Songs Only You Know (17 page)

Or maybe I’d wanted her to console me. To hold me in some way or pull me together; had I fallen into her on my way back through the condo’s front door, she would have.

Instead, I returned the stick to the garage.

I redialed the number I’d found in the desk, waiting for the child’s cute message.

“I’m real sorry about all that,” I said. “Merry Christmas.”

W
rong way up was how I first noticed her.

I hung from the ceiling, gripping a metal rafter that stretched the length of the venue. My body halved like some deranged gymnast’s, jackknifed, a guitar dangling from my neck by its strap. Someone there had a camera with a blinding flash; another spectator would later say that, upon seeing me upside down, he’d considered socking my face. Blood rushed brain-ward as my unattended guitar’s full-volume feedback took on an expression of its own. I didn’t want to let go. Every few beats, I pumped my thighs to kick upward at the ceiling. Dust clouded down. The crowd cheered, and she stood front and center, not bothering to plug her ears like the pretty girls usually did, if they watched at all.

We’d booted Repa thirteen months earlier and had since enlisted several replacements. This latest drummer was surprisingly good, pounding out a frantic syncopation, a war-dance backbeat. My business with the rafter was their cue to improvise. Ethan’s bass sounded as though he was ripping the strings
from it, possibly with teeth. The bodily demands of our shows had inspired me to work off my beer flab through a regimen of calisthenics and barbells. I felt strong, ready to dangle there for hours.

The lights warping and my temples like blinking fists.

Her eyes seemed to dare me to hold on, a little longer.

Rushing the stage, a middle-aged hippie donning a purple tank top held the microphone to my lips. His face peered at me from a bizarre angle. People called him Pharaoh, and Repa had once woken on a couch to find him licking his neck—but that was old news. With each buck of my legs, I screamed.

That’s it. Let it all out
, Pharaoh seemed to say, following my mouth with the mic, astonishment crossing his face like he’d long ago hallucinated this particular instant.

I howled again. Pharaoh nodded:
Yes, yes, yes
.

We’d booked tonight’s show as a benefit concert to pay for damages we’d done the last time we’d played this venue, a place known as the Bastard. Once again, my knuckles were chalked with drywall plaster. Ethan had pounded a scar into the plywood stage. The PA sounded blown, so we’d indulged in a compensatory freak-out attempting to transcend fidelity, as often was the case. As the years wear on, what characterizes my memory of those performances is murkiness. I think of them and feel shameful and sad and amazed at the way my body behaved in accordance to the sound. Sometimes I feel a jolt of pride, a longing to experience that music one last time, though I’m glad I no longer have what it would take. But I’ll never forget how she deadeyed me, a look that said,
I know exactly what you mean
.

Like she’d seen all this before.

Pharaoh took no notice. He was ecstatic, feeding me the microphone. Helping me ride it all the way.

My strategy was that when someone in the audience glared, I’d attempt to match their eyes. The tough guys would glower hard for a minute, a staring contest, until they’d realize our aggressions had little to do with them. The crazy ones—the sex offender who’d been arrested on channel 7 news while wearing one of our T-shirts—would lock eyes the entire show, desperately, implying we had secret business together.

I’d never seen anyone like her, here or anywhere.

Standing at the edge of the light cast by a single bulb above the stage, she wasn’t turning away until I was sure she had no fear of me and whatever problem I was flailing to exorcise. Through my tunneling vision I saw enough to know that she wore a black halter. Her hair was dyed red, darker at the roots. She was short and delicate, calm in the way of something with nuclear potential.

I
N THE VENUE
’
S BATHROOM
, I made a long examination of my face in the mirror, as though I might rearrange certain features. I’d had my hair cut short. With my fingers I combed the sweat from it, a hackjob from a six-dollar barber on Ford Road. Outside in the parking lot, the crowd was leaving, and I found her bundled in an oversize peacoat, holding her breath as if to keep warm. January 1999. The final year of the millennium had only begun. For the sake of touching her, I pressed my hand to her back and felt the wool of her coat.

“Have a good night,” I said.

The cold was a cleansing thing. Beneath the streetlights, the heat rose like mist from my skin.

“You, too,” she said, half smiling in a way that kept me guessing.

She walked off with our drummer, the second since we’d booted Repa the previous winter. I watched her climb into
his car, which was rusted and covered on all sides with bumper stickers and punk rock decals. This was in poor taste, you’d know, if you understood anything about hard-core aesthetics. A harsh line was drawn between the mall-punk tourists and those who believed punk wasn’t a sound and a haircut but an ever-evolving defiance of conventions. Our band was struggling to preserve a degree of integrity to which our newest member, Blaine, with his earrings and studded belts and sloganeering, posed a dire offense.

As they drove away, Ethan appeared beside me, saying, “Look at that fucking car, man,” and I said, “What do you think of his girl?”

Women—we still rarely broached the subject, a threat to the singleness of our purpose. Ethan had yet to meet Lauren—or Caitlin, for that matter.

“She’s all right,” he said. “But, I mean, she’s with him.” You would have thought he was talking about a virus. “So what does that tell you?”

It was obvious that Blaine was a shape-shifter who’d joined our band for local status. Punk rock points, some called it. He was nineteen, two years younger than I and six younger than Ethan. Brown eyed and brown haired, he had a smooth face that was never in need of a shave, but he could play anything, even Repa’s parts—albeit half as loud. A big label, Relapse Records, had gotten in touch with the band, and we were counting on Blaine to play a tight set when the time came to impress.

But, about Blaine’s girlfriend—

Watching his hatchback vanish, I decided her business with him was a naïve misfortune. One of those self-prescribed disasters people bring upon themselves as a ploy to excise their worst selves, communing with what they least desire in order to orchestrate their triumph over it.

That was her case, I was sure.

With Blaine it was something else. He’d gotten lucky on a scam and wound up with her in his passenger seat.

T
HE BAND HAD A
whiff of parody without Repa, an element of farce. Ethan knew it, and so did I. We played songs Repa had blacklisted, knocking them out too easily, the notes too precise to be true. He’d been our offbeat heart. I’d have begged his return, but he’d put his drums in storage. Japanese was Repa’s new obsession, and after a year of language tapes and caffeine pills, he’d moved to Okinawa. He was capable of unpredictable feats—I’d only begun to understand. For months after we sacked him he’d refused to speak to me, and in his absence I taped a photo of him to my amplifier, which I turned up twice as loud. Some shows were practically memorials to our ex-drummer and to what we’d been.

He and I patched things up one night before he left the country. I’d arrived at his Ypsilanti apartment, where he greeted me from a folding chair, a mountain of flash cards at his feet. Not moments before, he’d seen a witch tornadoing around the light fixture. “Right there,” he’d said, pointing to the ceiling as fresh tattoos, some glistening with ointment, stretched across his forearms. One resembled a sickle; another brought to mind the tree of life.

“On a broom?” I’d asked.

“Nah,” he said, “just spiraling around the lights, all crunched up in a ball.”

He’d bought a chopper, too, and stenciled a biker logo on the back of his leather jacket, a one-man gang. Through the blurred early morning, I’d clutched his leathered ribs hard as he sped us across Ypsilanti on his black-and-chrome hog, both of us screaming “Bonsai!” when he yanked the handlebars for a
pathetic wheelie. Then and there, trusting his every pop of the clutch, I’d felt our love liberate itself from the music we’d made. He was on his way, the sweet freak … he was gone.

By turn, we hazed Blaine, feeding him drinks until he’d keel on the rehearsal-space floor. Someone nicknamed him Mr. Personality, and our scene of cronies and hangers-on put the name to use. Blaine seemed to it take as a compliment, grinning, pulling from behind his ornamented earlobe a Marlboro Light he’d stuck there for such occasions. Will considered our newest member a personal insult and protested Blaine’s third performance by walking onstage, miming the universal sign for cutting one’s throat.

“If he can play, that’s what matters,” Ethan said.

Blaine rarely spoke of his girlfriend. When he did, he seemed to be excusing himself for future betrayals by saying that she lived two hours away. I assumed she’d escape him soon enough, so that I’d never see her again.

After a mid-winter rehearsal, I raided Blaine’s car, digging through his cassettes and chucking across the parking lot the ones I found objectionable. Hamburger wrappers were littered on the backseat, drumsticks everywhere. A Polaroid was taped to the sun visor. Her eyes—green, I could finally be sure—dominated the photo. I wasn’t one to covet what I couldn’t have; fear of rejection often made me pretend I wanted nothing at all. But I despised Blaine for having touched her, tainting the silvery feeling moving through me as I stared at her face. I considered snatching the image, but it was theirs: her eyes were shining for him.

W
ill was naked and prune fingered, so he said, in the midst of taking a long bath. It wasn’t the first time he’d phoned me from the tub, and he always seemed a touch sentimental once he’d been soaking awhile. Through the phone came an unending racket, a swish of bathwater followed by a metallic clang.

“What’s that sound?” I said.

“Andrew’s rifle,” he said. “I talk to it when I practice my words. It helps me orate.”

Too often I forgot that Will was a stutterer. Only when ordering food or asked his phone number would his voice lapse into a repetitive, locomotive stammer. His name, its dreaded
w
phoneme, was particularly troublesome. In rare moments, he’d be brought to tears about it, describing strategies he used to avoid “tight spots” where he’d be cornered with no choice but to struggle for minutes on end to produce a string of three mangled words. His diversionary tactics were masterful enough that few people recognized the wickedness of his condition. Lately,
he’d been practicing, reading aloud the works of T. S. Eliot into a handheld cassette recorder and, when inspired, spouting free verse dredged up from the most infernal areas of his discontent.

“What’s on your latest tape?” I asked.

“Everything,” Will said. “Everything on my mind.”

I didn’t want to imagine.

“And, by the way,” he said. “You’re moving in. I told you I’d smoke Ralphy out of here.”

I avoided Ralph. He’d blindsided me at an ice rink when we were kids and these days rolled with types you might encounter amid a strip-club brawl. He wore skintight blouses and was tanned year-round, which somehow magnified his unpredictable energies. To take over his room could mean rough stuff down the line.

“How did you do it?” I asked.

Will had no regard of any sort for Andrew’s cousin.

“I think he heard one of my tapes was what did it,” he said.

The day before, Will had left for his latest job at a nearby Oriental-rug shop, accidentally leaving his cassette deck on the kitchen counter. After hours of flipping Persian carpets and the whole lot of nothing he did there, he’d returned home to recite a new monologue and discovered the tape had been rewound. Not only that, it was cued to a particularly incensed passage, which, Will insisted, could only mean Ralph had taken a private listen to his recordings.

“Now he knows,” he said, “something he didn’t before.”

I took it to be true because when I stopped by to survey my new room, even Andrew seemed puzzled by Ralph’s desertion. Without explanation he’d fled the upper flat in a single February afternoon, evicted by the powers of verse.

I
T WOULD TAKE WEEKS
to make my move. The record store had just gone under, and Will had convinced the Armenians who
owned the rug shop that I’d be a great choice for their new repairman. The hours were steady, and I was to arrive early each day. Caitlin had agreed to wake me each morning so that I’d be on time. “No snooze button,” she warned. “No
Wake me in ten minutes
.”

For fear of shaking things up, I was hesitant to announce my plans. The year in Mom’s house had passed with relative ease, and our lives were going placidly enough. We’d survived another Christmas, this time without incident. Caitlin was halfway through winter semester at a local college and waitressing at a steak house after classes, while Mom had a never-ending list of home improvements she intended to make. Now and then, Dad called to report on Red Wings scores and life at Ford Motor, offering us the option of believing he was sober—and I took him up on it.