Songs Only You Know (36 page)

A
NOTHER DAY
, I
WAS
giving Dad’s toilet seat a serious workout, reading through stacks of
Time
left on the porcelain water tank. In the next room, Billy Joel’s
The Nylon Curtain
blared at a volume that turned its pop shimmer into a braid of white madness. Whose condo was attached to this one? I hadn’t heard a sound, hadn’t seen a car pulling in or out of the driveway next door.

So much Vicodin had cinched my bowels. When enough was enough, I flipped the roll of toilet paper, and as the cardboard cylinder spun, I heard a clink on the tile floor. Looking
down, I saw a glass tube, inches from my toes and stuffed with a steel-wool knot. I put it to my lips and sucked, tasting the unlit resin. I pressed it to my nostril. Burned crack smells like dirty socks, like old laundry that’s been set afire. It smelled familiar: the bathroom of a Detroit club, the endmost stall? Something, something, something.

I twirled the glass pipe in my fingers, rolled it over my thigh, thinking,
I know everything. I know where you’ve been
.

My dad might have trusted me never to tell a soul, to allow him the benefit of the doubt in the eyes of the world. I’d carry the lie. The illusion that he’d died clean and sober, lived his final days honorably, in allegiance to the twelve steps.

My aunts, the nurses—what a scene they must have come upon, before the coroner and the phone calls. Another glass stem in his fingers, I was sure. The bent, clawing pose a man strikes as he dies in a burst of narcotic light. This is what I believed—and, no, I didn’t blame them. I’d have done the same thing, pulled the drugs from his pockets and rearranged his limbs to wave my hands over the scene, wiping all evidence from the earth.

T
HE PIPE REMAINED IN
the pocket of my jeans as I spoke to realtors and lawyers. It was a charm between my fingers as I said things like “probate court” and “priced to sell” and “open house,” and “everything goes.” It was with me as I signed the closing papers. Maybe there was enough of a hit packed inside it to warrant my arrest. Or maybe one day I’d throw it into a sewer or the trash can in a gas-station bathroom. Pitch it from the window of my speeding car. Or maybe I wouldn’t let go of it for a long while.

I
WONDERED:
W
HAT IF
he’d died years before that pipe, before he’d ever held one? Struck dead by a car or by the freak heart
attack he’d survived in 1981. Thirty-one years old, gone of natural causes—then he might have left the earth a good man, a great man. Sometimes I envisioned him as a photograph we’d have kept in our wallets, a young father I’d barely known, who vanished before I learned what he was made of. I might have turned to his face when things were at their worst, thinking,
Talk to me now. Show me the way
.

Or I asked myself: Would my sister have lived, might her sadness have taken a slow, patient course, if only we’d been raised fatherless? Would I have discovered his old guitar and followed a different tune? My mother, a widow at thirty—spared so many nightmares of her husband’s eyes and the drug menace within. I added up the good and the awful, but in the end how could I remember him without praying that I never found myself in his place? Not for a day, not even his very best.

O
NE LAST THING
I found as I scrubbed out the debris of my father’s ancient computer, a single poem, a file named “Caitlin.” Nothing more than two lines:

Twisted metal and burning steel / Help me Cait, pull me through the wreck
.

T
en seconds before the last note of our final song, the drummer hammers through the skin of his snare drum. The band turns to face him. We slam the chords, watching his sticks pound a few ghosty eighth notes from the torn snare, and then it’s over. The crowd applauds, a good three or four hundred out there beyond the stage lights, some whistling through fingers. Behind the ringing cymbals the drummer smiles; we all do. Our first show: gone off with barely a hitch.

We’d been together a few months before scoring this slot opening for a Brooklyn trio named TV on the Radio, whose album was breaking in a way no one expected. March 2004. Detroit. A stroke of luck at a Woodward Avenue club called the Magic Stick.

The house music slammed on and the crowd made for the bar, the restrooms, the back alley. Fifteen-minute changeover before the headliner, meaning we had five to collect our equipment and scramble out of the way. Once we did, Ethan hugged me, bending from his six-foot-two vantage to wrap his sweaty
arms around me. We were backstage, an altogether-new amenity, a graffiti-covered room with free beer, towels, a bowl of tortilla chips. We’d yet to decide how to describe our sound, but since our initial practice I’d felt certain jujus and mumbo jumbos colliding. Ethan pressed his forehead to mine, as if we’d just exonerated ourselves from some future punishment: playing in cover bands, open-mic nights.

“It’s good to be back,” he said.

Ethan had been an obvious recruit. He’d botch notes and rush the beat, but when it came to going for broke in the name of rock and roll, you could count on him rising to the cause. With or without me, he’d go on living it; together, though, our mutual devotion became a gestalt, encouraging the type of inner-band hypnosis necessary for true creative lift off. I put an arm around him, slapped his massive shoulders.

Our drummer entered the huddle, clasping our necks and butting his noggin against ours. I’d met him in a Dearborn bar that fall, after my dad’s condo sold. A wily brute from my hometown who played the traps with a neurotic chutzpah and had barely a tie in the world. He was the closest thing we could find to Repa, who after a stint as a Ypsilanti cabbie had taken work driving eighteen-wheelers across the country. This inaugural performance had tinkered with the new drummer’s emotions. He was shirtless and girthy, hirsute but for his glistening, bald scalp, which wrinkled as he said, “Oh, man, I feel good.”

T
HE HOLY FIRE
—I’
D SEEN
the words painted across the fender of a Christian landscaping company’s trailer, hijacked it then and there as a declaration. Pictured it stamped across album covers in bold type. Ethan worried, “They’ll think we’re a God band,” but the idea was to transcend. To save our souls, or burn them, musically.

The band’s name spread across town faster than I’d thought possible. After a few more gigs, our photographs appeared in the weeklies. College stations began spinning our demo. Things unfolded so easily there seemed to be some trickery at work, but I began angling for the big time. We’d play only the good clubs from here on. No basements or garages or VFW halls. No business with Warden or any other punk rock crapshoots. I reminded my bandmates how old we were getting, saying, “We’ll all be thirty-something by the time our third album is released.”

Bartenders began sliding me free drinks, and girls working the doors at clubs waved me in as if my ticket money were an insult. People who’d come to see Ethan and me play in previous incarnations now worked the establishments where we spent our nights.

They said, “I listened to you in high school.”

And I said, “Yeah, yeah,” because you never knew who was giving you the rub in places like that.

Punk, whatever you’d call it, had become gentrified. The scene had changed, or it was a new zone altogether. After the shows, girls sauntered through the clubs, tattooed and urchinlike, hanging around with a purpose I was unaccustomed to. A handful of managers had begun chasing us gig to gig, urging us to bring them aboard for a 20 percent cut of the big break we could all feel was just around the bend. By having hung around with the right sort of musical lifers, I’d earned a reputation as a fanatic with an uncertain past who did nothing but write songs. And I wanted compensation for the work. I’d come to covet the tour bus and backstage rider and televised appearances, a public existence that mattered terribly to the world. A gold record, some trophy I’d present to my mom, one she’d hang on her wall, finally proving that I’d done good.

To assure our meter would be impeccable, we practiced to a metronome five nights a week. I sang what I could. What I couldn’t, I screamed. Until the sun came up. Until our fingers bled and our ears filled with wax. Even then, sometimes, we kept at it, song after song. And they could hear us, whoever was listening.

B
Y DAY, PUBLIC-SCHOOL STUDENTS
gawked at me: a hungover, black-clad Transylvanian wandering into their Dearborn, Michigan, classroom. To avoid the sound of my name, it was my habit to have the kids call me Mr. Blank as I sat behind their teacher’s desk, apologetically offering their assignments.

“You ain’t from around here,” they’d say. “Are you, bro?”

I’d enlisted as a substitute teacher that fall, making myself available for every subject and grade, which meant I received a 6:00
A.M
. call each morning requesting my services. I took on anything: high-school mathematics, drama, music, grade-school phys ed. Wary looks, left and right, as I entered those schools double fisting gas-station coffees, my unwashed hair matted from sleep. Certain teachers slipped insults my way, calling me metro or mortician as I passed. I suspected it was a matter of time before the district learned I was unfit to be mingling with formative minds. My concern was that I’d shame my mother, who now worked in an administrative building designing computerized activities for students with communication deficiencies.

“How does it feel,” she said, “being back in those schools?”

Sparring my hangovers, I never once arrived drunk. Though I’d had a nosebleed before a sixth-grade class, moments after the smartest of them beat me in a knuckle-biting chess match.

“It’s a trip,” I said, and Mom said, “Who would have thought?”

Eventually, I received a mysterious notice by mail, informing me I’d been blacklisted from Dearborn High. Two more citations would have me terminated from the district, though I couldn’t remember committing an offense, other than neglecting to teach a single thing. Conspiring with the school, I suspected, were the neighbors next door to the Dearborn bungalow I’d moved into. Among them were two fleshy teenagers I’d seen roving the high school. Their entire family had been giving me the hairy eyeball since I’d moved onto their block; perhaps they’d seen Mr. Blank stagger home in the wee hours and had informed the administrators I was a hazard. To outfox them, I began entering the house through the side door and peeking through the blinds before I left.

Each substitute gig paid seventy-three dollars and afforded me breaks to sleep on the teacher’s desk or write lyrics. If I played it smart, I’d never visit the same place two days in a row. Assignments came by way of an automated phone service. With the touch of a button I could refuse work any day I wanted, just about the worst thing for someone in my shape. Any night a drink might come my way, and where that would leave me in the mornings had only one certainty—that everything, mind-body-soul, would ache.

There were pills, too, a flood of painkillers and tranquilizers coming into the mixture of what my friends and I believed was artistic inspiration. A pill dealer worked at the State Theatre, while someone else always seemed have a bottomless stash, a sister working as a nurse. I found the tablets I liked and ate enough that I’d writhe in bed once the chemicals began to abandon my body, leaving in their absence a clenching gastrointestinal pain. I wasn’t above swindling walk-in clinics, either, lurching with fake ailments as I nudged the staff toward medications I desired: Vicoprofen, which was oxycodone cut with ibuprofen, instead
of the stuff in Vicodin that grizzled your intestines. I went as far as slicing my arm and stuffing a clump of bloody toilet paper into my underpants. At the clinic I refused a seat, telling the receptionist my hemorrhoids had ruptured, which sent a hiss through the waiting room. The doctor never troubled to glance at my prop, but I got what I’d come for.

On mornings I woke clearheaded and rested, there first came a moment where I’d take inventory of all sensations—the taste in my mouth and my heart rate and the pressure behind my eyes—before realizing I wasn’t to be punished that day. It would have been an unendurable way of life had the band not been composing a formidable new set list, songs filled with peaks and valleys and parts that felt like soaring. We practiced at every chance, making as much music as we could. Sometimes it was just me and the drummer, who’d quit his job delivering pizzas and whom I liked immensely once the amplifiers were switched on.

We met at a Michigan Avenue doughnut shop to sign the contracts. A reputable magazine had reviewed the band, and a satellite radio station put a song of ours in rotation, and by May we’d piqued the curiosity of a few A & R types. The manager we’d chosen was a music-biz prodigy, a no-bullshit go-getter who’d yet to turn twenty-five. Across the tabletop, he spread the documents: a four-album deal with a California record label subsidized by Sony, a corporate madness Ethan and I had once raged against.