Songs Only You Know (35 page)

“It’s gonna be all right,” I said.

I’d already begun assuring myself things would go differently this time. I reckoned I understood the low-blowing shock waves that came after losing someone. The way they took years to rise and curl and break. Caitlin’s death had shaken me loose from myself, but I’d harness the coming weeks and months. I’d ride them expertly, sensing each undertow, never fooled by the numbing crests that trick you into believing you’re sailing free.

“How?” Mom said. “Was it drugs?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Doesn’t matter anymore.”

N
ot just the city—half of northeastern America was blackened, if you believed the news. Early that morning, the circuits had blown. Rolling brownouts. Too many AC units, coffeemakers, and box fans sucking voltage. August 15, 2003, and as far as I could see the earth was without power. Police officers directed traffic on Michigan Avenue, waving their hands through a smear of exhaust while Howe-Peterson, the funeral parlor where Caitlin had lain three and a half years earlier, was lit by candles.

It felt as though I’d only just left, a dark riddle I hadn’t the grace to solve. In my head I made up a song about being buried in leaves and set aflame—anywhere but here—when my time came.

Inside was a sweatbox filled with mourners in suit coats and dresses, fanning themselves with prayer cards. Mom had pasted together a collage—snapshots of Dad with Caitlin on his shoulders, the four of us carving pumpkins—photos she’d peeled from poster boards stored in the basement after being displayed
beside my sister’s coffin. Dad’s family brought their own framed pictures of him: looking stoic in his air force uniform; wearing a Halloween costume—a 1950s clown getup—grinning over six or seven birthday candles. Set on a podium next to the casket was a recent impromptu headshot, catching him with a similar boyish gleam. It was no put-on: the earnestness of his smile, his small teeth peeking between his thin lips.

Dad’s mother came at me with a hug. Drawing me near the coffin, she pointed to the framed image, saying, “That’s your father. This is how you remember him.” She reached for the frame and held it up. “Not there,” she said, nodding to my dad’s corpse, which I’d yet to willingly observe.

I’d insisted on an open casket, a cause for resentment among Dad’s family. His youngest sister had discovered his body inside his condo; another had been called to assist. Both women were nurses who loved him with a matronly intensity. My aunts, the nurses, said he’d had a heart attack. They were firm in their diagnosis, insisting there should be no autopsy. One told me he’d died in his favorite chair. The other said he’d passed on the living room couch and that he’d looked at peace.

They’d known another man, one I might never understand. What he’d left them with was something cherished, much more good than bad. Their unconditional love was frozen in sad time, impervious to the many hells he’d been capable of. He was my grandmother’s favorite son, my aunts’ favorite brother, and to allow the rest of us to see him in his final state must have seemed unbearable. What he’d leave me with was another thing entirely—so many things of the kind only a son carries away from his wasted father. I needed to see him once more, to say to his face whatever might come to mind.

Ford Motor employees and 12-step fellows drifted my way, prompted by my resemblance to someone they called “A good
man. A great man.” I’d donned one of Dad’s paisley neckties. Angela was in the black dress she had worn to my cousin’s wedding. The minute she’d said, “I’m always here for you,” I gave up any idea of us being apart.

I held her hand.

She’d brought a Baggie of Vicodin. I’d known she had access to the pills, I had begged for them because I feared what might happen once I started drinking. I saw it in Angela’s eyes, too—her worry over how all this would play out in the coming weeks. And I couldn’t tell if it was the effect of the opiates or if the scene inside Howe-Peterson was as dreamily sepulchral as it seemed: the swell of the heat wave; musk exuding from the textiles; running makeup and perspiring scalps; the mothballed blazers. As dusk fell, people moved toward the coffin with candles in their hands, raising them over my father’s body.

Andrew paid his respects. Will vanished no sooner than he’d arrived, dressed in a blue blazer and pleated khakis like some old-fangled Bible salesmen. His eyes told me how little he wanted to be there. He had tickets to see the Stooges that evening, their first tour since ’75.

Mom stood in a corner as Dad’s family worked the room. Awful things were said at her expense—grief-blinded anger directed toward her for not, I suppose, having stuck beside him through another hundred nights of dread and maxed credit cards. I overheard this horseshit with an ease that made me believe I’d been meant to. By evening only the true bloods remained, mulling about the doorway. The windows had darkened and the staff gathered in the vestibule, hands clasped, insinuating in a professional way that now was about that time.

Seeing my chance, I slurred something to a staff person about having a moment alone with my old man before the lid
was closed. She seemed to understand, enough that she quickly arranged for my private viewing.

The chapel doors closed behind me, and I approached with a flashlight, turning it on my dad’s face as I neared the casket’s edge. He looked barely like himself. His chest, as I laid my head on it, felt stuffed with tissue. When I began to cry, it was as deeply as I could. I took his thick fingers into mine and felt suddenly aware of the truest reasons that he was there, cold and lifeless beneath me. It was like a question being answered with a thousand larger questions, and I sensed his defects within myself, what it might take to overcome them: everything I had. For a moment this awareness whispered near the periphery of my blindest spots, only to vanish as soon as I raised my head from the dampened patch I’d left on my father’s starched shirt.

I told him, in no uncertain terms, “I love you.” Then I said, “You crazy fucker,” and it felt as though I was saying it to both of us.

When I opened the chapel doors, Dad’s family awaited in the hallway. “Now it’s the family’s turn,” my uncle Dennis said, as all eight siblings made their way into the chapel. I liked some of these relatives and felt nothing much for others. But I believed we all were deciding, then and there, that I’d never be one of them.

A
NDREW AND
I
MUST
have been the only people in Wayne County listening to a tune that evening. He’d tapped the batteries in his garage, where he stored energy channeled from solar panels affixed to the roof. It was enough to run a lamp in the upper flat and keep a record going on the turntable. Andrew boiled noodles; the fridge was stocked with beer.

“You gotta eat,” he said. “Slow down the thought forms.”

Since abandoning the mind quest he’d braved three summers
earlier, Andrew had evolved into a pious, selfless blue-collar guru, working as an electrician’s apprentice. The fasts and cosmic toils had led him to a sane, sturdy way of life. He’d changed for the better. He now spoke with untroubled simplicity.

“The journey,” Andrew said. “It’s whatever you learn from it. The only choice is to make it about growth.”

Angela had gone home exhausted with my mom, both wanting for sleep, defenseless against the heat. Dark and sweltering. Of all evenings for the Stooges to reunite—Iggy the Iguana, four years older than my dad, and still strutting the world’s stages. The power, however, had not returned to the land. Pine Knob amphitheater was an unlit chasm and Will’s whereabouts were unknown.

“Willy,” Andrew said. “Think he’s in trouble?”

I didn’t care to guess.

He switched off a lamp, lighting several candles and placing them around the flat. His solar-charged batteries might have been running low, and he knew the records were what I needed most. “It’s sorta nice,” he said, about the way the candlelight twitched in the corners. And it was, even at a time like that.

Will was laid up at Oakwood Hospital the following day, having drank himself into a diabetic shock. I was unaware of this as I read my dad’s eulogy: a sloppy, unreligious account of family anecdotes, the pages marked by sweat as my voice hoarsened and faded. Afterward I walked outside, down the church steps, intending to embrace the heat wave, which was now being publicized as a regional crisis. The moistened asphalt smelled like chemicals. And it might have been the Vicodin I’d crushed and swallowed, because as I stood in the sweltering daylight, I was positively unafraid. If only in that sunblind moment, I could have laughed. You could have dug your thumbs into my eyes and I wouldn’t have minded.

I was standing like that, feeling that way, when Lauren drove by, smoking a cigarette and slowing her Ford Tempo as it sputtered past. We saw each other quickly and clearly, though I knew she wasn’t coming inside.

But seeing her pass. Knowing she would again, even if I wasn’t there—it told me more than I’d wanted to know about love. That at your worst moments you are forgiven by those who see all the way into you, clean through your fears, to the thing you truly are, what you could or couldn’t be.

Springsteen’s
Born in the U.S.A
. Stevie Wonder’s soul-sap double album
Songs in the Key of Life
. Paul Simon’s
Graceland
. Simon
and
Garfunkel, pitiable old Garfunkel, whom Dad always claimed was a dead weight Simon had to leave behind. Crosby, Stills & Nash. Neil Young. The Doobies, The Stones, Led Zeppelin. Steely Dan.
The White Album
—Ringo Starr bemoaning the blisters on his fingers during “Helter Skelter’s” discordant anticlimax.

I inserted the cassettes into Dad’s stereo, blasting them through a tube-powered stereo he’d assembled in the seventies, before I was born. The scuffed plastic cartridges had passed through cars he’d owned when I was a kid, and the songs themselves generated not single memories but strobes of our old life: baseball games and swimming pools, drives to Cedar Point. Bike rides. Ice-cream cones. Caitlin and me singing in unison to Van Morrison’s corniest ballads. Things I’d forgotten during the years I’d invented a familyless version of myself, a person who’d come from nowhere, like some world-beaten tunesmith. Now I remembered the entire arc, the decades of our simple life
unfurling to where I presently was, Paul McCartney bellowing loudly to me about getting to the bottom and going back to the top of the slide.

Turning around.

Going for a fucking ride and doing it all again.

I walked through the condo, wielding a dagger Japanese automen had given him as a gesture of transcontinental schmooze. I ate the last of the TV dinners. I changed the locks and peered through the windows. The entire place had been left to me. It belonged to me—a two-bedroom void at the end of a newly paved road.

Before I’d arrived, someone had removed the photographs of Dad’s parents, which had sat on a dresser near the front door. Everything else, I was apparently entitled to. His tool bag. The dresser itself.

Once I started drinking, I did a whole lot of sitting in the bathtub, sucking light beers because they had little effect. Rising from the tub, I weighed myself on a digital scale—my scale—watching the numbers fall. One sixty. One fifty-seven. I wanted to get lean, act quickly from here on.

In the basement, I pressed weights on Dad’s rusted bench. Scanning the living room day after day, my thought was: junk, junk, junk. Two couches, a dining table. Everything that had come with Dad after the divorce.

I shaved with his razor. I crawled into the sheets and slept on my parents’ old bed.

I turned over pictures of Caitlin.

The stereo churned.

Paul Simon was going to Graceland in the span of four and half minutes, joined by his son, the child of his first marriage …

If Dad’s phone rang it was Mom or Angela, making sure I was there. Or it was Ford Motor’s human resource department, with
a stiff deadline for the return of Dad’s company car. It had been a few weeks, a month. One afternoon, for the sake of doing anything, I stuffed Dad’s clothes and suits into trash bags and carted them to the Michigan Avenue Salvation Army where Will had once found his favorite costumes. Walking into the store, I set the first load on the counter, figuring they saw people like me every day, casting off sacks filled with past lives. When the clerk whined, “You gotta fill out a slip for those,” I snatched the rest of the bags, chucking them two at a time through the doorway, saying, “I’m giving you a life’s worth, man.”

What is left of a man’s life? A bicycle. A television. A bed. A sack of tools.

In a filing cabinet, I found workbooks from the rehabs he’d attended. On the pages were lists and confessions and charts of terrifying ideas, drafted in my Dad’s slashing print.

Triggers:

Feeling bad
.

Feeling good
.

Dad. Dennis. Cindy. Dearborn. Detroit. Work. Weekends. The car. Caitlin
.

The last one, the doozy—it arrowed through my lungs, pumped blood into my spleen. It said, simply:
Fuck it, let’s go
.