The Bad Decisions Playlist (15 page)

Compared with either of those choices, having a dad who skips out and isn't a dad at all might not be so bad.

My mom has a piece of fruit skewered on her fork, and she's teasing Rick with it, pretending to feed it to him and then moving it just out of reach when he tries to eat it. They're both giggling. In a moment I'll rejoin them and they'll say,
Austin, we have some exciting news for you.
Urrrrrrrp.

The restroom is near the entrance, and through the glass I can see happy people on the sidewalk, enjoying the morning sunshine. I push through the door and step outside.

I recognize the neighborhood now. I check a map on my phone, and there it is, the recording studio, just a few blocks away from where I'm standing.

It's Sunday morning. He won't be there. And even if he is, I don't want to see him. Is what I'm thinking as I start down the sidewalk, away from the restaurant, away from my mom and Rick, toward the recording studio.

∗  ∗  ∗

Rocker Dude is sitting at the incongruous reception desk, reading the same issue of
Guitar Player
.

“Shane here?”

The bored glance, the gesture with his head to go on in.
Rock on, dude.

I get to the door at the end of the hall. I knock a few times but no one answers, so I turn the knob, open the door, and peek in. There's an anteroom, and then another door with a circular window like a porthole in it. I peer through the window and see a dimly lit audio-monitoring room, the mixing board glowing like a massive control panel in a spaceship. The board faces a big window into what I assume is the recording studio.

It takes a second for my eyes to adjust enough to see that there are two people in the control room​—​Ed the engineer and Shane, both listening to something on headphones. Ed is nodding his head. Shane is shaking his.

As I watch he takes his headphones off and tosses them aside, then slumps way back in his chair until he's practically facing the ceiling, rubbing his eyes.

I open the door and step inside the room. Ed looks at me, surprised.

“Hey,” he says. “What's up?”

“Who is that?” says Shane. His eyes are still closed.

“It's me,” I say.

He opens his eyes and tilts his chin down to look at me, then straightens up in his chair.

He doesn't say anything for a bit. Then he says, “You want to go fishing?”

“Fishing?” I say.

“Yeah, fishing. Isn't that what fathers and sons do?”

“Shane,” says Ed, “we have a lot of work to do here, and you're about
this
close to Barry losing his patience and pulling the plug on you.”

Shane looks at me.

“What do you say?”

What do I say? I say, “Sure.”

∗  ∗  ∗

So my dad and I go fishing.

First, though, we descend upon a Target and power-shop for fishing gear: rods, reels, a massive tackle box, a random assortment of grotesque lures to fill it, every “Do we need this?” from me met with a firm “Abso
lute
ly.”

“Hats,” says Shane, so we try on all sorts, me settling on a straw cowboy hat, Shane getting one of those bucket things, and then we both get huge wraparound sunglasses.

Before we left the recording studio, I texted my mom:

Hey, sorry ran into a friend will meet you at home

She texted back,
What? You are such an asshole.

Then,
I am so angry at you.

Rick is very disappointed.

You owe me a big explanation.

And so on, until I turned off the indicator so that it doesn't buzz each time a new threat arrives.

I ride in the giant red shopping cart. Shane pushes me at a near sprint. He hops on the back. We nearly plow into a very ample lady. Unhappy store manager in red Target vest voices polite disapproval. Sincere apologies are offered, somewhat undercut by stifled giggles. Items are paid for, Shane shoplifts a candy bar, we make our escape.

A drink run. A six-pack of soda, two six-packs of beer that we place on ice in the cooler​—​another Target purchase, very reasonable price.

“Um, where are we going?”

“Well, where would you normally go if you were playing hooky?”

“I guess I'd go to the place we call Whitmore's.”

“Can you fish there?”

“Yeah, sure, I guess.”

“Okay, let's go to Whitmore's.”

As we drive we talk about music. We talk about guitars. We talk about artists we respect and shows we've seen and who we wished we'd seen. We don't talk about the other night or about anything that might point us in a direction leading to tears or anger or not talking.

We park the truck near the path and lug the rods and tackle box and cooler and Shane's acoustic guitar through the woods. When we get to the spot, Shane looks around and says, “Well, we got us a river and we got us some train tracks, and if that ain't the stuff of music, I don't know what is.”

So now we're settled against a thick tree upstream from the railroad trestle, a hundred and fifty dollars' worth of fishing gear mostly forgotten in the long grass by our feet. Instead we talk a little and drink beer (“You can have
one,
” said Shane, I think because he was trying to seem responsible, but pretty soon I noticed that he wasn't keeping track). Mostly what we do is take turns playing Shane's guitar and sing songs together.

For hours.

Do you know that Carter family song, “Long Journey Home”?

I'll teach you.

Do you know “Wild Horses” by the Stones?

Of course.

“Wish the Worst” by the Old 97's?

How's that go?

That's really good, says Shane, or Let me show you how to do that better, or Here's something you might want to work on . . .

Like, you know, a dad would do.

Hours drifting by, Shane and me, the creek swirling and changing color as the sun sinks lower, trains passing, clouds forming and dissipating.

We talk about rivers and trains in music, all the references, the delta blues. We sing “Take Me to the River,” “Watching the River Flow,” Joni Mitchell's “River.” We talk about Jeff Buckley wandering into the Wolf River in Memphis, Tennessee, and drowning, and Shane sings me a beautiful song about that by another Amy, Amy Correia, a song called “Blind River Boy.”

That's beautiful, I say, and he says,
Yeah
. . . Off somewhere, thinking about something. “I knew him, you know,” he says.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. When he was down in Memphis. I was a lot younger, just getting started.” He thinks some more. “You know, you do this stuff, Austin, you create something, I think you have to be on good terms with the devil. But don't ever think you can be friends with him.”

We're in a sunlit patch, warm, but I shiver.

Then he says, “Dat's some deep stuff, right?” and throws back his head and laughs, dispelling the shadows, and launches into “Friend of the Devil,” and we have more sing-along time.

Being there with him, singing and talking and just sitting in silence watching the dancing eddies of the creek, I feel a sort of contented happiness that I've never felt before. And also a sort of terror. Like someone has said to me,
There's this thing called oxygen. You breathe it and it keeps you alive.
Now I'm having oxygen for the first time and it's so basic and so good, but now I also realize how much I've always needed it, and how I will go on needing it, and I don't want it to go away.

When it gets late in the afternoon, the sun down behind the trees, Shane says, “Let's get some food. But before we go, I want to hear something by Austin Methune.”

“What?”

“Sing me something of yours.”

“No, I can't. I don't have anything.”

“Nothing?”

“I just have pieces of things.”

“So play me a piece of something.”

“I can't.”

“Austin,” he says, “here's the great part. It can stink​—​I mean absolutely
stink
—​and it's okay, because it's just me.”

I think about that. He smiles at me and passes the guitar over.

So I start strumming, then quietly sing something that came into my head last night during my under-the-covers songwriting session. “Oh, Josephine, Josephine / hear my plea / Someone has got to love me / and it can't be me. / I'm a liar and a deceiver / I can't stand me neither / But if you leave / well that's the end of me”

Then I stop.

“That's it?” he says.

“That's all I have. That's about as far as I usually get.”

He's smiling, nodding.

“What?”

“Josephine​—​she's the girl from the other night,” he says.

Again, not so much a question as a statement.

“Yes.”

He nods again.

“It's not about her,” I say. “Or me.”

“No, right.”

“I'm just using her name for the song.”

“Sure. It's a good name.”

I wait.

“So . . . what do you think?” I say.

“I think you've got something really special there. Something really promising. Keep working on it.”

“The song?”

“The song. And the girl. C'mon, let's go get some food.”

∗  ∗  ∗

We drive to Uptown, me a bit buzzed, Shane not showing any obvious effects from the numerous beers he downed. Which, yeah, I've been the unwilling witness to a fair bit of parental drinking in my time, and maybe there's a tiny red flag being waved somewhere in my mind. But this is different, because it's Shane.

We eat at some hipster place that's half restaurant and half bowling alley. I take a break to use the bathroom and check the by-now-impressive number of affectionate, supportive texts from my mom, the last of which suggests that I had better goddamn well be dead, because that's pretty much the only excuse for not responding that will cut it at this point. So I text her back and tell her, Yes, I'm dead, I'm texting you from beyond the grave and I bet you feel pretty awful right now, and my ghost is having dinner at Devon's and will be back later on and I still love you even though you hate me, your poor dead son.

When I get back to the table, Shane is fiddling with the check, pen hovering.

“The other night,” I say, “that was the first time I've ever been able to get onstage and perform.”

He lowers the pen. “What? You're kidding.”

I tell him about my whole problem with audiences.

“I don't know why,” I say.

“I do,” he says, and starts scribbling on the check.

“So?”

“Because,” he says, distracted as he adds numbers, “you think it's the only thing in this life you love to do, the only thing you
can
do, but you're afraid to find out that you really
can't.
Because if you can't, what have you got left?”

He signs his name with a flourish, then looks up at me, offers me the pen. “Here, you should be writing all my wisdom down. This stuff is priceless.”

∗  ∗  ∗

On the way to the car he says, “Speaking of performing, Amy's leaving tomorrow for a bit to do some shows in Chicago. We're having some folks over tonight, and she's going to sing some stuff, I'll sing, other folks will sing, we'll all sing together. It'll be a regular good ol' time hootenanny. You want to come?”

“Sure.”

“You can bring someone, you want.”

So I call Alison.

“Austin!”

“Hey there. Listen, there's this party thing tonight . . .”

We make a plan that we will swing by and pick her up at eight p.m.

“Here,” I say to Shane when we reach her house, and Shane pulls over and stops.

Then I sit there in the passenger seat without moving.

“What?” he says after about thirty seconds.

“Actually, can we stop somewhere else instead?”

“Sure. What's up?”

“I just realized who I
really
want to invite.”

I thought that you were someone else /

I thought that I was too / but maybe if you were with me /

we'd both be someone new

“Hi. Jacqueline, right?”

“Uh . . . yeah?”

“So good to see you again!” I say.

“Uh-huh.”

“Austin.”

“Uh-huh.”

She's standing in the doorway, looking at me with the same amused contempt as before. I smile warmly back at her. She has makeup on and she's fiddling with her hair, doing those occult things girls do. A date tonight, I imagine.

“Might I add that you look particularly ravishing this evening?” I say.

“What do you want?”

“Is your sister available?”

She snorts. “Hold on.” She leaves.

Fidget. Pace. Turn a full circle. Phone buzzes. Another frowny-face emoji from Alison, who has sent me, like, five of them after I texted her and said I had to cancel because of a Mom thing.