Stone Arabia (4 page)

As it turned out, he was not the world’s most brilliant guitar player. He was good, good enough for songwriting and singing, which were the things he really cared for. He worked at learning the guitar and achieved a high level of competence. Nik taught himself everything about playing, even taught himself the fact that he was not ever going to be a virtuoso.

The actual demise of Nik as possible guitar hero came in 1973. Nik had just begun to play out with his new band, the Demonics. Previously there had been some jam sessions with school friends, but the Demonics were his first band to venture past the garage. He had a bass player, Sam Stone, and a drummer, Mike Summer. (Or maybe it was Dave Winton first and Mike later?) They had scored a regular gig opening for bands at this shitty club called the Well. They played early in the evening when no one was really there, kind of a fill-in thing. But it was a great opportunity—they were just beginners. They still had these long shags and they were a little pimply and peeled. Nik was always pretty good-looking, but he hadn’t found his look quite yet—he was still in the developmental stages. He was on the verge of good-looking. Denise went to all of the gigs even though she was sixteen and well under the legal age. She just slipped in as part of the group. She found a perch near the stage and folded her legs and arms until she felt nearly invisible. The Demonics played the same ten songs over and over. Although Nik had already written hundreds of songs by this point, the
only ones they had rehearsed and could even play at all were these ten fairly simple songs. After a few weeks of their boring set, Nik tried to introduce new songs. But something wasn’t working. They would just fade on the stage, already sick of themselves. Then they would get some minuscule amount of money and mope around the edge of the performance area. They’d stay for the next band if they could, but the club knew the Demonics were all underage and they weren’t supposed to hang out after the gig. One night, though, they did manage to stay for the next band, the Cherries. There were four of them—drums, bass, and two guitars. They all had short hair (for that time) and wore collared, short-sleeved tennis shirts buttoned all the way up and tucked in to their beltless, tight, flat-front khaki pants. Nobody looked like that yet.

“Speed preps,” Nik whispered, staring at them. The singer hardly touched his guitar and spent most of his time closed-eyed at the mic, hurling words into the dark. He would hold a chord and then wave his right hand at the strings at crucial moments, giving an underfill to their sound. The other guitar player, the taller, sweatier one, played the leads and sometimes sang harmony—his singing kicked in about as often as the lead singer swiped at his guitar. They played seven hard, fast, close rockers. They wiped the Demonics off the stage. Nik knew it, Denise could tell by how he studied them.

From that moment on, he focused on his songwriting. He recruited Tommy Skate to play lead guitar for his shows.
And the rest was history.
He understood he wasn’t ever going to be one of those great live guitar players, no matter how hard he worked on it. He didn’t spend forever flogging his failures. He
moved things along. Denise slowly began to realize how deeply serious he was.

The Demonics grew to be a pretty decent live band. But Nik preferred composing to performing. He never stopped writing new songs. As devoted as he had been to learning the guitar, his obsession with songwriting trumped everything. He wrote in notebooks, he wrote while he watched TV, and yes, he wrote even while someone was trying to talk to him.

“Yeah,” he said, nodding, but with that dazed noncommittal style the true nonlistener adopts.
I’m agreeing with you—just a crapshoot, but why not?
But Denise knew the songs were really good, so she couldn’t mind all that much. She figured that’s just how artists were.

The amazing thing was Nik didn’t seem to pay attention to anyone or anything around him and yet then he would write something that seemed entirely to depend on the closest attention. Like “Versions of Me,” his great early song about playing poseur and then wondering why no one knew the real you. He already let the ironic twist come in, the self-admonishment that made him such an appealing songwriter. When he first played this song for Denise, they were sitting in the kitchen of Casa Real. It was late, they had been out at a party. Denise followed Nik in, drunkenly shushing each other even though their mother was still out on a late shift and they were the only ones home. Denise walked straight to the pantry and took out a box of Wheat Thins. She stood with the pantry door open and gnashed a steady stream of salty squares between her teeth. This was her strategy to avoid room spins and subsequent hangovers. She always crammed as many
starches in her stomach as she could before she made any attempts to go horizontal. And she always woke up sixteen and fresh-faced.

Nik held his guitar by the neck as he hoisted himself up on the old aquamarine tiled counter. He rested the guitar against his lap and attempted to reach in his jacket pocket for his cigarettes—he shifted his pick to teeth and tried again. He then replaced the pick with a cigarette and started to play. Denise didn’t stop eating her crackers as she walked over to the narrow transom window above the sink and pushed it open.

“I’m not gonna smoke it,” he said without looking up. She put her hand in the Wheat Thins box again and watched him strum. “You want to hear a new song?” he said, looking up. She nodded, leaning against the sink. He began to play “Versions of Me,” and all at once Denise’s very familiar but distant brother became someone else. This was truly the moment when she saw how different he was from everyone else she knew, including herself. He, just by singing his song, could change how she saw the world. He became a vivid human to her, someone who understood her as yet unnamed alienation. She had, all at once, a deep faith in his perception, as he pinpointed the way she often felt, angry at the world for misunderstanding her while playing at deliberately misrepresenting herself. He stopped and shrugged. He lit his cigarette and took a long, proud drag.

Brother is a rock star.

“I love it. It’s great!” she said, still chewing.

He smiled.

“Your first hit!”

“A chart-topper,” Nik said, with a sarcasm about his chances
at success that would soon be replaced with something more, well, unusual.

The moment stood out to Denise for other reasons as well. She realized then that he was good at this, songwriting, in a way he never was at guitar playing. He had figured this out, while she was still nowhere.

Denise really should call someone.

She sat down at Nik’s worktable, a huge unfinished piece of wood set on two sawhorses and pushed against the wall. His razor-point black pens of various widths and sharpened General’s Cedar Pointe pencils were neatly lined up. Scissors, X-Acto blades, erasers, homemade wheat paste, double-sided photo tape, rubber cement, and Tombow Mono Adhesive were all within reach. A ream of acid-free pure white paper, and off to the side the white Royal manual typewriter with the lazy
a
that he used to type his formal entries in the Chronicles. Evidence of the Chronicles was everywhere around her. The earlier volumes were shelved in chronological order starting in the garage downstairs (1970s–2003). But he kept the volumes of the current year in a neat row on a shelf above his desk. On the walls near the desk she could see the framed album covers, posters, master images for label art, photos, and pasted-up fake news clippings. And under her hands and all in front of her was Nik’s clear, inviting wood desk. All set up for work.

His archive oppressed her. She needed a chronicle of her own, with her own opposite silly penchant for reality and memory and ordinary facts. Because that was all she could think to do with what had transpired. She must conclude it liberated her in some deep way, and maybe it even did.

My disclaimer:

You can go back forever to grab a context for a brother and sister. And even then the backward glance is distorted by the lens of the present. The further back, the greater the distortion. It is not just that emotions distort memory. It is that memory distorts memory, if that makes any kind of sense. I must simply try to recall the events that led to our crisis (let’s call it that for now). Because there were contributing factors, things that speak to states of mind. There were signs and indications and decisions with consequences well before the events of the last few days. Can one make causal connections without manufacturing narratives? Or is all memory simply the application of narrative to past events, and is it only human and coherent to do that work? To begin, I must be quite clear with myself. I must do my best to stick to the fairly recent past, without the nostalgic digressions, to stick to exactly what happened this year, 2004, what actually happened to us, and, well, to me.

I arrived at Nik’s bar shortly before midnight. I call it Nik’s bar, but it isn’t. It is Dave’s Bar. This marginal establishment—broken stools, gum-stuck linoleum floor tiles, dirty bathrooms, expensive speaker system, heavy pours—has been a functioning bar for three decades, with Nik working there, on and off, for most of those years. While the New Year announced itself in beer and blurry kisses, I sat, on my own, on the other side of the bar from Nik. (It is easy to recall the start of the year because of the holiday. A holiday helps to place you. Memory technique #1, use Dates as Placeholders in your brain. All calendars are simply ancient arbitrary mnemonic tools for the culture. We will take Pope Gregory’s version and move on.) Naturally 2004 was a leap year—already a bad sign, as far as I was concerned, and I was deeply concerned. New Year’s Eve is a rough holiday even in the best of years. 2004 whiffed bad from the get-go.

At midnight Nik would put on the Rolling Stones’ “Dead Flowers.” The song is easy to recall because he played it every year at midnight. Which also makes the actual night difficult to recall, as all the moments hearing that song run into one another, indistinct, uniformly soundtracked. He poured some drinks.
He keyed up the song. He poured himself a drink. He let the bar crowd start counting down the seconds until midnight. He poured more drinks. It is just a sloggy old bar, so mostly it was beer and shots and not a lot of complicated cocktails, but this year I saw he struggled to get all the rounds done in time so he could attend to the music and the countdown. He did this and I watched him, sort of hoping to talk for a moment. Although I hadn’t had much to drink, I was feeling a little sentimental about my big brother. I had listened to his latest CD, a seasonal release called
Caroles and Candles
by his band the Pearl Poets. The Pearl Poets were a side project of Nik’s in which he used the one-name pseudonym Mason. They were a moody folk trio—Mason, Mark, and Chris—but actually all of the parts were voiced by Nik. They all lived together at Tottenham Cottage in North London. They sang pristine Celtic-style layered harmonies, Nik managing all of this with his old Tascam four-track. The first Pearl Poets album,
Sylvan Shine,
was released in 1980. It was a concept electric folk record. All the songs on that album had sky-related titles: “Aurora Borealis,” “Corona,” “Fata Morgana,” “Airglow,” “Brocken Bow,” etc. The second album,
Suites for the Sweet,
took ten years to produce. It featured original and traditional folk songs with electric arrangements. As I recall from the liner notes, Nik used lots of fiddle and unusual time signatures. I didn’t think it was nearly as good as the first one. This current seasonal release of obscure traditional carols and a few original ballads was the third Pearl Poets album, and although the concept was a bit stretched at this point, it had been so many years since the last one it seemed fresh. A reunion Christmas album to cash in, I guess, was how he would
describe it in the Chronicles. I loved it, and I was eager to report the details of my admiration. At least a superficial report, a first pass at it. But he was busy, and then we were right up against midnight. He drank his shot, “Dead Flowers” came on, the whole bar started singing along. He gave me a sloppy kiss on the cheek, his lips wet with bourbon, and I waited until he turned back to the bar before I wiped the wetness off my cheek with a bar napkin, quickly, and then returned the napkin to the bartop, where it found a wet spot and began to darken.

I suppose as I sat there in the early-morning hours of 2004 I might have been contemplating the previous year. I probably couldn’t recall much—now I can’t even recall if I recalled much. But my memory concerns hadn’t reached their peak yet. My semi-obsessive interest in how my own memory functions would top out about a month later. All of that had begun with my mother’s memory issues, which had really kicked in in the last few months of 2003.

Maybe, though, as I sat at the bar, I thought of Ada, and maybe I tried to picture her in New York, at a party. Which would have been nice. But sooner or later I have little doubt that my thoughts turned to my mother’s mind. It is the kind of thing that occurs to you in the marginal moments of your life: during a commercial, a shower, in the fraught minutes before you fall asleep. Or when you sit at a bar, waiting for an arbitrary holiday marker to pass. You suddenly remember how badly she was failing and it deflates you, just takes the air right out of you. So I was probably thinking of her mind and memory, but I can’t be sure, because I cannot recall anything except the song and the kiss and the cocktail napkin on the bar.

This is one of the reasons I am so squeamish about looking back. Can I even do it? Can I be accurate at all? I have discovered how much memory can dissolve under pressure. The more I try to hold on to my ability to remember, the more it seems to escape my grasp. I find this terrifying. I have become alarmed at my inability to recall basic facts of the past, and I have worked to improve things. I have been studying various techniques and even tricks, and I should employ them. Memory, it seems, clings to things. Named things. Spaces. Senses. I even tried the old trick (memory technique #2, use Rhyme and Stories) where you apply a little poem to things you want to remember. A little nonsense thing, like
His name is Ed and his nose is red.
Or Bob’s birthday is 11-9-63, ’63 is when Kennedy died, 119 is 911 backward. So
Kennedy’s assassination was an emergency
is what you have to remember. And truly this stuff works, somehow giving your brain little games of association to help it organize its input. But there are two problems with this: I don’t want to fill my head with stupid games. In the time it takes to think up this stuff, I mean, your life is going by. I just hate it too much, I’ll just write down Bob’s birthday, seriously. And that is the other problem. I don’t want to remember someone’s name or some date. That is the kind of skill a politician needs so he can be fast with hundreds of names. That is an imprinting technique for the future. I’m not interested in that (there are only a handful of names in my life). I’m thinking about past events. I’m interested in recall, exact recall, of what was said, who said it and to whom. I want to know the truth, undistorted by time and revision and wishes and regrets.