My Father Before Me

by Chris Forhan

  51

  Entering high school, I had left my junior high heart behind me. My ardor for Cherie had cooled, then vanished. This puzzled me; my pure, earnest desire for her had felt so unwaveringly true, so much an axiom of my existence on earth, that I had presumed it would remain a lodestar until my death, a fixed fact by which my happiness would forever be measured. But now I was suddenly, seemingly permanently, ecstatically unhappy about someone else: Sue, a cute, thoughtful, quiet girl in my typing class, an impassioned Catholic who had room in her heart only for Christ, then later for a muscled lunk named Tim, but I was counting on my guileless charm and devotion and tenacity to lure her away from both of them and into my arms. How little it takes to believe the unlikely, to let desire do reason’s work. Sue knew I liked her—I told her; everyone told her. She kind of liked me, too, enough to flash me a bashful smile when we passed in the halls; enough to let me walk with her the half mile to her home from school, after which I retraced my steps to begin the walk to my home; enough, even, to go out with me a couple of times: to a baseball game, to a movie. But she didn’t like me enough, finally. She could not be my girlfriend, she explained to me. Instead, she would always be my good friend. And isn’t that, she mused, more to be valued, really? No, I thought. No, it isn’t. It is not to be valued.

  Thwarted, with nowhere outside me to go, my desires were channeled back inward, into poetry, into song. In memory, my junior and senior years in high school are a long, dim, drizzly winter afternoon. I sit alone in my room, drafting and redrafting lines of poetry in which my unimpeachable feelings for Sue, cruelly spurned, refuse to die; they make a clamorous sound but a coded one—they are expressed in references only she would recognize. Sue alone would be able to construe my meaning should she ever—Please, Lord—ask to read one of those poems I keep reminding her that I write, or should she ever discover a piece of paper lying conspicuously on my desk in typing class, as if, oops, I’ve accidentally left it there, and should she, curious, pick it up, and study it, and bite her lip, and place her fingers gently against her chest, then read it again, slowly, then again, until she knows it by heart and understands me at last and regrets her foolishness and admits to herself that she wants me for her own. It’s my last, best hope. When not writing a poem, I am gazing at Sue’s photo tacked to my wall while I sing along with my records. Every song is about her. This is easy to imagine when I’m listening to Electric Light Orchestra’s “Can’t Get It Out of My Head” or Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ “The Wild One, Forever.” It is harder when the song is Blue Öyster Cult’s “7 Screaming Diz-Busters.”

  I wasn’t listening much to the Beatles anymore—certainly not to Paul McCartney’s solo work. With “Silly Love Songs” riding high on the charts, he and his new band were coming to town, but I wasn’t going. All that cloying gooeyness: I was disdainful of it. McCartney was irrelevant, I thought, a goofy tunesmith, a candy salesman. He was okay. He’d done some things in the 1960s. But he was no Supertramp.

  When I told Al that I wouldn’t be going to the concert, he looked at me straight: “Don’t be a dumb shit. It’s Paul McCartney. It’s a Beatle. He comes to town, you see him.”

  We saw him. Trusting me again even after the beer fiasco, my mother agreed to let me drive the Dodge to the show. In the seat where my father had lain his head for the last time, I rattled down the freeway with Al and a couple of other friends, and soon, in the dark, under the concrete dome of Seattle’s new functional gray hunk of a sports stadium, I was standing among sixty-seven thousand people, and there he was: Paul, a football field away but there nonetheless, an actual Beatle, visiting from my past, visiting from another world, from his world, wherever that was—Paul, in glimmering black satin pants and jacket, Paul leaning forward at the black piano, belting out a song of amazement about his love for his wife, whom he couldn’t stand to be without, whom he would never dream of leaving, who even now stood just feet away from him, crooning along with his song, which was her song.

  A few months later, he released a recording from that concert tour, and I played some of the songs on the school radio station: fifteen hundred watts of solid power, 89.5 on your FM dial. Though the signal reached throughout Seattle, we never sensed that we had many listeners. The station was operated by students—amateur broadcasters who might yearn to be accomplished professionals one day but whose main job now was to avoid sounding too nervous and bumbling and creaky-voiced. I found a home at the station, an identity: I was one of the radio guys. I liked the idea of being on the air; it confirmed me, even if that me wasn’t me, exactly. Two years earlier, I had hidden in the clothes, and behind the grizzled voice, of Bick Bark. Now I would hide behind my own voice. With the live microphone inches from my lips, I was unavoidably present, appearing in a stranger’s home or car—if only by accident, while he was searching on the dial for another station; at the same time, I was alone, safe in the studio, almost anonymous, a name without a face. My obligation was to speak not my heartfelt thoughts but a disc jockey’s practiced, impersonal patter.

  We played the hits and oldies and album tracks and, on Saturdays, jazz. Sundays were silent. The students had the run of the station, mainly. We chose the music to be played, although the one among us who was program director was required to listen to each track on every new album, keeping an ear out for vulgarities. If he heard a profanity or a reference to genitalia, he marked the track as unplayable. One day we discovered that even irony could be taboo. One of us played, on the air, Randy Newman’s new single, in which he sang, “Short people have no reason to live.” We thought the song screamingly funny, an over-the-top, unsubtle comic attack on mindless prejudice. We got it—it was difficult not to—but Mr. Adams, our faculty adviser, was not amused. The song demeaned short people, he said; it would not be played again on his station. Mr. Adams himself was decidedly short. The satirical nature of the song was lost on him. It went right over his head.

  Satire, sarcasm, irony: these were the stock-in-trade for my friends and me—safe modes in which to express ourselves without fully expressing ourselves, we who were made of need and nervous glances, who were generally embarrassed, inept, and monosyllabic when it came to sincere, serious talk. It was a mode of discourse familiar to me from my home. When our father had fallen into the habit of inserting into conversations the statement “Well, it’s relative,” we had responded each time, in unison, “Relative to what?”—ignoring the substance of his thought and instead poking fun at his fussy inexactitude. When I entered the kitchen one afternoon and caught my little sister rapidly stashing an unpermitted bowl of ice cream in a cabinet, I flew into mock fury, raising my fists toward the ceiling and screaming, “How dare you!” I took comfort in pretending that something mattered when it didn’t, in mocking those who cared passionately about the irrelevant. All the while I was unmindful of how this habit could be a means of self-protection: a way of not speaking aloud, and unironically, of the things that do matter.

  MAD magazine and National Lampoon and Monty Python’s Flying Circus: these were the master practitioners of the humor my friends and I prized. The jokes we told felt accurate as expressions of the jokes we felt ourselves to be; they arose from our hunch that existence is absurd and unfathomable—that the mere fact of being was worth making fun of. At its best, such humor was evidence of our humble refusal to presume: evidence of our attentiveness to the existentially unknowable, of our distrust of the falseness of convention, and of our wide-eyed appreciation of people’s common humanity. At its worst, it was evidence of our cruelty and stupidity.

  Al, his brother Kurt, and Scott had started a punk band—the Cheaters—and devoted much of their time, when not practicing or inventing absurd and comical logos for the group, to haunting radio station lobbies and record stores and downtown clubs and theaters where they might cross paths with musicians. They met Graham Parker and Cheap Trick. Teaming with an amateur photographer acquaintance, they stalked the members of
KISS at their downtown hotel and took pictures of them without makeup; the band’s manager grabbed the camera and stripped the film from it. When the Ramones came to town, my friends and I lingered outside the theater after the concert, keeping our eyes out for a Ramone, any Ramone. At last, Dee Dee, in his mop of black hair, leather jacket, and torn jeans, strolled out the side door and down the sidewalk. We followed at an indiscreet distance, waiting for whatever might come next, waiting to decide why we were trailing him. Then Scott yelled, “Dee Dee! Get out your knife! I’ve got mine! Ramone! It’s a rumble, just you and me.” Dee Dee turned around, sneered, chuckled, and kept walking. Scott had no knife. He had no interest in fighting a Ramone. His interest was in pretending to be the sort of person who was interested in fighting a Ramone.

  I think of myself in such moments—and they were continual throughout high school—as being almost invisible, a peripheral figure, a voice on the radio but not a real person willing to show his face, a watcher, not a member of the band, just a hanger-on, a junior high friend of the bass player with nothing to do but go where he and his friends went. The world they were becoming citizens of was a real world, an identifiable one, with distinctive rituals and knowledge whose shape and significance remained always just beyond me. The Cheaters cut a single and landed a couple of gigs as an opening act at the Bird, a punk club that hosted shows of local bands and others driving up from Los Angeles or San Francisco. As we entered the club one night, we overheard an exuberant spiky-haired guy who was pointing to a button on his shirt. It said DEVO. I had no idea what the word referred to. “Devo is it now,” he pronounced rhapsodically, evangelically. “Mark my words: there’s no other band. Devo is all that’s going to matter from now on.” Inside the club, the audience, meager but crazed, in slashed T-shirts and frayed Army jackets, hunks of metal dangling from their ears and noses, squeezed toward the lip of the stage and pogoed or taunted the musicians, tossing popcorn at them, and the bands retaliated by spitting back. In my JCPenney clothes—flared jeans, plaid button-down shirt, and down jacket—I kept my distance, leaning against a far wall that was squiggly with graffiti. Occasionally, amid the music’s sloppy thrash and drone, its frantic motion, I heard something that entered me and stayed put. “Jesus Christ is a monkey on your back!” railed the singer of one band. The song was “Boss on the Cross.” It was audacious and funny and true and, while it lasted, made me forget my suburban shopping-mall clothes.

  At home, the music I listened to was often something new that I had smuggled out of the radio station. In the fall of my senior year, I had begun playing on the air a song by a new artist with a comical name: Elvis Costello. “Alison” was gorgeous and tender and bitter and sad—I decided I should take this guy’s album home. On the cover of the record, called My Aim Is True, the singer looked nothing like the swaggering, glamorous, shampooed stars in satin pants whom I was used to seeing on album covers. He was skinny, gawky, splay-legged, and pigeon-toed, and he wore nerdy black-rimmed glasses, but he was grinning deviously and throttling the neck of his electric guitar as if he could kill me with it. Elvis Presley had died three months earlier, and on the cover of this new Elvis’s record was printed, top to bottom, over and over, brooking no dissent, “Elvis is king.” Who was this guy? I put the needle in the groove, and then I kept it there: day after day, after walking home from school, I put the album on, listened to it all the way through, and listened to the whole thing again, then again. The more I listened, the more I understood who this guy was: he was me.

  The songs trembled with desire, vitriol, disillusionment, and guilt. They were witty and enraged and self-implicating, their pithy images boiling over with intelligence and pain. Elvis sang to someone of loving her more than everything in the world but not expecting that to last. He sang of a woman who, as detectives drag the lake for a corpse, coolly files her fingernails. He sang of feeling like a juggler with too few hands. I hadn’t realized a person could say these things, or say them in this way; I hadn’t known for certain that what I felt, others felt. The album was a stone tablet carved with eternal verities, a gift of permission handed down to me from a cloud. Elvis was all that was going to matter from now on.

  Kevin had moved out of the house by then, into a tiny furnished studio apartment over his landlord’s garage. One afternoon he was back home visiting, and I brought the record upstairs and told him that he had to hear it. I pulled the disc from its sleeve, slipped it onto the turntable of the family stereo, and played my two or three favorite songs. “Hmm,” he said. “Pretty good. There’s a little reggae beat there.”

  A few months later, walking through north Seattle, miles from home, I saw, blocks away and strolling toward me, my brother, of all people, even farther from his own apartment. I hadn’t seen him in weeks, but here we were, sharing the same unexpected route. We stopped to greet each other, amused by the coincidence. “Hey,” I said. “What are you doing?”

  “Singing the entire album of My Aim Is True to myself.”

  “Me, too,” I replied.

  When Elvis came to town, I made sure to see him. Even after moving across the state to college the next year, I took a Greyhound back to Seattle in the middle of the week to see Elvis’s show with Al. He and his band played for a furious forty minutes, speeding up the tempo of each song, hurtling through it as if they couldn’t wait to get offstage. Between numbers, Elvis said hardly a word. Then he stomped off.

  Was he done? Was this it already? We cheered and cheered—we kept our side of the bargain—but we could not persuade him to return for an encore. Instead, probably at the direction of Elvis, in order to clear the room, someone sent an ear-piercing, unrelenting squeal of feedback through the speakers. Beside me, Al dropped into his seat. He began to shiver, his face expressionless, his eyes wide. I shook his shoulders. “Al!” I said. “Al! Are you okay? Speak to me!” He was pretending to be catatonic; I was pretending not to know that he was pretending. It was a thing we did: letting a moment of reality become suddenly, easily, the backdrop of a fiction we were enacting. It came naturally to us—a way of living slightly to the side of life, of watching it while watching ourselves watching it. “Let me help,” a stranger next to us yelled through the noise. “Let’s find a doctor for your friend.” The jig was up. Al stopped trembling, stood up, and followed me and the rest of the crowd streaming out the doors and onto the sidewalk.

  We had slipped into such playacting at an earlier concert, too. In the Coliseum, the big arena downtown where the Sonics played their games, Al and Kurt and Scott and I stood on the main floor, shoulder to shoulder among thousands of fans listening to an opening act of little interest to us. It might have been Ted Nugent. We had come for the main act—Cheap Trick? Blue Öyster Cult? I don’t remember. What I remember is that Al and I—simultaneously realizing that, standing there, we could be mistaken for numbskull teens grooving to numbskull music—decided to entertain ourselves by pretending to be numbskulls, the sort of humorless louts who often mystified us. Al pushed me. “Hey, man!” I yelled. I threw myself at him and wrapped my arms around his head. He slipped out and took a wild fictional swing at me, and I swung back. We were giddy, distracting ourselves from the dumb, unironic music by acting dumb and unironic. And then someone’s arms were encircling my chest and squeezing hard—a security guard’s—and then another guard was joining him, and they were lifting me off the ground, and Al was disappearing into the crowd, and they were hauling me away, pointing me toward the exit door, yelling, “Out! You fight, you’re gone!” and the door was slamming shut behind me, and I was outside, alone, in the dark and cold and silence.

  I had nothing to do, nowhere to go. My friends were my ride home. I hoisted myself onto a low concrete wall. I sat and waited. After a few minutes, chilled from sitting still, I slipped down off the wall, paced up and down on the sidewalk for a while, then sat on the wall again.

  Two hours later, waves of concertgoers surged out of the arena. Al, Kurt, and
Scott found me waiting. They enjoyed the requisite laugh at my expense, and we drove home.

  While being carried off the arena floor, I had complained, desperately, bitterly, to the guards, “But we were kidding! It was a joke!” It did not matter: they saw what they saw. It would not have helped my case if I had argued, “Don’t you understand? Nothing means anything.”

  52

  At the radio station, I had worked my way up to being the morning disc jockey. Five days a week, I arrived early to school, warmed up the transmitter, and, at seven o’clock, began the broadcast day. For ninety minutes, playing songs by Neil Young, James Taylor, and Joni Mitchell, I was a voice in the air. While introducing the names of records and bands, while announcing the weather forecast, while encouraging listeners to call with requests, while extemporizing—I hoped—with a delightfully dry wit, practicing my enunciation and my seeming naturalness, acting as though I were every listener’s mellow friend, I was only a small part of myself: a part I could control and perfect, in the dark.

  By the time of Kurt’s late-afternoon shift, the music on the air got harsher, louder, more electric and strange: the New York Dolls, Roxy Music, Frank Zappa, the Tubes. Al worked at the station, too—and Paul, who had little interest in music but who had a golden voice and a holy devotion to broadcasting and ended up making a lifetime career of it. Anthony, happy and angular, all bones and hair like a picked-at Brillo pad, worked behind the scenes as an engineer alongside Dan, an occasional DJ and tireless prankster.

  Dan’s dad was a vampire. Every weekend, he rose from the dead. I’d seen him: the Count, the host of Channel Seven’s Nightmare Theater. Late each Friday night, to the sound of distant howling, the camera panned toward a coffin, whose lid creaked open to reveal a skeleton in repose. Slowly the bones took on flesh and movement, and then, black-caped, fanged, and pallid, Dan’s dad sat up, cackled, and, through thin, bloodred lips, introduced The Bride of Frankenstein or The Creature with the Blue Hand.