Songs Only You Know (38 page)

That’s when I’d wonder if Caitlin and my dad were witnessing me from another plane, where everything had already happened. I’d talk to them, imagine them out there, but never at the same time. I’d speak to one and then the other, as though they hovered at two different places in the sky, each of them looking down alone, which said everything about my inability to piece this all together. But I thought they knew my fate, every moment about to unfold. They knew you could leave this world in a black cloud and that sooner or later everyone you
knew would follow, and then it would be over. But that’s not what they saw for me, not what they wanted. Returning home, I’d creep through the side door, cranking on the box fans and sliding onto my parents’ old bed—one thing I’d salvaged and kept for myself.

W
HEN
I
TOLD THE
women I was out of money, they directed me to another house where the slender one in the backseat went inside to see a man. She was in there a little while, long enough for me to know what was going on.

“I want to drive this car straight through that place,” I said. “This sick place.”

Rage was passing through in jolts, quick revulsions that felt superhuman.

“Now what are you talking?” said the woman beside me, sitting shotgun—Angela’s seat, Will’s seat. She slapped my shoulder, “Don’t be fuckin’ around here.”

“I’ll drive this thing straight to hell,” I said.

My head swelled, congesting with heat. There were jaws inside it, clamping down. I didn’t feel good, but I wanted more of whatever I’d had. I’d been experiencing it without comprehending it: the brain swirl and my tingling windpipe, a mind speed that smashed each thought violently into the next. Was this my father’s abyss? I understood it only to the extent that I ached for another breath of smoke.

Not much later, the other woman came out in a rush and injected herself into the backseat.

“Aw, what you get?” the old one said as her bony friend presented a new, minuscule sack of drugs. She took it. “We gotta smoke this now,” she said, “this boy here’s gettin’ all suicide on me.”

The rage had passed; I felt nothing.

The woman in back said, “You always getting me in trouble,” as the one next to me packed the next hit, saying, “You first, baby. You earned it.”

When that ran out, they asked to be dropped off at the busted corner where I’d found them. But I couldn’t fathom them leaving me alone, just like that, to carry on with my life.

“We’ll go cash a check,” I said.

“Shit,” one of them said. “Motherfucker wants to cash his check.”

I crossed the Dearborn line and pulled up to a twenty-four-hour grocery store I’d been coming to since I was a child. Caitlin and I had picked cereal boxes off its shelves, bought plastic trinkets from quarter machines at the entrance.

The older woman took my arm in hers as the three of us crossed the parking lot. I was protecting them now, vouching for their souls as we entered the grocer’s neon jaw. The bright light of the store made apples gleam while revealing the scanty dreadfulness of my companions’ costumes, the bruises on the dark skin of their exposed legs and the grime on their clacking heels. We weren’t dangerous. I knew what we were—the most pitiful beings breathing in that particular time and place.

“Get whatever you want,” I said.

The ladies went on a spree, throwing liters of cola and potato chips and lipstick tubes and sanitary napkins into a shopping cart. The woman who’d sat in the backseat never looked me in the face, never smiled. Twenty-five, thirty-five—she had such power of experience it was impossible to guess her age. Her scorn was valid. She was onto me, knew I was a tourist in their world. The older one squealed and danced toward each item, saying, “Oh, I like this,” before tearing it from the shelf.

When they’d finished, there were enough provisions in the cart to feed my band for weeks. I wrote a check as the fat one
rubbed up on my thigh, sickening me in every way, but I wasn’t about to offend her now that we’d come so far. The cashier, whom I’d seen so many nights working the graveyard shift, didn’t look at me. She never had and never would. If only she’d seen me earlier that night, playing for my life—the music, the music, the music—I’d have made perfect sense.

I got a twenty-spot for writing over the check, and we drove downtown for the last bit of crack. We’d yet to finish sucking clean the small rock when an eerie narcotic undertow made me instantly suspicious of a plan to kill me.

Told me I had to act fast, go mental.

White devil. Pale white crazy devil boy.

“Out of the car!” I yelled it. Slammed the brakes hard enough that both of them had to collect their minds before anything else happened. When they didn’t open the doors, I jabbed my knuckles between my teeth and bit. I’d chewed up my tongue in a drug fit, could feel it wagging like a sponge. My neck felt wrenched in a vise. My chest banged. I’d never wanted a beer more than I did then, though I knew it would do no good. The velocity of crack, the Technicolor glow of the grocery store—it had spun me into a void, of which I’d suddenly located the center. An instantaneous sobriety. I’d known that to happen: a brutal clarity shining forth like a planet at the end of a binge. Suddenly all the liquor in the world could no longer alter the mean truth of the here and now.

“Hold it, honey,” the older one said. “That shit’ll creep on you. It’s creeping on you.”

The possibility of this moment lasting a breath longer sent me into a clenched-fist panic. “Get outta here,” I said. “You’d kill me for nothing, both of you.” And I knew—they knew—that I was putting them on.

“We cool,” the old one said. “We cool.”

They scattered to the street, laughing, lugging their plastic sacks. It was a mile walk through the trenches to the burned-out Mobil station. And I yelled through the closed windows, from inside that stove of gray smoke, “I hope you got what you wanted,” which was the thing I’d feel the worst about, years later, once that night seemed to have finally ended.

All the while the CD of my band’s music had been spinning. It was only after they’d gone that I realized it. The melodies, the sound of my warbling voice, echoes from some life that awaited me whenever I next awoke. Maybe they weren’t much, our songs, but they carried me home through Dearborn’s unsuspecting morning. Through the side door of the house and up into bed.

F
or years, Mom had been claiming Ozzy was thirteen.

And I rubbed the dog’s cystic head with an increasing adoration, knowing he wouldn’t be hobbling blindly through my mother’s house forever. Not only could he no longer see, he’d also gone deaf and had begun soiling the wood floors. Truth told, Ozzy was closer to twenty. An enduring, mythic mutt so dear to my mother that she did nothing to hide her love. Outside her bedroom door hung a framed painting of him, anxious eyed and with a clenched mouth, aptly realistic. In the living room were glossy photographs a coworker had commissioned after sneaking into the house and drugging the poor animal for the session.

For his portraits Ozzy sat doped, wearing a red bow tie.

Mom acknowledged the gaudiness of these tributes, but she didn’t care. “We have a special relationship,” she’d say. “He’s my little buddy.”

Each night, she’d been clutching his hind legs to walk him up the stairs before heaving him onto their shared mattress.
She’d laughed sadly, saying, “Some days he seems perfectly fine.” When she finally took the dog to be put down she didn’t mention a word of it until I came by one weekday afternoon.

“Where’s Ozzy?” I asked, perceiving his absence the moment I arrived.

I’d told her I wanted to be there when the day came, though she might not have believed me. She had little reason to believe much of what I said, but I’d had a plan of chauffeuring them to the vet, giving Ozzy’s head one last scratch, holding Mom’s hand as the needle punctured his hide. I’d wanted to take her for dinner afterward, where we’d laugh about the dog’s near-death exploits and cranky ways. His snooty avoidance of my dad. How he’d harried Caitlin, snatching her balled-up tights and gnashing holes in them.

“Oh, I couldn’t tell anyone,” Mom said. “I wanted to say good-bye to him on my own.”

Just like her, never troubling a soul. Which made it all the worse to think of her coming home to an empty house, alone with what she knew. So many nights she’d spent eating in her favorite chair as Ozzy awaited scraps at her feet. She’d spoken to him like a housemate; once he could no longer hear, she’d developed a system of tickles and taps that would have the dog slouching toward the back door or leaning into his bowl. He’d sit, unmoving, as she daubed his infections with ointment. His eyes glazed and cloudy, knowing she was there to guide him through.

“He always liked you,” Mom said.

“You kept him alive,” I said. “He had a good long life.”

When I left, I noticed Ozzy’s bowls where they’d always been, at the foot of the garbage can in the kitchen. One filled with water—a little murky, a little gray. The other half full of kibble. Soon enough they’d be tossed away, but I’d always remember
him there, raising his head as the back door opened, keeping a watch on things, waiting for the woman he loved.

A
NGELA HAD COMPLETED HER
master’s degree that spring, a few months after she’d turned twenty-three. She’d also published her first story. By July she’d made plans to move to New York, a bold decision that made me suddenly aware that she didn’t need me as much as I thought she did. I’d taken for granted that we’d wind up in a quaint midwestern abode, battling it out until old age mellowed us. Her ability to shatter this expectation only raised my respect. Most of her things were packed by the time I drove out to help with her move. Kalamazoo would never be the same once she left, and I wanted to visit the cemetery and other places I might not see for a long while.

Like the cluttered hidden-gem record shop on West Main.

A few doors over was a Chinese place she and I enjoyed. A night on the town had often been two plates of noodles, then an hour browsing the aisles of CDs and albums, taking a long drive with whatever new sounds we’d acquired. Let us put aside the fact she was leaving and spend one last weekend as if nothing were about to change—that was my approach, and she rolled with it. Ignoring the boxes stacked in her bedroom, we headed for dinner early enough to assure that the record store would be open afterward.

Driving to the restaurant, Angela said, “You’re not looking so good,” and it was true. My hair was shellacked by grime, my posture compromised by a variety of pains. Forget the look in my eyes. The night before, the band had played a Detroit festival, and during our set I’d felt a warm, syrupy guck moving through my jeans; my underwear clung to my legs, worrying me that I’d soiled myself. Between songs, quick scans of the crotch region assured there was no visible evidence, but afterward,
in the venue’s toilet, I’d investigated my drawers to find them sopped with dark red mucus. A moment of reckoning, signaling, possibly, the closeness of the end. I’d come to worry that any cough or dizzy spell or spasm in my chest was the effect of all the bad thoughts I’d been smothering. Stress-born diseases. My body was not my own. Having crapped blood for the past half year, I could critique the mess each morning according to hue and volume. Now I was incontinent, a leaking wound.

This was what Angela had missed, and I was glad for it.

“How was the show?” she asked.

“Good,” I said. “We played a new song.”

I’d had to focus on the tiled wall to keep from fainting as I staggered to the bathroom’s sink. I’d slapped my face with water and stared into the mirror, thinking of her, no one else.

Angela said, “What did you do after?”

“Ack.” My mouth tasted of cat piss. “Not much.”

Though by the time I’d made it to Jimmy Bang-Bang’s, I’d forgotten about the blood. His four-bedroom house was a deadbeat roost in heart of the city, the walls painted crimson and an enormous stereo in the dining room, where everyone gathered around a table and slobbered about rock and roll, about seeing the world. Angela would never meet Jimmy, but she intuited the depravity of people like him from the hesitant tone I’d use when pronouncing their names.

What was I going to tell her, really?

Jimmy, a local drummer, greasy coiffed and perpetually shirtless, always insisted his guests help him imbibe all the dry goods, so there’d be no leftovers. The night before, he’d overestimated the party’s spirit—people dispersed to the upstairs bedrooms, slipped out undetected in search of 4:00
A.M
. pancakes. Early that morning I’d found myself alone with a mound of unfinished powder spilling across the table. In the coming months, Jimmy
would make a point of asking, whenever he saw me, “Do you have any idea how much drugs you did?” No, I didn’t. No idea of the amount I’d snorted or how I’d managed to get home, nor how to convey a word of this, anything, to Angela. But once she and I were served our noodles, the first bites of lo mein set loose a cruel spasm in my stomach. I saw Angela watching with fearful eyes, holding her chopsticks like wands, just before I fainted onto the paper tablecloth.

T
HE
E
R DOCTOR CHECKED
my vitals and drew blood, explaining I’d need both a colonoscopy and endoscopy to get the bottom of things.

“Whatever it takes,” I said.

I had no insurance, but I spoke with certainty. My vigilance for self-preservation arose in the manic and costly fashion of people who regret their own inestimable self-abuse. I’d binge on vitamins and colon cleansers and herbal potions the way I did anything else. Run up a tab. To prepare for the scopes, I was ordered to a day of fasting and laxatives. From Angela’s couch, I called Ethan, asking him to put a hold on practice on account of I might possibly be dying.

“This is terrible,” he said. “We’ve got a tour in a couple weeks.”

Angela made a bowl of Jell-O—the only solid I was allowed to eat—as I spent a day creeping to and from her apartment’s toilet.