I didn’t know how to respond to that.
“Robert’s father helped Dad. We can help him. And we can put it on our transcripts.”
“So you’ll do it?”
“I’m not going to take orders from that suckass,” he said. “But, yeah, I can get Farrelly and Ron Toll to work with us. You can be the fifth member.”
I said nothing at first. I didn’t want to do the coupon book sale. Coyle gave me a disparaging look.
“Stop being so lazy, Willie. Robert’s father really did help us. So, yeah, tell him I’ll do it. And tell him you’ll do it, too.”
“It’ll be weird being on Robert’s side,” I said.
“We’ll just have to suck it up. It’s only like two weeks.”
So that was that. We registered our team the next day. The sales would begin the following month.
* * *
—
A few days after that Dad called a family meeting, our first in almost half a year. We were all so busy and involved in so many disparate activities that it was unusual for the whole family to be together, and definitely unusual for us all to be paying attention to any one thing at the same time.
On this afternoon Coyle, Fergus, Maddy, and I were all sitting side by side on the long couch. Dad sat back on the easy chair, seeming pleased about something. Mom came in from the kitchen, drying her hands.
“Your father and I feel that sometimes all we’re doing is what we need to do, and not taking time to smell the roses.”
“All stick, no carrot,” Fergus said. “Welcome to the family.”
“Will you shut up,” Maddy said. “I don’t want this to take all day.”
“Your father and I want you to have fun and not just be working all the time,” Mom said. “And so, with that in mind, your father has an announcement.”
Our father cleared his throat and leaned forward and tried to look benevolent. He obviously thought he had something momentous to tell us.
“As a treat for everyone, I have a surprise.”
“Are you going back into the hospital?” Fergus said.
Dad put his fist into his palm.
“If anyone’s going into the hospital it’s you. Now shut it.” He turned to the rest of us. “I have gotten five tickets to the Bob Seger concert, which is in two weeks. Me and all of you will be going to this concert together.”
Dad waited for a reaction. There was complete silence.
“You mean we’re going to a concert with you?” Fergus said after a moment.
“I can arrange for you to renovate instead.”
“I’d almost rather,” Fergus said. “Why doesn’t Mom have to go?”
“Oh, be quiet,” Mom said. “Your father has gone out of his way and spent a lot of time and money and gotten you tickets for a concert. Are you all that ungrateful? What do you say?”
There was a long silence, then Coyle said, “Thanks.”
* * *
—
I haven’t mentioned Bob Seger yet, but he was a deity in our house. Dad loved Bob Seger with the unalloyed force of his relentless personality. He loved the anthems. He loved the slow ballads. He loved the blue-collar rockers. You basically couldn’t ever say anything bad about Bob Seger unless you wanted to call down the full wrath of my father’s fury. For all our childhood, whenever we worked in the office buildings, or exercised in the basement, or went on road trips, it was always Bob Seger in the tape deck, particularly Night Moves, which was my father’s favorite album.
And so when Dad heard that Bob Seger was coming to the Chicago area that fall he didn’t ask us if we wanted to go. Like everything else, he just assumed that we’d all go along gladly, and if we didn’t, too bad. It was a “family obligation.”
That family meeting about the concert was in late October. In mid-November, we all climbed into the car on a Saturday afternoon and Dad drove us to Fanny May’s, where we got three boxes of chocolates. We then rode to Big Al’s Beef, where we each got a foot-long sandwich. Then he drove on to the Rosemont Horizon. I think we arrived at around five o’clock, four and a half hours early. They hadn’t started to collect for parking yet. The concession people were just starting to arrive. We were insanely early. Dad got out of the car and looked around the empty lot.
“Number-one fans,” he said.
Coyle, Fergus, Maddy, and I got out of the car and looked at Dad sullenly.
“What?” Dad said. “We’ll get good seats.”
“It’s not general admission,” Fergus said.
“We’re five hours early,” Coyle said.
“Let’s just check it out,” Dad said. “Stop complaining.”
Dad started toward the stadium, bustling and swaggering, which was the way he acted when he knew he’d messed up and felt self-conscious. We arrived on the west side of the stadium and saw the ushers walking into a double-doored entrance, which was propped wide open. Dad motioned furtively for us to follow him, all cloak and dagger. Maddy, who was eleven years old, stopped outside the doors. She knew we weren’t supposed to go in without them taking our tickets. Fergus grabbed her and dragged her in, and by that point Dad had cut to the right while the guards turned left. We met him at the base of a series of concrete ramps.
“Yes!” Dad said. “First ones in.”
“We’ll be the first kicked out,” Coyle said. “We’re not supposed to be in here.”
“They didn’t take our tickets,” Maddy said.
“Didn’t you ever sneak into a movie?” Dad said.
“No,” Fergus said. “Did you?”
“All the time,” Dad said.
This was news to us. Dad turned to Maddy.
“Don’t worry. We have tickets. We’re not doing anything wrong.”
“I actually think we’re trespassing,” Coyle said.
Dad began to reply, but then music echoed through the empty walkways. It was the muffled first notes of “Turn the Page” coming from inside the stadium.
“Yes!” Dad said, holding a fist up. “Sound check. Let’s go.”
“We’ll get kicked out,” Coyle said.
Dad gave Coyle a derisive look.
“Are you a wuss?”
“Wuss,” Fergus said to Coyle.
“We’re missing it!” Dad said.
Dad hurried up the ramp and disappeared somewhere above us.
“Should we go after him?” Coyle said to me.
“How should I know?” I said.
“We snuck in,” Maddy said. “We’ll get in trouble.”
“We’ll just say we were following our father,” Coyle said. “It’ll be him who gets in trouble.”
Dad was above us somewhere, sprinting up the concrete ramps. Being that close to the great man overrode all sense of caution. Seger was doing his sound check!
We were left alone with Coyle. Since Dad’s medical scare, our father had become less insanely concerned about our every action, but strangely, Coyle had become more attentive to us, as if our father and Coyle had switched places. We waited for Coyle to tell us what to do.
After a moment, he said, “Dad’s being an idiot, but we better follow him.”
We walked up the ramps after our father. We entered a concrete hallway that opened up into the vast, gloomy stadium. Far away we saw the lit figures of the band wandering around onstage. Dad was already halfway down to the ground floor when we arrived in the open area of the stadium. Dad waved to us furtively and kept on going down into the gloom. Coyle, Fergus, Maddy, and I muttered about how we weren’t supposed to be there and we’d definitely get kicked out and how we should be hiding, not walking right up to the stage, but we followed him.
Dad walked to around the twentieth row and then cut into the aisle and we came up and sat next to him, the five of us slumped in the unlit stadium, whil
e onstage, twenty yards away, Bob Seger, Dad’s favorite musician of all time, was talking with a soundman. Dad motioned to us, making sure we were taking it in. There he was. The rock god! Bob Seger! And we were there for the sound check. Yes!
The soundman walked off and Seger turned to his band—one, two, three—and kicked into “Against the Wind,” and at that moment Dad just about lost his mind. He was bouncing up and down and shaking his fist and smiling from ear to ear.
I was not a fan of Bob Seger. By the age of sixteen I had put classic rock behind me. I liked REM and U2 and Elvis Costello. I thought Seger was cheesy and for old people. And even if I had liked him, which I didn’t, Dad’s unbridled enthusiasm would have turned me against him.
But I have to admit, despite my skepticism, Seger sounded pretty good. Even in the sound check he seemed like he was having a good time. He seemed like he got along with the guys in the band. He put his heart into it.
So Seger played “Against the Wind” and Dad was rocking back and forth in his seat, utterly pleased with himself, checking us every few moments to make sure we understood that we were getting our own special concert. Seger went on to play “Mainstreet” and “The Fire Down Below” and the first chords of “Rock and Roll Never Forgets.” Soundmen and musicians were talking over the songs, giving instructions, but the band went on playing and got through the entirety of “Mary Lou” and then started in on “Night Moves.” Despite myself, I thought “Night Moves” was a pretty good song, and for about six minutes the five of us sat there, transfixed. As much as we liked to mock our father, to say that he was crazy, that he had no common sense, we had to admit that he had led us on some unique adventures and had thrown himself into his duties as a father wholeheartedly, and for that moment, listening to “Night Moves,” we all felt pretty good about being together there at that concert. For our entire lives we’d been told that other kids got special things but we didn’t because our situation was different. We had to accept what we could get. But now Bob Seger was playing a concert just for us. And it was pretty nice.
The song ended. Seger jumped off the stage and started toward the open doors, where daylight filtered in. His bus waited just outside.
“Stay here,” Dad said, and started down the aisle.
“Where’s he going?” Coyle said.
“To be an idiot,” Fergus said.
“Let’s go,” Maddy whispered.
“I’m not missing this,” Fergus said.
Dad walked up to the stage and stepped right in front of Bob Seger as he went toward his bus. Dad held his hand out.
“Just wanted to shake your hand. I love your music,” Dad said.
It was so quiet in there we could hear every word.
“Cool, man,” Seger said.
They shook hands.
“Good music,” Dad said with all the force he could muster. “Really good music.”
“Thanks. Glad you like it.”
Dad pumped his hand some more, then Bob Seger said thanks again and pulled his hand away and walked on. A security guard was already approaching Dad from behind. He took him by the elbow and began to lead him out.
“Busted,” Fergus said.
“Let’s go,” Maddy said.
The four of us walked back along the aisle in the direction we’d come. We made our way up the steps and then down the ramps and when we walked back out into the parking lot we found Dad standing near our car.
“I shook Bob Seger’s hand! The guy looks like a lowlife, but he makes good music.”
“You hear that?” Fergus said. “He looks like a lowlife.”
“But we’ll forgive him,” I said. “He makes good music.”
“He sort of looks like your friends,” Dad said to Coyle.
“Imagine that,” Coyle said.
About four hours later the real concert started and our seats were so far away that the guys in the band were just dots in the distance. But all the time we were watching the concert we knew that we’d had our own special performance beforehand.
On the way home that night Dad talked about the sound check and how it was a special thing just for us, and at first I liked that he mentioned it. It was true. It was a good moment. But over the following days Dad kept going on and on about the sound check and the more he talked about it the more it started to bug me. I could see that it wasn’t just a memory at a good moment. He wanted that concert to be this legendary thing that we’d all remember, something that would be a barrier between us and our childhood difficulties. And I guess I can understand his wanting to draw a line in the sand, to have a fresh start, but the thing is, I didn’t want our past struggles to be forgotten, either. For me it was a question of being truthful. The fights had happened. I wasn’t going to deny them. If anything, I wanted to remember them vividly, even to exaggerate them, to accept them as part of our story. I told myself that if my parents were going to try to make this fantasy version of our childhood, then I was going to hold even tighter to my version of events. I was going to be the one in the family who remembered.
* * *
—
The winning team in the coupon book competition usually sold somewhere between five and seven hundred books, which meant five thousand to seven thousand dollars raised. A team could get receipts from only five people, but the easiest way to fudge on this was to get coupon books from other kids and pool them together on a single team. That was considered normal and even essential to be a contender for the award. Most people didn’t want to work without recognition, so human nature kept this method in check, but, as it turned out, Coyle’s friends didn’t care if they got credit for their sales. They just wanted to stick it to Liam and Tom, whom they’d never liked. It didn’t help that Liam and Tom called their team the Gladiators—a name we mocked relentlessly. Our team was the Choppers, after the bikes Coyle and his friends rode.
The sales went on for four weeks, and I found that I was better at selling than Coyle, who would just hold a book up and say, “You want one or not?”
Selling seemed like begging to Coyle. He just couldn’t do it.
I, on the other hand, had no problem begging. I would wheedle, cajole, banter, and make deals. I wasn’t above making myself look pathetic. I was articulate and looked like I was about twelve years old and I came in with more sales than anyone else, except Robert, who hadn’t been lying when he said he was a good salesman.
Coyle managed the crews, took in the sales slips, and tallied them. He ran the business end and made sure the salespeople showed up to work. Robert ran the sales crew and for four weeks we all worked together, and by the end, as far as we could tell, we were beating the Gladiators by at least a hundred coupon books, probably more.
One afternoon in the last week of sales after we’d all gotten used to working with one another, we were in the backyard and Robert walked out to where Coyle’s bike was parked. It was a warm day and Robert was wearing his cutoff khaki pants and a pastel tennis shirt and high-top sneakers. He glanced back at Coyle as he reached the bike, to see if it was ok, and Coyle nodded that it was ok. Three and a half years before they’d fought because Coyle would not let Robert touch the bike. Now Coyle agreed offhandedly.
Robert threw a leg over the bike. He kick-started the engine and put the bike into gear and gave it a little gas. The bike eased forward and Robert rode slowly around the backyard once, and then a second time, then brought the bike back to the spot where he’d gotten on it.
“Take it out on the road if you want,” Coyle called. “I don’t care.”
“That’s all right. Thanks.”
Robert turned the bike off and walked back, holding a fist up, saying, “I finally got to ride your bike.”
“Only took you four years to get permission,” Fergus said.
Coyle saw me watching all of this. He knew what I was thinking. He had let Robert
ride it but he still didn’t want me touching it. There had been a warming between us over the last years, but a part of me resisted this warming of relations, and I think part of Coyle resisted it as well.
“When you match Robert in sales you can ride it, too,” Coyle called.
He said it as a joke, but I knew the prohibition against touching his bike wasn’t a joke. I’d only ridden it that one time with my father. Coyle had never said it was ok. The bike was still a sore spot between us. I guess I didn’t blame him after I’d hit him with the gun, but it bugged me. Everyone could ride it—even Robert—but not me.
* * *
—
On the last week of the sales period, the only neighborhood we had left to cover was the richest one in Indian Hills, a private development that lined the golf course. We had saved that neighborhood for last because many of the houses had gates so you could not get to the front doors, and the houses were so far apart that it wasn’t efficient to walk between them. Robert, Coyle, Fergus, and I were going one way on the Ring Road when we saw Liam and Tom and Doug walking the other way. They were three of the five members of the Gladiators, and as we passed Liam called out, “This is private property.”
“Just ignore them,” Robert said, but Fergus yelled out, “Private for you, too.”
“I live here,” Liam said complacently.
“Do you really?” Fergus said with mock admiration.
Robert and Coyle snickered.
“Come on over here and say that,” Liam said.
“I don’t care,” Fergus said. “I’ll come over.”
Fergus handed his backpack to Coyle and started across the street toward Liam and Tom and Doug, who were standing along some clipped hedges. Fergus was a stocky fourteen-year-old at that time, with his straight brown hair, a loose-limbed, rolling, athletic way of walking, and a cheerful, sarcastic, joking manner. Liam, who was eighteen, had droopy eyes, shaggy blond hair, and a thuggish demeanor. He played defensive line on the football team and had broken a quarterback’s arm that year. I’d also heard he’d choked his girlfriend in the hallway. He was not a nice kid.
The Brother Years Page 18