Songs Only You Know (14 page)

Caitlin began badgering me to hack off my chin-length mop of hair, thinking, perhaps, that a change of image might spur me toward other progressions. A bout of wicked sadness had not, she seemed to insist, left her blind to my hygienic shortcomings. When she said, “Why do you want to be a dirtball?” I knew it was a very good sign, her investment in my business rather than her own worries. She’d also reclaimed enough of her wits to suggest we do away with presents and donate to a needy family.

“We don’t need anything,” she said. “Look around.”

My mom agreed. So did I.

Four days before Christmas, the three of us drove to a west Detroit neighborhood named Brightmoor. A short way east of the band’s practice space, Brightmoor was one of Motown’s crack-shack havens. Along with Randall and countless others, I’d commuted there to buy booze from stores where, behind bulletproof glass, the clerk didn’t ask for ID but rang an extra buck to the bills of white boys like us. Evergreen Road, the hood’s central thruway, was an unbeautiful strip offering none of the ruined grandeur found closer to downtown.

Mom piloted the station wagon, keeping an eye on the unfamiliar signs. A pile of gifts was next to Caitlin on the backseat, nailing to a tee the wish list she’d acquired from a local charity. We had an address and vague directions. A rotisserie chicken sat in my lap.

I’d been detouring through Brightmoor after band practice to study the blocks of boarded-up houses. After dark, the streets were empty but for lone figures who emerged only to shepherd those freaky hours. They appeared ageless in the shadows. On even the coldest nights, I’d seen them lurking or wheeling by on bicycles, locking eyes with me through the windshield, turning to watch as I passed, in case my brake lights flashed, which
meant something in those parts. Every fourth house seemed to stand defiantly kept amid the vacant, burned, and graffiti-covered Cape Cods. The ones I paid attention to had faint lights glowing behind drawn shades, a car with tinted windows and chrome rims in the driveway, and as I passed I couldn’t help searching for my dad, dressed in his suit, walking into these places.

“This is a rough area,” I announced as Mom braked for a red.

“How would you know?” Caitlin said.

I’d been asking around. All it took was a pocket of quarters, slipping them to hustlers working outside Detroit clubs.
You ain’t no cop, look at you. What you wanna know? You want some shit just say so
. I’d learned from Repa how to jive with these folks, to slap hands when they throw up a palm and feel that toughened skin. That’s when I’d look into their eyes, set like marbles in bone-dry sockets, expressing only a starving, animal plea for one more hit. Brown teeth and gray-skinned lips, maybe a duffel of unidentifiable salvage they’re desperate to hock. I knew half of what happened to you was luck, good or bad—the circumstances that leave one person with a place to lay his head while another scrounges for coins.

“This,” I told my sister, “is crack town.”

“Not everyone’s on crack,” she said, but I’d become prone to the terrible, witless suspicion that yes, yes they were.

I tried feeling wise, as if I were in the know about Brightmoor’s goings-on. Pay a runner or a hooker or street-side creep five bucks to get in your car or—if it was a guy on a bike—caravan with you to meet the man. Smoke your shit in a by-the-hour motel or then and there in the dealer’s home or on the street or at a stoplight as you convinced yourself you were never going back for more … then again and again …

This was the extent of what I thought I knew.

Also that crack and grass could be rolled together in a joint,
because I’d accidentally taken a hit off one outside a gig in Pontiac. That’s if I was to trust a guy named Jason Heck, who’d coughed and said, “Don’t mind the rough spots, it’s just a little crack.” I’d sucked it, back and forth with Jason Heck, until it was gone, and when the band hit the stage I threw the microphone into the crowd and screamed at the floor, and no one there seemed to mind.

M
OM HAD GONE OVERBOARD
with the gift wrapping: curly bows, streamers and shredded ribbons. The packages were more elaborate than anything inside the small green house we arrived at. Mom and Caitlin wore skirts. They’d showered and done their hair. A woman held open the door, saying, “Don’t worry about that,” as we began removing our shoes. Her children sat on the couch, three shy-faced eyefuls whom I couldn’t imagine setting foot in their own front yard.

The living room was a tight unit with barely space for all of us. In the corner, a strip of carpet appeared burned away, and in the lukewarm air was a smell like wet, dirty towels. This was when I knew that, whatever my family had been through—whatever we’d go through—we had it easy.

The children approached us meekly, accepting the gifts. That was the most ludicrously white I’d ever felt: inside those walls, hoping they trusted us. Caitlin smiled as the children shook their packages. I was planning to meet the band in an hour to load the van and head downtown for our final show of the year, and I slipped into a vision of the impending performance—the set list and the strike of the first chord. Otherwise, I stood beating back every feeling that arose.

The children’s mother nodded as they opened their presents: that season’s popular dolls for the two girls and, for the boy, a pastel, machinelike squirt gun capable of serious battle. Taped
to the walls were crayon drawings of black Santas descending to a puke-colored abode.

“Santa asked us to deliver these for him,” my mom said. “He’s busy this year.”

“Oh, no,” said their mother. “Santa’s stopping by. He’s comin’.”

“Four days away,” Mom said, by way of recovery.

The boy clutched his toy, mimicking the sounds of gunfire as the girls waved their dolls’ limbs at Caitlin. She waved back. I knew what she was thinking because I’d begun to think it, too: how impossible it seemed that there was not a thing more we could do. As we drove away, waving from the station wagon, Caitlin began crying without a sound. Though I knew they’d meant well, it was easier to pity my mom and sister for their sloppy goodwill than it was to extend my own feelings. Evergreen Road passed outside the windows. Mom set her palm on my knee, squeezing gently, as if meaning to console my sister, who sat weeping in the backseat and just out of reach.

T
HE FOLLOWING MORNING
I climbed the basement stairs with a full-body ache, twitching each limb and rotating my neck to assess the damage. My arms were dotted with welts, my lips swollen with bite marks. Postshow mornings felt like I’d been mugged, and I reveled in each twinge, as if it fulfilled the idea that I could not be easily destroyed.

Our year’s-end gig had gone savagely well.

A punk in a Santa Claus hat had roamed the crowd, the red triangle of his cap sharking amid the bobbing heads. I’d done what I could to eject my soul from my body, and between songs Repa pulled a buck knife to carve his forearm—two or three slashes. Iggy Stooge, David Yow, GG Allin—the maim-yourself routine had been done, but what hadn’t in the name of rock and
roll? Later someone told me that with each crack of Repa’s drumstick, the blood that had drained onto his snare was sent flying, speckling the audience. It could have happened. What’s certain is that before our final song, once the time was right, he’d licked his wounds and made it known that the taste—it was good.

In the kitchen, the coffee was still warm. A note taped to the pot, the one place I’d see it:
Out on errands. Love, Mom
. I drained a mug and took a second to the upstairs bathroom for a marathon shower. Once the water went cold, I pulled open the curtain to find nothing to towel off with. I shouted for Caitlin. When she didn’t answer, I limped naked into her bedroom to scavenge in her laundry hamper.

There was a note placed on her bed. I snatched it, the stationery darkened by my wet hands. After the first few lines, I understood.

Tugging my jeans on over damp legs, I charged through the house, calling her name. Ozzy ran in circles, yapping while I checked every room—the basement, the closets. Outside, Caitlin’s car was nowhere to be seen. I passed through the kitchen, slapping the garage door opener on my way out the back door. Fresh snow had fallen. I was shoeless, shirtless, still damp as the aluminum door rolled up to reveal Caitlin’s white Escort. The exhaust pipe vented blurry fumes as the car idled. The driver’s seat was reclined, but I could plainly see my sister. She wasn’t moving.

I yanked opened the car door.

“The hell you doing?”

“Nothing,” said Caitlin, perfectly alert. Pure embarrassment crossed her face. The kind of expression you see in someone who’s been caught lip-synching pop songs in the mirror.

“Go back inside,” she said.

“Hey,” I said.

She knotted her face, glaring, annoyance being the sole
emotion she was an expert at faking. Blonde wisps escaped from a stocking cap pulled tight over her head. She’d bundled up. Mittens. She appeared wholly rational. We might have been arguing over a carton of leftovers I’d devoured without permission.

“I found your note.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t do this anymore.”

I reached across her and cut the engine.

“Don’t tell Mom,” she said, huddling into the seat.

“This is selfish,” I told her. Then I aimed for something profound, making a lame speech about all those who had less than we did, limbless and crippled people, starving, in other parts of the world.

“You don’t think I know?” she said. “I think about that all the time.”

She was looking past me and toward an escape from this day. It must have seemed easier to sleep forever than to carry whatever diagnostic branding she’d been given, whatever humiliating dormitory episodes were playing in her mind, and to begin reintegrating into the wide, wild world. My wet hair hung in my eyes. I decided that, if it might make her happy, I’d let her trim it any way she liked.

“You want my coat?” she said.

“I want you to knock this off.”

“You don’t know what it’s like. Everything comes easy to you.”

I laughed the way you do when nothing useful comes to mind. She saw it that way—my easy life—and she might have been right.

“Everything hurts,” she said. “I hate it.”

“What’s so bad? Nothing’s that bad.”

Even now, nearly eighteen years on, I’m not immune to fantasies of revising the past and altering the course of things to come. I envision myself there with Caitlin, filled with the
knowledge of everything I was helpless to understand then. I’m able to fix her without a word. And she sees it in my eyes, the irreducible love that I’m no longer afraid to give—even if it would mean reliving those strange days one by one, starting from that moment in the garage.

Next she told me something awful that had happened to her, swearing me to secrecy before I’d steadied my pulse. “Promise you’ll never tell,” she said.

And I did.

A vow I’d never break, which made me feel as though the weight of all she’d said had landed squarely on me.

I went brutish; it was all I knew. I grabbed a hoe and gnashed several times at the cement. There were unpacked boxes on the ground, and I booted them around until Caitlin slammed the Escort’s door and began to cry.

“Don’t,” she said.

“All right. I’m sorry.”

“You’re not gonna tell,” she said.

I slung my arm around her. My skin was a sheet of warmth, immune to the cold. I hugged Caitlin to my ribs, and she clutched herself as her head pressed against my chest. She refused go limp in my arms, but I felt her elbow beneath her jacket, her hair on my bare shoulder—proof she was there with me. We waddled together into the house, where she sat at the kitchen table as I prepared lunch. Turkey sandwiches, a bland, scarcely garnished specialty I’d perfected.

Caitlin stared at the stack of bread and cold meat on her plate.

Did I actually think she was going to enjoy this?

An Advent calendar stood in the center of the table, a cardboard structure housing twenty-five perforated rectangles marking the days leading up to and including Christmas.
Behind every numbered flap were small plastic trays of candies, most of which had already been torn from the calendar. I punctured the paper seal that read
23
and gobbled the pebblelike confection in an attempt to make her smile. It cracked between my teeth. I opened another panel, the one for Christmas Eve, stuffing tomorrow’s treat into my mouth.

Caitlin shook her head.

As though she were on another, unreachable channel, she said, “I wish I knew guys like you and your friends.”

I couldn’t tell if this meant she wanted to tag along with my band or if it suggested her hopeless crush on Andrew, whom she’d always adored. But we were wrong, I thought, all of us: me and my friends and my band. Wherever my sister belonged in the world, I believed we should come no nearer to it than I was at the moment: grinding the sugar from my teeth, fingering the crusts of her sandwich and urging her to take a bite, thinking it might be enough to renew her.

The first day of a new life.

I
OPENED THE DOOR
of our rehearsal room, and there was Repa swinging a claw hammer, pounding out a rhythm on a piece of sheet metal. Three or four salvaged televisions flickered behind him. Ethan sat on a garbage-picked couch, nodding along to the performance. They were waiting on me. My minivan had stalled countless times on the way over, poisoning my mood and leaving my fingers cold and brittle. I’d need a minute before my hands would be able to fret a guitar.

“All right,” Repa said, whanging the metal sheet, “Kristopher fucking Kringle.”

Christmas Eve rehearsal was symbolic, a test of our commitment. We were also sorely in need of fresh material. A new label had arranged to release our album-in-progress, news to which Warden had responded by calling us traitors, defectors from the CTW cause.

I blew into my hands, relieved to be inside our windowless room. The space was bare of the inspirational knickknackery most bands enjoyed. Adorning our white-plaster walls
were scribbles of psychotropic poetry and a xeroxed photo of Warden, his forehead marked with a pentacle. A liquor-store clerk we’d named the Christ Figure had been visiting us with plastic jugs of vodka and econo-sized bags of peanuts. Empties and crushed nutshells littered the floor. We’d been admitting select colleagues into our rehearsals: Repa’s anarchist admirers who’d rechristened themselves things like Squirrel and Star; an unequivocally likable paraplegic who bore Iron Maiden tattoos and insisted we call him Gimp; a half-Irish, half-Japanese longhair who played along on an unamplified guitar, occasionally exposing his pierced urethra. After three months there we’d barely written a minute of new music, but we were still drawing an audience. One fifty in Detroit, a hundred or so in Chicago, ten to forty people anywhere else. They came for the antics: Ethan mauling his amplifiers. Repa pulling his buck knife.