by Rob Roberge
You scream “Fuck!” And then realize that drunk men screaming fuck just outside the lobby without keys are men who spend the night in a drunk tank. You walk off, smoking, trying to remember which direction the liquor store was. You wander the unfamiliar streets of Sarasota for about half an hour before you find one.
You only have enough cash on you for a six-pack of Mickey’s Big Mouth and two airplane gins. You don’t need smokes because you always buy a carton when you hit Virginia, a tobacco state where they barely tax the things and pretty much give them away. You think it’s how they get people to move to Virginia. People like you, anyway.
You don’t risk drinking the beers on the walk back, but you kill both dinky gins. When you get back, no one is answering the buzzer. The porch light is still off. You think about buzzing a neighbor, but then you’d be no better off. You’d be in the hallway, still drunk and still conspicuous.
You’re pissed and thinking, What the fuck did I just drive here for?
You wander off to the darkest corner of the parking lot and start drinking your beers. You sit smoking and ducking out of sight whenever you see a porch light come on or car headlights sweep by. Whenever you hear a car, though, you wait and watch for lights to come on in Mary’s apartment.
You’re almost drunk enough to pass out when you see a guy come out onto his patio and look your way. He walks back in quickly. Right away, any trouble with Mary is forgotten and you start convincing yourself that he’s calling the cops. You leave the beer and walk out of the apartment complex. If the cops have been called, you don’t want to be on this street, so you end up walking all over Sarasota as steadily as you can. You piss behind darkened trees. It’s after two and the bars are closed. You think her roommates must be back by now, but you’re afraid the cops are waiting for you.
It takes another hour before you feel safe heading back to Mary’s. The roommates, if they’re home, are asleep. The lights are off.
You are starting to get sober enough to explain yourself, so you stay in the parking lot, sitting on the curb and smoking. You walk over to where you left your beers, but they are gone. You go back and smoke on the curb. Cigarette butts are crisscrossed at your feet. Your throat is raw. You wish the liquor store was still open.
Not long before dawn, Jimmy’s truck pulls into the lot. You sit there, staring. You’re not going over and you hate yourself because, while you are mad at Mary, you are much more relieved that you are no longer alone. You feel pathetic. Someone with a spine would tell her to fuck off. You just want to thank her for coming back while it still feels like it’s night and not the next morning.
Mary sees you from the truck. If they were going to kiss goodbye and give you some hint as to what is going on, they won’t now.
She gets out of his truck and he pulls away, having the balls to give you a dirty look before he turns around. Mary’s walking unsteadily, looking a little drunk, toward you and you try to see if her clothes look the same as when she left, of if they look like they’ve been off and then back on. Her head is shaved, so there’s no way to judge from her hair. She’s in low-waisted jeans and a tank top. The same necklace and series of metal and black rubber string bracelets. You forget everything for a moment and just look at her and think how beautiful she is.
Your happiness and relief at seeing her again outweighs your anger, and you hate yourself for this. You should be mad. You should scream your fucking head off.
She says, “What are you doing out here?”
You snap. You do yell. “Where the fuck have you been?”
“Jimmy needed to talk.”
“Jimmy needed to talk? Jimmy needed to talk? Who the fuck is Jimmy? Did he just drive halfway across the country to see you?”
“He’s a friend.”
“A friend?”
“He’s a friend.” She has her keys out and is walking toward the door. “And keep your fucking voice down.”
“Why the fuck couldn’t you just tell me you were going somewhere?”
“Will you please keep your voice down?”
You are in the lobby. Some guy is pushing an industrial vacuum cleaner and you don’t say another word until the two of you are alone in the elevator.
You think about screaming, but you end up sounding weak and pathetic. “You just left me.”
She’s staring straight ahead. “You’re drunk. I’m drunk. Can we talk about this in the morning?” She closes her eyes and rubs her temples. “I’m fucking exhausted.”
“You’re exhausted?”
“Enough!” she says. Then, quietly, “Please.” She looks in your eyes. You will never know exactly how to read this look. She seems exasperated with you, but she looks at you with as much love as you have ever seen. Whatever you could say couldn’t mean as much as those eyes.
She says, “Can we please, please just end this day?”
You have no idea if she fucked Jimmy or if he just needed to talk and she got roped into something she hadn’t planned on. You could ask her if she fucked Jimmy. Later, when you move to Sarasota to live with Mary, you and Jimmy will actually become good friends. You will have a lifetime of opportunities to ask either of them about this night, but you never will. You and Mary are still close. You could text her right now and ask if she fucked Jimmy that night. The answer wouldn’t matter now. It wouldn’t have mattered much then, really, you realize. It wouldn’t have changed a thing. As long as she came back.
You tell her, yes. Yes, of course. Of course, we can end this day.
—
2013: Whenever you are at all short or rude to Gayle, you end up thinking she will know the real you and leave you. You apologize profusely when you have done something wrong. You also apologize profusely when you’ve done nothing wrong. You apologize to friends for calling them or e-mailing them. You feel like you’re an intrusion in almost everyone’s life. Sometimes you walk into a room and the first thing you say is “I’m sorry.”
—
LATE SUMMER 1988: Jane has kicked you out of her apartment and you sleep at your friend Jay’s rehearsal space. Jay used to be in a band with Jane. She fired him. He jokes that you’ve both been fired by Jane.
The building’s an old factory warehouse and Jay has turned the enormous second floor into six rehearsal rooms and one main recording room. There are couches all over the open spaces, but no beds anywhere. Technically, no one is allowed to live in the building—it’s zoned commercial—but Jay lives there along with his artist neighbors, who crash upstairs. The only working bathroom is the one that must have been the men’s restroom when it was still a factory. The women’s bathroom has a giant sheet of plywood screwed over the door and a hideous smell that forces you to hold your breath while you piss in the men’s room next door. There are three urinals—only one functional—and a stall with no door. You’ve been in drunk tanks with cleaner toilets. There is no shower. You bathe, when you do, in a deep sink that also serves for doing your laundry and dishes. Though there aren’t a lot of dishes—you and Jay buy takeout when there’s enough money left after drugs.
When you first get here, you sleep on one of the couches that faces a window with a view of Boston—the lights of the South Side swelling into the affluent glow of the Back Bay and then the financial district. The city blinking with life and promise. You can’t see Jane’s apartment from where you are, but you know exactly where it is and you know you could point to it if not for the tall buildings in the way and you look out the window at night with the beauty of the city shimmering and you wonder how you fucked up again and you wonder how many more years you can live the way you do.
Still, the great night view cheers you at first, but then you realize that bands are booked for practice at all hours. The lights are on and the noise is deafening in the main room, so you move to the floor in an equipment-storage room leaving that view of the buildings between you and Jane. It’s not comfortable, but it’s the only room Jay never rents to bands, so no one will come in and tell you to
move so they can make some god-awful racket they think someone might actually pay to listen to.
You haven’t played guitar in weeks. You left one at Jane’s apartment—not your best but still yours—and you don’t know if you can or will get it back. You start to wonder if you will ever care enough to be in another band. You care less about making music every day. Your bands keep falling apart and you don’t have the energy to start another. You audition for one, but by the second practice you realize you are way too much of a control freak to join anyone else’s band.
You think that maybe it’s time to do something other than music, but you have no idea what. Jay gives you keys to the studio. The building is within a block of a liquor store and a Chinese restaurant that has greasy steam tables where every dish is a dollar.
You lock yourself in the storage room and you turn out the lights and you drink and take ten or fifteen Valium a day and fade in and out of sleep while you listen to Richard and Linda Thompson’s Shoot Out the Lights over and over. You listen to it so loud that you don’t hear any of the bands that are practicing, though you feel the vibrations from the bass and drums in the floor and walls. Shoot Out the Lights is a whole album that’s centered around the breakup of a relationship—sung by a couple that was breaking up while they recorded it. It’s the perfect soundtrack for what you’re going through.
You listen to it as closely as you can and you’re drinking and you think of Jane and after a while you realize that the whole record has this brilliant musical parallel to its emotional content. The songs are about love ending, about the lingering pain and love left when it’s over, about the nature of unresolved emotions. And after listening to the record nonstop for days, you realize than none of the songs resolve musically. The songs don’t end on the root note—which would make them resolve pleasantly to the ear. They end on unexpected unresolved chords—the fourth or the fifth. Form perfectly meeting content. You think Richard Thompson’s a genius for making an album whose lyrical content is about the unease of a lack of emotional resolve and then writing music that mirrors that discomfort. You think you are a genius for recognizing what Richard Thompson must have only put there for very smart, incredibly perceptive listeners.
You listen to Shoot Out the Lights and you read John Cage’s essays on melody and dissonance. About how any dissonance that resolves to melody is ultimately pleasing to the average human ear. And how any melody—no matter how beautiful—that resolves to dissonance actually hurts and disturbs the listener.
How things end, in music—how they resolve—that’s what defines the whole experience.
At night, you lie in the dark and listen to Shoot Out the Lights and you think that no one except you and Richard Thompson could possibly understand the agony of love gone to dissonance. No one could know how this lingering pain could feel, except for you and Richard Thompson. And Joni Mitchell. And Bob Dylan.
—
2011: The eastern cougar, native to eastern Canada and New England, is declared extinct.
—
2003: You are about to play your first sober show. Ever. You played your first show in 1979 when you were thirteen years old. You are thirty-seven years old. You have been onstage for years, but never like this. Never this raw. You are ten years clean and you are shaking—not just your hands but your whole body. Every molecule of you vibrating at once the way it does when the train comes into Union Station. You have no idea what to do. You want a drink. You would rather be loaded and alone than clean and with people. And you are scared shitless.
—
1986: You are in love with Lisa, who once left you for a woman but is now sleeping with you again, and she has always wanted to fuck on a bed of rose petals. She has had this fantasy for years. The night before her birthday, you and your friend Nick pull every last rose from the Boston Common. You pay Nick with a baggie of pot and he wanders off down Charles Street. You put the clipped rose heads in five-gallon paint buckets and carry the buckets over to Lisa’s apartment and you pluck all the petals and spread them on her bed before she gets home from her late poetry class.
It does not end well. Roses have insects. Lots of them.
But at least you tried. And you showed Lisa that she most certainly did not, from then on, want a bed of rose petals.
—
1987: A guy you play guitar with named Mick tells you, “You seem to fuck a lot of lesbians.”
—
1990: Your dad’s father is dying. His last words to you are: “If you are going to try to fuck every beautiful woman in the world, you are going to die an unhappy man. And take care of your feet.”
Over the years, you will find he was right.
—
2013: Suicide is the tenth leading cause of death globally.
By 2010, the Golden Gate Bridge has had more than 1,300 people kill themselves by jumping off of it since its opening in 1937.
So many people had killed themselves at the Luminous Veil in Toronto that they built barriers to prevent jumpers. The same measures have been taken at the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State Building. In 2014, plans to install a barrier on the Golden Gate were approved.
These measures are considered to be effective. At least they may be effective at stopping people from killing themselves in those specific places. There’s no way to tell if any suicides have been prevented or not.
When you think about killing yourself now, you try to remember, no matter how bad it gets, an interview you read with a man who had jumped off the Golden Gate and somehow managed to survive.
He said that the minute he jumped, as his free fall started, he thought: I think I just made a terrible mistake.
You try to remember that. Always.
—
1985: You are in Amsterdam, at a party with some friends. You’re on a semester abroad and classes are held in this bizarre castle maybe fifty kilometers south of the city. But you love Amsterdam, and you spend as much time as you can there. You will eventually go back and live there until you go totally broke and have to leave.
But one night you are playing guitar at a youth hostel with some guy who only knows Talking Heads songs. He sings “Psycho Killer” entirely in French. You just play along and you all drink and smoke hash. Eventually he asks if you’d like some heroin.
You never turn down drugs—even drugs you’re not that fond of. But you’ve never tried heroin. A ton of your heroes have been junkies. You have romantic ideas about it. You think of Miles Davis, of Keith Richards, of Johnny Thunders. It doesn’t really occur to you that it pretty much destroyed their lives.
You snort a line. Very soon, you are calmer and happier than you can ever remember feeling. It’s a perfect waking dream. It’s every beautiful moment, amplified all at once. You love everything around you.
It’s like someone pulled a plug at the bottom of your brain and all the tension and insecurity and self-hatred just drained away. It’s like you are living in someone else’s body. Someone not at all like you. Someone happy.
You ask this guy where you can buy some heroin.
—
1972: You are at the dinner table with your family. You dread family dinner. You dread the fear that starts about an hour before your father comes home. Two years after this, he will get a job as a narcotics officer with the state and he will become a much nicer, much less stressed and angry person. But he is working eighty hours a week at three jobs as a pharmacist, which he hates. Most nights at dinner, you never see his face. You only see the back of The Bridgeport Post. When you annoy him, he folds down a corner of the paper and tells you to please give him a moment’s peace. This often gets your parents arguing, adding to the long list of reasons you dread dinner.
You will never remember what else is on the dinner table this night, but the vegetable served up is brussels sprouts. You hate brussels sprouts. The smell alone makes your stomach flip-flop like a fish on a dock.
You try to eat one, but you can’t. If the smell is this bad, how ca
n you possibly put one in your mouth and chew it?
“May I please be excused?” you ask. This is what you say in your house when you want to leave the dinner table. It may be the only formal thing about your parents.
“Not until you finish your vegetables,” your mother says.
“I can’t.”
“You will,” your father says. “This isn’t a debate.”
You know you can’t chew them, so you cut them in half and start swallowing them like big pills washed down with your milk. You get most of them down this way, but then one gets about halfway down and threatens to come up. You barely keep it down.
“I can’t eat any more of these,” you say.
“I said this isn’t a debate.”
You are getting desperate and angry. “If I eat another one, I’m going to puke.”
Your father says, “You puke and you’ll eat it.”
You are not thinking—well, you’re not even capable of thinking that your father is getting his ass kicked by the world eighty hours a week at a job he hates. You know your parents argue about money all the time and there’s a ton of electric stress in the house. But you don’t know they’ve moved to a town they can’t afford so you and your sister will be safe and get a good education. You aren’t thinking about how he coaches your junior league basketball team or your little league baseball team. You aren’t thinking about anything you might like about this man. You are only small and you are filled with rage and hatred and anger and fear. You are shaking and you feel like you might piss your pants. You father stares at you.
You try to force down another half brussels sprout with your milk and you puke. The vomit hits your plate dead center but sprays milk and whatever else you ate for dinner—something that looked like spaghetti sauce—over the sides of your plate onto the circular wooden dinner table.
Your father makes you eat one brussels sprout off your puke-covered plate and you do. You fight to keep it down and feel puke rise into your throat but you stop it. Your mother yells at him. This may be one of the times she threatens to leave him.