Songs Only You Know (24 page)

“What are we gonna play tonight?” Ethan said. He’d scribbled a set list on a napkin only to drop it in a spill of beer, the song titles wilting.

“Improvise,” Will said.

Already, he was in a greasy, drunken condition, dressed in felt slacks and suspenders, topped by a black cowboy hat, which he’d graciously tipped as our waitress read his handwritten order for octopus, jotted down to avoid pronunciations. Once the plates arrived Will ate strategically, tucking bits of seafood behind his ears and retrieving them midconversation. I’d begun worrying about him. While I’d spent the summer nights with Angela, Will’s public insobriety had become artlessly demented. Yet when I spoke of my new love, he’d say, “I’m happy for you,” squeezing my shoulder as though I were his to give away.

To announce he’d finished his meal, Will raised his plate, attempting to smash it over his head—a hollow
tonk
and a spatter of fish oil, then a line of blood trickling from his hairline. Seeing this, Repa leaped the patio fence to climb up on a nearby Dumpster, howling once or twice before growing intrigued by whatever he saw from that vantage point.

Blaine watched skeptically. Over dinner, part of me had sympathized with him, and this was my mom’s altruism at work, infused in me: her belief that the least likable people are most often those who’d gone unloved. There were traces on Blaine’s face of an awkward kid who’d grown painfully into a slender, wisecracking schemer. I knew much more, too, bleak details of his time with Angela that I’d never repeat. What I understood beyond doubt was that all this—losing Angela, the band’s dark hymns, Repa’s howls—was a scary culmination, edging him toward his worst days.

And still, I liked him less than anyone I knew.

D
IM THE LIGHTS AND
leave them that way. No strobes. Nothing in the monitors but the vocal. Tell the soundman to crank the kick drum and redline the snare. No entrance music. No
Good evening thanks for coming out
—the last thing this crowd wants. We take the stage, and by the first verse, Ethan is butting the headstock of his bass into the floorboards. Someone sprays the audience with beer, a thumb over the mouth of a shaken bottle. You fret the notes as best you can, but the important part is the sound, charming the feedback like a snake. The low end is a tempest Ethan and I have on reins, and I can almost see it: coiling before the stage. The trick is to choke it silent when the stops come—on a dime, on the downbeat.

This is what we do. It’s why they say we’re
tight
.

Repa stood front and center with a cigarette in mouth, pumping a fist to the beats he’d written years prior. The Shelter was half full. To make an impression, I’d borrowed an extra Marshall and was pushing two hundred watts. The audience lurched back the moment we began. You saw it in their faces: windswept by decibels. Midway through the set, a bottle was smashed, and the crowd parted to watch Will drop and roll
through the glass—the “creepy crawl,” as it was known in California. Repa joined him on the floor, the two of them wriggling in a sexless embrace as the show climaxed.

Here is all the noise you’ve ever imagined. Here are your friends dancing on glass. The crowd cheered and shouted out their favorites, the ones we didn’t play anymore. As our final song reared toward its end, I pulled off my guitar and battered it against the stage until there was nothing left but shards, which the audience scrambled for and further annihilated. Claiming his part in the dervish, Blaine kicked over his drums as Ethan held an ugly, sonorous note that rang long enough for me to sneak out the club’s back door. My Escort was the first car to leave the parking lot, headed for Angela’s Kalamazoo bedroom. One hundred and forty miles’ worth of Michigan passed like nothing, my head ringing as I steadied the wheel.

Angela slept the next morning as I sat on the edge of her mattress, listening through the phone as Ethan detailed the show’s aftermath. Repa had retched, and Will had kicked a hole through a wall in the club’s restroom. We wouldn’t be invited back to the Shelter was the general feeling he had.

“At least we’d got paid,” he said.

Angela’s pretty face twitched, accentuating the feeling that I alone had orchestrated the whole debacle from here in this miniature bed—phoned it in.

“What about Blaine?” I said.

“He took his drums home in his car.”

One way or another, he’d known his time with us had ended. Hanging up, I should have been relieved. But later that day, as Angela and I cruised the west Michigan country for the simple pleasure of being on the move, I pictured Blaine driving home with his carload of gear, dragging on a Marlboro Light, waking
alone inside his mother’s house with his hands calloused from our music and the postshow whine in his ear.

T
HAT
M
ONDAY
, I
HIT
Dearborn in time to start the workweek, just a minute or ten late for my morning shift. Angela and I had barely slept, and it was days like this when I welcomed the stillness of the rug shop. Frank Sinatra’s voice, crooning from the showroom stereo, serenaded the hours. The Armenians never tired of those easy, swinging tunes. And while I refused to memorize the words, here and there in Old Blue Eyes’s ballads were such grandiose melancholies rising in the string arrangements—these I’d hum along to.

On my worktable, the General had unfurled an enormous, threadbare Persian carpet that awaited my care.

“It’s a big one,” said the General’s wife. “He must trust you.”

Will entered the showroom freakishly alert with a cup of coffee and news of a groundbreaking discovery, sidling up to me when he saw his chance. Saturday night, he said, he’d spent quarantined in his bedroom, blasting his headphones while high on ecstasy. “You won’t believe this stuff,” he whispered. “Coltrane never sounded so good.”

I knew ecstasy as a designer drug, a favorite of the Day-Glo club kids who organized raves in abandoned warehouses. Techno was their groove of choice, and Detroit was touted as the genre’s birthplace. The urban innovation had since been co-opted by baggy-panted, nipple-pierced suburbanites, and I despised electronic music on principle—its artificial drumbeats and garish synthesizers. The drug, too, I abhorred for its tacky connotations.

“That’s all chemicals, man,” I said. “Brain-damage stuff.”

“I’m telling you, it changes everything.”

Come Friday night, I was slithering on Will’s bed, gripping
the sheets as he sat beside me blaring Coltrane’s “Ascension” into headphones he’d clamped over my ears. Will worked the stereo’s knob, conducting the sounds, smiling down on me. What he’d claimed was true: the music made eels of my limbs.

Will had taken a hit as well. For the moment he was content to dote on me, clutching my hand through the sonic journey he’d prescribed. With my eyes closed, the saxophones were trails of flame. My body was an orb blown from the horn—the horns, seven of them—my jaw chattering to the ride cymbal’s clang, the sound undoubtedly more majestic than anything I’d heard, felt, seen blazing over the sky. Something erogenous was going on with my jaw, grinding my teeth together in a way that pleasured my entire being. So that we might trance together, Will tried blasting the music from his speakers—a feeble sound compared with the claustrophobic roar of the headphones.

“We’ll trade.” I plugged the headset back into the tuner. You could honestly hear my molars ripping into one another but it didn’t bother us. “On and off, man, on and off, we’ll choose each other’s songs.”

I played him the second Stooges album, their best. He responded with a Godflesh mindmelter called “Head Dirt,” industrial lava taking form like devil disco.

“I love you,” we said, each time we exchanged the headset.

A pile of CDs collected on the floor.

To my mind, ecstasy inhabited a precarious region of the drug spectrum: worse than acid yet nowhere near as abominable as crystal meth. I’d swallowed the pill fearing I was at the foot of some accursed road my father had ventured a long way down. But the zest, the depth of my bliss—it had been worth the risk. Lording over Will, I scrutinized his collection for what I’d play next. Just then, I believed I understood my friend’s anguish. I
visualized that stutter he’d never been able to tame, trapped in his throat.

I wanted him healed—I’d do it with the perfect song.

Standing to choose the next disc, I felt the drug course into whatever part of me it had yet to touch. Then it was as though I felt all the love I’d ever known and ever would condensing inside me, becoming a singular, comprehensible thing: a diamond, I held it beneath my tongue. The music whined from the speakers clasped over Will’s ears, and I had an urge to call everyone I knew, to tell them I’d been cured of every bad thought I’d ever endured. My sister—the perfect words came into my possession, the truest things possible. Pure joy touched me, or I’d been returned to it. I had a sense I’d feel that way forever. And all this happened in a matter of minutes. Or it might have been hours. But it did happen, and I was never really the same.

T
EN HOURS LATER
, I awoke on the floor. On the mattress above, Will lay snoring in tangled sheets. My gums were chewed raw. My neck ached from whatever contorted position I’d slept in, yet an exhausted awareness of what I’d experienced remained. Lapping water from the bathroom faucet, feeling it wash through my chest, my first legitimate thought was of my mother, and I drove the quick mile to her house, calling her downstairs as I entered. Caitlin had left for work, but I hollered her name anyway. Then I sat at the kitchen table, half aglow, listening for steps overheard.

“I love you,” I said the moment Mom appeared.

Something was awry—she knew me. She took a seat, reached instinctively to prune a flower stemming from the table’s centerpiece. She’d begun dying her hair a conservative blonde to conceal a faint gray tint that had emerged these past years. It was pinned back with girlish barrettes, revealing more of her
face than I was ready to see. Worry had lit up her eyes and turned her cheeks a flamingo shade.

“Your hands are shaking,” she said.

Driving there, I’d meant to tell her our troubles were clearing up, that I’d happened upon a new way of being—and how simple happiness was, really, when you got down to it. I’d actually felt these things, but now, as she stared deep into me, my mood plunged.

“I’m so sorry” was what I managed. “I’ve been a terrible son.”

Mom might have been waiting for a moment like that, in which I’d awaken from the sullen blackout of my youth. She began to weep as I told her of the hope that had been set loose within. That I saw what mattered. That I’d always be there for her, from here on out, no matter where the years might take us.

“The only thing I want,” she said, “is for you to be happy. You were a happy kid, you know?”

Maybe I had been—memories that had embarrassed me until this very moment.

“Yes,” I said.

“You remember when you used to tell me everything?”

I’d heard about ecstasy’s vicious, serotonin-depleting comedown, but other than my aching jaw, this was easygoing. On the ride over, it had even crossed my mind to share the drug with my mom, that the two of us might access that euphoria together. I wanted to meet her there, to know her in that way. I reached over and hugged her, assuring her that everything would be okay. I saw clearly now: whatever needed to change was damn well about to.

I
STOPPED BY EVERY
day after work, washing Mom’s dishes and startling Caitlin by massaging her shoulders. The two of them laughed as I put the pans and plates in all the wrong places.
Trying to repair a towel rack, I drilled a number of erroneous holes into the drywall.

“He doesn’t know what he’s doing,” Caitlin said. “He’s making a mess.”

That weekend I drove to Kalamazoo, to a house Angela had moved into with seven girls, all of them bartenders. A true college squat, with empty fifths displayed like trophies and posters of pop stars on the walls and a television going nonstop. Once we were alone, I dug two pills from the pockets of my jeans.

“It’s safe?” Angela said. She’d just come from the shower. Her hair was slicked. Her cheeks were pink. “I heard people get sick. I heard sex is so good you’ll never think about it the same.”

I set a pill in her moist palm. The blue tablets were incised with Cadillac logos, rendered with the crude accuracy of an Oreo’s wafer-top decoration. Angela smirked at hers, as if wondering what basement druggist would take the goddamn time.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Once in a while.”

We kissed. We swallowed the pills.

She’d excused herself to the bathroom when the drug began to overtake me—an instantaneous joy-wave that, as it arrived, felt as though I’d known it for lifetimes. Unable to wait another moment, I barged into the bathroom. Angela had just vomited, but I saw in her eyes that she too had become lifted. We cuddled on the linoleum, massaging each other’s temples and trying out every possible way of saying we were deathly in love. For hours, we remained like that, rising only to lap water from the faucet. When her roommates pounded on the door, we locked eyes and breathed as silently as we could into each other’s mouth.

Angela’s earlobes turned crimson. Her eyes swirled, and I had the feeling that if I touched her imprudently she might die. Kissing would have been too much. We merely toyed with
the possibility as we ironed our foreheads together and huffed into each other’s lungs. “Give me air,” I said. Not because I was breathless—it was ceremony, inspired by that dim-lit, windowless commode. Our tandem breathing was also the only thing that ceased the grinding of my teeth. And she resuscitated me, again and again, emptying her chest as I kneaded her hands, feeling each bone in her palms.

It was, until then, the happiest moment of my life.

Eventually, we came out. By then the house was empty, but we scurried through the hallway and locked her bedroom door behind us. I was still brimming, beginning to mourn the slow comedown while trying to think my way back to the peak. I lay on the carpet as Angela pulled a CD from her shelf and a trickle of piano began chirping through the room.