“Hey, John,” I said. My dad barely looked at me. We hadn’t spoken since I’d gotten that judge to emancipate me six months earlier. John had signed off on it, but he’d taken the whole thing as a personal insult that he wasn’t interested in letting go.
“What do you want?” He passed the beer-can pipe to a blonde girl in a black sleeveless T-shirt sitting next to him. She gave me a glassed-over look from behind a piece of greasy hair. I think she was a friend of my cousin.
“Where is everybody?”
“Your mom’s at the casino. Your brother’s in the kitchen.”
“You know where the Telecaster is?”
John just shrugged. “You should ask your brother about that.”
I pushed my way through and found my older brother, Cody, trying to light pure grain alcohol on fire while blowing it out of his mouth like a dragon. An alcoholic dragon.
“Well, hell, look who it is,” he slurred, punching me in the arm. “The prodigal son or long-lost brother. Or whatever.” Then he gave me a half hug, half headlock. “We’re still brothers right? What did the judge say on that subject?”
“We’re still brothers. Nothing I can do about that,” I said.
I didn’t know how Cody was going to feel about this TV thing. People would have told you he was the musician in the family since he’d been playing in bands on and off for years. His band even opened for Lynyrd Skynyrd once, like, three years ago when they played in Little Rock. Sometimes we used to play together at bars—called ourselves the Buckley Brothers. But all that ended when I moved out.
Some sketchy guy stepped in between us then and pushed a twenty-dollar bill at Cody, who pulled a couple of pills out of his front shirt pocket and dropped them into the guy’s hand.
You know how some people have a family business that everyone is supposed to pitch in and help out with? Well, this is ours. Cops in Calumet claim if they could get rid of all the Buckleys, the crime rate would drop at least 80 percent overnight.
“I’m thinking about kicking you out of the band,” my brother said, eyeing me to see if I was going to argue that there wasn’t a band to be kicked out of anymore. “You haven’t been to practice in months. You too good for your family now?” As the music in the living room switched from hip-hop to country, my sister, Sissy, bounced in through the kitchen door.
“Baby Ford,” she said, hugging me. She calls me Baby even though she’s only twenty-one. Sissy’s good-looking, and that fools people because if you cross her, she’ll put a screwdriver in your leg. Ask my uncle James about that—he’s still got a limp.
“Dad said you were here. What are you doing, huh?” she asked, looking curious. “You didn’t come to party.”
“Ford’s decided to crawl back and beg for our forgiveness for disowning us,” Cody said.
“Not exactly,” I said. And then, suddenly feeling embarrassed, I just went ahead and came out with it. “I’m gonna be on this show called Spotlight.”
“What are you talking about?” Sissy asked.
“You heard me. They liked my singing.”
“You’re gonna be on TV?” Sissy asked, really not absorbing this information.
“I’m flying out tonight.”
“Well, shit, why didn’t you tell me?” Cody wanted to know, a nerve-wracking smile coming across his face. “Let me get my stuff and let’s go, man.”
I made sure I caught his eye because sometimes Cody will dodge you and pretend he doesn’t understand your meaning. “Just me, Cody. It’s not like a band thing.”
“How you supposed to do this without me? I taught you everything you know about music.”
“I’m just gonna do my best, I guess,” I told him. “Anyway I gotta go. I came by to get my Telecaster.”
I could practically hear Cody’s bad side clicking on in his brain. “Well, that’s gonna be difficult. I sold that old guitar to Marcus at the pawn shop.”
I stopped and looked at him. “You sold it? That’s my guitar, Cody.”
“Family guitar, really. And you left the family, if I remember.”
“Grampa left it to me, and I want it back.” I ordered myself not to let my hands curl into fists. Because that’s what Cody wanted. Because it would mean I was still like them.
“Yeah. And, well, I want to hook up with Taylor Swift, but you don’t always get what you want, do you?”
We glared at each other for a minute. His eyes had that look they got when he was making someone miserable—he was enjoying himself. He likes to poke at people, find their weak spots. What I wanted to do was leave. I swear that’s what I was hoping for myself. But what I did instead was hit him.
He put me on the floor, fast as lightning. Pinned me down and sat on top of me. Then he hit me on the side of the head with his open hand.
“When are you gonna learn you’ll never whip your big brother?”
Sissy was pulling him off me when some tattooed dude appeared in the doorway and yelled, “Cops!”
“Shit!” Cody jumped up and pulled a paper bag full of pills out from its hiding place under the kitchen sink. He seemed like he was going to bolt right that second, but then he reached down and pulled me up. “Don’t you have a plane to catch?” he asked, finally looking at me straight on.
We ran out the back door. People were scattering out every exit like cockroaches when you turn on the light. Cockroaches wearing a whole lot of denim.
Out in the backyard you could see the blue lights flashing and the dark shapes of people making for the woods. Rounding the corner of the house, wouldn’t you know? I ran right into the outstretched arm of a cop. My back hit the ground first, knocking the breath out of me.
A half hour later I was still in the back of the cop car, wrists throbbing from the handcuffs digging into them. The door opened. “Hop on in there,” ordered the cop who’d clotheslined me. I recognized him from a few years ahead of Cody in school—a short, bulky guy named Steve Greggs. He had Cody in handcuffs.
“Oh, hell no,” Cody said when he saw me in the car. He twisted to talk to Steve. “Damn it, Greggs, you let my brother go. He don’t even live here.” Steve tried to put Cody in the car, but Cody definitely wasn’t making it easy.
“He’s got a plane to catch, you idiot! To Hollywood, you hear? He’s gonna sing on TV. If you mess this up for him, I swear, I’ll take it out on your ass, Greggs. You were an asshole in high school, and you’re still an asshole. Maybe this is your chance to turn that around.”
“Shut up, Cody,” said Greggs, pushing my brother in next to me. “Things have changed a little since high school.”
“Yeah, now you’ve got a gun instead of a baseball bat.”
“Forget it, man. I think you helped me enough tonight already,” I told Cody. His ranting was only making things worse.
Greggs slammed the door on us, then slid into the front seat, taking his time with checking out his mustache stubble in the mirror, just to piss off my brother.
“Listen, you dumb redneck! My brother has places to be!” Cody yelled through the metal grate.
“Bullshit,” Greggs said. “You Buckleys are trash, always have been. Only places y’all are going are to the state pen in Jacksonville or into the ground.”
My brother kept trying to make eye contact with me on the way to the jail, but I didn’t want to look at him. I felt hot angry tears behind my eyes, and a terrible frustration. I couldn’t believe that I’d blown this chance. It seemed to me that Greggs must be right: failure was in my genes.
It was just before dawn when I was bailed out by Leander, who was waiting for me when I stepped outside. In the end I was only charged with disturbing the peace. I guess my brother had managed to hide the evidence before they caught him, but making me miss the flight—they couldn’t have punished me any worse.
During the night, part of me had almost felt relieved t
hat the whole TV thing was over with. I told myself I’d probably just have made a fool of myself anyway. But when I saw Leander, the relief went away and then the guilt rushed in. Leander was the only person who’d ever really seen anything in me. He’d given me my job, he’d rented me my house for almost nothing, and he’d taught me a lot about music.
“I missed my flight,” I said.
Leander nodded. He’s a guy who looks like he should have a beard. It’s confusing that he doesn’t. “I noticed.”
“Thanks for bailing me out.”
It felt bad to have him pick me up at jail. A few years before, Leander had caught me breaking into his store, but he’d ended up dropping the charges on the condition that I work for him to pay for the damage. Eventually it turned into a full-time job, helping around the store and teaching guitar lessons.
I don’t know what he saw in me that no one else did. I mean, my teachers used to tell me I was smart and they’d point to my good scores when I happened to be in school on the day of one of those state aptitude tests, but they also said I didn’t apply myself. I did apply myself, but it was to screwing up. And trying to fit in at home. None of that mixed well with school, and I finally just dropped out sophomore year. That didn’t seem to matter much to anybody.
Anyway, Leander sort of started looking out for me. He was more like a parent than my own parents ever were. He’d buy me meals at the diner, his way of making sure I was eating real food and not just living on cold Pop-Tarts and SpaghettiOs. He talked me into working toward getting my GED. It was when I started going to his AA meetings with him, when I first heard him talk about his family—how his kids don’t speak to him anymore—that I started thinking he was trying to make up for past mistakes by helping me out. At first I went to the meetings for the free doughnuts, but then because the people there knew where I was coming from. Most of them had things much worse.
My family found my sobriety really irritating. They all thought I was judging them or something. I found out that if you’re going to be around tweakers all the time, you kind of need to be drunk. And I also found out that I really didn’t have much of a desire to get loaded once I broke off from the crowd. I stopped needing the meetings. But I just kept to myself more, kept my door closed during parties, and that was working out okay until someone almost blew my head off.
I was sitting on my bed during yet another party when a bullet tore through my wall and whizzed by my ear like an angry wasp. It stopped in my little practice amplifier. Turns out, some idiot was showing off his new .45 in the living room and accidently fired it while pretending he was a gunslinger. Cody couldn’t stop laughing about the look on my face. I couldn’t stop thinking about how stupid it would have been for my whole life to come down to being shot through the skull by some drunk dumbass. That’s when I decided I wanted out.
Leander helped me set up the emancipation. Talked to my parents about signing off, telling them it would be better all around. They had never heard of emancipation, and they mostly saw it as me thinking I was too good for them. But in the end they signed off, because what difference did it really make? The judge determined that it was in my best interest and that I’d proved to be self-sufficient. And just like that, I was a seventeen-year-old legal adult and could live on my own.
We’d been driving in Leander’s Cadillac for a while before he said anything else. “So that’s it, then?”
“I guess so.”
“What’s your plan? Work in my store for the rest of your life?”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing wrong with it. I like having you there. It’s fine with me if you want to spend the next twenty years giving boogery kids guitar lessons and spending your lunchtimes eating with an old man.”
“Good, because that’s what I want to do,” I said, even though it felt bad to say.
Leander braked at a stop sign, but then he didn’t get going again. We just sat there. “Now that I’m old, I look back on my younger self, and I realize the number of chances a person gets to change their life—I mean really change it—there ain’t many. And most times, it ain’t even any.”
“I missed the flight,” I reminded him. Now, I had some idea that I could call the producers and beg them to get me another ticket. Maybe they could do it. I didn’t really know. I’d heard that out in Los Angeles, people in TV just threw money around like it was confetti.
But I couldn’t bring myself to pick up the phone. Asking for another ticket felt the same as saying that I was just some backwoods guy who had messed up before anything even started. What was I gonna say? Hey, sorry I missed the flight, got arrested for being at a drug party. Can you just send another four hundred dollars?
I told Leander, “It’s over.”
“There’s more than one way to get to California.”
“Maybe I don’t want to hear what those people think of my singing anyway.”
Leander nodded again, like I was making some kind of sense, but then he said, “I think you’re lying to yourself. I think you do want to know. You think it’s common to have the kind of talent you have? That promise, it’s in your bones, and if you don’t let it out, it’s gonna burn you up. And I don’t feel like sitting around watching it happen. So you’re fired.”
I smiled, assuming that he was joking. “C’mon.”
“That’s right.” He gave me a look that said, Cut the bull. Then he pulled the car up to my house and held out some cash. “Here’s two hundred dollars severance pay. That should be enough gas money to get you to LA. Don’t think it over another second. You get out of my truck, and you leave town right this minute.”
When he wanted, Leander had a way of talking that cut right into me. So when he looked at me with those wise hard eyes of his and told me to leave town right this minute, that’s what I did.
Twenty hours later I wish I’d at least stopped by a store to pick up some new shirts and maybe some provisions for the trip. Still, just driving through all that empty space has made me feel like I’m expanding. I want to keep driving. I don’t really ever want to arrive.
7
It’s one a.m. when I walk through the doors of the hotel, only thirty-eight hours later than I was supposed to be here. It’s definitely not the Motel 6. The lobby reminds me of the inside of one of those science labs where they solve crimes on TV, except there are a bunch of cute girls hanging around instead of nerdy scientists. I mean, there are more good-looking girls in this one hotel lobby than in all of Calumet put together.
The desk clerk looks me up and down before he types my name into the computer. “Mr. Buckley, you’re with Spotlight?”
Nobody’s ever called me Mr. Buckley before, outside of school when I was in trouble. “Yes, sir,” I say. “That’s me.”
He picks up a phone, dials, and has a quick conversation. “. . . no, he’s here now. Yes, he’s standing right in front of me. Okay.” He hangs up. “The producer will be right down, Mr. Buckley, if you want to have a seat on one of the lounge chairs.”
The last part of the drive out I’d been filled with weird confidence. Felt like the whole city was waiting out here just for me. But now, looking around at this crime lab with the attractive girls and the DJ playing his bleep-bleeps and boops, I start feeling pretty nervous.
They aren’t gonna let me in this thing. I didn’t even call to tell them that I was making the drive. I didn’t even call them after I missed the plane. What if I’m disqualified already? I probably am. Stupid. What was I thinking anyway? I don’t even have enough money to make it back home. They’re probably sending a security guard down to throw me out of here.
“Ford?” A woman’s standing in front of me in a silk robe, like I woke her from sleeping. She doesn’t look as old as I thought a producer would, but she does look pretty annoyed.
“Sorry I’m late.”
She puts two fingers to her eyebrows
like I’ve given her a headache. “Where the hell have you been? You made me feel like some soccer mom who lost her overgrown kid at the mall, you know what I’m saying? I had a PA talk to the guy at your work—”
“Leander?”
“I guess? He said you were ‘going to be here, he guaranteed it.’ But there was no way to reach you. There are these things called cell phones.”
“Yeah, I don’t have one right now.” I shrug, then ask, “What’s your name?”
“What?” She seems to awaken, and looks at me in surprise.
“Your name.”
I swear she’s acting like I asked her what she wants for Christmas. Finally she gets over the surprise and says, “Catherine.”
“Hi, Catherine, nice to meet you. Like I said, sorry I’m late. I got held up on account of some family stuff.”
“We’ve been trying to decide on a replacement for you all day. You know, I was one of the ones who really fought for you because I thought the show could use a little hayseed—no offense,” she tells me. “You made me look bad.”
I look her in the eyes. “I’m real sorry, and that’s the best I’ve got. If you let me compete, it won’t happen again. I’ll be punctual.”
She studies me, and I can sense she’s starting not to be annoyed anymore. “Did you buy your own ticket?”
“No, I drove.”
“You drove out here?”
“On my motorcycle.”
She jumps up and down one time like a little girl. “We should get some footage of you on the motorcycle! It will kill in your video package, set up that whole personal narrative of an outsider rolling into town on a cloud of dust. I’m picturing dirt. Torn denim. Maybe we get a tumbleweed.” She seems so suddenly excited that I get excited too, thinking I’m back in.
But then her expression goes flat as fast as it lit up and she says, “I’ve got to talk to my executive producer. Hold on.”
Everybody Knows Your Name Page 3