg. Evan suspects that Lars was slightly retarded long before the blow to his head, since the blow occurred thusly:

Lars and Berg, fifteen and thirteen respectively, were working in the yard, breaking rocks for the Japanese garden their father was building, which, when completed, would boast a twelve-foot waterfall and an impressive collection of immaculately groomed bonsai trees. Lars and Berg argued. Berg, the younger, threatened Lars: “I’m gonna knock your head off with this hammer.” Berg gestured with the heavy clawed chipping hammer in his hand.

Lars, not to be intimidated by his little brother, responded: “You’re gonna have to pull it out of your ass first.”

Then, Berg, being a man of his word and a bit quicker than the hulking Lars, swung the hammer and connected with Lars’s head just above his ear. The sound was similar to the sound made when uncorking a bottle of wine. Pock. Not loud, but disturbing nonetheless.

There was blood, screaming, a trip to the hospital, a skull repaired with a hard plastic disk and some baling wire. But no lasting damage, thank God, except that Lars had problems comprehending his math homework after the incident. But, apparently Lars had problems comprehending his math homework before the incident, too. That the incident occurred at all suggested to Evan that there was a certain chemical deficiency in the Hero family.

“Hey, Ev, ” Lars calls out, waving frantically, as if a giant albino with a dent in his head is hard to pick out of a crowd.

Evan and Dean make their way toward him. There’s a larger than normal mob of young Bohemians gathered on the sidewalk. Evan never would have thought Lucky Strike was that big a draw.

“Hey, Lars.”

“What’s with the kid?”

“This is my son, Dean. Dean, this is Lars.”

A look of panic sweeps over Lars’s face. His hand instinctively goes to his mouth, he chews at the tender flesh around his thumbnail, a nasty habit.

“I didn’t know you had a kid, ” he whispers to Evan through his thumb.

“I do, his name is Dean. This is him.”

“You didn’t have a kid last week.”

“Well, I do now, ” Evan confirms.

While Lars digests this new information, he tears a piece of flesh off of his thumb and chews on it with his front teeth, grinding it up, gnashing it, pulverizing it. When it’s gone, he licks at the bloody wound he has just created.

“They’re sold out, ” he says.“Do you have a ticket for him?”

“What?”

“The show is sold out.”

“You’re kidding me!” Evan cries.

“Nope.” Lars stuffs his hand in his pocket, apparently overcome by a sudden feeling of guilt at the profuse amount of blood flowing from his thumb wound.

“How could they be sold out?” Evan asks, dismayed.

“Someone posted on the Internet that Tom Waits was showing up. I guess they all figure if Tom Waits shows, Jim Jarmusch might show because he’s shooting a film in Portland, and they figure if Jim Jarmusch shows, Johnny Depp can’t be too far behind. So, therefore, you get all these loser artfags going to a see a band they’ve never heard of before tonight.”

“Oh, that makes sense.”

“So what do you want to do? I mean, I can go inside with him—what was your name again?”

“Dean.”

“I can go inside with Dean and you can try to worm your way past the bouncer, I guess. Because you know I’m not giving up
my
ticket and I know you don’t want Dean standing out here alone all night. If you don’t make it in, I’ll just take him to your place after the show, right?”

“Right, ” Evan sighs.

“See you, sucker, ” Lars chuckles.“Come on, Dean.”

Evan watches them walk away together.

“What happened?” he hears Lars ask Dean as they head toward the entrance.“Your old lady get sick of you and tell you to go stay with Dad for a while?”

“No, my old lady got killed in a head-on collision with someone driving the wrong way on the freeway.”

Lars doesn’t respond for a moment. Then, “Really?”

“Yeah.”

“That fucking sucks, man.”

“Yeah.”

“Fuck that.”

And then they are too far away for Evan to hear.

NO ONE IS scalping on the street, and the doorman won’t budge. It’s nine forty-five, almost fifteen minutes past the scheduled start time, and, though he doesn’t hear any music from inside, he knows it’s too late for him. He’s about to pack it in when he hears a familiar voice:“Yo, Evbee!”

Evbee? Evan turns around quickly to see who it is. Walking toward him is a stocky black man with close-cropped hair and a broad face, wearing black leather pants and a black leather motorcycle jacket.

“Yo, Evbee. Wassup?”

It’s Billy Marx, one of the founding partners of The Sound Factory, the hottest recording studio on the West Coast.

“Hey, Billy.”

Billy strides up to Evan and shakes his hand in the cool hip-hop way, a handshake with which Evan was never quite comfortable but always felt he could bluff his way through: slap hands, slide into a thumb-wrestling grip, then, palms together, lean in and give a poundy with the left hand—a quick thump to the hollow of the back of your co-greeter with the flat of your fist.

“What’s happening, brother? You here for the gig?”

Evan nods.

“Yeah, but it’s sold out. I can’t get in.”

“There’s always room for one more, ” Billy says.“Come on, I got a table.”

Evan follows him to the door and they walk right past the doorman without a pause or word of explanation. The same doorman who had so rudely rejected Evan minutes earlier. Evan smiles. Billy Marx is the one guy Evan knows who actually has enough juice to walk past any bouncer in Seattle.

While Billy and Evan aren’t exactly close friends, they see each other around occasionally, and they’re always friendly, since they have a mutual bond that goes way back. Billy was the drummer in Evan’s first real band, Free Radicals, a band that was full of good musicians, but was ultimately doomed because they were too diverse in styles and interests to really click. After the band broke up, Evan asked Billy what was next.

“Start a rehearsal studio, make a paycheck, ” Billy said.

“Sounds boring, ” Evan said.

“You know how much money is in drumming?” Billy asked in response. “Ten bucks a gig. I’m serious. You either write the songs or you produce them. That’s the money. Good studio musicians get by all right, if they live in L. A. But a mediocre drummer in a rock and roll band? Screw that. I got a kid, man. I need health insurance.”

The prophecy. And now he has health insurance and more. A dental plan, even.

Inside Jefferson Bank is a long, dark bar that is separated from the rest of the large room by a four-foot-high wooden divider. The main area is filled with small tables, all of which are full. At the front of the room is a stage with amps and musical instruments, but no musicians. Evan scans the room for Lars and Dean, but he doesn’t see them.“You looking for someone?” Billy asks, noticing Evan’s search.

“Yeah.”

“Well, come up front for a minute. I want you to meet someone.”

Evan really wants to find Dean, but he doesn’t want to be rude to Billy, who, after all, was the one who got him inside. He glances around one more time, but the room is packed. He might never find them. So he follows Billy.

They pick their way through a tangle of tables until they reach a long table near the front where about ten people sit. Billy indicates an open chair, then moves around and sits across from Evan, next to an incredibly beautiful woman.

Shockingly beautiful. Indeterminate age, maybe thirty or so, Asian-looking, with milky brown skin and long frizzy hair that is pulled behind her into a low ponytail. She’s wearing a little black dress. Her eyes are vast reflection pools, her cheeks are high and defined, her lips are full and pouty. Evan almost can’t breathe, he’s so taken with her.

She’s probably Billy’s girlfriend. Evan knew that Billy had a kid, but he also knew that the mother took the kid and left. This girl is a pretty fair consolation prize.

She catches Evan staring. She smiles a little, dips her head modestly, and looks away toward the stage, stretching her long, slender neck into a wonderful arc—not reprimanding Evan for his stare, but encouraging him to look more.

Which he does. Billy doesn’t care. He’s already deep in conversation with someone else. With extreme effort, Evan takes his eyes off the girl and looks around the table. He doesn’t recognize any faces, but he knows he’s sitting with the band. They’re all dressed in ultra-cool fashion, way beyond Evan’s look—charcoal lounge suits with thin ties and French-cuff shirts proclaiming that they are definitely from a different tribe than Evan. Just when you thought you were cool enough. . . He lets his gaze drift back to the girl. She’s saying something to the guy seated next to Evan. Evan tunes in.

“—I just think it’s inappropriate. I’m not commenting on the value of your music, Theo.”

Theo? Evan looks over. Next to him is a tall, gaunt white guy with thinning hair in a floppy drab suit. He’s smoking a cigarette. Theo Moody, the leader of Lucky Strike.

“Music doesn’t have a bedtime, ” Theo says. He has a gravelly deep voice. His nose is large and it angles slightly down, as do his eyes, giving him a perpetually sad look. “If there were some rare lunar eclipse and you could only see it at two in the morning, wouldn’t you wake your kids up?”

“I think it’s sweet that you equate yourself with a rare lunar eclipse, Theo.”