The Bad Decisions Playlist (11 page)

“Yeah, of course.”

“Right. Does she say​—”

“She says you're my dad.”

“Yeah.”

He gives a little snort of laughter, shaking his head, sighs.
Ain't that a thing,
he's saying.

“I guess it's possible,” he says. “When were you born?”

I tell him.

He thinks about it.

“Yeah, I guess that makes sense.”

“But what do you
think?
” I say.

“You do look a lot like me. And you got a voice on you . . .”

I wait.

“Yeah, I think . . . it's . . . possible.”

“Possible.”

“Yeah.”

I wait some more.

“Okay . . .
probable
,” he says. “I mean, I think . . .” He doesn't finish the sentence. He looks off, shaking his head again.
Ain't that a thing
. Then looks at me again, gaze level. “Yeah, Austin,” he says, “I'd wager I am.”

I let go of the breath I didn't know I'd been holding. “Yeah,” I say, nodding. “So . . .”

“Yeah,” he says, “So.”

Ever had this conversation? I bet you haven't. There's some awkwardness. The silence stretches out. There are a lot of important questions you should ask your dad who disappeared before you were born. Right at this moment I can't think of a single one of them.

“That's a cool truck,” I say instead. He seems relieved.

“Not poseur-y? I feel poseur-y.”

“No, I think you can rock it,” I say. “You look cool.”

“Thanks.”

Part of me is taking notes, because he
does
look cool. I've never met a grownup who looks so cool, not a bit of effort to it. He even somehow looked cool when he was trying to avoid getting his skull bashed in.

“How's your head?” I say.

“Hurts,” he says. “Should have seen that coming, I suppose. KD always was, uh . . .”

“Moody,” we say at the same time, then look at each other, both of us grinning shyly.

“Her work?” he says, gesturing toward my head.

“This? No, someone hit me with a mandolin. Smashed a Gibson A3 over my head.”

“What? That's a crime!”

“Yeah.”

“I mean to do that to an instrument like that. I hope it's okay.”

I laugh. “Totaled.”

“Girl involved?”

“Yeah, that one,” I say, twisting to point at Alison. She's standing by the concession stand, watching us.

“Probably worth it,” says Shane.

I laugh again.

“Hey, you know what?” I say. “I think I might have your old guitar.”

“Really?”

“Johnny Cash sticker on it?” I indicate where the sticker would be.

“Holy crap! Yes! Johnny Cash sticker! Man! I wondered where that got to!”

“You can have it back, you want.”

“No, you keep it.”

“Thanks.”

“Yeah, jeez, that old guitar. No kidding. No kidding.”

Then we're quiet, both of us shifting around a bit. I'm hoping he wasn't listening the whole time when I was singing to the girls, didn't hear me wreck the title song from his second album.

“How is KD?” says Shane, serious again.

“She's all right.”

“I'd say tell her I said hi, but . . .”

“Yeah. She says she'll kill you if you come back.”

“Yeah, I suspect she would. She with someone?”

I stare at him.

“I'm just asking. I just want to know that she's okay.”

“She's with a guy named Rick. He's a lawyer.”

“That the guy who came out when I was there?”

“Yes.”

“What's he like?”

“He's a douche. But mostly he's just boring.”

He nods.

“Yeah, well, sometimes boring is okay. They married?”

“That why you're here? You gonna rekindle the romance?”

He grimaces, looks away.

“Sorry,” I say.

“Curious, is all. I haven't seen her for sixteen years,” says Shane.

“You're the one ran out.”

“I didn't know about you,” he says. “Okay? I was twenty-one. I wasn't much older than you, and probably half as smart. This is as big a surprise to me as it is to you.”

We both shift around a bit.

“You really upset her, showing up like that,” I say.

“Uh . . . no kidding?” he says, touching his forehead.

“I want you to leave her alone.”

“Sure,” he says.

“I mean it.”

“I understand.” Then, “I can leave
you
alone too, you want.”

I think about it. While I'm doing that, he glances at his watch. “Crap,” he says. “I have to get going. Look, I'm only in town a few weeks. I understand if you don't want to hang out or​—”

“I want to. I mean, we should talk, right?”

“Absolutely. I'd like that.”

“Okay.”

He nods. I nod. We nod.

“So . . .” I say.

“What happens next?” he says.

“Yeah.”

“Depends. You busy tonight?”

“No.”

“Can you get away for a bit without getting in trouble?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Good. What happens next is you come to my show.”

When we met each other on the street /

I said it's funny, I was just thinking of you /

and it's true, 'cause that's all I do /

I just think of you

Amy is waiting for me outside the venue in cowboy boots and a skirt and seems genuinely happy to see me​—​“So glad you could make it!”​—​pulling me in for a hug and a kiss like we're old friends.

She escorts me into the club, a medium-size downtown place with a real light grid, some folksy-hipster band finishing their set and thanking the audience just as we enter.

“Shane here?” I say over the applause.

“He's getting ready. Come on.”

Amy leads me by the hand through the crowd, recorded music coming on as the folksy hipsters start packing up. I catch a brief glimpse of Shane and wave at him, but he's conversing with someone from the club and seems focused on getting ready.

First show in ten years, he told me before we parted at Lake Harriet. What have you been doing? I asked him. Been here and there, some studio work, audio mixing, that sort of thing. Some hard living along the way, he said, and chuckled. “But that's all behind me now.”

The other thing he said, leaning out the window of the Rover before pulling away: “You sang it better than me.” Then smiled and waved and drove off.

Amy brings me to a circle of grownups who are chatting at the back of the club and says, “Everyone, this is Austin. He's awesome.”

Handshakes and fist bumps and high fives, people telling me their names, which I instantly forget, and then they all go back to talking. Which is fine, because I feel shy and intimidated, surrounded by all these strangers who are all cool and worldly and, you know, cool and worldly, everyone talking about gigs and recording sessions and SXSW and Coachella and video shoots. There's lots of beardage and tattooage.
Did you do that gig at the Troubador in LA? How was the show at Brooklyn Bowl? When you headed to Nashville?
I've never met grownups like this. I stand there feeling like an infant, reminding myself not to pick my nose or wet my pants.

Out of nowhere, Ed, a balding nervous-looking guy who I gather is Shane's producer and audio engineer, says, “How do you know Shane?”

“From being awesome,” says Amy quickly, and I look at her with gratitude.

The audience is doing the changeover thing as we wait for Shane, people who were there for the first band departing, new people coming in. It's getting more and more crowded, and I hear snippets of conversations, people saying how psyched they are to see Shane Tyler play​—​first show in, what, a decade? WTF ever happened to him?

I catch another glimpse of Shane, who's paused halfway up the five steps to the backstage area and bends and kisses Amy on the lips, which sort of answers the whole “moral support” thing. I'm left to mill about with everyone else, and end up drifting over to the wall and parking myself there.

“Yo, dude,” says somebody next to me, and when I turn there's a huge guy with a red Mohawk and black spiked leather looming over me, pure punk-rock mayhem, and he says, “You're with Shane, right?”

“Uh, yes. I guess. Yes.”

“Cool! Here!” and he shoves a pint glass of beer at me.

“Thanks,” I say, and then
zzzhooop!
Amy swooshes in and intercepts the glass before it reaches my hand. “Patrick!” she says to punk-rock dude. “He's sixteen!”

She gets me a Coke and rescues me from the side wall.

“Who is that guy?” I say.

“That's just Patrick,” she says, as if that explains things.

“Doesn't seem like his scene.”

“Yeah, Patrick's full of surprises. Come on​—​come stand with me.” She leads me by the arm to the platform where the audio board is, and we squeeze up there next to the sound guy, who nods to us gruffly once but otherwise doesn't take any notice of us.

The recorded music cuts off, and people start to whistle and applaud, and then Shane comes out onstage and the place erupts, Shane waving shyly to everyone and doing little mini-bows with his head. Then he steps up to the microphone, adjusts it, and says, “Uh . . . hi. I'm Shane Tyler,” and the place explodes again, and he just starts playing.

Wow.

His voice sounds different than on the recordings. Not bad, just different, weathered, miles on the highway and tobacco and Scotch. On the recordings he sends his voice soaring up into the tenor range, and its purity catches at your heart, pulls you along with it, but he leaves some of those highest notes alone now. I watch his eyes as he sings those passages, and maybe I'm projecting, but I see something there, that wry self-amusement, like a man squinting up at steep mountain passes he was once able to climb with ease and sighing at how age has started to catch up to him.

The room is hushed as he sings, no one yammering away in the back or at the bar like they always do when someone's performing. This is special. Shane Tyler, minor legend for those in the know, has returned. They're getting to see him play, and they'll get to say,
You know, I saw him when he was just starting his comeback tour, before he was selling out the big auditoriums.

My father. I'm watching him and I'm thinking, that's my father, that's my father onstage.
Feel that,
I'm telling myself.
Feel something about that.
But all I notice is the absence of feeling. I'm watching a man perform onstage. He is my father. Nothing. So instead I try to just enjoy watching Shane Tyler play.

His voice has aged, but his guitar technique is drop-dead dazzling. He strums and flat-picks and fingerpicks, surprising you with little fills and unexpected side trips between the verses, or dancing a complicated choreography with his voice as he sings.

I alternate between watching him and watching the audience. In the crowd I see smiles, solemn expressions, eyes closed in concentration, bodies swaying. Something shared and sacred about it, even if Shane is singing about love and lust and drinking and death.

Then, as I'm scanning the crowd, my gaze jerks to a stop. Like it got snagged on a face. I get a burst of that same hallucinatory
no-way
moment I had when I first saw Shane on the front porch of our house. Across the room from me, facing the stage, is Josephine.

She's watching him, nodding her head to the music like everyone else. From what I can see she's dressed way too formal for the room, her hair up, a black dress with straps, like she escaped from the prom and ended up at this club. I can't believe she's here, can't believe it from twelve different directions.

I suffer through a quick spasm of paranoia, wondering if she's somehow in cahoots with my mother or checking up on me, but just as I'm thinking that the song ends. As everyone is clapping she glances randomly in my direction and spots me, and you can't fake her expression:
BOINK!
Straight-up shock and surprise, comical, like she opened the fridge and found a raccoon in there waving at her.

I look away reflexively, but I'm sure she knows I saw her. I fake it anyway for a few seconds, doing a bad job of pretending that I'm unaware she's there.

“Man, it's so good to have all you folks here tonight,” Shane is saying, and there's the requisite hoots and
yeahs!
and applause, and I join in, darting a look over at her​—​just as she looks at me. She doesn't smile or wave. She just tilts her head a bit, the gesture saying,
Well?

I give her the bro nod​—​a little tilt up and then down of the chin.
I see you, you see me, we're both here.