At his apartment in Playa del Rey, Tony will come to the small screen door and greet me with a beer. We’ll sit down in front of the TV on his black leather couch to play Madden NFL on his Xbox, chain-smoking like the delinquent teens we once were. Me with my Parliament Lights, he with his Marlboro Lights. I watch as Tony gets up again and again to refill his glass. He says he’s just having a “few drinks,” but each “drink” consists of an entire water glass filled to the rim with whiskey and ice cubes.
For the first couple of drinks, he’s funny, charming, full of confidence and plans, telling me about his job doing sales for a large-scale printing company, the big clients he’s landed, how he wants to start his own company someday. He makes jokes and claps me on the back. “That’s a touchdown, little bro. Ayy-ohhhh! Hey, man, we should all take a trip to Mexico or something. Maybe cause some trouble.” There is that old kindred feeling, like we are survivors of something, a plane crash maybe. Like we walked out of the wreckage and found ourselves surprised to be alive. But by the third or fourth glass, his eyes gloss over, his speech begins to slur, and he becomes erratic and emotional. Angry. At the government. At Mom. At Doug. Even at Dad and Bonnie. It’s everyone’s fault. For every problem, every challenge, every issue he’s ever faced, our parents and Synanon and the entire full-of-shit world are to blame.
I can sense his defensiveness about his son, so I don’t bring it up, all the ways in which his son is facing challenges exactly like the ones he resents so much. I think that’s what they mean when they say addiction runs in families.
One night we go to a party down in the Jungle, the row of low apartment buildings along the strand of beach in Playa del Rey between the marina and Dockweiler State Beach. It’s a rooftop Halloween party. There is the visage of lights behind us, the endless black ocean to the west. Tony and I don’t have costumes, but no one seems to mind. There’s a keg in the corner, red Solo cups in the hands of half-dressed zombie surfers, Reagan, Nixon, JFK in rubber masks, a Beetlejuice, a Freddy Krueger, a St. Pauli girl, a few scary clowns. They all know Tony and they all slap me on the back like a lost cousin at a family reunion: “Oh, so you’re Tony’s brother! How does it feel to be related to a legend?”
We smoke and chat and dance and it all seems like a relief, the din of the party a welcome break from the isolation of my trailer in the wilderness. She approaches me in a giant brown cat suit, a few wisps of messy blond hair tumbling onto her forehead that she wipes away with a giant felt paw. “Hey, wanna thumb wrestle?” She has flirty brown eyes and there is something familiar about her, something that takes me off guard in the private room of my mind from which I’ve been watching the party. It’s as if she simply opened the door and let herself in.
“I mean I was a thumb-wrestling champion back in the day.” She unzips one of her paws to reveal a sturdy, wiry hand. “I don’t want you to be intimidated. I’m obviously out of practice, so you may have a shot.”
She places her hand in mine and cocks her thumb back. “Ready? Set. Go!” It’s strange how a sudden intimate gesture can remove the space between people, the simple fact of our hands touching. I feel pulled from my private room, pulled inevitably into the present. I introduce myself, tell her I’m actually the state hot-hands champion but I’ve dabbled in thumb wrestling from time to time, though you have to be careful about injury when you’re a two-sport athlete.
There is a look on her face, a willingness, as if we are two specimens of the same species, surrounded by so much alien fauna that quickly retreat into the background as we recognize a familiar dance in the other.
As we talk, I can see her checking my expression from the corner of her eye, feel the warmth of her hand. Her name is Amber. She is from Iowa. She’s been here two months. She was raised on a dairy farm. She has my attention. I can’t help but be charmed by this skinny woman in the ridiculous cat suit, so quick, so forthright. I decide to take a chance. “So do you have a boyfriend or what?”
“Sort of. He’s over there in the zombie costume.” She points toward the keg.
“How’s it going?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean is it better than this? Because this is pretty good.” I point back and forth between us.
“Actually, no.”
“Great.”
Tony comes over and we start a thumb-wrestling tournament that is embraced wholeheartedly by the party at large. Amber and I split up, but I catch her looking at me as she glances up from her thumb-wrestling matches. When I walk off to use the restroom, she is waiting for me in the hallway.
“So you live up in the sticks?”
“Yep. Got my own double-wide and everything. The real exciting days are the ones when you catch the horses doing it.”
“Awww.” She smiles at me and slips a piece of paper into my pocket. “It’s actually not serious with the zombie. I’m not really into zombies. Call me.” She disappears around a corner, a fuzzy brown tail trailing behind her.
By the time we get back to his apartment, Tony is stumbling drunk on the brink of tears. Some time after the fourth or fifth drink, a transformation took place and all that good-natured warmth turned to self-pity. He tells me that I’m on his life insurance policy, that I am the only one who is, that he has put me as the sole beneficiary of every life insurance policy he’s ever had. It seems to have some kind of special meaning to him, this gift he could give me by dying, as if the sum of his life could become a gift if it only ended in tragedy. I take it to mean he sees me as his family, the one he trusts, the one who knows something nobody else does, and I feel guilty for the ways I’ve privately judged him.
I tell him I want to start a band. That I moved to the trailer to write a novel but I’ve been writing songs and making demos instead. I don’t really know where to begin. I know it sounds crazy because I’ve never really sung in front of anyone. But it feels real to me, like there’s something there I should follow. “Anyway, they’re all sad songs for some reason.”
“Of course they’re sad! What else would we write?” He stares down at the ground, swaying softly. “You and me are the only ones who know. Nobody else understands what happened.”
He passes out on the couch, leaving me in the quiet living room with the leather couches, a glass of scotch sweating beads of water on the coffee table.
* * *
TWO DAYS LATER, Amber the farm girl from the Halloween party meets me at the Mexican restaurant at the bottom of the hill beneath the trailer where I live, in a town called Acton. She’s smaller without the cat suit, but the quick wit, the sudden familiarity and the warmth are the same. After dinner, we go back up to the ranch and I kiss her next to a pile of horse manure, under a bluish moon, the coyotes yipping through the canyons in the background.
“I could get used to this,” she says.
“I should’ve known the manure would do it for you.”
“What can I say?” She looks at me. “I like big piles of shit.”
By the end of the week, she is driving up to the trailer every day after work to cook dinner with me and go for long walks up to the buzzing towers at the top of the hill overlooking the Mojave Desert. There is a sudden relief, as if all the isolation and loneliness I felt have been replaced by something exciting, something new that makes me wonder if my decision to swear off relationships was a mistake, if the wreckage of the Naomis was a fluke and I am meant for something better now. It’s a type of amnesia, this feeling. The best kind.
We make plans. We tell our stories. I sing her my sad songs. She cries on the couch, nestled in a corner, her small legs tucked under her, her brown eyes wet, black streaks of eyeliner falling over the constellation of blameless moles on her cheek. We are swept up, our minds racing through the fantasy of who we could become like two people running through the hallways of a new house, imagining the life they could live in it.
This lasts three weeks. Out of nowhere one day, the fear comes. It first creeps in when she suggests we go to Iowa so I
can meet her family on the farm. I know, logically, that it’s a perfectly normal suggestion given how much time we’ve been spending together. But instinctually, immediately, I feel a tightening in my chest that quickly winds itself up into a full-blown panic. It’s bodily. My legs feel weighted. My hands tied. My breath shallow. I try my best to hide the feeling from her, to nod in assent or say something like “We’ll see,” as we discuss the possibility over several days and nights. But I can’t shake the feeling that I have overcommitted, that she is not the person she pretends to be, that she is lying about her feelings for me, which are only like those one has for a ghost, the fake person I’ve conjured for her, that I have only been acting and she has been naive enough to have believed the act and that somehow implicates both of us.
The strange thing about the feeling is that it’s not preceded by any concrete action. It’s more like a suspicion: a creeping sense that there is something rotten at the heart of her, or rotten at the heart of me, because what else could explain the fear, the dread, the panic, I feel?
When I break it off with her a few days later, when I tell her I am “not ready for all this,” she holds her small head against my chest, those familiar tears in her brown eyes, and says it can’t be true, that there’s nothing to be afraid of, that this sudden turn of feeling isn’t real. I’ve told her about what my Stanford TA called my attachment disorder, the thing I inherited from living as an orphan in Synanon, from all those years in Oregon. She tells me it’s just my fear talking and that everything is fine, that she is the same person I met at that Halloween party in a giant brown cat suit.
“Don’t psychoanalyze me!” I yell. I can see the confusion on her face. “I’m not your fucking pet project, okay? It’s over! Accept it! Just fucking leave!” I see her swallow hard and gather herself. I’m not even sure if I mean the words I’m saying. The weight they carry surprises me. I haven’t thought any of this through. The words are a reflex, the way a child pulls his hand from a hot stove. I can feel the rift inside me, something warm being suffocated by something cold, a part of me that is in charge of another part of me.
She gathers the few things she’s left in the trailer—her handbag, some clothes from the bedroom, a toothbrush on the sink in the tiny bathroom—and leaves.
I hear her car start on the gravel path next to the horse pasture. Her headlights illuminate the dull, dusty, vacant hills behind my trailer and she is gone.
My sleep is fitful and I wake up to an empty feeling, a guilt like the guilt I felt for the bunnies we killed on the gravel path outside the barn. I don’t know who the bunny is, whether it’s Amber—the light in her eyes extinguished by cruelty and sadness—or the relationship itself, this harmless, joyous thing I’ve stepped on and destroyed. Or if it’s me, if I am the bunny, the part of me that hoped things could be different, that believed in her, that felt calm and safe.
The hollowness in my chest expands until there is a black hole of nothingness too big to contain. The clock ticks. My keyboard goes untouched. My guitar sits in a corner gathering dust. I go for a run. I feed the horses. I find a white wool sweatshirt she left behind balled up in a pile beside the bed. It smells like her.
Two days pass; then all at once a new feeling comes. A blinding white fear of being alone. It’s less like the boredom, the fatalism of adult single life, and more like I am a baby lying beside a stream in a dark forest. Unprotected. I am afraid. The words flash across my mind: You. Will. Always. Be. Alone. Something bad is coming and there is nothing I can do to stop it. Why did I push her away? She was so soft and warm and kind and good and funny and I am now here standing alone at the precipice of this vast darkness.
I drive down to the city to her new apartment in Los Feliz on the Eastside of Los Angeles and call her from the alley beneath her bedroom. She answers and I tell her to go to her window. I wave. She comes down to let me in. I tell her I’m sorry. I tell her I’m crazy. I tell her I was an idiot and I didn’t mean it. I just get confused sometimes. We reconcile, but I can feel her resistance, less like I’m a repentant drunk and more like she knows she can’t say no—she’s been hurting too, after all—but she dreads whatever is coming next. Or possibly I imagine that. Maybe she’s simply glad to see me. I don’t really know. I never know which of these feelings to believe, because they all coexist inside me: the simple one attracting me to her for all the reasons that are abundantly clear, the dark one telling me I am suffocated and trapped, the panic like that of a child terrified of being left alone.
* * *
WHEN I GET bored of trying to write the novel, which has mostly gone untouched while I write songs, when I long for new experiences, I find myself pitching an editor at a music magazine to assign me features about musicians. I just want to be close, to be out at night with the sweat of the crowd and the boom of the speakers. After twenty blind pitches, I’m finally given a few freelance assignments to write about live music. The editor likes my pieces, and when a vacancy comes up, he offers me a job as the new managing editor. The magazine is called Filter. I’ve been going to shows for so long it seems like a natural step. Watching the crowd in the back, jumping through the pit in the front, trying to understand why everyone is here. The recurring thought I have is that every show is a celebration of something. An idea. Sometimes that idea is as simple as sadness, or anger, or, for particularly bad shows, love. So the game I like to play is piecing together what idea we are celebrating tonight. The more specific the idea, the better the show.
Tonight we celebrate the shared sense that our ironic detachment from the world is both our greatest amusement and the feature most destructive to our lives. The thing we are celebrating is the fact that we know it and have the gall not to care.
Tonight we celebrate the wonder we had at sadness as children. Like finding a dead bird in the grass after a heavy rain and trying to imagine what came before and what comes after.
Tonight we celebrate mirrors, the harsh well-lit ones, the bent and twisty ones, the fabulous vanity we feel as the light reflects off our clothing and cheekbones while we strut between them.
Tonight we celebrate fucking. The mystery, the possibility our bodies offer us for transformation, the sense that our bodies know our selves better than we do.
It’s a great job. I get to hear records before they come out. I get to fly to faraway music festivals in places like France and Iceland. I get to sit across from Tom Waits in a roadhouse in Marin County where I tell him about songwriting and my book and the trailer on the edge of the world and he tells me, in that broken chain-saw voice of his, “That’s how you do it, man. After a while, it’s like Emerson said, the universe conspires.” I get to sit in the basement of a tiny bar in Alphabet City with Lou Reed, to be the erstwhile mop-topped journalist whom he tells, “Rock and roll can go, ‘Ba, ba, baaah,’ my friend. It cannot go, ‘La, la, laaaah.’”
I love the seedy clubs, the pretentious, lively conversations with rock stars and writers casually sipping red wine in the back room with their legs crossed. The magazine staff is so small the editor in chief and I end up writing most of every issue, filing seven or eight feature stories per issue under different pen names, which we decide should sound like French Canadian hockey players, for some reason. We stay up all night on deadline at our office on Miracle Mile, copyediting, playing Galaga, and drinking beer. When morning comes, we crawl over to the print shop with our hard drive, making the 7:00 A.M. print deadline by maybe eight minutes.
With the money from the new job, I move out of the ranch and back to the city. I get a place on the Eastside in Los Feliz, one neighborhood away from the rock clubs in Silver Lake. It’s a tiny upstairs studio apartment with espresso wood floors, a shade tree and a brick facade outside the unscreened window like something from the Latin Quarter in Paris. There’s a kitchenette and a closet where I tape entire books to the wall with duct tape, Notes from the Underground and The Trial, right over my writing desk. I like the idea of Dostoevsky and Kafka looking down at me,
fellow travelers in the 3:00 A.M. task of confession and poetry.
When I’m not writing stories on rock and roll, I’m still writing songs, fiddling with guitar effects, scribbling pages of lyrics in notebooks. Amber and I have settled into a perpetual state of not-quite-togetherness but not-quite-not-togetherness, which means we spend most of our time either breaking up or getting back together. I know she finds it exhausting. I know it’s unfair to her. It’s just like the feeling I got in college that my knowledge could not save me, that despite my earnest desire to be a better man, a better boyfriend, a better friend, I am caught between two emotional poles: one constantly running away, the other constantly running back.
Sometimes I think I’m like what I once imagined Dad to be, before I really knew him, when he was just an idea in my head. I pictured him as swashbuckling and charming, one foot in front of the law, living life by his wits, longed for and sought after as he moved from place to fascinating place. Other times, I wonder if I’m like Paul: a basically good man with a crippling disorder, trapped by impulses he can neither understand nor control. The worst of it is when I wonder if I’m like Doug. I read somewhere that victims of abuse identify not only with the victims but with the abusers as well, taking note of the power the abuse gives them. I wonder if I am this, that I’ve learned that the threat of leaving has given me a power, over Amber, over the women I met whenever we broke up, to be both present and absent, forever a captain setting sail on the horizon, always one foot on his vessel, so present and earnest about his desire to stay, so enraptured with the promise of the sea.
Something about rock and roll makes all of this bearable, like I am among fellow travelers in drink and an idea of love that is shared like a dark joke. So it feels like a secret life, to be interviewing rock stars by day and trying to write songs about my confusion by night. The interviews are a farce, this role play of musician and erstwhile journalist is only an act I put on for appearances because all I really want to know, as I swim in this black river beneath my life, is this: How? How do you do this thing I want so desperately to do? How do you write a song?
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