Songs Only You Know (23 page)

“If she wants a new car, she can go out and bust her ass for it,” he said.

Ozzy patrolled the floorboards, slinking toward my mom and retreating to the fringes each time my dad spoke. “I don’t know,” he said, seeming to admit he’d relinquished some jurisdictional power or that he was, after all, helpless to arrange the world to his liking. “I just don’t know.”

W
HETHER OR NOT
D
AD
was sober wasn’t a question anyone spoke aloud. His showing up to Mom’s house seemed to imply that he was. He’d also begun phoning me at the upper flat, where, at my mom’s suggestion, Will had been answering the line as a
linguistic exercise to help his stuttering. I’d return the calls during hours that left to chance whether he’d be home, and then it might be days before he’d get back to me. When we’d connect, he spoke with the self-deprecating insight of someone who’d undergone a severe conversion and was subsisting on only the rawest aspects of himself.

“I’ve gotta keep it simple” was one of his latest phrases. The lingo of the 12-step fellowships he’d been taking part in. “Do the next right thing” was another. His sponsor was a Vietnam vet who told stories of bullets whizzing through the jungle and had, my dad admitted, diagnosed him as an “insecure egomaniac.”

Dad’s favorite new slogan was “It is what it is.” But if ever I had a technical problem—an oil leak or a question about sinking anchors into my bedroom’s plaster walls—his voice would spark as he offered technical details with a confidence that made me believe he was, as he liked to say, “on the beam.”

My uncle Dennis, the third youngest of Dad’s five brothers, had been joining my dad at meetings. Once or twice, they’d stopped by Mom’s house on their way. Dennis was a truck driver. After years hauling freight over interstate highways, he’d settled into a schedule of local routes and a modest Dearborn home with his wife and two daughters. Dennis’s favorite slogan was “My drug of choice is more,” and his sleeveless shirts exposed a tattoo of a bloody-fanged wolf on his bicep.

In their husky stature and thin blond hair, they were unmistakably brothers. Walking beside each other, they looked like a two-man gang, reformed troublemakers on a penitential mission. I kept a distance but figured my dad had no better sober ally than his brother. It was Dennis’s wife I saw most often. Aunt Bonnie worked the register at the 7-Eleven on Telegraph Road and nodded to me like any other customer when
I’d come in to deplenish the beer supply. She had flaming red hair you’d spot the minute you pulled into the lot. Her most evident tattoo was an eagle, its wings fanning wide across her sternum.

D
AD PAINTED THE WALLS
of Mom’s living room on an early September weekend. Will assisted, working off the speech lessons Mom had given him and leaving me with no role in the refurbishing. I waited all year for autumn. I reminded myself not to miss it as it happened. The sky was densely blue, the air perfectly lukewarm. When I came by the house that Saturday, I saw Will leaving in his paint-smeared jeans. Passing me in the driveway, he raised his brows in a way he rarely did.

Mom was smothering her nervous cough with a Kleenex as I entered through the back door. “That Dennis,” she said. “Something’s going on.” Down the hallway I heard my dad pacing the living room, speaking a quiet gibberish into the phone. Aunt Bonnie, Mom told me, had called in a panic.

My plans that evening were to roadie for a group of friends who called themselves Wallside and were playing Grand Rapids, two hours west. We called it roadying, yet it was merely a way to tag along in another band’s van, to feed the compulsion of being forever on the road.

Dad stalked into the kitchen, surrendering the phone.

“I’ve gotta go get Dennis. He’s in trouble.”

“Where is he?” Mom said. “Is he in some crack den?”

She seemed to be lamenting the fact she’d invited any of this into her new sanctuary. Muttering “What’s wrong with these people?” she walked out the back door to tend what was left of her garden. Dad stood blowing gusts, the weekend scruff on his neck daubed with white paint. It was his brother. It was the poltergeist of his addiction conjured into a sunny afternoon.
Caitlin was working the dinner shift at the steak house, which was a lucky thing.

“Can’t someone else get him?” I said.

I was crunching the facts I knew about the drug, bits I’d been told by rehab counselors: the abysmal recovery rates, the never-ending temptation.

Dad said, “I’m just gonna pick him up.”

“How do you know where he is?”

“We know where he is.”

“Where? A crack house?”

“You wanna come with me?” he said.

I could take it or leave it—either seemed an act of trust. Dad had also been inviting me to 12-step meetings, so that I might comprehend his disease. Or perhaps because he suspected I, too, might benefit from the principles suggested there. My reason for refusing any of this was not for lack of burning curiosity but for fear of witnessing my father any more closely and nakedly than I already had.

“I have to go out of town,” I said.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll get Dennis and bring him home.”

W
ALLSIDE
’
S
’84 F
ORD
E
CONOLINE
was far more hospitable than the Orgasmatron. I’d come to feel more at home with these musicians than I did my own band, and we drifted into a lazy silence after leaving Detroit, watching Michigan pass east to west beyond the windows. Wallside’s music was high-decibel chaos owing nothing to proficiency, spared only by the earnestness with which they went apeshit. Their brotherly ways heartened me, as did the fact that they admired my band, readily admitting we were superior. Hard to resist telling them Repa would be rejoining, that we’d again be at the apex of our powers. But I held out. There was a show booked at the Shelter
for the end of the month—a prestigious gig for which ads had already run—and we’d need Blaine to drum one last time.

Nearing Grand Rapids—no chance of turning back—I accepted my failure to confront whatever grim passage my dad had offered to lead me through. He’d never again speak of that day, but what I imagined was specific: the front room of a Brightmoor crack house; a cinder-burned couch occupied by tweaking addicts inhaling doses of smoke. I pictured my dad extending a paint-spackled hand to Dennis, pulling his brother to his feet amid the secondhand fumes. I could have been there, could have smelled it, but I’d taken the easy trip.

Throughout Wallside’s show I crouched beside the amplifiers, ready to attend to any technical difficulties. I drummed along on my knees, wishing I were playing. Their singer lost his footing and took a spill, splitting open the crotch of his pants. Before the last song, Scott, their long-haired guitarist, turned to me while standing at the microphone. “This next one’s for our friend here.” He eyed me through wet hair, miming a pistol with his fingers and pointing it my way. Pressing down his thumb. Bang. “One of the good ones.”

A customary thing: a band ingratiating their roadie before an audience. I’d done it many times to Will, to Warden. Just then the simple courtesy crept over me like some shamanic rite, as though my friend had perceived the darkness in me as I’d stared out his van’s windows.

The hiss of the amplifiers. The guitars being tuned for the final onslaught.

One of the good ones …

I nodded, extending my arm and aiming two fingers, firing an invisible bullet right back at him. The drummer counted off the beat, and I felt the tickle in my throat, warning that the
tears were coming, which gave me more than enough time to cinch them at their source.

The night of her late-September birthday, Caitlin crossed the border, partook in Windsor’s festivities, and returned with a black eye. Her purse was stolen, too, though no one would find out about it until later that week. I’d gone to see Angela after Caitlin blew out her twenty candles and hurried off to the real party. By the time I returned, her bruise had begun yellowing around the edges. It looked worse as the days went on. Caitlin spent a week on Mom’s couch with her bangs brushed over her face, missing work and skipping class, reeling in her old trance in front of the television.

She was curt about what had happened, evasive—no names, no places. She said there’d been a fight, a mess of blind punches she’d tried to stop. Another day, she said it had been an accident. Once, she said something about how Dad or I would never hit a woman, but no matter how I drilled, that was all I could get out of her before angry tears clouded her eyes, one of which was hemorrhaged and bloodshot.

We’d just sat down to dinner—Caitlin, Mom, and I—when two detectives showed up with the purse. It was one of those big, black numbers that could carry a human head and then some. But nothing inside it was missing. The Windsor club my sister visited had installed undercover cops, suspecting one of their employees of snatching American wallets for their licenses and passports. They’d caught the skeever just in time, and after an international handoff, here it was, care of the Detroit police.

“You’ll want to double-check your belongings,” said one of
the cops, standing on the porch while I paced back and forth past the front window, wondering if I had a purpose in the situation.

“They got him,” Mom said, really trying to interpret this visit as good news. She invited the men inside, a guy in his early thirties and another pushing retirement. When handed her purse, Caitlin held it at arm’s length, her face not quite settled on any one expression. “Smells good,” the young detective said, about our dinner, which was going cold at the kitchen table.

Both men interviewed my sister, thinking she might have information that could lead to further arrests. “You have to be careful,” said the younger one, clean-cut and pleased with his role here. “Identity resale is big business.”

Caitlin was terrorized, swiping at her bangs while refusing to look anyone in the eye. I also felt suspect in the presence of these men. Mom pressed the detectives for details, asking the name of the club and what went on in those places, wanting a connection between the missing purse and my sister’s bruised eye. As she and the men spoke, they seemed in agreement that the youth, these days, had gone insane. The younger officer would later call the house, trying to better acquaint himself with my sister under the guise of follow-up work; that day, they left chivalrously. “You have a great dinner, now.” Caitlin took immediate refuge upstairs, leaving me with a barely manageable urge to break inanimate objects. I managed the high road instead.

“This has to stop. Her running all over Canada.”

Mom folded her arms. When it all got to be too much, she seemed to hold in a single breath for as long as she could—that’s when she’d cough. She covered her mouth and let out several quick barks. We both needed an unthinking moment
before any more could be said. Mom looked around the living room and after a deep sigh explained that my dad and Will had made a horrible mistake. They’d slathered the walls in gleaming, high-gloss trim paint instead of the flat eggshell satin finish she’d wanted.

“Oh, it looks stupid,” she said. “Can’t anything just work out?”

Will would hear all about their error. Sooner or later I’d tell him about Uncle Dennis, whom he’d always been fascinated by and had nicknamed the Beast. “Tell me about the Beast,” he’d say. Will relished the hard cases, tough-luck stories. Sometimes I felt like a man of the world, being able to report such troubles. Yet I’d keep Caitlin’s black eye to myself. I’d pound the image from my thoughts any way I could, usually with a ferocious new hatred for all of Windsor—though the memory of her wound would arise again. Not just in the days following but for years after. Blue turning brown. The busted vessels enclosed by her blonde lashes. Her hand shooing me away when I pressed for more details. The television’s light reflecting on the glossy living room walls.

A
dozen of us lounged on the street-side patio of a Greek-town restaurant, the band and a mob of hangers-on. Our table was in plain view of the Shelter, a three-hundred capacity club we’d play in a matter of hours. It would be our biggest headlining show, one to prove our mettle in a club where we’d seen some favorites. Detroit’s
Metro Times
—a weekly that largely dismissed bands like ours—had run a sympathetic article, calling us “one wild ride.” The poster for the evening’s gig, stapled to nearby telephone poles, flaunted a photo of Repa sneering in his leather jacket. He was here, too, spouting Japanese across the table. We were all here. Ethan, Will. Warden was due to materialize any moment.

“Think anyone shows up?” I said, meaning an audience.

“Fucking rock and roll,” said Repa. “That’s what matters.”

Blaine sat abnormally quiet, his blankness causing me to wonder if we were on the verge of an incident. Every available indication was pointing to the fact that this evening’s performance would be his last with us, and he was many things but not dense.

Angela had wanted to hitch a ride to Detroit, which would have been a sure cause of trouble. Thinking of Blaine’s eyes on her put me in a lunatic state. I felt prepared to duke it out with him at any moment, knowing that in a fistfight there was always the chance he might get lucky with a jab to the nose. No risking Angela being around to witness a fluke like that. Instead, I planned to drive to Kalamazoo immediately after I played. Though we’d first met at a show, I’d now cordoned Angela in with those I intended to keep a safe distance from the band’s whirlwind, like my sister, who’d clipped our article from the
Metro Times
to make a point of wagging it my face: “Ooh … ‘wild ride.’ Too wild for me.”