Hollywood Park

by Mikel Jollett

  A few people told me, “It’s a weird name,” and it’s “kinda long,” and “It sounds like some bad OC death metal thingy.” I don’t know if the point is for people to understand. Or if it’s better for the name to be disorienting, a blank tableau upon which one can sketch whatever ideas one chooses. Why be normal?

  Daren gets it.

  “So what do you want to do with all this?”

  “You know, play shows, make a record, see where it leads, the whole thing.”

  He nods his head slowly. “Okay, I’m in.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, let’s start a band.”

  I take a breath to hide my giddiness. “Cool.”

  We make a plan to meet for rehearsals at a friend’s studio. He leaves me his phone number and an email address. I glance at it as he walks out the door. It reads, “Daren: One_imaginary_boy@yahoo.com.”

  Of course.

  CHAPTER 40

  BREAKING

  Standing center stage in front of a five-piece rock band as the sound swells behind me feels exactly like being the captain of a spaceship I don’t quite know how to fly. It isn’t at all what I imagined it would be. It might be the way the subwoofers make the room shake when Daren hits his kick drum, a visceral boom right at the center of my chest, or the way the guitar lines seem to bounce around the room, over the stage, the exposed air-conditioning ducts, the bottles at the bar, the signs for the exit and bathroom. I hear my voice amplified to an inhuman volume, see the faces of the people holding drinks—friends and friends of friends mostly, who’ve come because we begged them to. They look up at me as I take a deep breath and begin. And here is this thing I’ve longed for for so long, the image come to life as I stood in the audience watching other bands, wondering what I would do if I was ever the one standing center stage at the microphone.

  Okay, smart guy, now what?

  I don’t know how to hold my guitar or which foot to put my weight on. I don’t know where to look. I don’t know if I’m supposed to dance or stand still. I hope I’m singing in tune and I hope everyone remembers their parts. I look through the crowd from face to face but it’s too much, too many people to take in, too many lives to consider. Some watch distractedly. Some talk. Some stare. I try to un-focus my eyes. I try not to see them, the people in their judgment, their detachment. I try to avoid the slick tight jeans and vintage jackets, the jagged bangs and elegant haircuts, the subtle tattoos, country hats, feather necklaces, heavy boots, rings, key chains, slouching expressions, narrow disinterested eyes, the signifiers worn like the bright plumage of exotic birds, and just focus on what they’re hiding.

  There is one thing I know, one thought that runs through my mind as I stand exposed and nervous under the cheap bright twirling lights: You have to show them. You came all this way. Now just show them.

  Daren and I booked the show before we had any other bandmates. After months of rehearsal in a claustrophobic studio space, full of adrenaline, jumping around in our short shorts and tank tops, we felt we’d discovered something. Occasionally, we would stop after a particularly fraught section of music and I’d look up at him, a little embarrassed, wondering what to make of it, all this screaming and pouncing. He would just nod his head and say something like “Fuck yeah, man.”

  How could I not love him for that?

  We tried auditioning more of those semipro “gigging” players, but they just kept flaking on us. Fuck them, we thought. We’ll do it as a two piece. So we booked a show at the Echo on Sunset in Echo Park, a damp, beer-soaked room Drew and I had been to countless times to watch other bands. You can smell the fury in such places; it’s in the peeling posters, the sting of the nostrils from the bleached tile floor.

  Then, one day a few weeks before the gig, my friend Steven dropped by the apartment. A writer from Filter, he was a spindly, tall, stylish Taiwanese American man holding a white Fender Jaguar guitar, the perfect complement to the black one I owned. I played him the demos. He plugged in and played the riffs by ear. That’s all it was. I asked him to play the show. He said yes.

  Next came Anna, a Filter intern whom I ran into at a taco shop drunk at midnight. We toasted our tacos in a drunken gesture, and she mentioned she played violin. I had written some string parts on a few songs. She could come up to the stage for those songs, then leave again, like a guest attraction. So I asked her if she would play the show. She said yes.

  Finally, there was my friend’s neighbor, a double bass player named Noah who joined us for the one and only practice two days before the show, as a favor. If nothing else, I thought, the enormous upright bass, the size and shape of a lifeboat, would make for a great prop. When we finally gathered for that one and only practice, I was filled with such gratitude, such awe, feeling an incredible sense of privilege to have all these talented people playing these sad songs of mine.

  We decided to wear only black and white. There was some talk about White Noise and the idea of TV static, of seeing ourselves as instruments of what Andy Warhol referred to as a “happening,” how we could disappear into the “occurrence,” become instruments “of the moment.” But it was probably because that was the only way we would all match.

  Daren and I salvaged the hood of a rusted-out yellow Alfa Romeo at a junkyard in Sun Valley, thinking if we put it on the stage and miked it as if it was a piece of his kit, the car hood would add to this sense of “happening,” of racket come to life. Every few songs, it is Anna’s job to run to the back of the stage and pound on the car hood with a mallet.

  Something about it made sense: part revival, part confessional, part circus—that’s rock and roll.

  After a few songs, I stop thinking about my feet or my clothes, my bad hair, my inadequately low, scratchy voice, and I just think about the songs. Where I was when I wrote them, how it felt to be in those moments, to long to be here. The band plays their parts perfectly, every note. I am so grateful to them. Amber is in the crowd somewhere. The audience is fickle. Some clap. Some don’t. Some pay attention and some talk the whole time. Some come up to me afterward with beaming faces and say something like “I had no idea! Wow!” Others seem unimpressed. I don’t care. I’m just glad they’re here in this room, drifting through space with me. I would take them all home if I could.

  It’s a gift to stand and sing, to jump and spit and sweat, to say the things I never thought I could say out loud, to be at the center of this precious moment, this stage, the only place I have nothing to hide.

  It feels like flying.

  * * *

  WE BOOK ANOTHER show. Then another. Most are disappointing and there is a feeling like performing alone to an empty theater.

  We are at a record store. Should we set up beside the import rack or just stand next to the counter? Will that block the line? I mean, if anyone shows up.

  We are at a small stage in a room adjacent to a Mexican restaurant. Why do they need these heavy plush red curtains? Are they worried people will see us eating chips back here? There’s no one out there but the waitstaff anyway.

  We are at the Elks Lodge in Palm Springs. I remember this. I used to sit and listen to speeches about the future in rooms just like this, in another lifetime, when I had a future.

  We are at a radio station in Seattle that has started playing one of our songs. Who brought the set list? Are you sure your cousin doesn’t mind if we crash on his floor? We have to leave by 5:00 A.M. so Daren can get back for work.

  We are trudging through alleyways, unloading cars, lifting amps, unwinding cords, tuning strings, twiddling reverb knobs, waiting impatiently at the bar for the other bands to finish for our heartbreakingly brief half an hour onstage, for this one moment to stand onstage for the scores of people, the handful of people, the one person who may look at us as if to say,

  Tell me about when you were young and you stared at a violet sky wondering why it made your heart turn in your chest. Tell me of the private loves you had, when you thought you might live forever. Tell
me how this thought came crashing down one day and destroyed you. Tell me how you rose from those ashes. Sing to me.

  * * *

  THERE’S SOMETHING ELSE. A feeling that follows me through those squalid rooms and half-empty halls: the ever-increasing sense that I will fail spectacularly. That in doing so, I will embarrass myself and reveal a naked ambition, an inadequate mind; to try so hard, to care so much, to be so serious about this bit of silliness, will only make me look silly too.

  I tell Dad about this feeling one day at Hollywood Park, sitting in the box seats. He likes the box seats. He says it means you’re serious. It’s a little strange because I know he likes to sit on the benches in the sun like the other regulars on the days I don’t come with him. But when I come with him once a month, to eat lunch and make our bets, always going in together on the Pick Six, he likes to get a box, like we are landed gentry from another time.

  He doesn’t know about the bright room I carry with me in my mind a thousand feet beneath the racetrack, the dreamscape I go to visit my F-A-M-I-L-Y, feeling like everyone is young again and we will never die. I never tell him about that. He’s not one for metaphors. It’s like we’ve divided the world between us and we come here to share it, to tell the other what we’ve seen. He gets V8 engines and classic cars, football, World War II, Mussolini, black-and-white movies, Old Spice, fistfights, Mexico, “calling people on their bullshit,” George Carlin, Jackson Browne and the Allman Brothers. He seems content to leave metaphors to my world, along with “college,” long-distance running, Russian literature and indie rock.

  He loves that I started a band. When I sit next to him in the baby-blue 1959 Chevy Apache he restored with my uncle Donnie, he likes to put on Eat a Peach by the Allman Brothers and crank the stereo. It has to be loud for the sound to get over the purr of the five-hundred-horsepower engine that can be heard for blocks. He’ll cock a thumb and rock his elbows, look at me and say, “Now, that’s one smokin’ guitar. You guys should do something like that.”

  He and Bonnie come to the shows and sit backstage smiling at everyone like it’s the most natural thing in the world, to be sitting there, cowboy boots propped up on the table in the greenroom while the bands scurry around him drinking beer, going over set lists in their hoodies and tight jeans.

  I tell him I feel ridiculous sometimes, that I have friends who think I’m kidding myself, that I’m squandering a writing career or something more responsible like law school in favor of something so impossible as rock and roll. He cocks an eyebrow at me and says, “Fuck ’em. What do they know?”

  “I don’t know, Dad. I’m just scared all the time. Maybe it won’t work out and I’ll look like an idiot for committing so much to this silly thing.”

  “Good!” He looks up from the program, leaning back in the metal folding chair in our box near the finish line, and smiles at me. “It’s good to be scared! That’s how you know you’ve risked something. That’s the whole point of taking a gamble on something: you don’t know how it’s going to turn out. There’s no payoff without risk.”

  “I just feel like people are laughing at me, Dad.”

  “Let them. Listen, being scared to fail, taking a big chance when you don’t know how it’s going to turn out, that’s how every great story begins. If you already knew the ending, it wouldn’t be very good, would it?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Anyway, at least you’re not bored out of your mind in some cubicle, or locked up in a jail cell.” He stares down at the horses promenading onto the track, manes braided, hides oiled, all glistening muscles and bright colorful numbers. “Don’t ever forget that I believe in you.”

  * * *

  TONY COMES TO all the shows. I see him standing at the side of the room with his shirt rolled up at the sleeves, his strong tattooed arms crossed in front of him, a thick silver necklace joined by a small padlock around his neck as he bobs his head with the drumbeat. I know the necklace is supposed to be some kind of punk statement, a new look he’s adopted since moving away from Playa del Rey to an übercool industrial loft building in downtown L.A., but the padlock seems more immediate than that, like he knows he’s chained to something.

  He’s not one for the theater of competitive irony of the Silver Lake rock-and-roll scene. He just stands at the side of the room watching his brother.

  The crowds grow. The rooms fill. Friends bring friends and we stop having to ask so much. I don’t really know why. I know we take it all very seriously and I know that people seem to respond to that, to the seriousness of this ridiculous thing, the ridiculousness of being so serious about it.

  On the night we sell out the club we started at in Echo Park, Tony is the first one to arrive, already at the door by the beginning of sound check. He’s memorized every word to every song. He asks me for pages with the lyrics printed out. I see him singing when I scan the room from the stage. He sways, sipping his scotch and soda, raising it in the air to cheer at the end of each song. I can feel his pride in me. His glee. It’s comforting to have him there, and even though I worry about his drinking, I think maybe he has it under control, at least for now.

  So I am shocked when he calls me one afternoon to tell me he’s addicted to heroin and he’s scared he’s going to jump off the roof of the ten-story building where he lives.

  I don’t know what I thought, but not this. His voice is creaky and desperate as he tells me he’s been shooting heroin in the bathroom, just as Dad used to do. He’s also smoking crack, taking a mountain of pills and drinking a fifth of whiskey every night. The words fail to register. I just thought he was a kind of dime-store drunk. Heroin? Fucking crack?

  “I don’t know what I might do, Mick. I’m scared I’m just going to kill myself. I need help. Can you help me? I don’t know what to do.”

  He doesn’t seem like the proud, strong, tattooed guy singing along at the side of the room, but more like the sad boy with the shaved head whom I remember from Synanon, the one who sat alone at the edge of the playground until he was nearly seven years old.

  I tell him not to move. I drive my car across town, speeding the whole way, hoping he doesn’t jump, thinking about my brother, the one who guards me, the one I must guard the way a boxer guards a broken rib. I keep him on the line the whole time. I’m on Sunset. I’m passing the fire station, I’m going under the 101, I’m turning left on Second Street. Please don’t do anything. Please. I’m almost there, I swear. I’m not leaving. I’ll be right by you. We can go somewhere and talk about it. We can go somewhere and not talk about it. I’m here, I’m here, I’m here. Please don’t die.

  I turn right on Wall and see him sitting on the concrete stoop of his apartment building, his hair big and wild, his neck thin, his eyes squinted, his shoulders slumped in his gray sweatshirt, the padlock hanging beneath his chin. I get out of the car and he gets up and I throw my arms around him. He feels heavy, empty, like I am holding a dead body.

  “It’s okay, big bro. We’re going to get you sorted out.”

  “I don’t know how I got here. I don’t know what I’m going to do, Mick. I don’t want to die. I can’t do this anymore.”

  “It’s okay. Let’s just get in the car. We’ll go talk it out. I’ll sit with you while you kick if you want. Just like Dad always talked about. I’ll sit right next to you. You’re going to be okay. I’m not going anywhere.”

  “It was so stupid. I don’t know what I was thinking fucking with that stuff. I can’t be here. I just can’t be here anymore.”

  “I know. I know.” He buries his head in his big hands, his body shaking.

  “I feel so sick.”

  “You don’t need to do anything but get in the car.”

  “I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die,” he keeps saying as he rocks back and forth.

  He gets in the car and we call Dad and Bonnie and he tells them the whole story, how he smoked heroin on a whim at a party and then started buying needles and packets to heat and inject. He’s been taking
Vicodin and Percocet for years now, he says. It started with a back injury, but he just kept it up, taking more and more. He’s up to forty-five Vicodin pills a day, along with the fifth of whiskey. The crack came last. He bought it to try speedballs, injecting the heroin first, then smoking the cocaine rocks with a glass pipe until he fell over on his kitchen floor.

  “It wasn’t even fun. It was just like trying to extinguish something by the end. Like trying to bury myself beneath the drugs.”

  For a brief moment, they think he’s joking. Nobody knew how bad it was. They tell us to come over to the house in Westchester, that we need to figure it out as a family, that they’re here. We’re all here. “No one is going anywhere.”

  We drive to Westchester and by the time we arrive, Bonnie has called five drug rehab centers. She hugs Tony at the door. She tries to talk to him about the different options, but Dad is furious, already knee-deep in tough love with that gruff no-bullshit voice of his. “That’s really fucking stupid, you know. What the fuck is wrong with you? Didn’t you learn anything from me? Heroin? That shit will kill you.”

  Tony stares at the ground, too weak to respond. He’s got huge black circles under his eyes and heavily chapped lips, that wild look as he shakes lightly and taps his foot. I sit next to him, an arm draped around his shoulders.

  Two hours later we are standing in the parking lot at Brotman Medical Center, a twelve-step-based rehab facility on Venice Boulevard. It’s dusk, a cold blue sky retreating to blackness over us as we stand in the wind. Tony throws up behind an ambulance. His body is already going through withdrawals. A paramedic asks if he needs help and I tell him we’re on our way to the drug rehab. He nods like he’s seen it before.

  Upstairs, we check Tony in and they put him in an empty white room. His tremor has gotten worse. He has a terrified look in his eyes as we gather to leave. He shouts at Dad, “What the fuck did you ever do, old man?! Huh?! You think you’re so much better than me?!”