The Temptation of Adam

by Dave Connis

  “You’re young. You have time to figure it out.”

  The comment makes me wonder if he even knows what being in love means.

  As I drive to Mr. Cratcher’s, NPR teaches me about the socialist dictator Hugo Chavez. Politics aren’t my favorite thing to listen to, but I’ve been having NPR withdrawals. Their funding telethon ran long because of dicks like me who listen but don’t support it.

  Dez’s car’s already sitting in Mr. Cratcher’s driveway when I arrive. It’s a rust-colored station wagon, and each of the doors are painted a different color.

  She leans against her hood, waiting for me. I never knew five in the morning could be so sexy.

  “Hi,” she says.

  I hug her. “Hi. You ready?”

  “I’ve done scarier things than singing with an old man.”

  I widen my eyes. “Not this old man.”

  “Is he like Hugo Chavez or something?”

  “NPR?”

  She nods.

  “Sweet mercy, you’re perfect.”

  “You haven’t answered my question.”

  “What does it matter? It’s too late. Even if he was Hugo, you already said you’d do it.”

  “Well, you didn’t tell me I’d be singing with a socialist dictator. That’s before information, not after information.”

  I pause before knocking on his door. “Do you have a flask?”

  She flutters her eyelashes.

  I hold out my hand. “Give it to me.”

  She rolls her eyes, slides her hand into her coat, and pulls out the shining metal container. “God, you’re so annoying.”

  I take it and dump its contents over the railing.

  “That’s not fair,” she says. “It’s not like I can just dump porn over the railing.”

  I grab my phone from my pocket. “Here.”

  “What about your mind? I can’t dump that?”

  “Okay, just … it was supposed to be funny.”

  She takes my phone and stretches her arm over the railing. The phone slides from her fingers.

  “I hope there’s grass down there,” I say.

  She holds out her hand again. “Brain, please.”

  I lay my head in her palm. She leans down like she’s going to kiss me but instead she blows into my ear. I shudder then swat Dez away.

  “Dez, why would you even do that?” I’m kind of angry, but I’m laughing at the same time.

  “Because that was funnier than dropping your phone over the railing.”

  “Was it?”

  “Okay, which is worse: the fact that your phone just shattered into bits and pieces on the concrete below or that you have air in your brain?”

  I throw up my hands. “Did you really just destroy my phone? Why—”

  She pokes my chest. “Totally kidding.”

  “You’re going to make me insane.”

  “I haven’t yet? Man, I’m losing my edge.”

  Before we can knock, Mr. Cratcher’s head appears in the doorframe. “Good morning, Adam. Oh, good, you coerced Dez to sing on our broken little record?”

  “I did indeed,” I say. “It wasn’t very hard.”

  “He said ‘sing,’ and I said ‘let’s go.’” Dez steps into the house and hugs Mr. Cratcher. “It’s weird to see you without the Knights of Vice.”

  “Well, there’s one right there.” Mr. Cratcher points at me. “One right here.” He points to himself. “And two right there.” He points to Dez and then winks at me.

  “Ha. Ha. Ha. Aren’t you two all buddy-buddy.”

  “Always,” Mr. Cratcher says. “Shall we? I need to teach you today’s song before we can record anything. Adam, can you get this young lady some water?”

  “I can. Just in the kitchen?”

  “Yes, glasses are by the fridge, second cupboard.”

  I’ve never been in his kitchen before. This is almost world-changing. I open the cupboard and grab a glass. I hold it to the dispenser on the fridge and a piss leak of water drips out of the spout. I look at the overwhelming amount of magnets, notes, lists, and pictures on his fridge. There’s a bunch of Gabby, so while I wait for the glass to fill, I study her features and her smile. I can tell she was a woman who had the eternally beautiful gene, probably like Dez does. Dudes don’t get that. We have the hot-then-beer-belly gene. Poor Dez.

  Poor Dez? We’re not even dating and I’m talking like we’re forever.

  Forever.

  Can addicts have forever?

  I shake my head and press the glass back into the stream of water.

  My curiosity moves to the edges of the fridge when I finish scanning all the stuff in the middle. In the top left corner, there’s a pile of whatnot waiting for me to sift through it. As soon as I touch it, the magnetic disk keeping the pile pinned to the fridge shoots into the sink, giving up on its one task in life. At least half the world’s stationary, Christmas postcards, and notes tumble to the ground. I curse under my breath and leave the glass in the dispenser cubby in order to pick things up.

  As I gather everything, I find an ancient picture of Mr. Cratcher sitting behind a mixing board in some studio. There’s a black guy beside him, wearing the culmination of all that was the sixties: tweed jacket, hair pick rising out of the afro on his head like a skyscraper on a horizon. Behind them, a sign hangs above the door proclaiming Abbey Road Studio: US in a thick and simple script.

  Abbey Road? Like, the studio The Beatles recorded in? That Abbey Road?

  I take the picture and slide it into my pocket, certain Mr. Cratcher won’t notice it’s missing. I grab the glass out of the dispenser and run up the stairs.

  “I might’ve knocked some stuff off your fridge,” I say, putting the glass down on Mr. Cratcher’s desk.

  “It is the plight of the fridge hoarder,” he says. “I do it frequently. Don’t fret about it.”

  “How do you want to record the vocals today?” I ask, sitting down in the desk chair and opening up the DAW.

  “Well,”—he rubs his eyes—“I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to do vocal tracks for the first few songs we’ve tracked. However, let me and Miss Dez practice first. We tested the chemistry of man and microphone; it is even more important to test the vocal chemistry of man and woman. If we sound like brilliance, then we shall record together. If we have a hard time keeping up with each other, we will record our vocals separately, one track at a time.”

  He pulls the guitar with the hole in it off the wall and grabs the stool out of the recording room—he calls it the isolation room.

  “What is the genre we’re singing, Mr. Cratcher?” Dez asks. “Rap? Gypsy Funk?”

  “I’m afraid my heart music has always been eighties hair metal.”

  For once, Dez doesn’t know if she should come back with wit. She gives me a horrified look, but says, “Oh, cool.”

  I laugh and give Mr. Cratcher a slow clap. “The beast has been tamed.”

  Mr. Cratcher gives me another wink, the second of the morning. The first wink was okay, and this one was meh. Any more winks and it will be creepy.

  On a completely different non–old man winking topic: porn.

  It just hit me like a wave of tingling vibrations. It feels like they won’t stop unless I scratch the itch. My knee starts bouncing up and down. I think about the whole drop-the-phone-over-the-railing moment. Dez’s right. Though my phone’s currently somewhere on Mr. Cratcher’s lawn, I can’t stop my thoughts, even after the disaster that was last night. I feel incredibly guilty for letting my mind sift through its stored gallery of thumbnails.

  “Boys,” Dez says, “you’re forgetting that my vocal chords are an economy. I’m the only one with the supply, but both of you have the demand.”

  Mr. Cratcher lets out a thick and hearty laugh. One I’ve never heard before. “Well said, Miss Dez. Well said. Now, the real question here has nothing to do with music.”

  Mr. Cratcher pauses and gives us the look of someone who’s about to ask about young love: raised ey
ebrows, a smirk that says “they know nothing” and “I wonder if they’ll make it” at the same time.

  I cut him off before he can ask. “No.”

  Mr. Cratcher stares at me. “It isn’t normal to be able to answer an unasked question. If one can do that, it means the question is close to the heart. Questions close to the heart are rarely questions, but answers.”

  “This isn’t philosophical, Mr. Cratcher,” I say. “We’re not dating.”

  Mr. Cratcher looks to Dez, a knowing suspicion in his eyes. “Is that true, Miss Dez?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “Not dating.”

  “Why not?” he asks.

  Dez and I decide who’s going to answer with a battle of quick head nods and unmoving glances.

  “Because we’re addicts and addicts can’t love,” Dez says flatly. “They can only consume. We’ll use each other, burn each other, and then lose each other. If normal people can’t make it through life without divorce, then the moment we start is also the moment we end.”

  Start = End.

  I think about that formula for a minute and conclude with this: why are my formulas looking more and more like a bucket’a’bull?

  This sucks.

  Mr. Cratcher sighs. “Miss Dez, have you heard the song ‘Hallelujah’ written by Mr. Leonard Cohen?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Adam, find it and play it for her, please.”

  I do, and this time I listen closer to the words. One line captures my porn-filled head and it hurts me. It’s a beauty-filled hurt though, not a pain-filled one. Is that even possible? Can there be two kinds of pain? A beautiful kind and a hurtful kind?

  Love is not a victory march.

  It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah.

  Love is a cold and broken hallelujah. How does that work?

  Before I can think around that any longer, I hear the line about a blaze of light being in every word. I watch Dez; my blaze of light, knowing everything in me wants her. I’ve watched enough porn to know what want feels like physically, and though that’s present, it’s only a little bit of what I feel. The problem is, I can’t figure out what else I feel. It seems like every time I get close to defining my feelings, she does something new and the definitions die. It doesn’t even have to be something huge, just a flick of an eyelash, or the twitch of a muscle in her jaw. Maybe all my feelings are fractions that make up a whole love for Dez Coulter. If that’s the case, then it’s terrifying, awesome, and confusing all at once.

  The song finishes. After a few seconds of Dez staring at her feet, she says, “That’s a nice song.” She says it so nonplussed that Mr. Cratcher shakes his head in disappointment.

  “I ask you the same question I’ve been asking Adam, Dez. What are you? What is Adam? What are we?”

  Dez’s jaw clenches. I see the tightness push against the skin under her cheek.

  “We’re all addicts,” she says. “Cohen was just an addict to the Hallelujah.”

  Mr. Cratcher closes his eyes like the comment hurts. “Just think on it. Both of you, please. Think on it now, in your youth, before you waste your life trying to find the answer like I have.”

  His plea is so deep and cutting, I think it makes Dez cry. We say nothing else that isn’t music- or album-related for the rest of our time together. They finally practice. Dez picks up the song with just one run through.

  Her voice = haunting + sunrise + beautiful.

  To my surprise, they sound amazing together. Some record exec should be kicking himself for not signing them already. Their voices—his wise and knowing, hers mysterious and young—combine to make my current world less porn-y and more normal.

  Dez is quiet as we leave. I walk her to her car, but she doesn’t look at me. Before she opens the car door, she says, “That man’s an emotional Hugo Chavez.”

  Without saying another word, she drives off.

  I’m struck with how differently we handle hard things. She runs away from them by physically removing herself. I run away from them right where I am. I’m running right now, crafting a scene in which a woman takes her clothes off on top of me.

  NOT TO CARE

  I’m staring at my computer, leg bouncing in the monotonous heat of temptation. I’ve opened and closed the screen a million times. I already feel guilty for having to fight against this, and I’m struggling to figure out why I shouldn’t just finish off the guilt. At least I’d be distracted for a little while.

  The front door opens. Addy’s home.

  I run down the stairs to see her. To get out of my head and away from the computer.

  “Hey,” I say as she tumbles onto the couch. “How was work today?”

  She grunts but doesn’t answer right away. “I had to fire four people. One of them felt inclined to tell me that his son would be eating out of the garbage because of me. It’s not my fault he hasn’t shown up to work on time once since we hired him three months ago.”

  I slide onto the couch and tuck my knees into my chest. “The guy or his kid?”

  “His kid. Totally undependable. How’s your day? Did you and Dez make up?”

  “I guess.”

  “I don’t know why you two aren’t together yet. You already act like an old married couple.”

  I take a deep breath. “Porn.”

  She looks up at me. “Come again, Papi?”

  “I’m addicted to porn. She’s addicted to everything. We want to try and kick our addictions before we can date.”

  Addy raises an eyebrow. “What will that accomplish?”

  I shrug. “Things and stuff.”

  “You don’t even know what it’d accomplish?” she yells. “Ugh, my brother is such a twerp.”

  “I do know, thank you very much.”

  “Well, what is it?”

  “We don’t just want to be each other’s newest addiction, you know?”

  “Oh, I guess I’ve never really thought about it that way.” She lies back down on the couch. “I gotta hand it to you, Papi, I think you’re just complicating a really good thing, but it’s your parade, not mine.”

  “Why do you call me Papi?”

  She doesn’t answer. She never answers.

  “Fine, what would you do if you were me?” I ask.

  “Me? Oh, I’d probably kiss a lot and figure out the hard stuff as I went. Tell me, have you ever seen ducks in a row?”

  “No.”

  She lifts up her head. “Have you seen chickens in a single-file line?”

  “No …”

  “Then why the hell are you trying to force the poultry into linear shapes?”

  I laugh. “I just came to you for dating advice for the first time in our relationship. Are you really about to let me walk away with ‘don’t force the poultry into linear shapes’?”

  She nods. “Totally.”

  “I mean, so far it’s the best advice I’ve gotten.”

  —

  At six, an hour before I leave for the Monday night Knights of Vice meeting, my phone rings. I know it’s Dez before I answer. Would telling her why I was suspended make me feel better? It would certainly distract me, but maybe telling the girl I’m trying to be a better person for the worst of what I’ve done isn’t the best call because here’s the thing:

  I did it.

  The more I replay the moments in my head, the more it makes me hate myself. My thoughts are an abacus and hate is the beads. Somehow, recently, the sum of me always equals how much I hate myself.

  I squash that idea of telling her.

  “Hello?”

  “Have you ever researched Mr. Cratcher?”

  “I don’t spend a lot of time Googling elderly men who ravage the minds of youth with philosophical questions about the human existence.”

  “Do it. Right now.”

  I flip open my computer, nervous that the simple act of getting online will be enough to break my mind-castle’s puny peashooter defenses. I type in “Colin Cratcher” and the results pop onto the s
creen.

  Famed record producer Colin Cratcher under investigation for first-degree murder

  Abbey Road producer Colin Cratcher primary suspect in studio murder

  New US branch of Abbey Road Studios closed indefinitely due to murder investigations

  Abbey Road US assistant producer Elias Harper murdered, producer Colin Cratcher primary suspect

  I remember the picture I took from Mr. Cratcher’s house this morning and pull it out of my pocket. I stare at it. The black guy standing next to Mr. Cratcher must be Elias.

  “Adam?”

  “Yeah, here. Sorry. This—this is crazy.”

  “I’ve been researching him for the last two hours.”

  “Do you know what happened?”

  “Yeah, so here’s what I’ve got. Abbey Road UK opened Abbey Road US in 1969. The UK execs hired Elias and Mr. Cratcher. Elias got his sister, Gabby, a job at the front desk. Because of the racial climate in the United States, people were pissed Abbey Road hired two black people, so there were a bunch of threats to shut it down. At the time, Mr. Cratcher was addicted to every drug ever and didn’t hide it very well, but I can’t find any evidence his drug use ever made him violent. Gabby and Mr. Cratcher fell in love around the time Elias and Mr. Cratcher started producing the album you guys have been working on after studio business hours. One morning, the studio head came into work to find Elias …” She pauses.

  Even though I expect something bad to follow, I’m not prepared for what she actually says.

  “… lynched … by a microphone cable. Because everyone knew Colin and Elias were working together after hours, and that Colin was addicted to drugs, he was the prime suspect.

  “The day of the hearing, there were protest groups for both Mr. Cratcher’s conviction and release on the courthouse steps. But get this, Gabby was with the group protesting for his release.” She pauses, waiting for me to give a reaction. I don’t, so she keeps going.

  “Mr. Cratcher gave a raw and honest testimony. He said he loved Elias as a brother, and the night he died, they’d both been doing LSD and drinking. Mr. Cratcher said he passed out, and when he woke up, he was in handcuffs. After a nine-hour deliberation by the jury, Mr. Cratcher was declared not guilty.

  “A few weeks later, after a ridiculous amount of threats, Mr. Cratcher and Gabby Harper married and disappeared. Currently, the murder of Elias Harper is considered a cold case. A bunch of people believe Mr. Cratcher was framed by a super-active Nashville KKK group because, after his disappearance, a known Nashville KKK leader was overheard saying Mr. Cratcher deserved to die because he was, I quote, ‘romantically involved with a …’” She pauses to figure out how to say what’s next, but her silence fills the blank.