“Don’t do this,” Warden said, into the phone. “Not now.”
Then he’d threatened to kill his boss’s newborn son.
The craziness he’d spew—you could have had him locked up, diagnosed him this or that. A sicko, mainly. Some people wouldn’t believe it, but Warden was, in his guts, a sweet man. He had no command over words; they came out of him like belches.
“You just don’t talk that way,” I said. “It ain’t cool.”
“That’s how it is, man.” And by this he meant I was right.
As for the bands and the scene, if they spoke of Warden at all, it was as the ass end of joke. CTW hadn’t released an album in more than a year, and his back catalog was stacked in boxes lining the walls of the loft. It gratified me, knowing copies of my band’s debut sat inside that tomb, as near to obscure as one might get. A record meant so much more if you’d scavenged for it, rescued it from a place like that.
And what about Warden’s undrained tub?
“Backed up?” I’d asked.
“I just get in it when I feel like it,” he said. “I’m not wasting any water.”
It wasn’t long before Warden lost all his winnings in a single night. I accompanied him with the purpose of glimpsing his luck in action, and after a few evil spins of the roulette wheel he drove through Ontario’s streets in a sad, delirious tantrum. I slouched in his passenger seat while the city spun by. The windows were open. Bad Brains was on the tape deck. The tires whined. It was one of those moments you want to stay in, where there’s enough simple chaos that you’re not worried about what comes next—moments Warden lived one heedless second at a time.
After fishtailing and a few more mindless turns, he braked in the middle of an unfamiliar road, shaking his hands at the wheel as if it were the brains behind his fit. Up the street a pair of headlights made themselves known, as though they’d been there all the while. When the car pulled next to us, its window rolled down. I couldn’t see who it was, but the voice was a man’s, someone old and impeccably sane.
“This is a one way street, buddy.”
“That don’t matter,” Warden said. “I’m from Detroit.”
WELL INTO HER NINETEENTH year, my sister had developed a fever for Windsor’s dance clubs. Joints I knew only by their neon signs. Jokers. The Loop. On weekends the queues stretched from their doors, putting on display guys wearing white-gold necklaces, silken shirts tucked into their flared jeans. Women in heels and halters, smoking and snapping gum. You’d hear the bass of house music rumbling the street. Andrew and I had approached one of those dens wearing flannel to have the bouncers turn us away us on sight. The signs read: LADIES NO COVER HALF-OFF DRINKS. Caitlin had begun leaving the house with her hair sprayed up into a wickerlike explosion, her black stretch pants so snug against her curves that the seam of her panties appeared embroidered on her rear.
Canada pants—that’s what they were known as in Dearborn.
Dearborn girls of a particular ilk pulled on this attire for their club lives. Seeing Caitlin in her Windsor-bound outfits, I refused to think of it as anything but a girlish fad, or a way of spiting me. I convinced myself that her benign, unworldly face would work as a shield against whatever she might encounter. The quiet girl in the back, holding up a wall … drifting along the schoolyard fence.
One August afternoon, she drove me to have my wisdom teeth pulled. After the molars had been yanked and I’d filled my oxycodone prescription, we took her Escort for a fast-food lunch. Burritos, I suggested, something easily chewed—though my jaw didn’t hurt a bit. I’d gobbled a number of pills before exiting the drugstore. By the time we picked up our meal, I was in a selfless, fuzzy mood, teasing her about the thug rap music playing on the tape deck. Tupac as Machiavelli. Caitlin drove, handling a burrito as she steered, a fluorescent entry bracelet from whatever club she’d attended the night before dangling from her wrist.
My brotherly advice erupted in paranoid bursts, even when it was incontrovertibly true. “You gotta be careful out there. There are scumbags everywhere.”
Catlin balked, dipped uncertainly into her newfound cool. “I know people who’d kill anyone who messed with me.”
She proclaimed this the way someone does when they tell you they have friends in crucial places—famous friends, rich friends—her tough-girl tone frayed by doubt. Still, it was one of the only things she’d ever said that chilled my bones. I pictured a defensive line of steroid-injected beasts, mixed martial artists aspiring to cage-fighting tournaments. I’d heard of some of the maniacs she’d been rolling with, people I knew only by the local legends that preceded them.
“I can’t help you when it comes to those people,” I said.
This was as honest as I could be. I’d posed as a tough guy when we were younger, and she alone might have been fooled by my bluster. More recently, I’d begun thinking of myself as a crazed and feared showman within my scene of malnourished punkers, but she needed to understand I had no powers compared with these mooks she’d befriended.
“I tell them,” she said. “I say, ‘My brother would go crazy if anyone messes with me.’ ”
Even this talk of violence was new about her. Yet I was too proud—that she saw me as a foreboding protector, that anyone did—to say otherwise. I was painless. My thighs had begun a warm tingle, and there wasn’t anything more I’d have asked from the day. Caitlin notched up the stereo’s bass, mimicking a thuggish bravado.
“They ask, ‘How big is your brother?’ and I say, ‘He’s not big, but he’d go nuts.’ ”
As summer of ’99 was turning to autumn, Dad became a semiregular around Mom’s house, dropping in for dinner and assuming seasonal chores. Come by after 6:00 P.M., and maybe you’d find him at the kitchen table or on the stone bench in her garden, talking with her as she weeded the flowerbeds. They’d been divorced for well over a year, and while I detected no romance rekindling, Mom seemed considerate of the fact he had nowhere to be once the workday ended. She obliged my dad the way you might a bohemian uncle. To me, she swore she had no interest in finding a new man. Said she’d manage on her own—that all men her age wanted, anyway, was someone to dote on them.
Since none of us had the spirit to accommodate new worries, I was free of having to answer for much. Mom avoided asking what I was getting up to, occasionally admitting she feared to know. For Dad, that I spoke to him at all satisfied him. It was Caitlin who’d begun staging outbursts that sprung my parents into tandem action, overriding whatever acrimonies remained between them. One early evening my sister threw a fit about wanting a new car. She’d badgered my dad for a loan.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with her,” he said, pacing Mom’s cramped kitchen. “She says her friends all have nice cars.”
“What the hell is her problem?” I said.
There was a lunacy among Dearborn’s working-class stargazers, who hoarded their tips to lease sports cars while never saving a cent. I, at least, had a timeless record collection of first pressings and rare jazz imports to show for my spendthrifting.
“She’s gotta get a grip,” I said.
Dad and I had begun seeing eye to eye on a number of practical matters, like the fact that Detroit’s mayor Archer was supremely more efficient than his psychotic predecessor Coleman Young, or the superior coffee available from the new Tim Hortons restaurant on Michigan Avenue, a delicacy previously available only in Canada.
I followed Dad into the living room, where Caitlin and Mom sat before the television. Something about the four of us together gave me the urge to run my mouth. As though taking a podium, I said, “All you care about is your clothes. What about charity and people with less and all that?”
“Look who’s talking,” Caitlin said. “You dress like a bum.” She turned her face from me as if she didn’t know where to begin. “Doesn’t he?” she said.
My parents all but winced.
Other than the collared shirts I wore to the rug shop, I’d reduced my wardrobe to five black T-shirts, which I could
tell apart by their tatters and cigarette burns. And two pairs of jeans. Those early autumn nights, I’d proudly uncloseted my Carhartt jacket, its collar stained by blood droplets from an onstage mishap with a microphone.
Without another look at me, Caitlin tromped upstairs to her bedroom.
“She’s out of control lately,” Mom said. “She’s like a different person.”
This was the part I didn’t want to hear. Neither did my father.
“If she wants a new car, she can go out and bust her ass for it,” he said.
Ozzy patrolled the floorboards, slinking toward my mom and retreating to the fringes each time my dad spoke. “I don’t know,” he said, seeming to admit he’d relinquished some jurisdictional power or that he was, after all, helpless to arrange the world to his liking. “I just don’t know.”
WHETHER OR NOT DAD was sober wasn’t a question anyone spoke aloud. His showing up to Mom’s house seemed to imply that he was. He’d also begun phoning me at the upper flat, where, at my mom’s suggestion, Will had been answering the line as a linguistic exercise to help his stuttering. I’d return the calls during hours that left to chance whether he’d be home, and then it might be days before he’d get back to me. When we’d connect, he spoke with the self-deprecating insight of someone who’d undergone a severe conversion and was subsisting on only the rawest aspects of himself.
“I’ve gotta keep it simple” was one of his latest phrases. The lingo of the 12-step fellowships he’d been taking part in. “Do the next right thing” was another. His sponsor was a Vietnam vet who told stories of bullets whizzing through the jungle and had, my dad admitted, diagnosed him as an “insecure egomaniac.”
Dad’s favorite new slogan was “It is what it is.” But if ever I had a technical problem—an oil leak or a question about sinking anchors into my bedroom’s plaster walls—his voice would spark as he offered technical details with a confidence that made me believe he was, as he liked to say, “on the beam.”
My uncle Dennis, the third youngest of Dad’s five brothers, had been joining my dad at meetings. Once or twice, they’d stopped by Mom’s house on their way. Dennis was a truck driver. After years hauling freight over interstate highways, he’d settled into a schedule of local routes and a modest Dearborn home with his wife and two daughters. Dennis’s favorite slogan was “My drug of choice is more,” and his sleeveless shirts exposed a tattoo of a bloody-fanged wolf on his bicep.
In their husky stature and thin blond hair, they were unmistakably brothers. Walking beside each other, they looked like a two-man gang, reformed troublemakers on a penitential mission. I kept a distance but figured my dad had no better sober ally than his brother. It was Dennis’s wife I saw most often. Aunt Bonnie worked the register at the 7-Eleven on Telegraph Road and nodded to me like any other customer when I’d come in to deplenish the beer supply. She had flaming red hair you’d spot the minute you pulled into the lot. Her most evident tattoo was an eagle, its wings fanning wide across her sternum.
DAD PAINTED THE WALLS of Mom’s living room on an early September weekend. Will assisted, working off the speech lessons Mom had given him and leaving me with no role in the refurbishing. I waited all year for autumn. I reminded myself not to miss it as it happened. The sky was densely blue, the air perfectly lukewarm. When I came by the house that Saturday, I saw Will leaving in his paint-smeared jeans. Passing me in the driveway, he raised his brows in a way he rarely did.
Mom was smothering her nervous cough with a Kleenex as I entered through the back door. “That Dennis,” she said. “Something’s going on.” Down the hallway I heard my dad pacing the living room, speaking a quiet gibberish into the phone. Aunt Bonnie, Mom told me, had called in a panic.
My plans that evening were to roadie for a group of friends who called themselves Wallside and were playing Grand Rapids, two hours west. We called it roadying, yet it was merely a way to tag along in another band’s van, to feed the compulsion of being forever on the road.
Dad stalked into the kitchen, surrendering the phone.
“I’ve gotta go get Dennis. He’s in trouble.”
“Where is he?” Mom said. “Is he in some crack den?”
She seemed to be lamenting the fact she’d invited any of this into her new sanctuary. Muttering “What’s wrong with these people?” she walked out the back door to tend what was left of her garden. Dad stood blowing gusts, the weekend scruff on his neck daubed with white paint. It was his brother. It was the poltergeist of his addiction conjured into a sunny afternoon. Caitlin was working the dinner shift at the steak house, which was a lucky thing.
“Can’t someone else get him?” I said.
I was crunching the facts I knew about the drug, bits I’d been told by rehab counselors: the abysmal recovery rates, the never-ending temptation.
Dad said, “I’m just gonna pick him up.”
“How do you know where he is?”
“We know where he is.”
“Where? A crack house?”
“You wanna come with me?” he said.
I could take it or leave it—either seemed an act of trust. Dad had also been inviting me to 12-step meetings, so that I might comprehend his disease. Or perhaps because he suspected I, too, might benefit from the principles suggested there. My reason for refusing any of this was not for lack of burning curiosity but for fear of witnessing my father any more closely and nakedly than I already had.
“I have to go out of town,” I said.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll get Dennis and bring him home.”
WALLSIDE’S ’84 FORD ECONOLINE was far more hospitable than the Orgasmatron. I’d come to feel more at home with these musicians than I did my own band, and we drifted into a lazy silence after leaving Detroit, watching Michigan pass east to west beyond the windows. Wallside’s music was high-decibel chaos owing nothing to proficiency, spared only by the earnestness with which they went apeshit. Their brotherly ways heartened me, as did the fact that they admired my band, readily admitting we were superior. Hard to resist telling them Repa would be rejoining, that we’d again be at the apex of our powers. But I held out. There was a show booked at the Shelter for the end of the month—a prestigious gig for which ads had already run—and we’d need Blaine to drum one last time.
Nearing Grand Rapids—no chance of turning back—I accepted my failure to confront whatever grim passage my dad had offered to lead me through. He’d never again speak of that day, but what I imagined was specific: the front room of a Brightmoor crack house; a cinder-burned couch occupied by tweaking addicts inhaling doses of smoke. I pictured my dad extending a paint-spackled hand to Dennis, pulling his brother to his feet amid the secondhand fumes. I could have been there, could have smelled it, but I’d taken the easy trip.
Throughout Wallside’s show I crouched beside the amplifiers, ready to attend to any technical difficulties. I drummed along on my knees, wishing I were playing. Their singer lost his footing and took a spill, splitting open the crotch of his pants. Before the last song, Scott, their long-haired guitarist, turned to me while standing at the microphone. “This next one’s for our friend here.” He eyed me through wet hair, miming a pistol with his fingers and pointing it my way. Pressing down his thumb. Bang. “One of the good ones.”
A customary thing: a band ingratiating their roadie before an audience. I’d done it many times to Will, to Warden. Just then the simple courtesy crept over me like some shamanic rite, as though my friend had perceived the darkness in me as I’d stared out his van’s windows.
The hiss of the amplifiers. The guitars being tuned for the final onslaught.
One of the good ones …
I nodded, extending my arm and aiming two fingers, firing an invisible bullet right back at him. The drummer counted off the beat, and I felt the tickle in my throat, warning that the tears were coming, which gave me more than enough time to cinch them at their source.
The night of her late-September birthday, Caitlin
crossed the border, partook in Windsor’s festivities, and returned with a black eye. Her purse was stolen, too, though no one would find out about it until later that week. I’d gone to see Angela after Caitlin blew out her twenty candles and hurried off to the real party. By the time I returned, her bruise had begun yellowing around the edges. It looked worse as the days went on. Caitlin spent a week on Mom’s couch with her bangs brushed over her face, missing work and skipping class, reeling in her old trance in front of the television.
She was curt about what had happened, evasive—no names, no places. She said there’d been a fight, a mess of blind punches she’d tried to stop. Another day, she said it had been an accident. Once, she said something about how Dad or I would never hit a woman, but no matter how I drilled, that was all I could get out of her before angry tears clouded her eyes, one of which was hemorrhaged and bloodshot.
We’d just sat down to dinner—Caitlin, Mom, and I—when two detectives showed up with the purse. It was one of those big, black numbers that could carry a human head and then some. But nothing inside it was missing. The Windsor club my sister visited had installed undercover cops, suspecting one of their employees of snatching American wallets for their licenses and passports. They’d caught the skeever just in time, and after an international handoff, here it was, care of the Detroit police.
“You’ll want to double-check your belongings,” said one of the cops, standing on the porch while I paced back and forth past the front window, wondering if I had a purpose in the situation.
“They got him,” Mom said, really trying to interpret this visit as good news. She invited the men inside, a guy in his early thirties and another pushing retirement. When handed her purse, Caitlin held it at arm’s length, her face not quite settled on any one expression. “Smells good,” the young detective said, about our dinner, which was going cold at the kitchen table.
Both men interviewed my sister, thinking she might have information that could lead to further arrests. “You have to be careful,” said the younger one, clean-cut and pleased with his role here. “Identity resale is big business.”
Songs Only You Know Page 17