Songs Only You Know (37 page)

“We’re gonna have to incorporate,” said the manager. “Get an LLC.”

The drummer and I scribbled our names, hoping to mail the papers west before anyone had a change of mind. The Californians allotted us a recording advance and a small monthly stipend as long as we were on the road. An upstart deal, meaning we’d have to claw tooth and nail for whatever crumbs of success lay ahead. A month later, we began tackling the country in a gleaming white Ford Club Wagon that bore no likeness to the Orgasmatron. Mostly, we played to empty rooms; but these were good venues, places you’d boast about having conquered. Chicago’s Empty Bottle. Berbati’s in Portland—decent-sized rooms with reasonable sound systems.

Showing up on time was the most we could guarantee.

I relished the stale-beer stench of deserted clubs, untangling the cords and warming the amps, tuning my guitar—wondering if anyone would appear once the doors opened to the public. Our bald drummer traveled with a hairdryer and locked himself away wherever he could to do god knows what with it. We bickered over publishing rights and album titles, but no one asked what our songs were about. One was called “In the Name of the World” and had a line that went
In the right light / we might seem good enough to keep
. Every few cities, there would be complimentary beer for the band or a bottle of vodka slipping into the night, and then the night might not end until it was ended for me, often by the sunrise.

Ethan was stuck with most of the driving. We’d traveled together so many miles that I could anticipate his lane changes and needed only to mumble for him to pull over for a restroom.

Amid our travels I began passing dark red blood in my stool, which a homeopathic clerk in Orange County insisted was evidence of a considerable gastrointestinal problem. I took action by padding my underwear with Kleenex to avoid bloodstains as we pressed onward, city by city, hawking T-shirts and perfecting
our songs. Back in Detroit, we recorded a single with a semi-famous producer, and for a few weeks our song played during the lunchtime rush on the city’s FM rock station.

Angela witnessed what she could from her Kalamazoo apartment. Well into the second year of a master’s degree in writing, she took study breaks to pull up our reviews on her computer, keeping an eye out for pictures of us and the type of women lurking in our crowds. It was no longer Lauren she worried about but female show-goers across the continent. She knew where I’d be playing next before I did and had the idea I was on a fame-bound ascent, at the height of which I’d leave her for good.

We spoke every night. Through the phone, the sound of her voice was so familiar that I hardly missed her. I didn’t want to long for anyone in this life. But I perceived Angela’s moods throughout the days, could sense her out there worrying and loving me long before I called. When I could, I’d drive to her Kalamazoo apartment where I’d sleep off weeks of exhaustion. In the mornings Angela sat reading and sipping coffee, lounging in a fake silk robe she’d slip out of just in time to head for dinner at the only decent Chinese place in town.

Sooner or later she’d ask about the nature of my road life.

“And how would I know,” she said, “if something happened out there?”

Maybe she would, and maybe she wouldn’t. I knew that.

“This album we’re writing, that’s what matters.”

And she said, “I know, it’s gonna be great, it’s what you have to do.”

But it’s impossible now to look back and root for this blinded young man, that it might all come his way. Because he bears so little resemblance to the person I am, or want to be. He’s the worst of me—dulled and bitter and fearful; desperate for great,
impossible things—a voice I still hear if ever I stray too far from truth. What might have been, if the planets had aligned and those songs had rocketed us around the world? I can only be thankful the road led nowhere or, really, led me exactly where I was supposed to be.

A July night, right around 2:00
A.M.
, I exited the Lager House with a shot of last-call whiskey I’d poured into a can of Pabst. The Lager was a hipster hovel on the Detroit end of Michigan Avenue, into which I’d ventured after a local gig that had gone especially well. People singing the words, shaking their bottles at us during the good parts—the better we played, the more I believed I deserved a heavy bout of drinking. The best shows, like tonight’s, made me feel immune to consequences or convinced me that consequences were what inspired me to perform well in the first place.

I’d closed out the bar.

A gang had assembled in the Lager House parking lot. Musicians and music types lighting bottle rockets as radios blared from cars, a change of station as you passed each ride. Tiger Stadium’s abandoned shell rose to the west, the upper deck a dark slab stamped into the ozone. The spirits were just beginning.

“After-party,” said a guy named Jimmy Bang-Bang: Keith Richards–on–punk, shirtless, two-foot exclamation point tattooed over his spine. “You.” He jabbed a finger my way. “You’re coming with us.” But I waved him off with my drink and boarded my station wagon, a blue, four-door grocery-getter I’d financed with money my dad left behind. The bar’s exterior lights snapped off as I nudged through the crowd, pumping the
brakes. People howled, slapping their hands against the hood. I recognized every face and tattooed limb. I saluted a voice that rose above the rest to shout, “Adios, motherfucker.”

Then a hard right onto Michigan Ave.

Which at that hour was a strip enchanted by the truest night creatures, those for whom the sunrise, if they saw it, meant only that they’d yet to succeed in obliterating their souls. A haunted place. The car seemed to descend into it as I headed west over Fisher Freeway: chewed-up storefronts and parades of hookers in sequined miniskirts, many of them so crack atrophied and gnarled you couldn’t imagine a letch on earth taking his chances. One of their hubs was an abandoned Mobil station, a mile or so from the Dearborn city limits. Another flock congregated at a self-serve car wash to use the cement wash bays like showrooms for the miracles they were selling.

Michigan Avenue from Braden to Schaefer, 2:15
A.M
.

Nights like this, I’d undertaken a personal business with the territory. Once I was driving alone, I couldn’t solve the terror I felt about returning to my bedroom, knowing I’d awake the next morning to crap blood and shiver until the coffee was ready. My only alternative seemed to be the outer-limits, people and places whose sadness might demolish my own. More than once, I’d given a woman twenty bucks to drive around with me, thinking she’d be relieved to sit and talk, taking it personally when she seemed annoyed by my misuse of her speeding minutes. “You done now?” they’d say. “I ain’t gonna drive around all night. I’ve got money to make.” I’d come on too fast, asking where they came from, thinking I’d convince them there were decent men left on the planet. They’d say, “You wanna party or not?” They’d say, “Where you been? What you on?” And I’d say, “Drinking,” and they’d say, “That’s all? You sure that’s all?”

What I’d wanted from them I will never fully understand.
There were traces of someone in their eyes, of people who’d been smoked out, until canceling themselves became the only means to get what they so awfully needed. Twitching, frenzied zombies hungry for one thing. They seemed absolute. Nothing in them could be reduced any further; the next change would be death. Sitting beside a woman like that, I’d know it could have been me, any of us, had the scripts been switched, had we been born there, in a hood where wild dogs had run off the postal service and the schools were patrolled by cops. Every one of those spirits was out hounding for crack—the coals beneath the night streets, the lifeblood of those moonlit hours.

A
COUPLE MILES WEST
of the Lager House, I turned down the stereo and pulled into the deserted Mobil station. The sign had been burned along with everything else, but you could still make out the name. Two women approached before I’d come fully to a stop. They always waved and peered through the windows, taking a good look at every visible surface before they got in. They smiled, giddy. I looked like a softy compared with a lot of what they saw.

“You gonna pay twice,” the heftier and older of the women said.

And I said, “Yeah, all right,” as they swung open the doors and squirmed into the car. I’d driven my equipment to and from the show. The back of the station wagon was packed with guitars and amplifiers. Instrument cables were strewn across the seats.

“The fuck is this?” said the skinny one, who’d claimed the backseat.

She held up the knotted end of a twenty-inch power cord as the jowled, magenta-lipped woman beside me said, “Yeah,
fuck’s that shit?” They were black women, dressed in shimmering plasticlike costumes with feathery scarves and rattling necklaces.

“It’s for music,” I said. “You plug them into instruments.” All those psychos, who beat and strangled these women—I wasn’t thinking about the grave hazards of their trade. The car was headed east for no reason at all.

“You wanna hear my band?” I said.

I slid our CD into the stereo and let it play, feeling an unfamiliar shame as the woman beside me mocked our white grooves, saying, “Lord, we got us a Beatle here.”

There might have been a girl at the show who’d have let me sleep it off in her bed, someone petite and confused, tattooed with skulls and vines. There’d have been breakfast in the morning, her roommate sulking bedheaded into the kitchen for a glass of tap water. Then I’d have to face her again, the undesirable closeness of having known each other’s lonely bodies, all the while worrying that Angela might somehow find out. I wanted no part of it, even if I did.

“We gonna party?” said the woman, turning to face me.

Flesh sagged mottled and coral-like from her cheeks. Stripes of blue makeup were drawn over her eyes. She looked like she’d been working that rodeo for years and didn’t have much time left before she’d have to come up with something else. She was truly excited.

“Party or what?” she said.

I knew I was rounding a corner when I said, “Yeah.” I had fifty, sixty bucks in my pocket. Said I was looking for cocaine, like I couldn’t have found that elsewhere.

“He wants powder,” the fat one said, instructing me to turn here and there, until we pulled up to a house, the front window of which cast the only light on the block.

“You got money, blondie?” she said, and I forked over what I had.

I was hoping she’d rip me off or that some unforeseeable coercion would extinguish the night, because I wasn’t about to turn back. I didn’t know what I was after but could feel myself drawing near.

She strutted up the porch. The girl in the back spent the minutes glancing around my car at the road cases and instruments. I’d yet to really see her face, only the glint of her eyes in the rearview, staring out from that dark space. I was afraid of her. She could have reached from behind and cut my throat if she’d wanted.

“You know this place?” I said.

And she said, “Yeah, I know it,” like the refrain of some old song.

When the older, fat one returned to the car, she began speaking to her backseat accomplice, using a tongue I’d never heard—rapid, rat-a-tat syllables. The only bit I made out was the girl in back saying, “Don’t you go gettin’ me in trouble, girl,” her tone gleefully announcing that we were already there: trouble.

They sensed my fear, knew every inch of this transgression.

“Drive, baby,” the fat one told me, exposing a miniature Baggie of teeth-sized crack rocks. “They ain’t got no powder,” she said, “but this’ll do, this’ll do.” She quickly packed a rock into a stem, acting with the instinctive certainty of a squirrel working the seed from an acorn, lighting up, passing the cylindrical pipe to her friend, who said, “Aw, girl.” She held a deep inhalation that kept her silent for what seemed minutes before she barked out a sound part laughter and part wheeze. “Mmmmm, fuck.”

I drove up and down vacated side streets as they traded hits, sighing upon exhale. None of us cared where we were going.
We all knew they were playing me, that this was the easiest cruise they’d taken in years. At a stop sign, deep into a shredded neighborhood, the woman beside me said, “You want some a this?” She took the flame to the glass nozzle, breathed in a long hit, and pulled my face to her lips, exhaling what was left into my mouth, which I breathed in, all the way, as far inside as it would carry.

Nothing miraculous—that first hit. Just a rush to my head while I asked myself,
Is this it? How it feels?
I was tired of everything, too drunk to ascend. It was the smell, mostly. A chemical stench filling up the car. We took the backstreets, doing the same thing awhile longer, until we’d run out.

They all crossed my mind during those late-night drives, the people who’d have wept at the sight of me cruising, dead to myself, steering with my knee. There wasn’t usually a street girl beside me. Mostly, I drove alone. Pulling to the Dearborn limits, turning around, swooping back for another glimpse until the sun became an undeniable fact, urging me home as the real world emerged: School buses and fresh-faced citizens in cars, the sweet lard aroma of doughnut shops. The morning’s paper stacked in metal boxes. All of it seeming to exist for the uncertain purpose of some allegory that was happening inside me.