Once we finished our homework, I would fix us dinner, which varied between spaghetti, frozen pizza, mac and cheese, and canned chili. And by us, I mean I cooked for the whole house—myself, Cal, Ingrid, and, while he was around, Chuck.
I hope this doesn’t give the impression that Ingrid was a bad mom. She wasn’t. She was just heartbroken. That’s what she used to say to me when I would find her fully dressed in her big, empty bathtub, staring out over the valley. I would ask her what was wrong, and she would say, “I’m heartbroken, Joey.”
She’d lost a son and then a husband, and she didn’t know how to heal from that. None of us did.
At any rate, if I hadn’t cooked, we wouldn’t have eaten, and that was that.
My mom and Chuck went out a lot after dinner, and Cal and I often had the house to ourselves. But even when Ingrid and Chuck were home, the house—a beige-hued Mediterranean-style monstrosity up on Edgewood Road that Bob had built himself—was big enough that we could do what we wanted and not bother anyone.
After dinner we would have band practice, which was just me and Cal working on songs in the garage. Then we’d watch movies or study guitar magazines until we fell asleep. We had a gigantic bulletin board on a wall in my bedroom—we called it our Wall of Dreams—where we tacked up pictures of all the guitars we fantasized about owning someday. Micawber, the Fender Telecaster made famous by Keith Richards, was the big one in the center, and all the other guitars—a Fender Esquire, a Gibson Les Paul Goldtop, a Martin D-18e, a Gibson Firebird, a 1961 Danelectro, to name a few—hung around it like moons orbiting Jupiter.
Once in a while Chuck would give us some pot, but Cal didn’t like Chuck or pot, and he rarely smoked with me. “Pot is for boring, unambitious people,” he’d decided early on. “I’m neither of those things. And anyone who can play guitar like you shouldn’t be either.”
Occasionally Cal and I switched it up and ate dinner with Terry when she had a rare night off, and she’d spend the whole meal asking us questions about what we’d been up to, what songs we were learning, and what we were studying in school.
Terry had been a teenager when she’d had Cal and was still young when Cal and I were in high school, but you wouldn’t have known it by looking at her. Whereas even in her grief, Ingrid still looked like your typical, well-to-do Marin County mom—nice hair, good clothes, good shape—life had robbed Terry of her youth before its time. She lived paycheck to paycheck, smoked Marlboro Lights, and was always frazzled and exhausted. The blue shadows under her eyes never went away, and the corners of her mouth appeared to be trying to pull her whole face down to the ground.
Terry worked as a waitress at a steakhouse near US 101. She and Cal lived in a small apartment in Marin City, in a building that could have passed for a rundown motel. The place had a cinderblock half wall that divided the family room from the kitchen, there was an electric burner on the counter in place of a stove, and the room Cal slept in was the same size as the closet in my bedroom. The shitty kids in our school called Marin City the ghetto, and I felt bad for Cal when they said it, but that kind of stuff didn’t faze Cal. He would peer down at them with his beady eyes—he was the tallest kid in our class and towered over everyone—and remind them that Tupac had once lived in Marin City. Cal never doubted that if Tupac could make it out of there, he could too.
Every other weekend I stayed with Bob on his houseboat in Sausalito. Bob didn’t like commotion, so I wasn’t allowed to bring my guitar. Never mind that he lived at the end of the dock where there were no trees and nothing to do except look at the water. Most of the time Bob did let me bring Cal, though, and for a while I thought this was a symbol that Bob cared about my happiness and was being a considerate father. Then Cal and I overheard Bob tell Debbie, the woman Bob was dating at the time, that he liked it when Cal tagged along because it meant he didn’t have to babysit me.
“It’s not called babysitting if you’re the dad,” Cal huffed to me, as if he were an expert on the subject. “It’s called parenting.”
Bob’s take on music was even more appalling to Cal. As far as Bob was concerned, music was part of the background noise of the world, not an art form that deserved to play a major role in a person’s life.
“Never trust a man who isn’t moved by song,” Cal reasoned. “It means he’s dead inside.”
One particular weekend, Cal talked Bob into taking us to the big Tower Records in the city on Friday night because Bob was having a party and we didn’t want to have to sit around listening to his guests get drunk and babble about how much they’d spent on their houses. Bob had agreed, but he punctuated his consent by saying, “There’s something wrong with two teenage boys who have nothing better to do on a Friday night than go to a record store.”
“We don’t think there’s anything better to do,” Cal replied on both our behalves, as he was wont to do.
“What are you, his lawyer?” Bob barked. “You know what I was doing on Friday nights at your age? Chasing girls.”
“Harp and I don’t have to chase girls. Girls chase us.”
That was only marginally true. Girls chased Cal, he picked his favorites, and then he made sure whoever he was dating
