The Wishbones (12 page)

The strangeness of what he saw still hadn't faded from his memory. Glenn was frozen. There was no other word for it. He was standing near the edge of the stage, trapped in the blazing glare of the footlights, surveying the darkness with an expression of wide-eyed, openmouthed awe, as if he'd just been offered a glimpse of a horror beyond human understanding. His left hand was where it belonged, wrapped around the neck of his guitar, but his right hand was on top of his head, tugging on a handful of his long, blond, Gregg-Allmanesque hair. Dave walked across the stage and touched him on the shoulder.

“Glenn,” he said.

“What?”

“Let go of your hair.”

I can't.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“It means I can't.”

“Come on, man. Quit fucking around.”

“I'm not.”

“We're standing up here in front of five hundred fucking people.”

“I realize that.”

“Well, let go of your hair then. We've got a song to play.”

“I can't move,” Glenn said miserably. “I think I'm paralyzed.”

Some hecklers started shouting at them to shut up and play some music. The MC, a Spanish teacher named Mr. Garcia, approached the stage to ask if there was some kind of problem. Dave shooed him away, then grabbed hold of Glenn's arm, just above the elbow, digging his fingers into the flesh.

“You gonna play or not?”

“I can't.”

“Then get the fuck off the stage. We'll do it without you.”

Glenn's face relaxed, as if he'd been granted a reprieve. He let go of his hair and dropped his hand to his side. Then he unplugged his guitar and walked offstage, disappearing behind the velvet curtain. Dave returned to his side of the stage and nodded to the drummer, who clapped his sticks together four times, just like they'd planned.

He was surprised by how good they sounded, how well the song came off with only one guitar. His fingers did exactly what he'd taught them, never stumbling once, not even on the fastest and most complicated section of the song. The drummer and keyboardist were right there with him, pushing him forward, lifting him up. His solo took him into a corner of the tune he hadn't explored before, into the whole mystery of Elizabeth Reed, why a song dedicated to her memory needed to be so bright and bouncy in some parts, so slow and moody in others. It wasn't until after it
was over, after the first ovation of his life had stopped ringing in his ears, that he allowed himself to think about Glenn and what he might do to console him. But when he got backstage, Glenn was gone.

Despite his absence, the Allmost Brothers took third prize in the show, behind a band called Sunrise Highway and the baton-twirling DeRocco Sisters (there were four of them). A week later, the singer in Sunrise Highway called and asked Dave if he wanted to be their lead guitarist. Without hesitating, Dave said yes (soon afterward, Sunrise Highway changed its name to Exit 36). In the fifteen years that followed, he and Glenn had never stopped being friends or playing music together. In all that time, though, except for a brief, muttered exchange of apologies the next day, they'd never really spoken about what had happened that night, or where they might have gone together if it hadn't.

Glenn followed him out to his car. It was after ten and the world was deathly quiet, as though a curfew were in effect. Dave looked left and right as he fumbled with his keys, an outlaw on the deserted street.

“Thanks a lot,” Glenn told him. Playing music made him look the way other people looked after sex or a good workout—like someone had taken an eraser and rubbed the tension from his face.

“For what?”

“It's an honor.”

Dave picked at his top front teeth with the tip of his car key. Sincere moments like this made him nervous.

“I'll feel a lot better having you up there next to me.”

“Are you scared?”

“Yeah. I'm just not sure of what.”

Glenn nodded. “I'm like that all the time.”

“I'm glad you're seeing someone,” Dave said, addressing this
comment to his friend's pale feet on the blacktop. “The shrink, I mean.”

Just then a car turned the corner at the near end of the block and began moving toward them at five, maybe ten miles an hour. Dave raised one hand in front of his face to fend off the dazzle of the headlights. He had a bad moment as the car rolled to a stop right in front of him, its windows all the way down, as if in preparation for a drive-by shooting. Four kids were inside, jocky teenage guys in backwards baseball caps, looking strangely subdued.

Without a word to his buddies, one of the kids climbed out of the backseat, shut the door, and trudged up the front walk of the house across the street from Glenn's. Once he was safely inside, the car drove off, maintaining its funereal pace. Dave and Glenn looked at each other and shrugged.

“I was kidding about not making the toast,” Glenn informed him. “Just don't expect the Gettysburg Address, okay?”

Dave couldn't help laughing, considering some of the asinine toasts he'd heard over the past couple of years. One guy talked for five minutes about what a stud the groom had been, how he used to pick up women in bars, go home with them, and never call them back. “All that changed when he met Maggie,” the Best Man assured the wedding guests. “She was the first one he ever called back.”

“Don't worry,” Dave said, clapping Glenn on the shoulder. “Just make it short, sweet, and from the heart.”

He got in his car and pulled away, tooting softly on the horn. At the corner stop sign he glanced in the rearview mirror and saw a barefoot guy in a pink shirt standing with his arms crossed in the middle of an empty street, his oldest friend in the world.

On the way home he listened to R.E.M.'s
Monster
and thought about how good he felt. He was excited about seeing Gretchen
again—it had to happen, he realized that now—as well as deeply pleased by the way things had gone with Glenn. Dave hadn't expected him to agree so easily, nor had he expected to feel so proud and grateful that he did. Glenn
was
his Best Man. Anyone else—his brother, or even Buzzy—would have been a substitute.

There was an obvious tension between the two things that were making him happy, but he preferred not to spoil his good mood by dwelling on it. His strategy for the time being was to keep his real life in one compartment and Gretchen in another. She was a fantasy, a stroke of good luck, an opportunity that had fallen into his lap, something he had to get out of his system. He could explain her in any number of ways, but there really wasn't any point in explaining, not even to himself. There was something she wanted to show him, and he wanted to find out what it was.

Michael Stipe would have understood, Dave was pretty sure of that. If there was one message R.E.M. had sent to the world, it was that standing still got you nowhere. They'd never been afraid of changing directions or taking risks. Even Dave was having trouble getting used to
Monster
, all the raw feedback and distortion, the glaring absence of the sensitivity and subtlety that had been the band's hallmarks for more than a decade. It was like they woke up one morning, looked in the mirror, and said, “Fuck it, man. We're tired of being ourselves. Let's be someone else for a while.” If Stipe had been in the car, Dave would have told him that he knew the feeling.

There Was 3 note on the kitchen table telling him to call Julie if he got home before eleven. Dave thought about letting it slide, but his conscience got the better of him. She was his fiancée; the least he could do was return her phone calls.

“Well?” she said. “What happened?”

Dave blanked out for a second.

“What happened when?” he asked cautiously.

“With Glenn. You went over there tonight, didn't you?”

“Oh yeah. He said yes. I didn't have to bug him or anything. He seems to really want to do it.”

“That's great, Dave. I'm really happy for both of you.”

“He says he's seeing a shrink now. I guess it's doing him some good.”

“It's about time.”

“The next step is to find him a girlfriend.”

“That reminds me,” she said. “Tammi just called. She and Ian are going out to dinner tomorrow night. She sounds really excited.”

“That's great. I hope it works out for them.”

“God, Dave, I feel like I haven't seen you in ages. Are we still on for the movies on Friday?”

“As far as I know.”

“Anything you want to see?”

“Whatever you want,” he assured her.

THIS SAD GIFT

 

From Cretchen's apartment
they took the F train to Second Avenue on the Lower East Side, a neighborhood Dave rarely visited on his courier runs. An exhilarating sense of anonymity washed over him as they walked the gritty streets past urine-stinking doorways, fruit stands, and displays of stolen goods set out for sale right on the sidewalks. No one here —not the fierce-looking men in turbans or the girls with pierced eyebrows or the Chinese deliverymen on bicycles or the homeless guys with their matted beards or the emaciated, jittery women with their ravenous eyes—knew that the woman he was holding hands with was not the woman he was engaged to marry, and he had a pretty strong hunch that, had they known, none of them would have mustered the energy or interest to care.

“I love this place,” Gretchen said, letting go of his hand to circumnavigate a puddle of pink vomit. “It's so alive. Every time I go home I wonder how people can stand it in the suburbs.”

“You get used to it,” he explained, forcing himself not to stare
at the gay couple who brushed by on the sidewalk, arms circling each other's waists. The man in the tank top had a clean-shaven head and appeared to be tattooed all over his muscular body. His companion was blond and boyishly cute, dressed in a brown business suit. “It seems normal when nothing happens.”

“I remember coming here for the first time when I was in college and thinking,
So this is what they've been hiding from me all these years.
It's a feeling that's never really gone away.”

Now that he was seeing her on her home turf, Dave had a better idea of how out of place she must have felt at the Westview on Saturday night. She was a hipster, bohemian and severe in her buckle-up pilgrim shoes, her black leggings with the ripped knee, her faded purple top, shaped like a dress but too short to be worn as anything but a shirt. She had two golden hoops in her left ear, one in her right, and an armful of silver bangles. She walked fast, head up, scanning the world with a calm vigilance.

“So where are you taking me?” he asked.

“You'll see.”

“After all this suspense, it better be good.”

“Don't worry. You won't be disappointed.”

He nodded, not really caring where they were headed, happy just to be walking through the twilight city with this formidable woman as his guide. The sheepish
I'm-from-New-Jersey
feelings that usually plagued him during his visits to Manhattan were absent, replaced by a buoyant sense of invisibility, a confidence that for once he had managed to blend in with the natives. He wished Julie were here to witness it, or at least someone from home—Glenn, maybe, or even Zelack—-just so they'd know there was this other side to him, that he was the kind of guy who could walk through the East Village on a Thursday night and look like he belonged there.

Gretchen stopped outside a storefront on Avenue A, unmarked except for a small chalkboard set up on an easel outside the front
door. A few feet away, an old bum was singing “Volare” in a soulful voice as he sprayed his chest and armpits with an aerosol Dave assumed was deodorant but that turned out, on closer inspection, to be Raid.
Open Mike Poetry Reading
, read the yellow letters on the chalkboard.
All Are Welcome.

Inside, the place was small and crowded and buzzing with conversation. Dave saved Gretchen a seat at the last available table—a rickety roundtop hardly bigger than a dinner plate—and waited for her to return from the rest room.

It was a scene—serious haircuts, lots of posing, widespread hugging and kissing of new arrivals. Half out of guilt and half out of curiosity, Dave tried to imagine Julie's reaction. Would it have pleased her to be sitting just inches away from a table whose occupants included a regal-looking black woman in a Caribbean-style headdress, and a scowling, potbellied white guy with muttonchop sideburns and a stovepipe hat? Or would the strangeness have caused her to shrink down into herself, lapsing into grim silence, rousing herself only to fan cigarette smoke away from her face as though it were poison gas?

Gretchen didn't look so hot when she returned from the bathroom. The color had drained from her face, and she kept licking her lips and swirling her tongue around the inside of her mouth like something tasted bad in there, so bad it couldn't be ignored. When she reached up to tuck her hair behind her ear, her hand was trembling so badly her bracelets chattered like teeth.

“You okay?”

“Yeah.” She forced a laugh. “I always get like this when I read.”

“You do it a lot?”

“Pretty often. Maybe once a month.”

“What are you reading tonight?”

She stuck her hand into her dirty canvas tote bag and pulled out one of those composition books Dave remembered from grammar school, the ones with the cover designed to look like a slab of marble. She set the book down on the table and rapped at it with her knuckles.

“New stuff,” she said. “Love poems.”

Dave glanced at the book. In the white box reserved for the owner's name and address he saw the words
Blood Blisters
written in neat block letters.

“Blood Blisters?”
he asked.

Just then the room burst into applause. Dave looked up and saw a husky, middle-aged guy with long hair and a Hawaiian shirt standing behind a mike stand, his back to a patch of exposed brick wall between the men's and women's rest rooms. His name must have been Pat, because people kept shouting it until it turned into a kind of chant. Pat just stood there grinning, reeling in the ovation with both hands, egging them on for more. Gretchen leaned across the table, an anxious expression on her face.

“It's a working title,” she told him. “You think I should change it?”

Ian hadn't made a joke, but Tammi started laughing anyway.

“You're pretty funny,” she said. “Julie forgot to mention that.”

“I wasn't trying to be funny. I really do think the Monkees are an underrated band.”

“The Monkees Monkees? You mean Mickey, Davey, and the guy with the hat?”

“Mike Nesmith.” He decided not to mention the fact that he'd worn a watch cap from kindergarten all the way through
second grade in an effort to be like Mike. “He's a big-time movie producer now. I think he was involved with
Repo Man.”

“Didn't see it.”

“You should rent it sometime. Emilio Estevez.”

Tammi took a couple of bites of her taco salad, watching him the whole time with her sharp little eyes. Ian wasn't that hungry, but he felt obliged to saw off a piece of his chimichanga. If he just let it sit there, she'd probably take it as a sign that he wasn't enjoying himself.

“So explain this to me,” she said. “Tell me what's so great about the Monkees.”

“Forget it. It's not that important.”

“Come on,” she said. “Don't be like that. I really am curious.”

“Really?”

“If you don't tell me, I'm never gonna know.”

She was teasing him, he could see that, but not in a nasty way. She was flirting, actually. Ian had been out of circulation so long he'd almost forgotten how to play the game. But it was starting to come back to him. The rules, the tone you were supposed to strike. He was having a better time than he'd expected. Tammi wasn't a beauty—she was short and solid and athletic-looking, with an open, freckled face—but she wasn't an airhead, either. It was nice being with a woman he could talk to.

“Well, here's the thing,” he began. “The Monkees were a product. Some businessmen came up with an idea for a TV show, and then they went out and invented a band to star in it. They were just supposed to be actors. Figureheads. Studio musicians were going to take care of the music. The whole point was that they were going to be controlled. Because this was happening at that point in the late sixties when rock ‘n roll was starting to turn dangerous. The Beatles had gone from being these cute moptops to
singing about revolution and LSD, and the powers that be were trying to put a lid on all the crazy energies that were floating through the air. That's what the Monkees were supposed to be about.”

“Huh,” she said, gazing past him in an attempt to make eye contact with their waitress. “I had no idea.”

“But the great thing is, the Monkees didn't go with the program. They rebelled. They insisted on playing their own music, and even started to write their own tunes.”

“Wasn't there a fourth one?” she asked distractedly, still trying to flag down the waitress. “Besides Mickey, Davey, and Mike?”

“Peter,” he said. “Peter Tork. Do you know the song ‘Pleasant Valley Sunday’?”

She didn't seem to hear him.

“You want some coffee?” she asked, covering her mouth to stifle a little yawn. “I always get sleepy when I eat Mexican.”

Dave had never been to a poetry reading before and found the whole process much more engrossing than he ever would have imagined. It was way better than the musical open mikes he was used to attending, where a parade of earnest, guitar-strumming folkies plopped themselves down on the wooden stool to crank out yet another cover of “Cowgirl in the Sand” or “Fire and Rain” or —God forbid—” Greensleeves.”

Here, you never knew what was going to happen next. One person would recite a poem or two—sometimes from memory, sometimes from the page—and then Pat would stand up and call out someone else's name. An odd sort of suspense filled the room as the audience members glanced from table to table, waiting for a poet to heed the summons.

Some of the readers looked like poets and some of them
looked like regular people. A handful of them looked like nuts, but Dave found out pretty quickly that it was useless to try to judge sanity, or even talent, from the reader's appearance; all you could do was wait for the words. It was like going to a big party and meeting lots of strangers in quick succession. That was all the reading was as far as Dave could tell—people standing up in front of other people, most of whom they didn't know, and saying, to the best of their ability, “Here I am. This is what I'm all about.” Some were great and some were terrible and most fell somewhere in between, but none of them lasted for more than three or four minutes, so you could even convince yourself that the terrible ones were actually sort of interesting.

The guy in the stovepipe hat read something he called “The Ballad of Jack and Charlie,” which he described as “a philosophical dialogue between Jack Kerouac and Charles Manson,” an idea that sounded good to Dave but that turned out mainly to be an excuse to talk really fast and say the word “man” a lot (“Listen, man, speed is just another word for life, man, and that's what those bastards refused to understand”). A woman of about forty with a beautiful cascade of graying hair stood silently behind the microphone, head down, her hands pressed together as if in prayer. Then, after maybe a minute had passed, she looked up and made a visual sweep of the room, apparently trying to make eye contact with each individual member of the audience. When she finally spoke her voice was calm, the voice of an adult reasoning with children.

“Why do I frighten you?” she asked. “Because I see through your lies, or because I am a woman-loving woman?”

That was her reading. She curtsied sweetly, a little girl who had just finished her piano recital, and scampered back to her seat. The woman in the headdress read a series of what she called “subway poems,” brief, vivid portraits of people who happened to sit across from her on the D train—a pregnant Puerto Rican teenager with a leashed ferret sitting on her shoulder, an overweight transit
cop sucking on a grape Tootsie Pop, a construction worker reading
Penthouse
right there in front of everyone. A wiry, troubled-looking man in hiking shorts, sandals, and mismatched tube socks read something he called “My Confession,” a laundry list of things he'd done to hurt other people:

I farted and blamed it on you,
I defaced you with my jism,
I only pretended to like your dog …

 

Gretchen was twelfth on the roster, and Dave watched her pallor intensify as the big moment approached. The eleventh reader was a skinny, tense-looking, college-age woman with bad skin and angelic red hair. She scuffed her way over to the mike, mumbled a sentence that included the word
puberty
, and began to read.