Songs Only You Know (21 page)

“You gotta have the face for it. The whole package.”

Not to say that the Armenians were ungenerous, simply that Will and I took offense at their pity. Our only recourse was to pretend we were lovers, pinching at each other’s buttocks and holding hands as we dusted the showroom.

“This place,” Will said, “is a whorehouse of neutral energy.”

I’d gripe to him, telling him that Blaine had stolen Angela’s mail, that he’d sent a message to her twin sister in Ohio, attempting to turn her against me. How it all would end was a worry eclipsing all others in my mind. “You’re only as good as your nemesis” was Will’s advice, but that wasn’t going to do, and he knew it. To make sure I was in fighting shape, we began sneaking to the back room used for washing rugs. Will would choose a rolled carpet—big ones, thirty-footers—urging me to throw jabs at the barrel-like shapes.

“Hit it,” he’d say. “Give me the rough stuff.”

One morning I attacked a hulking rug, a spool the size of two stacked oil drums. Will held it steady, bracing it like a heavy bag as I slugged with a sloppy wrath, punching so wildly that when I backed away my knuckles were scraped raw, trickling blood. Will held my wrists like a trainer preparing a contender for another round, scrubbing the wounds with a sponge he’d found in a pail of blackened suds.

“That a girl,” he said. “We’ll get you cleaned up.”

When I returned to the showroom, the General called me over to teach me a new braid that was to be tied along the fringe of a rare Persian. Sitting beside him on a workbench, I watched his fingers pull the elaborate threading this way and that. Up, under, and around.

“Now,” he said. “Let me see you try.”

I approached the carpet with my palms upturned, but soon enough it was necessary to pivot my hands in order to loop and interlace the thread. A small bit of blood pooled in the creases of my knuckles, thickening with each pulse. I smeared it on my jeans and went on threading as the General studied my hands, saying nothing, watching me tie the perfect knot.

W
ithout Repa aboard, the Orgasmatron was but a corroded jalopy, all man-stink and no charm, rattling north on the Ontario 401. I knew this route, the billboards and kilometer markers. Certain farmhouses and barns were familiar as I drove. The tour’s first show was in Guelph, four hours from Detroit. We’d just passed through Windsor, where Blaine swiped a carton of cigarettes from the duty-free store. He was sprawled across the bench seat with a cap pulled over his face, and I wished he’d fall asleep.

“Our ride,” I told him, “would be over if your ass had gotten caught.”

“Relax,” said Blaine. “I don’t get caught.”

Ethan sat dozing in the passenger seat.

I gassed the van.

How many fans might await us in Guelph? Twenty? Thirty?

Our prospects for a big record deal had mysteriously fizzled, probably due to a mistake we hadn’t known we’d made. I’d begun taking stock of what the band was costing my life, but what kept
Ethan and me going, what always would, was the possibility of our music being remembered. Or that we’d someday taste the same inspiration our heroes had, the ones who’d truly put themselves on the line—and we’d come so close to that, once or twice.

We’d driven an hour in silence when Ethan’s hand shot upward with a raised index finger. He dug through a bag of cassettes, injecting one into the boom box. “Almost forgot,” he said, and I knew he was talking about what Repa called our good-luck jam.
Play it, or we’re cursed
, Repa would have demanded the moment we’d left Detroit. Ethan pecked the rewind button, amending the oversight.

What was this?

Thoughts of Ionesco World Tour, 1999.

We’d amassed a checklist of superstitions: Never park on streets named after presidents. Never eat in towns advertising a Perkins Restaurant. The rare occasion we sprung for a room, it was never, under any circumstance, a Motel 6. Ethan suspected the chain to be owned by the Freemasons, while Repa had alleged the number 6 was a hex. Other traditions were pure jest. Every time we passed the west Michigan town Climax, we writhed in our seats, feigning lavish orgasms. Repa’s performance had always been most euphoric: shrills and coital whimpers that lasted for miles.

Our phobias and honorary customs were the ligaments that held together our traveling creep show, and none was more important than our good-luck song: a loathing yet triumphant barn burner that repeated the line
Just can’t win
with a fury that bolstered us for the miles ahead. If we were to have a legacy, so it would go. Decades later, when the connoisseurs unearthed our records, they’d hear our earnestness. Never did win—but what glorious losers. And this, I could tell, was the spirit we were now missing.

Ethan pressed
PLAY
on the tape deck.

As the song began, Blaine perked up to study me in the rearview. He had an eerie ability to detect vulnerabilities, sentimentalities. Behaving subtly, doe-eyed, he’d provoke tender moments in a way that contaminated them. Ethan and I grooved along, thinking of Repa across the sea, basking alone in Japanese neon.

Blaine fired up a Marlboro Light.

“What’s this?” he said. “Mick Jagger on Valium?”

Ethan notched up the dial, as though in due time Blaine would hear what we were hearing. It was midafternoon. Day or night, Canadians drove with their headlights ablaze. I steadied the wheel and switched on the beams, waiting for side 1 to end.

A
FTER A WHILE, YOU
really do become some version of what you’ve pretended to be. You fake yourself straight into form. Once I could no longer recognize certain aspects myself, I realized whatever soul-exchange prophecy I’d bought into was long under way. To achieve self-invention, you first evacuate the truest parts of yourself—they were slipping from me, connected only by a fear of losing touch completely. I’d begun to sense this, an awareness that pestered my thoughts as I stared out the van’s windshield or to the ceiling in an unfamiliar house.

We were playing well; that wasn’t the trouble. Blaine had mastered our songs. Onstage, every beat landed as it should. Yet the shows were black holes, out of time with reality. I’d begun feeling this about my entire life, as though it had always been occurring in a dimension that existed apart from who I was. I wanted to be two different people, or three or four—none of whom I liked entirely. But I imagined awaking years later to find myself rooted in the world, clear in my sense of purpose. A doting, obnoxious uncle to Caitlin’s children. I’d visit Mom,
having proved my mistakes had rounded me into a dignified, honorable man. Maybe I saw a small house in the country, with shelves of books and records. Angela dancing as a record spun. And a mutt in a field, an acoustic guitar on the porch. I would have told you there was no place for someone like me, but I didn’t truly believe that. I had a dream for my life, just like anyone. Yet without the music, what I was worth? To my friends? To Angela or anyone else?

Each night, after the shows, I searched the streets for pay phones. Between verses I’d been biting my gums so hard they burned at the touch of the gas-station peanuts we ate on the drives. Talking to Angela long distance, I spat blood on the cement, a sweat-through T-shirt plastered to my chest, the knees of my jeans dirtied from the stage floor.

It was through the phone, on an international call, that we first said it.

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

“Don’t say ‘too,’ ” she said. “If you have to say ‘too,’ then don’t say anything.”

Her sweet logic made perfect sense. Though her face, after a couple weeks, had become impossible to remember precisely.

“Come back safe,” she said. “We have all the time we want.”

A
NIGHT LATER
I had Blaine by the collar, pinned against the backseat. The van was parked outside a house belonging to a Toronto local who’d been good enough put us up, who was now flashing his porch light at random intervals with a purpose I was unwilling to interpret. As I shouted, my spittle misted Blaine’s face. He’d buzzed his Mohawk to a military crop, which suited him well. He wasn’t homely, not at all—just sneaky eyed and wolf jawed. He was taller than me, ropy and slippery, the kind
of fighter who’d go straight for the jewels. His strength surprised me as he grabbed my forearms.

“Say it again,” I told him. “Let me hear.”

Some locals had introduced us to a potent Canadian malt called Mongoose that had done us no favors. As a welcoming homage, the opening band had given us a husk of bottle rockets we’d fired off after the show, and it was amid this—the lighting of wicks, aiming the rockets from the Orgasmatron’s windows—that Blaine mumbled an uncouth something or other about Angela. A barely audible, seedy epithet he’d been saving for such a moment.

We’d been at it since, for nearly an hour, until, finally, I felt my arms weakening. I whacked his cheek, telling him to never again speak Angela’s name. But he shook his head, smiling the slightest bit, seeming to thrive as I leveraged a palm beneath his jaw.

The Toronto police were on us before I heard footsteps. Their flashlights shone through the windows, and I threw up my hands to explain there’d been a dispute, nothing two men couldn’t handle. “The neighbors said it sounded like murder out here,” said an officer.

“Just talking,” I said.

His expression never quite defined itself, miffed, but also curious at finding only us, two young men, conjoined in the backseat.

“And you?” the cop addressed Blaine, who’d lit a smoke. “You the one makin’ all the noise?” To which Blaine, as I knew he would, played it smooth.

“We cool, officer. Just chillin’.”

The cop gave us a warning, while the other prowled the van, beaming a light through windows. As they left, Blaine exhaled a gray plume in my direction. There were six or seven shows left
to go. There was Angela waiting for me at home. The Canadian summer night, airy and quiet as I stepped out of the van. Blaine and I entered the house with bedrolls tucked beneath our arms, where inside an unfamiliar living room we found just enough space on the floor to unroll our sleeping bags and lie side by side in the dark.

I’d been back to work a couple weeks when I looked up from a rug to see my dad grinning, on his lunch break. His suit coat was slung over his shoulder. He walked casually along the aisles of carpet, making no eye contact, delighted with the awkward humor that was implicit in his arrival.

The shop was a mile from the engineering compound where he worked. Despite his rehab stints, divorce proceedings, and quadruple bypass, he’d not only held on to his career but had been promoted to manage a staff of thirty engineers. Some mornings I could hardly manage to outsmart my headache and shower in time for work, which left me in awe of his tenacity. Despite whatever rest he’d gone without, I knew that when morning came he’d be the first on the job.

The General had taken Will on a delivery. The General’s wife was the only other soul in the shop. She approached my dad sweetly, with her usual pitch.

“In the market?”

“I could be,” he said.

He browsed the showroom, seeming to take interest in the stock as the General’s wife pointed out the merits of the rugs. Then she nodded to me, and I stood, walking over to begin flipping through the piled carpets.

I paused dramatically at the most hideous culprits, sliding my palm over the silken finish of a pink Turkish disaster.

“That’s a looker,” Dad said.

The General’s wife was charmed, I could see, as Dad mused about a time that comes in man’s life when he suddenly finds himself in need of a fine carpet. His barren condo might have actually benefited from one of those atrocities. I flipped a rug, then another. Dad and I shared a smile; he might have winked. In that setting, he appeared as sound of mind as anyone I knew, healthy and spry, with a wholesome flush to his face. His graying blond hair was trim. He was clean shaven, as always during the workweek, and did his best to give me a workout.

“Look at him go,” he said. “He deserves a raise.” He exited with a boyish gleam and a business card the General’s wife had slipped into his hand.

“That’s a nice man,” she said. “Go look. See what kind of car he’s driving.” She often asked Will and me to peer from the store’s back window to identify the model and make of a customer’s automobile—their spending potential.

I watched my dad pull away in his blue sedan, the brake lights glowing and releasing as the car vanished in the sun.

“Just a Ford,” I said. “Nothing fancy.”

D
AYS LATER
, E
THAN APPEARED
in the showroom as I was vacuuming the floor. Following Ethan, as if being led, lurched a dark figure in leather and denim, a mane of hair in his face. I’d slept the previous night in my car outside a Grosse Ile grocer, unable to make the drive after dropping Angela at her parents’. The morning found me pickled and passing hot gas in that painful, hungover way.

It took a moment before I recognized him. Then a bolt of excitement shocked me into commission.