Songs Only You Know (4 page)

D
AD CALLED FROM A
pay phone late that night, more than twenty-four hours after he’d disappeared. Like every call that day, I picked it up anticipating his voice and the diatribe I’d lay on him. “Lemme talk to your mother,” he said, implying
now
with his bone-tired rasp—all it took to force me into laying the phone on the kitchen counter.

I looked up, into the attached living room.

Mom sat in a chair, her eyes already on me, and I gave her a slow nod.

Caitlin bolted up from the couch. She’d been watching television in her nightie, ready to bare claws at any sign of our dad. When Mom grabbed the phone and said, “Where are you?” Caitlin crowded her, pleading, “What’s he doing with my car?”

“Tim,” said my mom.

It was never good when she used his name.

Caitlin grabbed for the receiver. “Tell him to get back here,” she said, “right now,” but I restrained her. The television was full volume. Ozzy paced below us, whining through his nostrils. “Let me go,” said my sister. “You big jerk.”

Caitlin didn’t have guitars or secret concerts going for her, no co-conspiring madcap like Will on her side. She went alone to work soup kitchens and sponsored impoverished children she’d seen on television. She’d drifted school to school, friend to friend. Tae Kwon Do to kickboxing, ice-skating to softball. I’d seen her twirling across the ice as cold rushed over her tights, or standing dazed in the outfield with a mitt too large for her hand, always with the same look on her face—no idea why she was where she was—freezing if ever the ball did travel her way.

“Lemme talk to him,” she said, a tone like she intended to deal the blow that would end all. “I don’t care what he’s smoking.”

Mom let this go on without even a scowl or wave of her hand. She may have wanted my dad to hear the other end of things. When I finally reached for the phone, she let me take it from her, which seemed an acknowledgment that I’d stepped onto an adult plane. Also a chance to speak with impunity. I knew nitrous oxide and psilocybin mushrooms. Blotter acid, green windowpane gel caps; a concoction called Martian juice, indigenous to Dearborn. I’d smoked opium in a tree and another time in Ford Woods. I would have told you I was a streetwise guru of narcotic thrill.

“All right,” I said, as if I’d guided a hundred bad trips. “I’ll come get you.”

Through the receiver my dad’s voice was a mess of huffs and half speak. “I’m fine,” slurring into, “don’t worry,” then
an explosive wheeze that seemed to confess he’d finally and totally destroyed himself. A hoarse tone as he drawled my name, dragged it out in a sad wheeze. Valium was part of his comedown program, he’d confessed to the doctors, and I was thinking of this cold fact as he said, “I love you … god, I’m so sorry,” heaving these words out to me from deep in some crack hell. I was imagining his face in a kind of detail I’d never forget, the horrible look in his eyes as he let out a sharp moan and went silent. He’d been reduced to absolutely nothing but pain, the most horrible sounds I’d ever heard.

“Where are you?” I yelled, at a volume I’d never before aimed toward him.

“I’m so sorry,” he said again. He mumbled, “Nah, nah, nah.”

Mom was there when I looked up. Focused on me, kneading her fingers, otherwise perfectly still, speeding through every possible strategy to end this right now while having no idea what happens next. Caitlin’s white-hot panic, looming in my peripheral vision as I grasped for my next words. Everything happening seemed like some hypothetical episode being acted out—whatever I
imagined
people doing while accosting their father midbinge. It was too new to be real. Just three weeks earlier he’d confessed to Caitlin and me in that very kitchen, his sleeves rolled and tie undone, saying, “I have a drug problem.” I’d asked what kind. He’d said, “Cocaine,” and my mom said, “Crack, Tim. It’s crack,” until he’d banged the table while Caitlin stared through me, knowing better than anyone that we were entering a nightmare.

We were still there.

“Tell me the cross streets,” I said into the phone, flailing a hand.

Caitlin pressed her cheek against mine, forehead grinding against my temple, trying to get an ear on things.

“Don’t let him trick us again,” she said, but I was getting somewhere with my old man. I’d grown deft at predicting the swing of his moods, had learned to jive my way through the worst of them; tonight I sensed the rare opening: his weakness, pure shell shock.

“Give me the streets, man.”

I strong-armed Caitlin from the phone, and she began crying in her soundless, embarrassed way. I’d already begun nursing a delusion that she could be spared, kept oblivious to the ghastly possibilities that were becoming clear to me: pictures I’d seen of dead basketball stars in the eighties. The gaunt fiends who scrounged for crack money outside Detroit concerts. Crack whores, crack motels.

“Don’t let him hang up,” Caitlin said as Mom stood watching, knowing this commotion was the truest thing my dad could experience. Hoping, like any sane person, that it might bring him home.

“Tell your mom and sister I love them,” Dad said.

I wasn’t about to cut him loose.

“The fucking cross streets.”

He sighed and cursed himself before naming a junction that sounded possibly familiar, way out in metro Detroit’s surrounding countryside. North Territorial and Seven Mile, about as far from the drug zone as you could get. “There’s a gas station,” he said. “I’ll be in the parking lot.”

“Twenty minutes.”

I hung up, and Caitlin snatched the receiver from its cradle, saying, “Let me talk to him,” weeping into the dial tone with everything she had.

Y
EARS BEFORE, ON A
family vacation, I’d heated a Petoskey stone on a grill and carried it in a baseball mitt to Lake Michigan’s shore, where I suggested Caitlin add it to her rock
collection. The vilest of many schemes I’d used to torment her when we were kids. By the time she’d plucked it from the sand, the stone was still hot enough to send her slowly to her knees, staring at me with those blue death stars—sadly perplexed that anyone alive could be so maliciously idiotic. This was now the look in her eyes, her face contorting into a wounded expression as I insisted on going alone to find our father and bring him home.

“Why you?” she said. “It’s my car, you know.”

We’d attended a humble Catholic grade school, a place of clip-on ties and plaid skirts and chewed, outdated textbooks. Gym class was in a bingo hall. At recess I’d held court with guys in my grade, breezing about Metallica or Kati Karl’s visible bra strap, while far across the yard I’d see Caitlin wandering along the aluminum fence that enclosed the premises. Things came easily to me then, friends, bonding over arcade games and horror flicks, playing it cool when it came to my whimpering fear of girls. Caitlin ached with shyness, drifting off, making herself unknown. One year her only friend was a bashful, small-boned girl named Priya Johnson, the sole black kid in her class.

Wearing a plaid jumper, whispering to Priya while dragging her fingertips along the schoolyard’s rusted fence—I wanted badly to believe my sister would always be that way. That girl. Out of earshot yet within a safe, visible distance.

“This is bullshit,” Caitlin said, letting fly a rare obscenity.

“Your brother will go,” Mom said. “You stay and keep me company.”

My sister wilted onto the countertop.

Her blonde locks spilled out, lush and streaked with auburn. While I’d been towheaded and sallow enough that childhood antagonists had crank-called our house whispering,
Albino freak
, Caitlin’s skin was a faint bronze and would remain so
throughout the fall. She was pretty, in her unpolished way. A likable, blue-eyed confusion. A suicide attempt the year before, enough pills in her tiny stomach to collapse a boar. Over what? The same unnameable gloom that fueled my musical obsessions? It was impossible to say, there in the thick of it, as I laced my boots and left to meet my dad.

Pulling out of the driveway in Mom’s Taurus, I rolled down the windows and punched another of my band’s cassettes into the deck. Demo tapes: an audio calling card for greater things. We’d dubbed fifty or so, and the plan was to play our first gig that autumn, after which we’d hit the road. It defied conventions of punk authenticity to be caught listening to your own tunes, an ego move expected of pursed-lipped rock stars posing for glamour shots while wearing their own band’s T-shirt. Once I had the wagon cruising steady, I shouted along with the sound of my own voice, shrugging to the groove, tapping the gas pedal to the beat of the kick drum.

With the right tunes, I’d plowed through what I’d believed were hard times: the gray days after Lauren, my girlfriend of three years, introduced me to self-pity by knotting tongues with the school quarterback, or Dad knuckling my forehead about the dunce-level marks and behavioral citations on my report cards. I daydreamed songs, entire albums spinning on repeat. I didn’t necessarily need a stereo, but the stock Dolby NR deck in the Taurus intensified the bass. The overtones swirled as the air rushed through the opened windows. The roads were empty. I reached out to palm the wind.

Listening to the band’s music, our mistakes were what I
liked best. A drumstick thwacked a rim. My guitar sizzled over a bum note before sliding into place. This was the kind of group I’d longed to be a part of. So many nights I’d spent composing “Musicians Wanted” flyers, listing the names of admired bands—Deadguy, the Dazzling Killmen, Universal Order of Armageddon—along with my parents’ phone number. It had taken a year of huddling with Will at the fringes of increasingly far-out gigs before I grew bold enough to tack my xeroxed queries on the walls of local record shops. The first and only response had been from a drummer who went by his last name, Repa.

I’m not messing around
, he’d said on the answering machine.
Are you?

Mom replayed the message, chuckling as Repa’s meaty voice infiltrated the kitchen. Days later I’d pulled up his driveway to see him emerge from the garage wearing a black shirt, black boots, and black jeans. He had a strong jaw, a large face with Cro-Magnon angles and dark, anxious eyes. First thing Repa had asked was if I went to many shows.
Shows
. You didn’t call them
concerts
. Hardcore punk shows—though punk, as the saying went, was dead. Come to the funeral.

“Some,” I’d said, yanking my amplifier from my truck.

“Me, too,” Repa said. “But the best shows happen when I’m alone in my room.”

Blaring headphones, eyes closed, envisioning yourself performing to a crowd of filthy hundreds—I’d understood exactly what he meant.

“That’s the real truth,” he said. “Nobody else around.”

Imagine what my dad would think of Repa, the finest musician I knew, yowling satanically as he attacked his vintage Pearl drums. Or Ethan, our bassist, four years older, a veteran of the scene who towered above with a brown pompadour and bargain
bin clothes and a fawn-eyed stare that was intent on getting however crazy we were gonna get.
Queer as steers
, Dad might have said, one of his corny gibes.
Boneheads, shitheads
. Yes, we were three freaks, playing for hours and toasting with coffee mugs at a diner, naming ourselves Thoughts of Ionesco after a French playwright I’d been told was absurd, yet whom none of us had read.

Officially a band.

“Brutal” was the word we used to describe our songs, and it was a benchmark, too. “More brutaler,” Repa might say, when the chords required a less-melodious touch. We’d spent a year rehearsing in Repa’s basement, during which I tried every lick I knew, pulling out twisted free-jazz chords I’d stolen from Dad’s old records—leftovers from those rarely mentioned days after he’d dropped out of the Air Force Academy and grown sideburns.

If he’d listened to our cassette, had he been able to hear it?

His unintentional influence.

T
HERE WAS NO GAS
station at the corner of North Territorial and Seven Mile. The two roads, in fact, didn’t intersect. The surroundings were nearly rural out that way. Beyond the headlights, the streets were dark, and I passed few cars, checking their make as they blurred by. I drove until I found the nearest Amoco, closed for the evening and unlit at the mouth of the highway. Aside from the chain-locked pumps and garbage bins, there was nothing to see. Not even a streetlamp glowed above the lot. I waited by the pay phone, picking it up to check for the dial tone. And there was one, so perhaps I’d found the place. Only minutes before Dad might have held his ear to that same piece of black plastic; it was possible I’d just missed him, that he might return any moment. The night was hot as ever. I had
a full bladder. I unzipped and let it go on the concrete, watching the stream puddle alongside the tires of the station wagon. No one else was around.

But I waited there awhile, just long enough to know for sure.