you know how that goes.”
I did. “Was Mikel there?”
“I went out to buy more beer. When I got back, he was dead.”
“Wagner told you he’d shot him?”
He shut his eyes, and his Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat. “He said he’d come by to see what was taking me so long. Mikel recognized him. Wagner said he attacked him, he laughed about it, said it was funny that my drug-dealer son was more concerned about protecting his family than I was. They fought, and Wagner shot him.”
We both fell silent.
“I had to hate you,” I told him. “Do you understand that? I had to blame you for everything you took away, because I didn’t want to give you the credit for anything I have. But Mikel never would have done time, Tommy. No judge would have sentenced him for a mistake. He was a kid, a scared kid who made a stupid mistake, that’s all. He never meant to hurt anyone.”
“You knew.”
“I remembered.”
Tommy shook his head. “Wagner wasn’t anything. He did us a favor. I wasn’t a good parent, and that wasn’t going to change. A good parent doesn’t beat his wife and doesn’t drink until he passes out and he doesn’t take drugs. A good parent doesn’t pour her bitterness on her children, deny them pleasure because she’s had it denied to her. We were destroying your life.”
“You gave me my life. You gave me my first guitar.”
“A piece of shit Silvertone in a house with a mother who would never let you play it.”
“You’re the one who gave me music, Tommy.”
“That’s not all I gave you.”
That afternoon, I finally went to Joan’s and helped go through Steven’s stuff, and we finally had it out, she finally let all the anger loose. I took it and gave none of it back, because I deserved it, and when Joan was finished we both could finally share the grief each of us had been holding in for so long. We had dinner at Riyadh’s, ate kafta patties and falafel, and I told her about everything that had happened. She held my left hand in hers, examining my fingers.
After dinner I dropped her at her home, then went back to mine, eager to be warm and safe. The million dollars was still in the duffel, and I thought it was stupid as hell to just leave it there, but there wasn’t anything I could do with it until Monday morning, when the bank opened again.
I thought about calling Hoffman, and decided against it.
Instead, I plugged the Tele into the VOX AC-30 and worked on some exercises, trying to speed my fingers along their recovery, and when I was tired and happy, I went up to the kitchen for a smoke and a drink, to celebrate my job well done.
It was Monday afternoon when I came to, lying on the kitchen floor, half-naked and feeling more than half- dead. When I managed to start moving to survey the damage, it shocked me. The kitchen was a mess, and the living room, and the music room.
The Taylor was in fragments on the floor by the foot of the stairs, strings and splinters, neck snapped from body, utterly beyond repair. Marks on the banister and the pads on the floor showed where I’d struck the instrument again and again, battering it apart.
I sat on the bottom step, staring at the corpse, and I tried and tried and tried, and I couldn’t imagine why I would have done such a thing. There was no reason, none at all.
Just seeing that Halloween pumpkin I’d carved with my mother, how I’d shattered it against the door of our house when the police had taken my father away.
Van called me that night, from Glasgow. I was at the sink, a cigarette in my mouth, bottle in my hand, trying to accept the rest of my hangover, and the ring sliced through all of the noise like it was made especially for my suffering. When I answered, I was surprised it was her.
“You have a minute?” Van asked.
I shut off the tap and said, “Sure. How’re you doing?”
“How’re you?”
“Turned a corner,” I told her.
“That’s really good to hear.”
There was a transatlantic pause.
“Clay’s not working out,” Van said.
“I’m surprised.”
“He just doesn’t have what it takes. He’s got chops in the studio, Mim, but you put him onstage, he’s like furniture. If you heard what he was doing to your arrangements, you’d cry.”
“I’m sure it’s not that bad.”
“No, it’s that bad, Mim, it really is. Graham and I were talking, and Click, too, and we’re supposed to be playing a couple gigs in the Midwest starting Wednesday, then on through the South. We were wondering if maybe you could meet us in Chicago.”
I looked at the row of bottles on my counter.
“I can’t.”
“If you’re angry, if you’re holding a grudge, I can understand why you’d be doing that. But this is about the band, and we can’t keep putting Clay—”
“You were right to send me home, Van.”
“What?”
“I said you were right, and I need to stay here, now. I need to dry out, I need to learn how to stay that way once I get there. I’m hoping that by June I’ll have it mastered. Until then, call Birch, or someone else.”
She gave me more of the transatlantic silence.
“I have to do this,” I told her.
“Good luck,” Van said.
I hung up, went back to dumping the last of my bottles down the drain.
Tuesday morning, I picked up Tommy at the hospital. He was expecting me to take him straight to Mikel’s, but I told him first things first, and drove him over to a shop on Hawthorne that I liked, called Guitar Crazy.
I bought him a used Taylor acoustic.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The technical aspects of this book were many, and those who contributed their time and knowledge are too numerous to name. That being said, special thanks must go to the following:
The members of
Special indebtedness to one of the most fabulous couples it has been my pleasure to know—Judd Winick and Pamela Ling, M.D. Unique insight, brutal honesty, great humor, and yes, I know it’s not so much a visual tremor as a verbal tic, but it’s so much more
To Nunzio Andrew DeFilippis, who leapt for the over-the-wall catch and made the save not once, not twice, but on three separate occasions. Like the ladies before her, Mim loves you.
Thank you to Gerard V. Hennelly, without whom no acknowledgment would be complete. You know dangerous things, and are always willing to share. Thanks as well to Nancy Hess, for taking the time to speak with a total stranger, and better, to speak honestly.
