Famous Builder (18 page)

Within minutes we’re inside a cramped electronics store across from the Cherry Hill Mall. In one corner: a taped-up photo of the Ayatollah Khomeini with three red circles superimposed over his face. In the opposite: a potted mother-in-law’s tongue that hasn’t been watered in weeks. There’s a stale smell baking: cherry lozenges, the slightest suggestion of cigarette breath. The salespeople, all with bushy, black mustaches, stand with their backs to the register counter. They trade jokes, though they’re sending out signals—I swear I’m picking them up—like hammerheads who haven’t smelled human flesh in weeks. (How tasty we must look to them. Who’s buying luxury electronics during an oil embargo and hostage crisis?) We paddle out between the displays, trying our best to look like energetic, capable swimmers, only occasionally grasping onto a raft before we swim on. How to tell the difference between one machine and another that costs a thousand dollars more? I know I should probably care more about the mechanics of popular music, but it’s as comprehensible to me as the dusty wires inside the hood of my father’s car. To me an amplifier is an amplifier, and I’m inwardly distrustful of those who’d give as much credence to the sound system itself as to the quality of a performance. Perhaps this has to do with my years of playing guitar in 1960s-era Catholic churches, where we had to make do with a humble microphone attached to a blond lectern embossed with an abstract fish. At such moments I feel the grave tug that I should offer myself up to the realms of church music forever—that this obsessive need to turn myself out to the world, this wanting, wanting, is simply going to do me in. Look up to God, I think, but such thoughts are almost unbearable right now: a lifejacket with weights sewn inside the collar.

A salesman with brass-colored freckles moves in our direction. Suddenly my father folds his thick arms over his chest with the instinctive distrust he holds for anyone who’s out to take something from him. My headache pounds. “The youngster here,” he says, before the fellow has the opportunity to extend his hand, “is a singer/songwriter.”

“Is that right?” The salesman’s gaze goes right to the tiny spot on my father’s pants, then fixes on a spot on his own. “We get a lot of young singer/songwriters in here. We just talked to a composer from Juilliard.”

My father’s features settle into a harder, more brutal version of his usual expression. Looking at him, you’d never know that he tears up, in public, at most movies, regardless of their content.

The salesman glances up, rubs his mustache with a ringed finger. “How can I help?”

“He needs a four-track recorder.”

“A four track recorder—okay. And mikes, and stands, and headphones, and—?”

My father nods once, firmly, with emphasis.

“The whole nine yards,” the man says somberly.

He leads us down a passageway. I try to hold myself together, but second by second, my edges are melting, flowing. I’m all over the floor now, a cold clear puddle of ammonia that could make your nose run, or scald the skin of your hand if you let it linger in me too long. Why should it make me so uncomfortable to receive something? Of course, my father spends the better part of each weekend working himself to death, but he’s choosing that, for God’s sake. He’s an electronic engineer; he has two graduate degrees; he’s certainly not as cash-strapped as he makes out to be. And yet, such thoughts are not enough to lift me off the floor, to take away this smell, which can only be described as guilt, guilt, the domain of the lazy, the muddle-headed, a state of being that was supposed to have gone out of fashion with Vatican II. I’m a solid, coherent adult at Loyola: no “youngster.” Why can’t I be that here?

We stand next to a small tower of boxes.

“A songwriter,” says the man. He looks at me directly in the face for a second, for the first time since I’ve entered the store, then turns away again. (Is there something about me that scares him, and him me?) He says these words with a brisk casualness, a lifted corner of the lip, as if such declarations are familiar from the mouths of ambitious Cherry Hill parents and their misguided offspring. A part of me wants to tell him, you don’t know who you’re talking to, but I keep my mouth shut if only to further things along.

The salesman reaches for a box marked TEAC. “Who do you sound like?”

I pause. It doesn’t occur to me that he doesn’t expect a complicated answer, that I should probably just say “John Cougar Mellencamp.” Instead, I choose to pose the truth as a question: “Laura Nyro?”

The corner of his eyelid pulses. I’m not sure he’s ever heard of her or not, but whatever he thinks of my answer, it’s wrong. He tears open a box and gingerly removes a bright machine with simulated walnut on the sides and two 12-inch reels. A bar is clicked to the right. Wheels turn with a satisfying
sshh
, like tide moving through a marsh. He holds up a mike. “Test, test.”

“Sing something,” my father says.

I roll my eyes, glare.

“Come on,” he says softly, with a hint of flirtation. My father turns to the man, a kinder, more relaxed expression softening the set of his nose, the length of his upper lip. He makes a slight nudging motion, even though he’s a full four feet from the man. “He’s bashful.”

“Daddy.”

“Go sing one of your church songs.”

The man hits the rewind and plays our conversation back for us. Church songs? What to do? Sing Psalm 150 in a public space for someone who’d have to pretend he’d appreciate my performance. Or worse, disappoint my father. But wouldn’t he love it, though, talk about it for years, just like the way he talked about my brother Michael when he played “Day by Day” on the piano in that restaurant in Mexico, with the ocean through the window behind him, to the applause and cheers of everyone at the tables—one of the many things that Michael had done over the years to lift my father’s gloom.

Fortunately, the salesman must know what’s on my mind. Or maybe the thought that we might be fundamentalists or fanatics of some sort, rallies his attention. (But you don’t understand, I want to say: Catholic folk songs. Guitars! Liturgical dance!) He quotes us a price that’s at least a $150 under list, so shocking my father that he’s entirely disarmed: he’s stunned that there could be something like luck or good fortune in the world.

“You’re sure you’re not selling me something returned?” My father squats, runs his hand on the surface of the machine for nicks, scratches, dents.

“You have my word, sir. It’s in tip-top shape. It’s just last year’s floor model.”

My father turns to me. He lifts his brows until his forehead wrinkles; the corners of his eyes squint. “And you’re sure that’s what you want?”

I nod.

“You’re not making this up. You want this, right?”

I put more effort into my second nod, though I think, well—too much is depending on this, no object in the world should ever carry so much meaning and possible defeat. But when I switch the knobs to the left, right, and imagine myself with the headphones on, my lips barely touching the spongy black bulb of the mike, a soft glow warms the underside of my arm from the palms all the way up to the shoulder blade. “Man, oh man,” I murmur.

“Ring it up, then,” my father says in a resigned, dehydrated voice. He pats his front pants pocket, slides out a stained caramel-colored wallet, from which he extracts a credit card. “BankAmericard.”

We walk across the slick parking lot. The clouds blow to the ocean now, the undersides glowing pink, umber, “muscular with gods and sungold,” as Joni would say. The air’s cooler, drier on the tops of our heads. Tomorrow I’ll be back on the train to Baltimore, but why dwell on that now? “Thank you,” I say. “Very much.”

***

The dorm’s a brick building on the east side of the college campus beside huge dramatic stands of pines. To get to my room, you walk through the lounge with the piano, pass rooms thick with smells: stale sheets, apple cores browning beneath beds, Aqua Velva in toothpaste green bottles. And, of course, boys. Tonight many of these boys have assembled in my room. (First a knock on my door, and then another. “What are you doing in there, beating off?”) There’s Todd, lying on his stomach on the carpet, where he crosses out an algebra equation; Gregg stands by the window bouncing a red-, white-, and blue-striped basketball on his palm. There’s Kenny, who’s buttoning up his plaid shirt, but who’s known to take off all his clothes without warning, to swing his soft pink goat dick in front of the window to get a laugh. In comes Scott, Nick, John, Fletcher. And I’m sitting on my bed. I play my guitar, hoping to find some strange, but inevitable chord progression out of which I can build a song. Everyone’s here but my roommate Doug (who’s called Dough behind his back), last seen weeks ago, whose presence is now represented by the poster of the grinning Farrah Fawcett-Majors above his bed. The heater wafts through the room. There’s a small, half-eaten container of excessively wet pasta salad sulking on the desk. Everyone’s edgy, agitated, tormented by their hormones, looking for something, anything, to jerk them out of their boredom. A bag of malted-milk balls appears, and it’s passed around, the spiteful little stones crushed between back teeth.

The phone rings. Seven boys lunge for the floor. They grunt, punching one another’s backs while the thing keeps ringing. I yell, “Will one of you get it?”

“Paul? You want Paul?” John’s barely breathes beneath the pack of boys, the air squeezed from his lungs. “Hey, where’s Paul.
Paul?
”

I kneel. The earpiece is pressed to the side of my face until the skin’s thinned. “This is Paul.”

The voice has the wholesome, heroic quality of someone who might manage a Bob Evans franchise along the Indiana Turnpike. It’s so newscasterly, so deprived of the omnipresent Baltimore accent with its diphthongs and swallowed vowels, that it might as well be Danish. “Lawrence Nilsen. I’m calling from
Folk Mass Today
magazine in San Jose, California.”

Yes, yes! The publisher of my liturgical music. Why would he call at this hour, minutes before midnight?

The pile on the floor separates. Everyone’s winded. Then Todd staggers backward, leans over, grabs his ankles. Without pause, Fletcher grinds his hips into Todd’s butt. Both moan, big mouths stretched in mock-comic ecstasy.

“You guys!” I smash my hand over the mouthpiece.

“Sounds like quite the party there,” Lawrence says.

“Rah rah,” I say blandly.

“God, those college years. I’d give anything to be back at old San Jose State.”

And before the sigh’s escaped my mouth he’s telling me about plans to record the music of four different composers who’ve published in the magazine. “We’ve been in the red for the last year and a half, and it’s the hope of Don O’Byrne that more people will sign up for subscriptions if the individual artists are better known. We think you’re one of the finest young composers of liturgical folk songs today. We think your work could be as big as Ray Repp’s or the Saint Louis Jesuits’, and we’d like to bring you out here to make a recording.” The more he talks, however, the queasier I feel. I reach for the bag of malted-milk balls and pop five, six, seven in my mouth, sickened by the glossy coating, the density of sugar on the tip of my tongue. My stomach feels full, tumescent. I tear open a second bag.

“When would we do this?” My voice couldn’t sound more distant. I should be jumping around the room like some love-mad bunny, but I can’t stop envisioning my future: it’s 2001, and I’m standing in front of a group of nuns in Bowling Green, Ohio, leading them in a responsorial psalm in a pink-beige cardigan with hair that’s too thick on the sides and a salt-and-pepper toupee on top.

“What about winter break?”

I give him a date less than six weeks away.

“Okay, I’ll book studio space for the first week of January. In the meantime, I’ll start on the arrangements. Bass, guitar, piano, two flutes.”

And then he hangs up before I’ve said thank you. Could it be that simple? Could life change so quickly, unfathomably, so radically? Kenny’s up on top of the heater, in front of the window, wearing nothing but a belt. He squats slightly, legs turned out at ninety-degree angles, like some ancient Egyptian goddess with a thick dick. A girl under the streetlight outside sees the spectacle: she drops her books to the ground as the boys hoot themselves silly.

“What’s the matter?” Kenny says, glancing over his shoulder.

I bite into my lower lip. “I’m making a record.”

“And I’m Stevie Nicks,” Todd says.

Fletcher sings “Rhiannon” through his nostrils, pushing it up toward earsplitting range. The others laugh, so full of vitality and the possibility that we’ll all lead lives of great joy, that I can’t help but laugh along with them. Until the skin tenses and folds above the bridge of my nose.

“I’m serious,” I say in a pained voice.

Everyone stops, stands taller. “When, where?”

“California.”

Todd’s eyes betray a curious mixture of the sympathetic and the resentful before settling on the latter. “So I guess you’re already out of here.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You’re too good for Loyola.”

“No, no,” I wail, hanging my head.

I’m sweating. It drips and runs down my back, pooling into the elastic waistband of my underwear, though it’s certainly not about the heat in my room. Six puzzled faces fix their attention on me. I’m about to walk out the door to get some air (let the six of them move forever into my room, I don’t care) when Kenny, now in faded pink sweatpants, walks back in the room with a case of Rolling Rock. One by one, green bottles are passed out to everyone. “To Lisicky!” he cries. “To the glorious state of California!”

By my fourth beer, I couldn’t be more excited about giving up my dreams of becoming a noted singer/songwriter to lead the Catholic churchgoers of the nation in song: the Ray Repp of my generation. I drink another beer, and then another, astonished by the cool black splash against the back of my throat. What have I been missing? Who knew how refreshing such a common, lowly beverage could be? On the TV, Deborah Harry murmurs through “Heart of Glass” on
Saturday Night Live
, with her eyes half shut. (At the same moment, one hundred miles to the east, my mother’s friend Dolores Dasher stands in front of her own TV, on her Anchorage Point porch, offended, with her hands on her soft, upholstered hips. “So damn blasé.”)