Shotgun Lovesongs: A Novel

by Butler, Nickolas

  “We have been married,” I said, swallowing, “four fucking months.”

  I knew people in Little Wing who had been married half a century.

  “It feels like forever,” she said, examining the illuminated screen of her cell. “You know?”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t. I’m totally fucking confused.”

  I knew then that she was going to break my heart.

  “Look,” she said, “I think I’m going to crash at Jenna’s house tonight. Let’s have coffee tomorrow?”

  I leaned across the table, whispered, “Chloe, we are married. We don’t sleep in separate beds. We don’t sleep at other peoples’ places.” I took her hand in mine. I took her hand with more pressure than gently. I took her hand a little less firmly than if she were dangling off the side of a building. “Chloe?”

  She looked at me. Looked at my hair, my shaggy beard, my long ears, the tattoos, my skin. I know that look. I know my body. I’m not a movie star; I don’t look like Ronny or Henry—big Midwestern guys, all brawn and gallant rodeo sunlight and black-loam hands. I’ve slept with more women than I care to remember, but I know that look.

  A woman will think she can fall in love with you because you can write a song, because you can touch some raw emotional nerve that most people don’t even bother thinking about. Because you can write a fucking lovesong. Because you’re famous. And for one night: you’re golden. I’ve been golden all over the world. Been golden with women whose names would make you blush, they’re so beautiful and so famous for it. Been golden with two, three, four women at once. All of their mouths on me, their tongues. But I also can’t tell you the number of mornings when those women were gone before I even woke up, before I’d finished my morning shower. Suddenly, after they’ve consumed you, after they’ve peeled away all your armor and your privacy, they see you’re just an average guy. An average white guy from a small town in Wisconsin.

  “You ever been to Wisconsin?” I’d ask them. “It’s the most beautiful place in the world. Great lakes, big forests, rolling hills, the Mississippi.”

  “Is that near Montana?” they’d ask. “Because it sounds like Montana.”

  “No,” I’d say, “it’s north of Chicago.”

  A surprising number of them can’t find Chicago on an atlas of America, even if you tell them it’s in Illinois, or on a Great Lake.

  Two weeks after that dinner, I was reading about rumors of my own divorce in the papers, avoiding the outside world. New York isn’t, wasn’t ever my town. I never felt comfortable there. The speed of things, the lights, the fashion, the money. And after the separation I liked the city even less. I could never go anywhere without a troupe of photographers following me, pestering me, asking me personal questions that I didn’t have the answers to. “What happened? Where did Chloe go? Where is she living? Hey! Yo Corvus!” The upshot of the marriage dying early was that I didn’t have to sell a house, didn’t have to move much. I rented a U-Haul truck, pulled in front of our building, and ended up taking a couch, a leather chair, a new television, my books, guitars, and the picture Kip and Felicia had given “us” for the wedding. I paid a bum fifty bucks to help me carry the heavy stuff; I would have called a friend, but I really didn’t have any in New York. All of our friends were actually Chloe’s friends. I left three thousand dollars in cash on the kitchen counter and a note telling her to call my attorney in Little Wing if she wanted to talk to me. The number I scribbled down was Eddy Moffitt’s. He might not have been a lawyer exactly, but I knew he’d handle the situation with aplomb and good humor. I also doubted very much that Chloe would remember Eddy, though I’m sure I had introduced them on more than one occasion.

  When I emerged from the building for the last time, I stood on the sidewalk and smoked a cigarette, took a last look at the city. The doorman left his post, stood beside me, and then said, like he’d never seen me before, “Sir, I’d appreciate it if you could smoke over there.” He pointed with a white-gloved finger to an alley full of dripping Dumpsters, thick brown puddles, and wet newspaper.

  “Hey, Tino. It’s me,” I said. “It’s Lee. Chloe’s husband. Remember?”

  He folded his arms over his chest, frowned at me.

  I stubbed out my cigarette in front of her building, spat in the street, said, “Hey Tino. The Yankees suck.”

  I admired the covert way in which he managed to grab his crotch and flip me the bird, right there in his navy blue velveteen doorman’s uniform, and all with the grace and arrogance of a true, blue-collar New Yorker.

  * * *

  People ask me about the title of that first album and I’ve told dozens of different magazines dozens of different stories, trying to make my lie original each time. I’ve told people it’s an homage to Guns N’ Roses. I’ve told people that it's about a suicide that happened, three towns over, each time changing the number of towns over or the cardinal direction in which that journalist ought to head. I’ve told people that it’s about being heartbroken—and that might be the closest thing to the truth. They ask me about the songs, about my process, and I can honestly say that I’ve never been rude to any of my fans—to the press, maybe, but not to my fans. I feel pretty goddamned lucky to have made it—to be a musician, professionally. But it isn’t necessarily comfortable for me to talk about that album, because the fact is, I was in a pretty dark place when I put it together.

  Because what happened was this: after those first few bands didn’t pan out, after we’d disbanded and gone our separate ways, I came back home to Wisconsin, licking my wounds, my tail between my legs, waving a white flag—all that shit. I was as embarrassed back then as I was now, after the divorce. The only difference between then and now was that now I had money. I didn’t have to worry about who was going to sell my next record.

  I had returned to Wisconsin on Halloween. It was a perfect Midwestern day that buoyed my spirits: fast-moving clouds traveling over a blue, blue sky, and cool, fresh air that smelled of rain and the western prairies. I whipped through Chicago along Lakeshore Drive, great whitecaps crashing against the concrete shore, towers of industry hulking up and over me to the west, clouds breaking against those buildings only to reunite beyond them. I remember thinking about Kip, up there somewhere, or perhaps deeper in that city, in the Loop, on the floor of the exchange, shouting imaginary numbers, flinging pink paper in the air, and flashing hand signals like a third base coach. The truth was, I had no idea what his job was like. But I knew then that he was making it, making a name for himself. All along the Gold Coast, I stared out my window and thought to myself, Fuck you, Kipper. Though, Kip had never wronged me in any way. I had no legitimate reason to resent his success. I continued north and west, through endless suburbs and tollbooths, until I reached the flatlands of northern Illinois, where the earth looks as smooth and dull as if the planet were a giant cube sailing through outer space, nothing to break the monotony but a huge automobile factory, a few roadside “oases,” and an endless series of heavy-duty electrical poles and wires, carrying energy away from the Dakotas and Canada and into the metropolis of Chicago.

  * * *

  My parents divorced after I graduated high school. It was a quiet separation, I suppose. As far as I know, there was no infidelity, no drugs, no gambling, no problems with booze. None of the normal reasons. I don’t think of my parents as particularly interesting people, but apparently, ever since my birth they’d been growing away from each other. I heard my father once, in the garage, say to my uncle Jerry on the cordless telephone, “We just don’t have anything left to say to one another. We don’t like the same things. I just don’t see what the point is anymore. Nobody’s happy.” So while I was touring the back-roads bars and bingo halls of the Midwest, while my bands and I drove the American coasts or toured western Europe, my parents sold my childhood home and went their own ways, Dad taking a job as a warehouse manager in Arizona, Mom moving back to her hometown in northern Minnesota, along the Canadian border, where she found work as a secr
etary and Sunday school coordinator in the church where they’d been married.

  “I don’t need much anymore,” she explained to me. “I bought a small house up there with a lot of space for gardens. It’ll be good to see so many familiar faces.” I imagined her licking the envelopes of church mailings and restocking brightly colored construction paper.

  And Dad: “I wanted to try living someplace warm for a while. Enough of this shoveling snow bullshit. Someplace warm. I got an apartment in a complex. Across the street there’s a cantina where I go for dinner every night. I drink Coronas and eat tacos, except they taste way better than your mom’s tacos in those hard shells. You should come down. Pretty Mexican girls. We’ll sit by the pool, drink beer together. Drive in the desert looking at cacti.”

  And so they left me homeless, Little Wing being the only place I really knew, despite trotting the globe. Little Wing, where all my friends were. Where I could always score a Friday or Saturday night gig at the VFW if I wanted to try out new material. Hell, I could even play covers all night long. And even if Henry wasn’t there then, I knew he would be in the future—I knew he’d come back. And Ronny. Out on the rodeo circuit—out in who knows where—Butte or Bozeman or Billings, Las Vegas or Laramie or Las Cruces. I had a hunch Ronny would come back someday too.

  Because Ronny was Little Wing’s first celebrity. I still remember the night he appeared up on the television set at the VFW one Friday night. The bar was packed, the whole town there. Ronny was slated to ride a bull named Texas Tornado, a black ten-gallon Stetson pulled tight to his head, everything about Ronny tight. His forearms bulging almost grotesquely in the paddock as the bull surged impatiently beneath him. His face so chiseled, so focused. His Wrangler blue jeans practically sewn directly onto his thighs they were so tight and a big silver buckle over his crotch, like a welterweight title belt, like a proclamation saying “World’s Biggest Dick.”

  When that paddock door burst open into the brown dirt arena there in Amarillo, Texas, we all gasped. And then cheered. God, did we cheer—the whole town against that bull—all of us hollering, spilling beer, jumping up and down and pressing up against one another, and Ronny—that cool son of a bitch—hanging on for all he was worth, one hand high in the air, as if pleading for applause, the other like a lanyard attached fast to the bull. Silver spurs shining, black hat bounced off, V-shaped hooves kicking into the air, bull-snot flying. Eight seconds to glory, and when a rescuing horse came to take him off that bull we shook that bar to its very timbers. God, was I proud. And Ronny, scooping that Stetson off the dirt and then bowing to the crowd like a real, bona fide cowboy, an American matador, before scaling a fence beside the paddock to wait for his scores.

  He won that rodeo. A five-thousand-dollar purse and a new shiny buckle and everyone in Little Wing thinking, Shit, Ronny Taylor is a rich man! Ronny is a goddamned TV celebrity!

  I wanted what he had, I guess. I wanted to come back to Little Wing and have the girls from our high school, girls like Beth, come up to me at the VFW and stick their tongue in my ear, tell me how beautiful and rare I was, how they wanted to have my babies, how they wanted me to tie them to a bed frame in the motel between Little Wing and Eau Claire, that eight-room motel where we went as kids sometimes to smoke marijuana, where sometimes two guys and two girls would take two beds and two bottles of Jack and sometimes in that room the math became a little fuzzy, and a loyalty to one bed or one lover became blurry at best and sometimes it was three of us and sometimes it was all four, on a bed or on the floor, sixteen limbs intertwined and in the morning, too many people for one small motel room and not hardly enough towels.

  * * *

  So I drove through southern Wisconsin, past Madison, past the Dells, and farther north, the aspen trees so yellow that when a shaft of sunlight hit them it actually looked like a sound, like a high-pitched musical note so pure it was hard to keep my eyes open—the sound of some divine sword splitting the air. And the maples, their reds as bold as the hearts we colored back in elementary school, those paper hearts we crayoned the hell out of to give to our mothers. I drove faster. Embarrassed that I was coming back with nothing in my hands, to show for myself, embarrassed that I wasn’t a superstar, but so happy to be home.

  Stopping at the IGA to pick up a celebratory sixer, I saw a handwritten note in an unsteady cursive advertising a room in a farmhouse outside of town at the ridiculously low rate of a hundred dollars a month. There was a telephone number and a county road address. I had about four thousand dollars cash saved up from our gigs and from odd jobs I’d worked on certain tours. I knew that if things ever got dire I could also sell my car, a dilapidated powder blue AMC Gremlin. I dialed the number and arranged to meet with the “landlord,” an obviously elderly woman named Bea Cather.

  She seemed to like me immediately, though maybe she was just lonely for visitors. She invited me in for lunch—tuna sandwiches, stale potato chips, homemade pickles, whole milk. We sat at her kitchen table looking out at an expansive backyard that led out toward endless acres of corn. Birdhouses and feeders spaced about every ten feet. Yard tchotchkes, garden gnomes, and purple-blue reflecting balls littering the space out there.

  “I could mow that yard for you,” I offered.

  “Oh, that’s sweet of you, but Joaquin’s already got that taken care of.”

  “Joaquin?”

  “One of my other tenants.”

  I heard footsteps above us, the faint sound of a radio.

  “How many other tenants live here?”

  “Right now, three. Four, if you include me. And the dog.”

  “This is going to sound kind of funny,” I said, “but … I don’t have any furniture.”

  “Don’t worry, dear, the room I have’s already furnished. There isn’t much up there, but it should suffice.”

  “Oh, and I’d like to pay you ahead of time. Six months. Is that okay?”

  I pulled out a wad of cash and counted out six one-hundred-dollar bills, laid them on the table.

  Bea raised a white eyebrow, looked at me over her reading glasses. “You aren’t one of those meth cookers, are you? I don’t need any drug dealers around here.”

  “No, ma’am,” I said, “I’m a musician.”

  * * *

  The best thing about touring, about music festivals, about new cities, is meeting other musicians. I’m at a place in my life right now where I can pick up a phone and call my label or my agent and get pretty much anyone’s number. I have Bob Dylan’s number written on a receipt taped to the wall of my studio. It just says “Bob,” and some numbers. Not that I’ve ever actually called it. I’m sort of afraid to. First of all, I’m afraid that he won’t know who I am, but also a little embarrassed that I care that he does know who I am. So for now, it’s enough that it’s there, that I could call him if I wanted to. For me, it’s about as close as a person gets to having a hotline to God. Maybe I should call him someday though. He grew up around here. Minnesota is right next door.

  But the point is, when you’re around so many musicians it can be great—new ideas, new sounds always bombarding you. Every day you can collaborate if you want to, bang crazy ideas off of people who won’t think they’re crazy. If you’re lucky, your sound gets more and more complex until you’re weaving this tapestry out of fabrics you don’t even remember owning, buying.

  But when I lived in that farmhouse, it was just me—no other musicians. I lived with people, but they mostly left me alone to work. The day after I arrived in Wisconsin, the day after I paid Bea that six hundred dollars cash, I awoke at noon to heavy rain hitting the tin roof of that old house. It was November first. I hadn’t unpacked my clothes, and the truth was, I didn’t really have any cold-weather clothes, hadn’t needed any in months, living on the road such as I had. So I opened the little closet. Wire hangers and a threadbare pink robe, the initials “BEC” embroidered in blue on the left breast. I put on the robe. My shoulders stretched the old fabric and my knees were well exposed. I thr
ew on a pair of blue jeans, some socks, a long-sleeve shirt, and wrapped myself again in the robe, tying its pink sash tightly around my waist. I padded down the stairs.

  Three Mexican men were sitting at the kitchen table, eating from a cast-iron pan of huevos rancheros, tortillas in their thick brown hands. I must have startled them, because all of their Spanish chatter stopped abruptly. They all just stopped eating and stared at me with tough, black eyes.

  Then Bea’s voice, loud and brittle, from the wraparound porch outside: “It’s okay, boys. He lives with us now.” They resumed chewing.

  I stood there, my hands in the pockets of the pink robe, studying the linoleum floor, then the magnets on Bea’s refrigerator, then a collection of porcelain chickens perched on a shelf over the doorway.

  “Sit down,” one of them said. “I’m Joaquin. That’s Ernesto. And that’s Garcia. Come on, sit. Tortillas?”

  And so I ate with them, silently, listening to them speak in Spanish, and I felt their dark, dark eyes upon me, studying me, their new roommate, dressed in an old woman’s clothing. The food was delicious. As depressed as I was those first few months, I must’ve gained fifteen pounds on Joaquin’s cooking. The beans and tortillas and menudo and rice.

  “Excuse me,” I said, standing up when I’d finished. “Thanks for breakfast.”

  “Almuerzo,” said Garcia. “Lunch.” He shook his head.

  I walked out onto the porch, pulled the robe tightly around my stomach. The rain was knocking the leaves off the trees, all those beautiful colors that had lit and adorned the sky yesterday now mostly on the ground—and the sky as gray as graphite. My breath steamed out before me. Bea sat rocking in a chair, holding a cup of tea in her hand. She didn’t look at me.

  “I couldn’t live here alone,” she said. “I couldn’t stand the quiet of this house all by myself.”

  I nodded. It was hard to tell how old she was. Maybe seventy. Or maybe ninety. Her voice warbled when she spoke, and yet the tone was confident, definite, precise.