Songs Only You Know (15 page)

He hooted with each drop of the hammer.

Ethan sat, eyes closed, absorbing the sounds in a spiritual fashion. This was Repa’s new music—farther and farther from anything you’d call song.

“All right,” I said. “Fucking hell.”

“What?” he said. “You don’t like it?”

It was a titanic noise that cut straight for the bowels. I was jealous that I’d had no part in its inspiration. Repa stooped to lift one of the televisions to his chest, then heaved it to the floor. A crash and a scream: the inevitable finale.

“That was wild,” Ethan said.

Repa stared at the wreckage. His arm was bandaged where he’d knifed himself two nights prior. “There’s no more booze,” he said, thrusting forward a mostly empty forty-ounce bottle as if it evidenced a crime. “Let’s frickin’ practice.”

He walked to his drums, swallowing the last of his beer and then urinating in the bottle before taking his throne. Ethan
and I plugged in our guitars. Mine was rigged with duct tape, encrusted with blood I’d never clean because I thought it looked rugged. Without another word Repa clicked his sticks, and we began a song we’d rehearsed hundreds of times. Among our sector of musicians, Repa was alleged the best drummer in Detroit, but tonight his signature beats stupefied him. His hair had grown into a shawl of dark waves, veiling his eyes as he struggled to keep time. Before we hit the second verse he leaped up and shoved over the vintage ’83 Pearl customs he’d once polished daily. He flung his crash cymbal across the room like a discus.

Ethan and I carried the tune a measure or two longer before letting our guitars dangle. Repa had taken us by surprise, which was something of a coup. Knowing this, he lifted his warm 40-ounce bottle to his mouth, making a show of a long, gurgling slug.

“Gotta be alcohol in there. I’ve been drinking for days.” After another pull from the bottle he coughed a spray of urine. “Tastes horrible.”

If he couldn’t carry a beat, Repa was prepared to give us a thrill. He tugged down his jeans, grunting and lofting his buttocks over his drums.

Ethan laughed. “Man,” he said. “Man, oh man.”

We’d taken pride in these moments, even as they were occurring, believing they proved our band was deranged, legitimately. “Let’s take this shit to outer space,” we used to say.

Here we were.

“Nothing,” said Repa, squatting, craning his neck to witness any turds he may have achieved. “I got nothing.” With his pants at his ankles he clambered over the spill of drums, mumbling, “Gotta be some liquor in this place.”

He was in character, Repa the Terror, tossing empties and
stomping the floor. His eruptions were nearly joyous, freeing him of pains he’d carried years too long. He had a way of screaming and laughing in an entwined, circulatory torrent, and this was the sound he repeated. I’d witnessed it all before, in half the states in the country, yet he now seemed over the edge—gone in a performance that couldn’t be switched on or off at will.

And it was beautiful, and horrible, and wonderful.

“Not a drop to drink,” he said. “On Christmas Eve.”

“Try the garbage cans,” Ethan told him.

Our rehearsal room was one of a few dozen in the building. Many renters were metal bands or lowlifes who’d moved in with junk-store guitars and used the spaces for narcotic getaways. Across the hall, a wrestling company had filled a room with a regulation-sized ring. Beastly, shirtless men in tights stalked the hallways, asking you to get inside the ropes with them to see for yourself how fake it was. The bathrooms were often puked upon. The garbage bins lining the hallways—large knee-high drums filled with the waste of a hundred low-rent hobbyists—were presumed toxic.

Ethan swung open the door.

Repa crawled out toward the nearest receptacle, nosing through it for bottles before stuffing a handful of discarded French fries into his mouth. He turned to us with the yellow mash between his teeth.

“Aha,” he said. “That’s right.”

The hallways were unusually quiet. Not a note was being tuned. The only sounds were Repa’s snarls as he dug deeper through the trash, so when a tattooed guitarist we knew rounded a corner at the end of the hallway, he came into view like some preyed-upon species.

The guitarist slowed his stride, squinting as if to validate what he was seeing: Repa’s jeans rumpled around his shins,
black underwear thonging his buttocks. I sensed him winding up for a blitzkrieg of pent expression so awesome it would threaten everything we’d worked for. Not now. Not tonight, but soon.

“Watch out,” Ethan said.

Repa faced the intruder on all fours, growling and crawling as fast as he could. The guitarist turned and dashed while Repa scrabbled up the hall, hands pattering, rounding the corner like some malfunctioning toy. Once he’d vanished, I locked the door of our room and told Ethan we were going to need a new drummer.

He laughed at me as if I’d suggested matching haircuts, zoot suits.

“It’s Repa,” he said. “No one can play like him.”

T
wo or three jabs landed on my shoulder before I awoke with the realization this was no dream but a real fist. The room came slowly into focus, and standing above was a familiar presence, out of place in my basement domain but exuding unmistakable energies. Another soft punch and I was almost conscious, just a twitch or two away from offering up a word.

“Merry Christmas,” Dad said. “You’re living like hell down here.” He smiled down at me. “I could smell you from the kitchen.”

Decorating my room were posters of punk rock heroes and jazzmen from the sixties. A Black Flag flyer depicting a cop with a gun inserted into his pouting lips. Dad glanced at the empties, the cables and snapped guitar strings, with a wary concentration that suggested he knew he was trespassing. Two years earlier he’d have had me at attention for a lesson in self-presentation. Things considered, his touch had softened.

And get a load of his tan suede jacket, new for the season,
a middle-aged sleekness he’d never before experimented with. His hair was trimmed. A decent-looking man. Friends’ mothers had told me so, but only now that I observed him with a tinge of postrehab, postdivorce sympathy did I recognize how he’d weathered in a becoming way. Coronary surgery, his many scrapes with life—these hadn’t stolen the natural dignity in his face.

He didn’t look like an addict. You’d never guess.

“Let’s go, Bozo,” he said.

Following last night’s foiled practice, I’d visited Will at the upper flat, where we’d spun records until the sky turned green. Afterward came three, four hours of sleep—something like that.

“Life’s in session, boy. Suck it up.”

I’d not seen Dad for weeks. To hear that he could still joke like this was a comfort. He snatched at the bedspread, attempting to tear it off in a single motion, and I fought to keep covered. I’d gone to bed naked for no reason other than that I disdained doing laundry, which left me with little more than the pair of jeans I’d toss beside the bed each night. There was a brief tug-of-war, during which I used all my strength, until Dad laughed and said, “We’re waiting on you.”

Y
EARS BEFORE
, D
AD WOULD
have been up late Christmas Eve sanding and hammering, gluing together the last seams of wood. Before dawn, Caitlin would have awakened me to creep beside her into the living room, where we’d find his homemade presents: A gymnast’s beam. A hockey net. A clubhouse replete with screen door and shingled roof. We’d tested their construction, running our palms along the sanded grain while Dad sipped coffee, watching over a leaf of the
Free Press
. So many hours he’d spent drafting plans, leveling the beams, stapling shingles and fastening the hinges. His gifts had an aura—his
touch. Mom’s would be hidden in the branches of an ornament-cluttered Douglas fir, and we’d pretend to be unaware until the moment she said, “I think I see something in the tree.”

She’d always enjoyed a good-hearted disdain for artificial Christmas trees, wincing at the idea of these gaudy impostors. “Plastic trees,” Mom would say. “It’s just not the same.” Yet upstairs in her new home stood a fresh-from-the-box synthetic green imitation, its branches plugged into an aluminum rod. Caitlin was zoning on the television when I emerged. Dad sat beside her on Mom’s flower-print sofa, appearing out of sorts. Mom worked the kitchen stove, calling, “Almost ready,” with the impenetrable courtesy she’d perfected dealing with special-needs students.

On the living room floor sat a keyboard, a disposable, toylike contrivance.

“Your mom said you want to learn piano.” The excitement in Dad’s eyes hit me like a slug to the kidneys. What on earth might he have built me by hand? He’d patronized the local instrument shop instead. “Tickle some ivories?”

More and more, it was jazz I was listening to. The atonal, mind-bending variety that did away with melody. The pianists—McCoy Tyner, Cecil Taylor—were my favorite. Their pounding, backward-sounding chords. I’d hardly touched an actual piano but must have mentioned wanting to.

“Thanks,” I said.

“It’ll work?”

The plastic instrument was dreadful to look at it, far from being anything usable to conduct the furious sounds I was after. The keys might shatter the moment I pounded. “It’s great,” I said, squinting to read the short catalog of electronic tones the thingamajig might produce: Organs. Bassoons.

Mom served waffles and fruit, and we sat in the living room
holding our plates. She asked Dad if he’d like his coffee warmed, the kind of gesture I’d seen a thousand times, but watching Mom repeat them now, caution in her tone, seemed to actualize all that had changed.

“Thanks, Cyn,” he said. “Cyn” instead of “Cindy”—which he alone called her on family road trips, as she sat beside him with an atlas; on a summer walk, asking for a napkin to wipe ice cream from his fingers.

Dad dug into the pocket of his jacket, which he’d yet to remove, and passed a card to my mom. Sipping coffee, I pretended not to notice as her nail pried open the envelope and she began to read. It appeared to contain a lengthy message, causing her to nod slowly as she read. Dressed in sweatpants and an oversize T-shirt, Caitlin sat unmoving, her eyes ticking back and forth from the television to my parents.

“Well, you always wrote nice cards.” Mom perched the card atop the coffee table, and I had to wonder if it would wind up with the others arrayed on the mantel. “I guess it’s time for your stockings,” she said.

Then I noticed them, across the room on a chair, so overfilled they couldn’t be hung from the mantel. Mom rose and carried them over, mine and Caitlin’s and my father’s. Stuffed inside were odds and ends. Breath mints and Chapstick. Lotions and soaps for Caitlin. Razors for me and my father, and aftershave, the brand he’d always worn. We regarded the items duly, Dad unable to get to all of them without closing his eyes, breathing fast and hard. He nodded toward my mom. When he reached out his hand, she took it.

I was content to carry on business as usual, but this weirdness became too much for Caitlin. “I thought we weren’t doing presents this year,” she said.

“Just a little something,” said Mom. “Nothing much.”

Before Dad left for his parents’ condo, where their version of Christmas was soon to unfold, I watched through the windows as he circled the house, surveying its exterior. He poked his head through the front door. “The foundation’s low on the east side. The basement could flood. You want me to look into it?”

Mom said, “I think we’ll live.”

Caitlin was already deep into whatever was on the television. A pink sweater sat folded at her feet on a bed of torn wrapping paper. After Dad drove off, I plugged in the keyboard and toyed with the sounds, dialing up a synthesized flute. I performed an easy, bittersweet melody as Caitlin and Mom took their time dressing. Imagine the sounds moving through them, with them. For an instant I lost myself, changing octaves before deciding upon the violas, playing that simple phrase again and again.

C
AITLIN AND
I
DROVE
together in her Escort, trailing Mom’s wagon and parking directly in front of Dad’s old house on Evangeline Street. The Arabs who’d moved in hadn’t hung a wreath, possibly the reason Caitlin huffed out an unenergetic, “Weird,” as she turned off the engine. Everything was changing, but there, on the other side of the road, were my grandparents, holding open their door.

“Happy holidays.”

Grandpa—Papa—wearing a Santa cap.

There’d be no talk of drugs or divorce here, only the charred gingerbread men and bowl of punch, the wood-paneled television and gas fireplace. Though I caught something in their eyes—my aunts’ and uncles’—a rapid-fire sorrow transmitted through handshakes or a quick rub of the shoulder. Mom and Caitlin might have liked to talk all night with a listening ear, but I only hoped that sympathy would help them overlook my
lack of plans and shabby Carhartt jacket, taken by my grandmother and hung in a closet beside the peacoats.

Mom’s tribe was unpretentious, people of work, family, and church. Papa was a window salesman; Lady Grandma a home-maker of forty years. Mom’s brothers and their wives seemed living proof of sanity’s attainability. I liked them a great deal, as much as I felt shameful and alien among them. I avoided mention of myself, and especially of my band.

“Music’s good,” I said, when they asked. “Pretty good.”

“Do you play any Christmas songs?” said my grandmother.

B
EFORE WE SAT DOWN
to dinner, Caitlin excused herself and left to visit my dad’s family while I stayed behind with Mom, pickled inside a sweater I’d outgrown, filling my glass with my grandpa’s Lauder’s scotch as many times as I could. My grandmother’s jellified roast beef oozed onto a platter next to a bowl of canned beans. As we ate, she asked if I’d be willing to sing for the family, once the meal was over. “I’ll bet you have a beautiful voice,” she said. “Though you wouldn’t have gotten it from this family. We sound like strangled cats when we sing. We shame the whole parish.”

My mom gave me a pitying smile.