Songs Only You Know Read Free Page B

and just out of reach.
    There was still a chance Dad would drift home to spend the night on the couch. The worst would be over. Tomorrow morning we’d piece everything together. Or does a person sleep at all once he’s toked from that pipe? The worst pipe packed with the worst drug. Does he actually come back? I reached for the box fan on my windowsill to crank it on high, and through the whirring of the blades the music returned, deep chords ringing slow and heavy. Will’s Easton lay beside me on the mattress, and already I knew what I’d tell him about the man and the showdown and how, when he’d ask me to repeat the story again and again, I’d describe the flash of the gun.

2
    C aitlin’s four-cylinder Escort was a dinky, white, egglike sedan she’d been driving the past eleven months, since she’d turned sixteen. Stacked in the glove box was an unlikely assortment of cassettes. Mozart, Carole King, the Smashing Pumpkins, mixtapes I’d made showcasing punk rock’s somber moments: the Replacements’ “Go,” “Long Division” by Fugazi. A rosary dangled from the rearview and fortune-cookie scripts were held with a paper clip beneath the emergency brake; all of which, I hoped, would remind my dad of Caitlin as he pulled into a dealer’s driveway or alleyway or whatever it was.
    Come morning, though, I was thinking most about a cassette I’d left in the Escort’s tape deck: my band’s first demo, our song titles—“Blamesday” and five others—printed on the shell. My family had been expected at Brighton Treatment Center the previous afternoon for Dad’s exit evaluation, and I’d been running late enough that Mom and Caitlin had left without me in the station wagon. Though Caitlin trusted no one with her car, she’d made the mistake of leaving behind her keys, whichI’d snatched, intending to analyze the band’s new recording on a different stereo. I’d blared the tape the entire twenty-five-minute drive into rural Michigan, where Dad awaited us in a farmhouse-turned-rehab. They might have heard me coming if not for those puny Escort speakers just sort of rattling as I maxed the volume.
    The band was onto some genuinely ugly sounds, our mission being to corrupt all traces of harmony. When notes felt too “right,” we augmented with wrongness. Lyrics were pulled unexamined from some part of myself that I couldn’t otherwise locate:
A rite of passage, bought and sold / See how we’ve grown to fill our cage
. More than tough or hard, we wanted to sound painful. Crazy. We wanted to take it all the way, whatever that meant, and had just enough skill to set ourselves on course.
    Our twenty-minute demo tape—now at my dad’s fingertips, awaiting his turn of the dial—held the proof.
    He suspected my guitar and secret life of cultish gatherings to be the cause of my lackluster grades, so I hid all evidence of the music for both our sakes. Things between us had begun turning a few years earlier, when I gave up my baseball mitt for an imitation Stratocaster I’d funded by delivering the
Dearborn Press and Guide
. He’d threatened to snap the instrument in two. The sound of it, even unplugged, goaded him. We’d have fared better had I, even failingly, striven for honor and experience through fierce, competitive sport. Teamwork. High fives that become hugs. We’d shared such moments when I was eleven. Now I understood he’d prefer to cancel large parts of who I’d become with age. Recently he’d uttered the words “Fuck you” to me for the first time and meant it so completely that I’d lowered my head to silently agree. Music—my drive toward it—upset a brute fear in him because songs reached me in ways he never could. Who’d guess that in the seventies he’d grownhis hair and attempted the classical guitar? He’d owned the first four Zeppelin albums. Now Dad called Robert Plant a “whiner,” Mick Jagger a “fruitcake.” I dreaded what he’d make of my band’s down-tuned noise,