by Kyle Minor
1.
A NOTHER SUICIDE. Area Code 615, the caller ID says. I answer and hear my brother’s voice. He just found out, and the funeral’s tonight. It’s the girl with the red streaks in her hair, the seventeen-year-old he brought home to Florida last Thanksgiving who smoked pot on the back porch and blew my brother in the bedroom while my parents prayed over the turkey and waited for them to wake up from their naps. Unlike the last few girls, this one was shy and lovely. She could hardly make eye contact with any adult in the house. When tickled, she doubled over and got teary-eyed. She watched football without complaining. She said she would never be any good at school. I wanted to take her home and adopt her and raise her through college.
It’s 380 miles from my brick apartment in Columbus, Ohio, to the funeral home outside Nashville, Tennessee. Six hours or so. “I’ll be there in five,” I tell my brother. “Stay,” he says. I’m already in the car driving. We spend the six hours talking on cell phones. It’s a mistake to keep Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison playing softly on the in-dash, but it’s not less than fitting. “I didn’t love her,” he says. “I didn’t want to take care of her.” He told her so, and she went to the bowling alley with some lowlifes from the community college. They passed around X, and she took too much probably on purpose and it stopped her heart. The word coming down was they were close to the hospital but didn’t take her to the emergency room because they were afraid of getting arrested. So they let her die. “You know what her mother told me?” he said. “She said, ‘My daughter loved you. Swear to god you were the only man ever treated her good. Nobody ever treated me so good in my whole life is what she said. Nobody will ever treat me so good again.’
“How do you face that?” he said. “How do you walk into that funeral parlor and let people talk to you like that when what they ought to do is punch you in the face?” America flies by while he says these things. Those rusty bridges over the Ohio, and the rows and rows of tractor-trailers idling in the vast lots in Louisville, and all the waystations that conjure brief meetings past: the hitchhiker in Shepherdsville, the stripper in Elizabethtown, the gas station preacher in Cave City. We meet at a strip mall off Nashville Pike, where I leave my car, and we ride together in his pickup truck to the funeral home near her trailer park in Gallatin. The cab has gone feral. The floorboards are littered with fast-food bags and empty plastic bottles and torn candy-bar wrappers. His skin is translucent and he is too skinny. “I told the doctor I’m not taking those pills anymore,” he says. “My sleep was all screwed up and I was hearing voices. It scared the hell out of me.” We’re flying over potholes and all the side roads now are dirt.
I wonder if he ended it with her the same reason he pitched the pills. It’s dark now. Somehow we make a wrong turn, then another and another. Dirt road shortcuts and switchbacks don’t yield much. We stop at a rural jiffy and a Mexican man points us half a mile down the road. By time we arrive the service is over. We first take the mother for catatonic in the foyer, but then she raises up and runs screaming through the sanctuary doors, and toward the open casket and throws herself over the body. Four of the men, one an ex-husband, pick her up and carry her to a grieving pew. We watch this through the floor-to-ceiling window separating foyer from sanctuary. “Don’t go in there,” my brother says to me. “I have to do this myself.” I watch him through the window.
The frame the window makes puts me in mind of a TV, and me deaf. If there were closed captions, they’d be sending pleasant words. Her family wants to comfort my brother. Their arms around him are fatherly and motherly. Even her mother calms herself and rises to kiss his cheek. When we leave he says, “I am a horrible person.” He is not, but there is no use saying. We retire to his house in Murfreesboro and recline in beanbag chairs and stare at the chalkboard walls of his recording studio and don’t speak or sleep. A pattern randomizer bounces lines and shapes across a spectrum of bright colors on the monitor beside the TV, which broadcasts chef shows all night from Chicago, Atlanta, and Tokyo. In the morning we eat biscuits and sausage gravy and bacon and cornbread at the Cracker Barrel by the interstate, and try not to talk about her at all. Before I leave town, he says, “It would have been better if it was me instead of her,” and what haunts me all the way home is I’m glad it was her instead of him.
2.
Another theft. Another embezzlement. A trail of broken promises from L.A. to Nashville. No reason to say whose story it is or who is telling the story or who went bankrupt or who got evicted, because every visit to Nashville you hear the same stories about different people. At the Sexy Sadie I say this to my brother, and he says, “Liam, tell him a story he hasn’t heard before.” Liam takes me down to the basement and kicks the wall and some of the mortar falls away. “Only thing holding this place together is the horsehair in the mortar,” he says. “This foundation was laid in the Civil War. This basement was a stop on the Underground Railroad. There’s still secret tunnels if you knock out that cinderblock right there.
“That’s your portal to a whole tiny city. It’s a merchant city, and what it’s moving is crack, meth, and heroin. Have you ever done coke and stayed up for seventy-two hours straight? Once this black guy pulled up in a limo and took us to this club where everybody was wearing a suit and a tie. He said once you go in there you can’t tell anybody what you see and you can’t come out for forty-eight hours. I can’t tell you what went on inside but I can say there were city councilmen in there, high-ranking police officers, firemen, A&R guys, ministers, hotel guys—and I mean real high-up execs—and prostitutes galore. Nobody could say whore in there. There were these big black bouncers who kept saying respect, respect. Nobody wanted to mess with these guys, and nobody would. I slept for like two days when I got out of there.”
He kept on this way throughout the tour of the house. Every room kept secrets, only some of which he knew. In this room, somebody blew somebody. In this room, somebody OD’d. This is the room where that girl took off her clothes and painted her body red. This is the room with the stolen lava lamp. This is the room with the toy piano. Skip the studio, you’ve spent enough time in there. That’s the boringest place. That’s my whole life, boring. On and on, and all the way he was promising the highlight of the tour would be the third-floor balcony. Nobody had so much as touched the third-floor balcony in the three years he had run the Sexy Sadie. As a matter of pride, no one would. Three cats had lived up there, and now three cat skeletons. Three cat skulls. But we never made it to the third-floor balcony.
A photographer arrived from Indianapolis. The other two members of the side project arrived carrying borrowed Diesel jeans and tight black Western dress shirts and Liam and my brother and the other two side-project guys changed into them for the photo shoot. The six of us piled into a black SUV. Liam said he was hungry. We detoured to a soul food place around the corner. Liam said we all had to eat chitlins and we did. We ate and Liam talked and ate. He said his parents were missionaries. He said he was a missionary kid. He ate chitlins and said he fucked eight girls this week. He said somebody blew him while he was doing blow. He said everybody went to sleep and he mixed down two songs overnight so he could free up the console for his own shit. He said don’t let anybody fool you, all anybody cares about is their own shit. He left the table for a few minutes and talked to some church ladies drinking coffee two tables over. They gave him hugs before he left their table. He came back and said, “Tell you what. These yellow tablecloths are the shizz.”
We got back in the SUV and went around looking for places to take pictures. The photographer said he wanted gritty. Liam said if gritty meant industrial, he could offer a whole city. We stopped first anyway at a practice studio and took some pictures in the practice space where my brother’s old band used to rehearse, and he said here’s where we kept the piss jar and here’s where the guitarist slept while we worked out the drum and bass problems. Liam picked at the acoustic foam on the wall. He said it was expensive but that didn’t keep it from being cheap. He said
he could get an industrial spray foam that would do a better job for practically nothing, but no one would respect it because what people really care about is that a studio look like some picture of a studio they saw in a poster from a guitar magazine when they were thirteen years old. We went out through the emergency exit, which was propped open. We stepped out into an overgrown field of green grass and green weeds. There was an eight-foot fence behind us and what looked from a distance like a baby’s head pushed between the links. “That’s it, right there,” the photographer said. “That baby doll head. That’s it.” When we got closer we saw there were baby doll parts all around. Arms and legs and plenty of them, but no other heads. Behind the fence a boarded-up building rose to four stories. The metal siding that hadn’t been stripped away was black with long streaks of brown where the rust was making a meal of it. The side-project guys stood in front of the fence, with Liam in front, and the baby doll head just off-center, and when they were done, the photographer showed them the previews on his digital camera.
Soon they bought a van and went on a club tour and abandoned my brother in a youth hostel in Boston, above a barroom where people were watching World Cup soccer, and fighting, and the band wasn’t allowed to play even though they had driven 350 miles to play at the club’s invitation. Everybody thought Liam owned the Sexy Sadie, but it burned down, and after it burned down it turned out somebody else owned it. Liam got a co-write on a hit country record and made a lot of money and moved into the building next door to where the Sexy Sadie had burned down and he called the new place the Sexy Sadie. My brother had written the hook for the song but nobody remembered. He said it was because everybody else was high when he wrote the hook. I want my brother to fight for a co-write, but he says life is too short and moves to Chicago for a while.
3.
Another phone call home. Another problem with money. Another problem with women. In Sacramento, somebody offers my brother sixty grand a year to play guitar and sing at Sunday church services and he says no because he doesn’t believe in God anymore. He gets a gig with a lady country singer but she fires him because he doesn’t play the Steve Miller Band cover the way she likes. For a while he’s Britpop and briefly big in Italy and Holland, but this girl who wears denim skirts wants him to quit and marry her and make babies, so he quits, but she asks him to do things he doesn’t want to do like choke her while they’re having sex, and eventually she leaves him.
The real money’s in Christian rock, a scene that’s a hammer-blow, every flirtation leaving him for weeks on the beanbag chairs in Murfreesboro after he’s been stiffed paychecks, accused of creepiness with underage fans, ratted out to image-conscious A&R guys. He does the same stuff everybody else does. One night he’s smoking pot with a teen pop idol while members of her entourage tryst on dingy apartment couches, the next night she’s on the late night shows talking about her virginity pledge. What sets my brother apart is he says the same things no matter who is in the room, and most people prefer what passes for the truth to what’s actually true. So he calls and says, “Enough. I quit. Enough.” No more touring, no more producing, no more engineering, no more songwriting, no more so much as sitting at the bar at Boscos with anybody wearing Diesel jeans, anybody with spiky hair, anybody with eye makeup, anybody in Nashville who’s ever been to San Francisco.
He applies for thirtysome jobs and nobody calls for an interview. There’s an ad in the classified section of The Tennessean for an administrative assistant position at a trucking company an hour out of town, and they don’t call either, but he has a feeling, so he gets in his truck and hand-delivers another resume, and then the fiftysomething manager, an ex-cop named Dickie, calls to say why should he hire a musician? Everybody knows musicians aren’t dependable, and anyway they leave without giving notice as soon as they get another music gig. My brother says he’s not a musician anymore. He was, but not anymore. He says, I’ll do anything, I’ll sweep your floors, I’ll make you coffee, I’ll pick your nose.
It’s this last thing, this I’ll pick your nose, that does it. Who talks like that? Dickie asks. Anybody so unpolished is somebody I can trust. You’re not trying to pull the wool over anybody’s eyes. I like you. You’re a straight shooter. So soon it’s eight-hour days, ten-hour days, twelve-hour days, fourteen-hour days. Truckers never rest. The road, the road, the road. My brother does dispatch, payroll, troubleshoots, schedules, oversees the truckers, oversees the warehouse guys, makes sure nobody’s falsifying paperwork, makes sure nobody’s hitting anybody else over the head with a wrench.
The truckers are contract workers, mostly. They get paid by the mile. They want work and lots of it. Buddy, can you get me a trip? Buddy, can you get me a run? They curse and he curses back. They want to take a load off in the chair by his desk and tell a story, he listens. Buddy, she hit me with a restraining order again. Buddy, she said don’t call no more. Buddy, I followed her over to this house and won’t you know it’s a swingers party. Buddy, you ain’t seen a fellow try harder to stay married. Buddy, you ain’t seen a fellow cry more. Buddy, I told her you get it out of your system, then you come home to me where you belong. Buddy, you wouldn’t believe this little schoolteacher—blonde hair, glasses, teeny tiny mouth—could have some sex fiend hiding inside that little body. Buddy, I’m gonna be a little late, gotta take a run with this honey I met over here by the elementary school. Buddy, I been going down to one of these swinger parties. Private club. Twenty bucks at the door, two-drink minimum. I figure good for the goose is good for the gander. You ever want to come with me, I’ll take you down there, you don’t have to do nothing, everybody’s cool down there, you can keep your shirt and pants on. I don’t hardly ever take my shirt and pants off. No, buddy, all I ever do down there is watch. Sometimes I get so sad watching, I’m thinking about her, buddy, parading around some lowlife place like where I’m at, I’m crying in my beer. Last week I was sitting on the couch with this old boy, naked as a jaybird, I’m telling him about my wife, and he says, Friend, I feel real bad for you. Tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to have my wife here suck your dick. No, buddy, he didn’t get off on it or nothing. Decent guy. He just sat there and drank his beer while she done it. Buddy, it felt real good but it didn’t keep me from getting lonely. Buddy, I miss her so much. Buddy, I’m gonna go over there right now and see how she’s doing. On and on, this talk, and my brother starts to care, and my brother starts going down to the dive bar some nights with the old truckers while they sing karaoke to the old ladies they go home with, and he listens to their stories about wife number four, the one with the kid you start to love so much it’s like the kid’s your own, and then three wives later, the kid’s still like he’s your own, and you’re sending checks for community college, and you’re giving advice, you’re giving up the spare bedroom, you’re driving cross country to bail him out of jail. This is the real America, right here, among the tractor-trailers without any heat and the tractor-trailers with satellite TV and Internet and the cowboy books on CD and the heavy metal mixtapes and however many milligrams of speed or cocaine or meth or whatever combination thereof it takes to keep you going 48, 54, 72 hours, although not on your runs, buddy, not for the hauls you call in, all that drug shit’s in the past and maybe the future too, you know how life is.
For a while my brother stops calling so often, and I worry he’s sinking into some dark hole he can’t get out of, all those long hours of guitar practice upstairs in his bedroom all through junior high and high school, and all those hours, days, weeks, months, years, by now almost a decade cramped in shitty band vans, logging miles, losing sleep, playing shows for thirteen or thirteen thousand, all of it wasted now, and him locked into some blue-collar management slave life not unlike what we watched our dad do all those years among air-conditioning men and sheet-metal men before he went back to college and clawed and scratched his way up to the corporate life, the desk and the dictaphone. My brother calls and says that’s the kind of thing that sounds good to him now,
the desk and the secretary and the screaming boss and the health insurance plan, HMO or PPO, I care not which. I want to go home, he says, and watch TV and chop vegetables like Emeril Lagasse and melt butter and sprinkle garlic on top. I want to mow the lawn and take my dog outside to walk and lift his leg by the neighbor’s mailbox. I want to paint the walls whatever color I want and go to the Baptist church and find some saved bad girl who wants to be monogamous and watch Scooby Doo and laugh at my corny jokes and get married and cook me dinner and take vacations to the Magic Kingdom or Epcot Center and ride the monorail from the Contemporary Hotel to the Polynesian Village. To me it all sounds terrible, and I tell him so. I tell him he was the reason I became a fiction writer and stopped being a preacher and stopped believing in God. I tell him he was the reason I was able to quit home and quit life and make a new life for myself based upon an idea of myself as a new kind of person I could invent and become, and I was able to do it because he did it first. “When you quit school,” I say, “and moved to Nashville and dyed your hair blue and started wearing eye makeup, I looked around me and said, What’s keeping me here? and the answer was nothing was. The only thing keeping me from becoming me was me. Me listening to what everybody else said life had to be, and me trying to believe what everybody else said I was supposed to believe, and me being somebody that other people could get behind. Just me. And that would still be me if it wasn’t for you doing what you did.”
It sounds ridiculous coming out of my mouth, and even if I could find a way to believe it wasn’t so, he tells me. “What you’re saying is childish,” he says. “It’s ridiculous. There’s no life in music or stories or art or whatever. Everything takes money. Everybody needs health insurance. I’m tired of not having money. I’m tired of being poor. If people are going to treat me like dogshit, I want to get money for it. I want to get paid. I don’t want to be afraid I’m going to lose my house. I don’t want people’s parents to act like I’m some kind of lazy person when I work harder than anybody I know. I want to wear khaki pants. I want to sit at a desk. I want to go to meetings.” This uprightness lasts another week or so. Then somebody calls from California. They need a bass player who can sing background vocals, road manage, and look good under the stage lights. Three hundred bucks a night and they leave for Ontario tomorrow. “Sign me up,” my brother says, and gives a few hours’ notice.