“Shit-all, huh?” Gpa said from the backseat.
Corrina looked at him through the rearview. I turned to apologize for the language, but Gpa was smiling.
“If you ask me,” he said, “this music is missing something.”
“Oh, yeah?” Corrina said defensively. “What?”
“A good guitarist.”
He smiled and leaned back in his seat, grabbing Old Humper by the scruff of the neck and scratching behind his ear. Corrina was about to say something, but instead, she blushed and stared straight ahead. She stayed silent but couldn’t hide her smile, letting the Electric Warts fill the car with their loud, soulful, bad-guitar song.
About an hour later, as we entered Barstow, I noticed the sign for the In-N-Out Burger, and Corrina took the exit and wound us up the hill to the restaurant. We needed to stop, take our bio breaks, let Old Humper stretch his legs and do his business, hopefully keeping his porno discreet if he had to do it all, and get some food in our stomachs, because we were starving.
The parking lot was jammed with cars, and we realized it was probably the spot where everyone stopped in the drive from LA to Vegas, so we had to park far back behind it, near the faded pink wall behind an outlet mall.
I let Old Humper out first and he ran circles behind the car and then dashed off through the lot. Gpa stepped out of the car and called after him. I was glad. Gpa looked back over the Blue Bomber at Corrina, who was standing with her legs spread like a superhero and stretching her back from side to side. “Hey,” Gpa called to her. “You’re a great driver.”
She stopped stretching. “I’ve always thought so.” She took off her sunglasses and squinted at him. “But no one’s ever told me so. Thank you.”
“Well, someone needs to tell you. You know, I’m trying to remember the last time I was in a car.” He turned to me. Old Humper had run back and I grabbed him by the collar. “Must have been with you, right?” Gpa said to me.
I fiddled with Old Humper’s leash, avoiding Gpa’s eyes, because I was annoyed with myself that I couldn’t remember the exact last time I’d been in a car with him, especially when it was just the two of us, and that was what really sucked—I didn’t know that the simplest moments could later become the most important ones. There was no way to predict. How many other important moments had I just let fly by?
Old Humper was behaving himself, so I asked Corrina if she’d stay by the car with him, walk him around a bit, try to keep him from chasing after legs, small children, or the base of the nearest lamppost, while I took Gpa inside to get us all some burgers and fries. She dug her guitar out first and slipped the leash around her boot. “He’ll be fine until you get back,” she said, tuning her guitar, and there was something so strange, seeing her leaning against the hatchback of Mom’s car with Old Humper looking up at her, head cocked to the right, peacefully and lazily panting as she began to play. She looked relaxed, but I wondered how, or if, that was possible.
“Always with that guitar, isn’t she?” Gpa asked as we walked toward the In-N-Out.
“I guess,” I replied. There were people everywhere, in every seat, taking up every inch of table outside, so I tried to hurry him along.
He laughed. “Hey, slow down, Teddy.” I did and he continued. “You’re starting to look nervous. I know how you get.”
“How I get?”
“Yes. I raised you. Think a grandfather can’t read his grandson?”
I pushed through the glass doors and got us into the winding line in front of the cashiers. It was an In-N-Out large enough to service an army.
“You get nervous. It was like that on your way to school, when you had to talk to people in the grocery store, or at the movies. Anywhere. It just snuck up on you and suddenly you were nervous. I always worried about you.” People had moved forward, the line was moving quickly, thankfully, but Gpa stood still as he spoke, holding up the line behind him that now went back to the double glass doors. “And then, later, when you were eleven or twelve, you couldn’t take Skipper for his evening walk without that same look coming across your face. Poor boy.”
I knew the face he meant. The smile that didn’t have the energy to really rise, the furtive eyes; it was my pathetic attempt to disguise the horribly uncomfortable fear that spun like blurred fan blades inside me. Fine, we could talk about it. I was getting the look on my face, but not because I was embarrassed about being a little terrified twerp. If I looked scared, I wasn’t. I was angry at him, because he was speaking too loudly and gesturing without thinking about how close people were to him, and he wasn’t paying attention to the line moving.
“Come on, Gpa,” I urged him, but he didn’t move.
“I’m saying that if you like a girl, stop standing around with that trembling lip and just let her know.”
“All right, fine. Just come on.”
“You can’t expect her to be a mind reader. You can’t expect her to like you if you don’t take a risk and tell her you like her. Sometimes a person just wants to know. It’s that simple.”
“We’re friends. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Who knows what she thinks?” he said, throwing his hands up. “But you’ll never know if you stay hidden in your own head!”
I took his hand and dragged him forward a couple of steps. He moved, only grudgingly. “Look, I know, I know. You can tell me all about it after we order the food. What do you want?” I asked, pointing up at the DayGlo sign. It was basically all the same: quantities of griddle-fried beef with or without cheese, and deep-fried potato. What was the choice, really? Just how much you thought you could pack down inside you? Still, I kept interrupting Gpa and asking him what he wanted, sounding way more pissed than I wanted to, until I realized I’d gone about this all the wrong way and a wild cloud passed behind his eyes—only a couple of hours into the trip and I’d already forgotten the care Gpa needed. People glanced at us quickly and then away. Some continued to stare.
Gpa’s voice grew louder. “You know, I’m trying to tell you a thing or two about girls and boys and what to do when you like someone, and you keep talking to me like I’m the kid. But damnit, I’m the adult here, Teddy.”
“I know. I know. But keep it down.”
“You’re always dragging me around, telling me what to do.”
“Gpa, please!”
“Everyone thinks I’m helpless, and I’m not helpless. I’m a goddamn vet. Sergeant. Marine Corps. Don’t speak to me like I’m a child!”
The mother and father in front of us angled themselves between Gpa and their kids and placed their hands over their children’s ears. A tall guy behind one of the registers glanced at us and quickly spoke into his black headset microphone. Everywhere in that packed zoo of a restaurant, people gazed at us as if we were crazy because Gpa was talking fiercely and quickly and loudly, and before the manager could come around to take our name and call the cops and get us locked away before we even got out of the state of California, I put up my hands and apologized to the crowd and tried to redirect Gpa out to the front patio.
“Don’t apologize for me like I’m not even here!” he yelled as I maneuvered him through the double glass doors.
A year earlier, I would have been too weak and Gpa certainly would have been too strong for me to force him back out into the parking lot and away from all the people we’d just scared the shit out of. But I was taller and stronger and in the seven months he’d been at Calypso he had already shrunk—his shoulders stooped more, he’d lost weight. If he thought I looked worried earlier, I was really terrified now because I felt an awful sense of doom lurking somewhere nearby, like Gpa might lose it all together, and without a room to ransack, what would he destroy instead? Himself? And it’d all be my fault—and instead of preserving the stories of the HFB, I’d have ended them forever.
As we walked toward her, Corrina stopped playing and watched us. She quickly put her guitar in the backseat.
“I don’t need to be treated like
a child!” Gpa shouted as I angled him toward the Blue Bomber.
He glared at Corrina when he saw her, and she quickly handed me Old Humper’s leash. “I’ll go in,” she said.
She was off in a second, and I put Old Humper in the backseat and shut the door, leaving the windows open. I had to keep a handle on one thing so I could focus on Gpa. He had at least quieted down, but he still muttered and eyed me suspiciously from the other side of the car. I hadn’t been thinking of him. I knew what I’d done was wrong. I’d bludgeoned him with questions, bludgeoned him with stimulus, too—and for Gpa, we were already a long way from his quiet, calm routines at Calypso. Beyond the In-N-Out Burger, the highway bent up and disappeared behind a dusty hill. There was no telling what would happen a few miles down the road, but I felt responsible and scared.
When Corrina returned with the food, she placed it on the front hood of the car, the only part in the shade, and sat a few feet away from us, eyeing us closely as she ate her burger. Gpa stopped moving and leaned against the corner of the trunk, muttering and talking about how sick and tired he was of people whispering around him and babying him, but when he yelled at Corrina, “Who the hell are you, anyway?” without knowing what to do, I walked up to him slowly and put my hand on his shoulder. “Gpa, it’s me, Teddy, and I want you to know I’m doing what you told me to do. I need your help, so please, please, please, please, please help me get you back to Ithaca.”
Behind me, Corrina pulled her guitar out of the backseat, careful not to let Old Humper out, and leaned against the Blue Bomber’s trunk beside Gpa.
“The damn music! Always with the music,” he said to me. “I’m so sick of all that Sinatra and Sam Cooke and Ella Fitzgerald. It all sounds like they’re trying to serenade me to my deathbed! Why do they all like that music so much?” He was talking about the dance mixers at Calypso. Yet another of the activities he refused to join there.
“But not this,” Corrina said to him, her ear down to the strings. “I play this one for the ex-hippies all the time. They love it. Maybe you remember it? You said you liked Jefferson Airplane. Or, Betty did. Well, this one’s for you and Betty.”
She got comfortable and strummed a few chords while I stood close by Gpa, not grabbing, only hovering close by, just in case. The old man still had fight in him, I could see it, but as Corrina began to play, he began to loosen up, relax his shoulders, and nod along. She played a few notes, gently strummed some more, and then hummed what must have been the first lines soft and low.
Gpa had to lean a little closer. “Wait. I know this one,” he said. “What the hell is it called?”
Corrina continued to play and hum, louder but still gentle.
“I know it,” Gpa said, a slight smile on his face. “Ha! When’s the last time I heard this? My God, I remember hearing this for the first time on the radio on the front porch.” Corrina paused and listened to him. “I heard it as I walked uphill from Woodcrest Avenue,” he continued. “Betty was dancing by herself, singing along.”
And on cue, Corrina sang out the first line of the song. She repeated the lines, singing them again, and then again, and then she played the guitar and let it crescendo and she looked Gpa in the eye and smiled and sang with open, wide-eyed warmth, nodding with her chin, encouraging him to join her.
It was loud, but not noisy, more stirring and uplifting, and Gpa bobbed his head. “Van Morrison,” he said.
“What?”
“The name of the songwriter,” he told me. “Van Morrison. ‘Into the Mystic.’ Betty loved this song. Everyone did. 1970?” he asked Corrina, and she nodded back. He grinned and then sang along with Corrina in a scratchy, off-key voice. She smiled between lyrics as she sang and Gpa began to sing along more, intermittently, picking up a word here and there; they began to sing louder, together, and I put a hand on Gpa’s back and he nodded, still singing.
Corrina let it go and go and probably played the extended version of the song, or her own version of the song, I didn’t know, but I felt that weird, warm feeling when you put two and two together and realize something on your own, as I thought about all the times Gpa had skipped the sing-alongs and the dance mixers at Calypso, all because they were playing the wrong songs for him.
Corrina had found the right song for the mood right now. She knew it when she found it, or in this case, played it.
It wasn’t right, being out there in the hot sun, a hundred miles or so into the middle of who knows what. It wasn’t right, our plan, but it seemed like the right plan for right then. Because here was another story for the HFB, a story about Gpa and Gma loving rock ’n’ roll—another chapter in their long love story. I’d never known that, and I liked imagining them dancing to the song on their front porch, clinging together, swooping around the wicker chair, pausing behind the burst of petunias to kiss. That was their Ithaca—and I had to get Gpa there.
CHAPTER 8
MR. AND MRS. FANTASY
“Oh, man, Yes,” Corrina said to Gpa.
“Yes!” He laughed.
“What?” I asked.
“The name of the group,” he said to me. He bobbed his head and Corrina turned it up on the speakers.
Gpa and Corrina sang along with “I’ve Seen All Good People” as it blasted from the speakers, but partway through the song, Corrina turned the volume down. She pointed ahead to a heart-shaped restaurant sign across the freeway. She’d slowed the Blue Bomber enough that we all got a good look at it. There was no restaurant anywhere, just the gray dirt, a few scattered sage bushes, a cloud-shadowed bluff way off in the distance. The red heart stood all alone in the desert, JENNY ROSE, the name stretched across it like a tattoo left behind long after the rest of the body was gone.
“Jenny Rose,” Corrina said.
“Is that another car?” I asked.
“Uhhh,” Corrina growled. “Sheryl Crow. Tuesday Night Music Club. 1993.”
“What?”
“It was her debut album,” Corrina continued. She picked up speed again, changed lanes, and pushed us ahead.
When the Yes song finished, she glanced back at Gpa, quickly scrolled to another song, and let it rip. “ ‘Dear Mr. Fantasy,’ ” she said. “Traffic. Debut album. 1967. Mr. Fantasy.”
“ ‘Dear Mr. Fantasy,’ ” Gpa said in the back. “My God. I remember that one.”
“I had a feeling,” Corrina said.
“How the hell do you know all this?” I asked her.
“The ex-hippies,” she said. She glanced at me and shook her head. “I mean, they named me after a Bob Dylan song they loved, so there’s that.”
“And then what? They drilled you on oldies for the rest of your life?”
“Classic,” Gpa said from the back.
“What?”
“Classic rock,” he said. “Don’t call it oldies.”
“Yeah, Hendrix,” Corrina teased. “It’s classic.” She laughed and then sang along with the song, her voice looping, harmonizing with the vocals coming out of the speakers.
Gpa nodded. “You have a hell of a voice,” he said. Then he leaned back and looked out the window.
She smiled and kept singing, and even though we were in the car with the lifeless dust of the desert all around us, I thought of her on the boardwalk, her voice rising up over the noise of nonsense, like that one bird hidden somewhere in the trees whose song makes you stop and appreciate the pause and the warmth of your breath within you.
“Okay,” she said when the song was finished. “That does it. I’m making two playlists. One for your grandfather, and one for me. That’s what we need. Every road trip needs badass playlists.”
“What about me?” I asked her.
“What about you?”
“Don’t I get a playlist?”
“You, Hendrix, might be a lost cause. Your Gpa, though? He’s cool.” She flashed him a peace sign and Gpa nodded back.
She fiddled with the phone. “And besides, you don’t need your own playlist. Both of the playlists are for
you, sort of.” And there was something in the way she said that, maybe the way her nose crinkled when she said it, the self-mockery of her own annoyance at me, that sent ripples of happiness all through me.
“Fine,” I said. I looked back at Gpa. “Hey, so Corrina’s the Wikipedia of music. I get that. But how do you know all this stuff?”
Gpa smiled. “Your grandmother.”
“What?”
“Your grandmother got me into rock ’n’ roll. She was always a step ahead of me.” He turned back to us and leaned forward. “But it was all because I had to go to Vietnam.”
As Gpa began telling the story, I realized I’d never heard any of it before, so I grabbed the HFB from my bag at my feet and began recording everything he said as fast as I could.
THE STORY OF HOW GMA GOT GPA INTO ROCK ’N’ ROLL
When people think of the Vietnam War, they assume most US soldiers there were drafted, but they’re wrong. Two thirds of the US soldiers in that war volunteered. Gpa was one of them. It was 1966, he was twenty-six, and he was broke. The garage he’d run for the first three years of their marriage had finally gone belly-up. They had a two-year-old boy. They would have lost their home without her parents’ help. He had no other options. He needed money and benefits. And so Gpa enlisted.
He had six weeks of basic training, and he went home once before he shipped out across the country and then across the Pacific. He’d only been gone six weeks and the separation already hurt. He could feel it—even in the records she played when he got back from basic.
“Listen,” Gma told him when she sat him down on the steps of the front porch shortly before he had to walk downhill to the bus stop and roll out of town. “Everything’s changing. Everything. Except us.”
They had a lot of the folk music she liked, and she’d played that Malvina Reynolds song about what have they done to the rain and the Joan Baez song “Saigon Bride” so many times after he’d enlisted he was sure she’d lost count, and he understood why she liked that wistful, sad, and almost innocent music, but in those two days between basic and shipping out, what he heard her play was different. Something he’d never heard before.
The Last True Love Story Page 6