Songs Only You Know (39 page)

She stood beside me the following morning as the anesthetist pumped me with sedatives. I knew the sight of me affirmed how right she was to be leaving, but I could tell she felt remorse. I squeezed her hand, thinking that if I lived, I’d make all the drastic changes. I’d start meditating, Tai Chi, soul-recovery stuff. The simplicity of what truly mattered—it fell over me in
a silvery rinse as I nodded in and out, trying to hang on to the fantasy for another second before I slipped away.

The sound of Angela’s laughter coaxed me back to life in a new hospital room.

“Go on?” she said. “You were saying?”

I’d muttered a delirious aphorism not a moment before, slowly emerging from an hour-long darkness that had passed with a single nod of my head. The words remained on my tongue, yet I couldn’t grasp my thoughts long enough to recapitulate them. When I stretched my fingers, Angela took my hand.

“You’re cute,” she said. “I love you.”

I had a mouthful of post-op grime. My throat was raw from the upper GI scope. Angela knew I was at her mercy, lying there in a paper gown. She shook her head, and we smiled. Lucid with anesthetic, I imagined living my final days in peace, so long as I felt that way: nodding in and out, forgetting what I said no sooner than it came from my mouth. I wanted to fall back under that spell for an hour longer.

When the doctor entered, he barely looked at me, scribbling on his notepad. The gastrointestinal scopes, he said, revealed a number of ulcerations in the lining of my stomach, not to mention some trauma to my bowel—issues resulting, no doubt, from my binges, which the fear of death had inspired me to speak frankly about. “You’re hurting yourself,” he said, curtly and factually.

“What about stress?” I said.

“Well, that never helps,” said the doctor. “But someone your age? What are you stressed about? It’s the booze, the pills. You either quit, or it gets worse and you come back bleeding up to your esophagus, and then there’s not much we can do.”

He actually raised an eyebrow.

“I’ve seen it before,” he said.

“My colon?” I said.

“Clean as a whistle. Nothing but some hemorrhoids, for which I’ve written you a prescription for suppositories.”

He winked at Angela, and she made a disgusted face.

A formidable bill would soon arrive by mail. In months to come, there would be more doctors, conveying identical sentiments, not a word of which I’d take to heart. If only they’d have told me I was done for—that I might have believed. It was, I suppose, what I’d expected to hear. The doctor vanished without so much as bidding me a good fight as a nurse appeared with a handful of scripts, none of which I’d have filled.

No—I left the hospital revitalized and contemptuous, with an angry urge to live, craving a gluttonous dinner and everything else.

Mom couldn’t bear to think of a new dog. “Maybe someday,” she’d said, “but it wouldn’t be fair to Ozzy, just yet.” Though when I returned to Dearborn, there was a tameless black kitten scurrying through her house, attacking her plants and waking her early in the morning.

“She’s a dickens,” Mom said. “A cute little thing. I named her Izzy.”

She asked how I’d been, how Angela was feeling about her big move.

“Good,” I said. “It’s all good.”

“You look pale,” she said. “Skinny.”

She was no meddler. She never pressed the matter when I insisted things were unremarkably fine. Her knowingness operated on a deeper register, triggering her chronic cough and
antagonizing her phobia of the telephone. We were sitting at the kitchen table. It was so good and so painful to see her.

“You’d tell me if something was wrong?”

“Yes,” I said. “Nothing’s wrong.”

And for every unpleasant detail I withheld, she, in turn, had a litany of undisclosed truths about my father. In this way, we protected each other. We acknowledged the weather; we spoke of cats and dogs. Mom lived on day-to-day appeals, praying for moments of peace: a tulip budding from the soil. And I resided in the gray areas of what she could and couldn’t stand to believe. I lived during the long hours she slept, once the sun went down, when I could imagine she was peacefully unaware.

“Do you want me to cook you something?” she said. “You need to eat.”

The kitten scaled its way onto the kitchen table and bounded toward her, touched by a joy that had something to do with my mother.

“That sounds good,” I said.

“Have you seen a cat do that before?” She stroked the animal as it burrowed into her lap. “Have you ever seen a cat like this?”

A
FEW DAYS LATER
Mom knocked at my front door in the early afternoon, still dressed in her pajamas. Though she’d never seen us perform, she often slept in one of my band’s T-shirts; I could see our screen-printed logo beneath her blue fleece as I welcomed her inside. Her face let me know her wariness of what she might come upon, dropping by without warning.

“I need to talk to you,” she said.

I didn’t look her in the eye; it had been a while since I’d been able to.

“What is it?” I asked. Which meant,
How much do you know?

Angela had called her that morning, laying out the hard
facts about my hospital visit. She’d told Mom I needed help. I was scheduled to leave for another tour in a matter of days, and Angela dreaded what might happen. To drive home the seriousness of things, she’d described an unpleasant scene or two: nights I’d been bloodied or too loaded to speak. A time I’d been welted in a belt fight. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought she was trying to wash her hands of me.

“What kind of trouble are you in?” Mom said.

I’d slept on the couch and could hardly recall the previous evening or what I might have said if I’d talked with Angela. My ulcerated gut hadn’t stopped me from carrying on with the drinks, the blood in my stool a daily affirmation that I was still alive. Angela and I had once joked about not knowing which one of us was crazier, and it seemed she’d finally settled on an answer.

“Don’t you lie to me,” Mom said. I felt the specter of Angela’s grief, could hear her urgency in the details Mom spoke.

Taking a seat beside me on the couch, Mom coughed into a Kleenex. “I won’t go through this again,” she said. “Don’t you put me through this.”

For everything Angela had confessed, I had a perfectly viable explanation. My stomach was shredded because I’d been eating too many peanuts and uncooked vegetables, drinking too much coffee.

“I’m stressed,” I said.

“You sound like your father,” Mom said. “You’re not like him, you know?”

In ways this was true; in other ways I felt exactly like him, closer than I’d ever been. Though we sat inches apart, Mom kept a strange distance.

“You’re smarter than this,” she said.

“I drink too much.”

“What about the drugs?”

I claimed I didn’t have a taste for any of them, which relative to my lust for booze seemed almost truthful.

Mom gazed about the house. The shades were drawn permanently to keep the neighbors from peeping. Clothes on the hardwood floor, CDs stacked on every surface, lyrics scribbled on napkins. The kitchen sink was filled with dishes and foam coffee cups. A knee-high plastic Christmas tree she’d given me seasons earlier stood propped in the corner. It was a mess, but I’d seen worse.

“Your uncle Dennis died yesterday,” Mom said.

“No,” I said. “Jesus.”

“The family wants to get ahold of you. They’ve been leaving messages.”

“Was it drugs?”

“I think so. They found him in a garage, in his car.”

Dennis had two daughters, one on her way into the army, but it was my dad I thought of foremost, how thoroughly the news of his dead brother would have pummeled him.

“You see what this does to people?” Mom said. “You should know by now.”

Her wrists and hands were scratched and nicked, bitten and clawed by her new pet. Her allergies had flared; her eyes were red. She kneaded her swollen fingers nervously. I could hardly stand to look, to think of her daubing blood from her wounds, alone with her kitten. Though I knew it took more than that to hurt her now.

I
MADE PROMISES TO
my mother and swore oaths to Angela. As an act of penance, I resigned to carrying a cell phone so that I’d be reachable anyplace in the country. My road kit was packed with niacin tablets and detoxifying tonics and other blood-cleansing remedies, along with a prescribed bottle of Antabuse—enough
to last for the band’s August tour. I’d experimented with the antidrinking medication a few years before. Ideally, you took Antabuse every day, so there’d be enough coursing through you to make even a sip of alcohol repulsive. A single drink might cause vomiting, delirium; a Pavlovian trick to wean a sick mind off the sauce. The doctors said you could die if you boozed while on this stuff, but I knew better. I’d learned that after taking a single pill I had three days before I could drink without breaking out in hives. On the road I planned to take Antabuse every third day, leaving open the option to skip a dose in time for Los Angeles, where our record company would be waiting to see an inspired set.

The band had a roadie aboard our latest expedition: Scott, the Wallside guitarist who’d aided my attack on Blaine a few years back. Blaine was now a junkie living in Las Vegas. Scott and I, however, had since become close friends, confiding earnestly and obliviously in the late, late hours. He was a genuine binge artist, just like me, and had sold me his prized ’79 Gibson Les Paul, a perfectly scarred relic that was easily imagined strapped over Jimmy Page’s lithe torso. Lately, Scott too was doing his best to keep clean. To encourage our good behavior, he drew a box chart on a scrap of plywood and affixed it to the back door of the van. He listed the names of everyone in the band and his own, printing them on a graph that accounted for each day of the journey.

“The no-fun chart,” he said. “Anyone who has too much fun gets a check mark. At the end we tally it up.”

“We’ll give out a prize,” I said.

“The prize,” he said, “is sanity.”

T
HE CROSS-COUNTRY DRIVES PASSED
in a constant sober panic. Our demo had been repackaged and rereleased by the
Californians, and if we kept our word, the next year of my life was a schedule of low-paying gigs. One day at a time, we were earning gas money along a trail that seemed to route us closer and closer toward defeat. Without the fanfare of Detroit crowds, I’d been resorting to dour screaming fits and partial disrobement during our set’s finale, hoping to leave any impression whatsoever on the few who watched us underwhelm their local stages. Each traveled hour felt erased from a purposed life I should be living. Such thoughts came with the job, anyone knew that, but without drink or sedative I couldn’t shake them. When not browbeating myself for losing Angela, I was thinking about the first taste of a drink and resenting anyone who was free to have one.

“No fun,” I’d say, each morning.

“Not one bit,” Scott replied, marking the no-fun chart accordingly.

“We keep this up,” I’d say, “we’ll live forever.”

I’d heard countless people claim that music had saved their lives. In my case, I do believe that to be true. I know also that the power of music began turning on me the minute I’d compromised my love for it. For next to nothing, I’d sold it to California, had even sweetened our sound and fussed over our image with the hope it might pay off with an entirely new existence. Thousands before me had copped out—some grew rich doing it, but I’d known better. Once my head began drying out, I heard what was missing in the chords, in the screams I’d placed so carefully, for dramatic effect, at all the likely moments.

As we traveled from town to town, I couldn’t keep the past from rising into every silent moment. I’d done so much thinking about the bad things. The good things, though, were what really stung, and in small doses I was being led back to
them. Memories of the morning walk my sister and I made to the bus stop for Stout Middle School. Along the way, there’d been a corridor of tall shrubbery, taller than either of us, always webbed by the spiders that had spun their way to and fro the night before. Neither of us had ever wanted to go first, to have our faces catch the webbing. Holding hands became our strategy: her and me, gripping tightly, laughing as we ran together through the invisible tangles.

“What are you thinking about now?” Scott would say.

We’d be passing through Arizona. Through Oregon. Places I’d never seen that reminded me of my sister and father, the people they might have been had we one day made it there together. I’d smile, the image looping again and again, repeating the instant Caitlin and I reached the threshold, just before we’d wipe the webbing from our hair.

“Nothing,” I’d say. “I’m not thinking about anything now.”

“Then how about tomorrow?” he’d say. “What about ten years from now?”

B
Y THE TIME WE
reached Seattle, I’d gone two weeks without a single drop, a feat that convinced me I had less of a habit than anyone suspected. With time to spare before the show, I walked alone through Seattle’s rolling streets, wondering where the rabble of the nineties grunge explosion had settled. Avoiding the club until it was time to perform, I took a seat at a bus stop. Minutes later, the cell phone startled me with a rude jangle inside my pocket. Mom’s number incoming—a rare thing. A stride against her phone phobia. If she was trying to reach me, it was for good reason.