Hollywood Park

by Mikel Jollett

  I tell him to calm down. I know he’s anxious and angry from the withdrawals. “Fuck off!” he yells at me and kicks a chair which bounces off the empty white wall.

  “Have fun kicking heroin,” I say, walking out, exhausted, annoyed, angry, worried.

  We don’t hear from him for a week. The doctor calls and says he couldn’t go on methadone because his liver was too weak, so he just had to kick cold turkey. They could hear him screaming from the nursing center down the hall, pounding on the walls and retching into the bucket they left for him. It was hard to witness, but there was no other way because the mixture of opiates and alcohol over many years had destroyed his liver. The doctor tells us he had the worst liver enzymes they’d ever seen and if he would’ve waited one more month he would be dead.

  I’m just glad he’s there. It feels like he’s safe, for now, like we are standing on the edge of a nightmare. We imagine these things romantically sometimes, the pirates on the run, the sanguine Dope Fiends one step in front of the law. But it’s not like that. It’s fear and worry. It’s my father’s desperate anger and tears, the truth we quietly acknowledge that if he died, if we lost a brother, a son, it wouldn’t feel romantic or tragic or mysterious. We would only feel cursed.

  * * *

  WE ARE MAKING a record. We are debating reverb. We are editing guitar riffs. I am singing, listening to the songs come to life, trying to imagine if this particular version captures the feeling, the specific one, the one that is mine, the contradiction that I swore to uphold at the altars of David Bowie and Robert Smith. Is the snare too loud to feel like loneliness? Does this keyboard effect really capture desperation? How much chorus pedal on this part makes it sound restless? The scream is too loud, the whisper is too quiet, the rack toms need to sound like trash cans in an alley, the voice should be in an empty field at midnight, not a church on a Sunday morning. I don’t know. I don’t know. Make it longer. Make it shorter. Make it meaner. Make it quiet. Make it loud.

  Amber and I are done. Amber and I are trying again. Amber and I are somewhere in between done and trying again. She is tired of it. I am tired of it. The break becomes more permanent. I see her out at a bar one night with another man. The band on the stage plays a sad song and I can’t help but stare at her as she smiles coquettishly at him, the stranger with the long black hair in the blue flannel and baggy jeans. Who is this guy? Why is this making me crazy? She sips her vodka tonic; I pound beer after beer. She leaves and I feel like I’m about to burst. I run into Steven by the door. “You all right, man? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  Fine. Fine. I’m fine. I’m fine. That little face, the big cat suit, the flirty eyes looking at him now, the quick smiles and prodding touches, the lightly suggestive jokes, all for the stranger in the flannel. I am stumbling out into the parking lot. I am walking into trash cans on Sunset. I am tripping under streetlights outside her apartment, knowing I can’t call, I can’t go home. Do I love her? Is this love? What is this thing I have created that I need so much but can’t seem to keep?

  There is no sidewalk, only dizziness, a blur of people staring as I fall into bushes, try to stand, tear my jeans and catch a glimpse of myself in the reflection of the window of the 7-Eleven on Vermont. I see a sad, rumpled shadow of a man. Swaying and drunk, I walk the five blocks home at 2:00 A.M. and pass out on my bed.

  In the morning, I splash water on my face, sit down at my keyboard with my guitar and write a song about it. I don’t leave my apartment for three days. I keep the blinds drawn and the door shut. I order in Chinese food and live off the week-old bread and cheese in the fridge. I just want to follow David Bowie’s instruction: find the contradiction; write about it. I can hear Robert Smith’s words echoing through my head: “Why be normal?”

  * * *

  THE DOCTOR SAYS Dad needs a heart operation or he will die. That’s what Bonnie tells me when we finally finish the record. There’s no time to celebrate finishing because my mind is suddenly hijacked by fear. My dad in a bed. My dad in a box. There are complications, risks. The doctor says the big problem is that his cardiomyopathy makes him a bad candidate for surgery, so the surgery itself might kill him. It’s risky, but then so is doing nothing. There are no good answers. It all sounds like something Dad would say.

  It’s hard to hear words like that without the sudden feeling like I am pinned beneath them and can’t breathe, as if the weight of the S for “surgery” has wrapped its curvy spine around my throat. In the weeks leading up to the operation, I am always a little out of breath, a shallow puddle of fear and anxiety in my chest. My mind is on a hospital bed where I picture a tan man with tubes in his nose, vulnerable, trapped.

  Now that we’ve finished the record, we’ve booked a series of shows every Thursday for the month of January at a club in Silver Lake called Spaceland. The “residency,” as it is called, is treated as a kind of coming-out party, the measure of a band in the Los Angeles music scene. Our third show of the month is scheduled for the same day as Dad’s operation. In the week leading up to that show, two big local radio stations have taken an interest in the song I wrote about the night I ran into Amber with the stranger. The song is called “Sometime Around Midnight.” It’s not anything I ever thought would get played on the radio. There’s no chorus or middle eight or what those gigging professional musicians called “hooks.” It’s just a short story set to music.

  The day before the surgery, one of the big radio stations starts playing the song regularly, right in between the White Stripes, Nirvana, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. When I hear it, my heart practically leaps from my chest. It’s like standing at the fifty-yard line in front of a crowded football stadium naked, like everything I’ve tried to hide has suddenly become exposed to intense public scrutiny. It also sounds a little lo-fi next to those bands, like you can almost hear someone coughing in the background.

  The station plays the song five times a day and I keep getting calls from people who say they heard it. When I check at night, there are scores of unread emails from various music industry professionals, agents, A&R reps. We don’t even have a manager. They all want to come to the show at Spaceland the next night. It seems so strange to me, after years of being told how the internet was going to change music, that it’s such a big deal for a song to be played on the radio.

  When I wake up on the morning of the show, I’ve already got a voice mail from Bonnie that she left when they wheeled Dad in for surgery at 6:00 A.M. I can hear the nervousness in her voice, the fear of something black and nameless. “We’re just gonna try and stay positive today because we don’t have any choice.”

  I shower and drive to Cedars-Sinai, where Bonnie and I sit together in the fifth-floor lounge, waiting. I try to imagine where Dad is, sitting alone in some pre-op room, his face beneath an oxygen mask. I want to sit next to him, to stand over the shoulder of the surgeon to make sure he doesn’t screw it up.

  A nurse comes out. There is a delay. Something about a surgeon and a conflicting procedure. Bonnie is apoplectic. “But what about his blood sugars? Isn’t there only a small window of time here? Don’t you need to start soon? Is he just sitting back there alone?” The nurse tries to reassure her as she wipes her tears from her face, avoiding the looks from the other families in the waiting room.

  By two o’clock I have to drive across town for a sound check at the club. It seems stupid to play a show on a day like this, but by the time I get to Spaceland, there is already a small crowd of people out front. We go through the sound check and I am frozen with the fear in my chest, the nameless lump that grows as I worry about what could happen. What if he dies? Will we cancel the show? Will we play the show anyway? What a dumb selfish thing to worry about. Does any of this even matter? Why is everything such a performance?

  I walk out of sound check and the line out front has grown to maybe a hundred people, down to the auto shop at the corner. Nobody recognizes me. I don’t know why they would.

  I drive back to Cedars-Sin
ai, where Bonnie is still sitting in the fifth-floor lounge. She’s got tears in her eyes when I get there, shaking her head, saying, “It’s taking too long. They should’ve been done by now. It’s too much. This is too much. I can’t take it, Mick.” I hug her tight and try to calm her, to calm myself, feeling the panic rising in my chest. Can I help? What can I do? My dad. My dad. No.

  At six o’clock, a short, kindly doctor in a white lab coat walks up to us in our chairs. He’s an Asian man with a tidy haircut sweeping his thick black hair across from his forehead. He has his hands folded in front of him.

  “Are you Bonnie Lou Jollett?” Bonnie changed her name when they ran off to Vegas to finally get married five years ago because they needed to in order to keep their health insurance. I was the only witness. Tony and I have taken to simply calling her “Lou,” since it makes our Jewish mother from L.A. sound like she’s a Southern belle.

  She looks up and croaks, “How’s my guy?”

  “Jim made it through the procedure and he’s resting now. We were able to place the stent in his heart and we think he’s going to feel much better from now on.”

  Bonnie lets out a gasp. She grabs the doctor’s hands and puts them to her forehead. “Thank you. Thank you. I don’t know what I would’ve done.”

  I feel a wave of relief wash over me. It’s instant. Like a blast of hot air. Suddenly the world is warm again and light again and there is a future in front of us and the room has lost the nightmarish proportions. We are lucky.

  An hour later we walk in to see Dad in the post-op area. He looks frail and thin in the small bed. It’s hard to see him this way, the strong man who held us in the waves, tired and frail, covered in white wires running beneath his hospital gown, the steady beep of a heart monitor next to his bed. I grab his hand. He opens his eyes. “Heyyyyy, duuuude.” He blinks. I kiss his cheek. I want so badly to protect him.

  Bonnie keeps kissing his forehead, sobbing as she leans over him and says, “Oh, baby, I was so scared. I’m so glad you’re all right.” She cries onto his hospital gown.

  Tony arrives. He’s been living in a halfway house in Culver City. He goes to work every day and to an AA meeting every night. He looks better. Still haggard, tired, fuzzy and quiet. But there’s a healthy glow to his cheek instead of the strung out, gaunt, exhausted, dehydrated look he had when we dropped him off at rehab. The light is returning to his big blue eyes.

  He leans over the bed and Dad grabs his hand with one hand and my hand with the other, nodding, looking back and forth between us. “We’re all right,” he says. “Everyone’s still here.” We lean in and hug, our foreheads pressed together.

  I grab on to Bonnie, who’s sobbing. “It’s okay, Lou. We’re all okay.”

  Dad looks up at me and asks, “Don’t you have a show to play?”

  I’d nearly forgotten. I kiss Dad on the cheek and hug Bonnie and Tony. I run through the halls of the hospital, feeling like I’m practically floating, past the old men coughing in their beds, the women sleeping on their backs with their mouths open. The unlucky ones. My father is alive! My father is alive!

  In the parking garage I nearly crash into another car. Turn right out of the driveway. Left on Third. Head east. The radio is on. I hear a DJ mention my show at Spaceland. It all seems so abstract, like something happening to other people in another part of the world.

  When I get to the club in Silver Lake, there is a line around the block. It doesn’t make sense. The club holds only about three hundred people, but there must be eight hundred snaking down the street, around the auto shop, up the next block. I don’t know these faces. Who are these people? Was there a fire?

  The band is waiting in the tiny greenroom behind the stage. Daren looks up at me when I walk in. “Is he okay?” I nod my head with a smile and Daren gives me a hug. “Fuck yeah.” I feel at this moment so grateful to have a fellow traveler, a friend, another imaginary boy who knows how precious this imaginary world is.

  CHAPTER 41

  “GOOD EVENING. THIS IS ALL I HAVE”

  By the time we play the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, by the time we stand on that enormous main stage under those massive black speakers, looking out over an audience that stretches for five football fields in front of us, just two spots before Morrissey himself with his pompadour and lyrics written as if in blood across my heart, it feels like the idea of the band no longer belongs to me. It belongs to others.

  It’s strange when that happens, when something that was once in your mind becomes an object in the world with a size and a shape, a thing that can conjure ideas in the minds of others. The songs seem like children who left home and traveled the world. They had their own experiences in the minds of others. It’s imperfect, this form of telepathy. And it’s wonderful. It’s also disappointing. To feel simultaneously seen and invisible.

  I threw up backstage before our set, in the grass behind our trailer. I was certain nobody would come, that the crowd would disperse when we took the stage. Or they would jeer, maybe throw things. Or worst of all, they simply wouldn’t pay attention.

  Shyness is nice and shyness can stop you from doing all the things in life you’d like to.

  After the record came out on a local indie label, we went on tour. We rented a black Sprinter van that looked like an airport shuttle and booked shows in every major city in the United States. The strangest thing at first was the simple fact that people kept showing up. It was one thing to play a show in Echo Park, quite another to arrive in Philadelphia or Austin or Chicago and see two or three hundred people waiting in line outside the club. I didn’t understand it. I got the logic that the record was being shared and a song was on the radio. We sat for interviews and people asked me questions just like the ones I used to ask other musicians, and I answered them. But there was an unreality to it all, like it was a dream from which I was about to awake. Each night, I left the stage with the feeling that I wanted to take the audience home. I’d meet them in a line after the show, shaking hands and taking pictures, and notice some people with actual tears in their eyes, looking at me as if to ask if I understood. Yes, I do. I’m glad you’re here. Why did you come? Is it because you have a Secret Place too? Did you invite me in for the same reasons I once invited others into mine?

  It felt sacred, this place, to stand on the other side of the bridge I imagined at twelve years old and know it was all real, these feelings that connect us like lost children.

  I would lace up my big brown boots, put on my sweat-streaked jeans still wet from the night before and twiddle with the guitar pedals at the front of the stage, the distortion, reverb, delay. Microphones were plugged in, cords taped in arcs across the stage as I stand on an X during sound check while someone focused the spotlight. From the back of the room the tech would yell, “Let me hear the kick! Okay, now the floor tom! Vocal stage right!” Backstage in a tiny greenroom, there was always beer on ice, wine bottles open next to vodka, whiskey, mixers. The conversation is light before the show. Did you see that scene by the lake when we drove in? I think there was an accident. There were three ambulances. I think a man was killed. No. Wait. Was I still asleep? Did I dream that? Did anyone else dream that?

  The taste of salt in my mouth as I swallow spit to sing, the sting of hair product in my eyes from the sweat beneath those hot lights, an electric shock from an ungrounded microphone when it zaps my lips and I jump back, the faces, all the different faces I don’t want to let down as I un-focus my eyes and peer around the room. We begin. A blur of energy. Dizziness. Sweat. Stomping and clapping and screaming and singing. I wake up in a cheap motel next to Daren or Steven or Noah. We get some coffee from the breakfast bar. We drive to the next city. We set up our gear. We search for food, then go to sound check, then back to the motel to shower. We go over vocal warm-ups and set lists. Then the show, the dream come to life, the bursting lights and screaming and wailing, a place to find that connection, that thing I long for. Then it’s quiet again as we watch the crowd fi
le out from the rafters above the stage, hoping our colds don’t get worse, drinking tea, or whiskey, or whiskey with tea for our stuffed noses and froggy throats. We go wilding through the streets to find a local bar at midnight, to savor this moment, this one precious moment: alive and awake in a rock-and-roll band in some dirty back alley on the moon. Sometimes we end up in a living room or a city park at 2:00 A.M. lighting fireworks, howling and jumping, then stumbling back to the motel to sleep before it is time to drive to the next town. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next.

  When we get to Portland, Jake is waiting at the back of the venue, his hands in his pockets, an enormous grin on his face as he watches me on the stage. The Wonder Ballroom is a big box with polished wooden floors that looks like the kind of place where they once held sock hops in the 1950s. The room has good energy. Jake is hard to miss, as always—my friend who looks like a six-foot-six, 260-pound Viking with a long blond beard smiling at me from the back of the room. He’s married now with two daughters. Tony and I both attended his wedding, flying up to Oregon to watch Jake cry like a baby, red in the face and swaying for the entire ceremony while his bride looked on, mildly annoyed, mildly amused.