Songs Only You Know (22 page)

“I need a rug,” Repa said, to no one in particular. “Bad.”

Here in the flesh, straight outta Okinawa, he evoked a dirty magic from which I hoped the carpet-strewn showroom would never recover. Rugs might have burst aflame if he’d fanned his arms. It had been a year since I’d seen Repa’s giant face, which was bearded, his smile widening as we took him in.

Will began flipping through the carpets, the General scowling as Repa described each one: “Crap. Crap, crap, crap. Makes me sick.”

When the shop closed, I found a note drawn in Repa’s hand stuck to my windshield:
Howell’s
. An old-timers’ bar just up the block. By the time I entered, he was on a stool, shitfaced and crooning to the jukebox. Deep-fried skin and chicken bones sat on a paper plate in front of him. The joint was empty but for a regular or two staring into the glass behind the bar. Ethan had abandoned him to fend for himself

“This place is great,” Repa said. “I love these guys.”

He hugged me tightly enough that I could smell all of him: spices and beer and the briny odor only he seemed to emit. “I love you,” he said, pulling from his leather jacket a red pouch on which a golden swastika was printed. A chintzy sack made of fake velvet. I opened it and plucked a number of Asiatic charms from inside, all of them tangled together in string. Beneath the lights of the bar I could see they were stamped with mystical characters and made of something like tinfoil.

“The hell is this?” I said, scratching at the pouch’s fascist logo. The least intelligent animals of the punk kingdom were known to champion the symbol for its sheer obscenity, but we prided ourselves on a rigid intolerance for bigots. “The swastzi?”

“It means something different over there,” he said. “It means ‘peace.’ ”

We drank what we could, and Repa demanded more chicken,
until the barkeeper gave us the nix. Night had fallen without our knowing. Sometime during the proceeding blur of music and calls to Angela so that she could speak to my lost friend and Repa’s telling of overseas motorcycle wrecks and the many ways he’d soiled the Japanese transit systems, he and I clutched fists and agreed he was in the band again.

“This time,” he said. “We do it wild.”

One bad idea, the best we’d had in a long time.

T
he two-dollar fare to cross the Ambassador Bridge was a better option than the Windsor Tunnel, which plunged you beneath the water through a cylinder of diesel-blown tile. From the bridge’s arch you’d glimpse civilization, split in two by the Detroit River. The west bank: Detroit’s garden of rust and hollowed buildings, sunrays splintering through jagged glass. To the east was Windsor, Ontario’s polished chrome, the green turf of city parks, restored crosses rising from chapel steeples. Swiveling your neck left to right, it was like a before-and-after exhibit, one side imploded and the other upright and gleaming.

For the band, crossing into Canada meant pulling over to allow border patrolmen to dismantle our road cases and molest our equipment. Coming home, the U.S. guards silently waved us through with a lack of ceremony that made us feel we’d returned to an undesirable place. I’d been crossing the bridge since I’d turned nineteen, able to legally enter Canadian bars two years before the States would allow it. Windsor’s pubs were unthreatening rooms with cheap pitchers and good music. Canada was a
place of luxury, a nearby reprieve. Their red maple leaf stamped everywhere, on paper sacks from McDonald’s drive-throughs and on the freshly painted receptacles into which those sacks were so diligently pitched.
SMOKING KILLS
warnings plastered to each pack of cigarettes; the Canadians’ rote politeness and clarity of speech. I didn’t hassle with strapping an antitheft bar across my steering column when I was there. Nothing was lurking in the corners.

There were also the Windsor casinos, which had never enticed me. By early September, though, Warden was on a monthlong winning streak, gambling the last of his record company’s account after he’d been fired from his job delivering Hungry Howie’s pizzas. Coming off a stay in his mom’s trailer, he was living near the Canadian border in a loft soon to be bulldozed for a new Tiger Stadium. Since Angela had returned to Kalamazoo for fall semester, I’d begun stopping by Warden’s cavernous new home, taking solace, imagining the glorious pad it might be if he bought a couch and arranged a stereo for communal listening. His only amenities were a mattress laid over milk crates and a formation of stuffed garbage bags containing most of what he owned. His bathtub was a trough of gray water.

I’d been there, half asleep on his floor, the morning Hungry Howie’s canned him.

“Don’t do this,” Warden said, into the phone. “Not now.”

Then he’d threatened to kill his boss’s newborn son.

The craziness he’d spew—you could have had him locked up, diagnosed him this or that. A sicko, mainly. Some people wouldn’t believe it, but Warden was, in his guts, a sweet man. He had no command over words; they came out of him like belches.

“You just don’t talk that way,” I said. “It ain’t cool.”

“That’s how it is, man.” And by this he meant I was right.

As for the bands and the scene, if they spoke of Warden at
all, it was as the ass end of joke. CTW hadn’t released an album in more than a year, and his back catalog was stacked in boxes lining the walls of the loft. It gratified me, knowing copies of my band’s debut sat inside that tomb, as near to obscure as one might get. A record meant so much more if you’d scavenged for it, rescued it from a place like that.

And what about Warden’s undrained tub?

“Backed up?” I’d asked.

“I just get in it when I feel like it,” he said. “I’m not wasting any water.”

It wasn’t long before Warden lost all his winnings in a single night. I accompanied him with the purpose of glimpsing his luck in action, and after a few evil spins of the roulette wheel he drove through Ontario’s streets in a sad, delirious tantrum. I slouched in his passenger seat while the city spun by. The windows were open. Bad Brains was on the tape deck. The tires whined. It was one of those moments you want to stay in, where there’s enough simple chaos that you’re not worried about what comes next—moments Warden lived one heedless second at a time.

After fishtailing and a few more mindless turns, he braked in the middle of an unfamiliar road, shaking his hands at the wheel as if it were the brains behind his fit. Up the street a pair of headlights made themselves known, as though they’d been there all the while. When the car pulled next to us, its window rolled down. I couldn’t see who it was, but the voice was a man’s, someone old and impeccably sane.

“This is a one way street, buddy.”

“That don’t matter,” Warden said. “I’m from Detroit.”

W
ELL INTO HER NINETEENTH
year, my sister had developed a fever for Windsor’s dance clubs. Joints I knew only by their neon
signs. Jokers. The Loop. On weekends the queues stretched from their doors, putting on display guys wearing white-gold necklaces, silken shirts tucked into their flared jeans. Women in heels and halters, smoking and snapping gum. You’d hear the bass of house music rumbling the street. Andrew and I had approached one of those dens wearing flannel to have the bouncers turn us away us on sight. The signs read:
LADIES NO COVER HALF-OFF DRINKS
. Caitlin had begun leaving the house with her hair sprayed up into a wickerlike explosion, her black stretch pants so snug against her curves that the seam of her panties appeared embroidered on her rear.

Canada pants—that’s what they were known as in Dearborn.

Dearborn girls of a particular ilk pulled on this attire for their club lives. Seeing Caitlin in her Windsor-bound outfits, I refused to think of it as anything but a girlish fad, or a way of spiting me. I convinced myself that her benign, unworldly face would work as a shield against whatever she might encounter. The quiet girl in the back, holding up a wall … drifting along the schoolyard fence.

One August afternoon, she drove me to have my wisdom teeth pulled. After the molars had been yanked and I’d filled my oxycodone prescription, we took her Escort for a fast-food lunch. Burritos, I suggested, something easily chewed—though my jaw didn’t hurt a bit. I’d gobbled a number of pills before exiting the drugstore. By the time we picked up our meal, I was in a selfless, fuzzy mood, teasing her about the thug rap music playing on the tape deck. Tupac as Machiavelli. Caitlin drove, handling a burrito as she steered, a fluorescent entry bracelet from whatever club she’d attended the night before dangling from her wrist.

My brotherly advice erupted in paranoid bursts, even when it was incontrovertibly true. “You gotta be careful out there. There are scumbags everywhere.”

Catlin balked, dipped uncertainly into her newfound cool. “I know people who’d kill anyone who messed with me.”

She proclaimed this the way someone does when they tell you they have friends in crucial places—famous friends, rich friends—her tough-girl tone frayed by doubt. Still, it was one of the only things she’d ever said that chilled my bones. I pictured a defensive line of steroid-injected beasts, mixed martial artists aspiring to cage-fighting tournaments. I’d heard of some of the maniacs she’d been rolling with, people I knew only by the local legends that preceded them.

“I can’t help you when it comes to those people,” I said.

This was as honest as I could be. I’d posed as a tough guy when we were younger, and she alone might have been fooled by my bluster. More recently, I’d begun thinking of myself as a crazed and feared showman within my scene of malnourished punkers, but she needed to understand I had no powers compared with these mooks she’d befriended.

“I tell them,” she said. “I say, ‘My brother would go crazy if anyone messes with me.’ ”

Even this talk of violence was new about her. Yet I was too proud—that she saw me as a foreboding protector, that anyone did—to say otherwise. I was painless. My thighs had begun a warm tingle, and there wasn’t anything more I’d have asked from the day. Caitlin notched up the stereo’s bass, mimicking a thuggish bravado.

“They ask, ‘How big is your brother?’ and I say, ‘He’s not big, but he’d go nuts.’ ”

As summer of ’99 was turning to autumn, Dad became a semiregular around Mom’s house, dropping in for dinner and
assuming seasonal chores. Come by after 6:00
P.M
., and maybe you’d find him at the kitchen table or on the stone bench in her garden, talking with her as she weeded the flowerbeds. They’d been divorced for well over a year, and while I detected no romance rekindling, Mom seemed considerate of the fact he had nowhere to be once the workday ended. She obliged my dad the way you might a bohemian uncle. To me, she swore she had no interest in finding a new man. Said she’d manage on her own—that all men her age wanted, anyway, was someone to dote on them.

Since none of us had the spirit to accommodate new worries, I was free of having to answer for much. Mom avoided asking what I was getting up to, occasionally admitting she feared to know. For Dad, that I spoke to him at all satisfied him. It was Caitlin who’d begun staging outbursts that sprung my parents into tandem action, overriding whatever acrimonies remained between them. One early evening my sister threw a fit about wanting a new car. She’d badgered my dad for a loan.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with her,” he said, pacing Mom’s cramped kitchen. “She says her friends all have nice cars.”

“What the hell is her problem?” I said.

There was a lunacy among Dearborn’s working-class stargazers, who hoarded their tips to lease sports cars while never saving a cent. I, at least, had a timeless record collection of first pressings and rare jazz imports to show for my spendthrifting.

“She’s gotta get a grip,” I said.

Dad and I had begun seeing eye to eye on a number of practical matters, like the fact that Detroit’s mayor Archer was supremely more efficient than his psychotic predecessor Coleman Young, or the superior coffee available from the new Tim Hortons restaurant on Michigan Avenue, a delicacy previously available only in Canada.

I followed Dad into the living room, where Caitlin and Mom sat before the television. Something about the four of us together gave me the urge to run my mouth. As though taking a podium, I said, “All you care about is your clothes. What about charity and people with less and all that?”

“Look who’s talking,” Caitlin said. “You dress like a bum.” She turned her face from me as if she didn’t know where to begin. “Doesn’t he?” she said.

My parents all but winced.

Other than the collared shirts I wore to the rug shop, I’d reduced my wardrobe to five black T-shirts, which I could tell apart by their tatters and cigarette burns. And two pairs of jeans. Those early autumn nights, I’d proudly uncloseted my Carhartt jacket, its collar stained by blood droplets from an onstage mishap with a microphone.

Without another look at me, Caitlin tromped upstairs to her bedroom.

“She’s out of control lately,” Mom said. “She’s like a different person.”

This was the part I didn’t want to hear. Neither did my father.