“I didn’t mean to upset you,” October finally said. “I was only trying to tell you that I understand.”
I looked at her but didn’t say anything. I felt all tied up inside, certain I was blowing it, certain this would be the first and last dinner we’d have together. But October held my look with soft eyes. Then she ripped off a piece of bread from the loaf, dipped it in the oil, and said, “It’s OK. You’ll tell me when you’re ready.”
She didn’t seem at all annoyed with my emotional ineptitude, and that surprised me, mainly because it didn’t jibe with the reaction I was used to getting from women, which was typically disappointment and frustration, not understanding.
Nevertheless, from my point of view, October might have been able to perceive emotions, but she couldn’t perceive facts, and I believed it was the facts that counted. I believed that the more facts October learned, the easier it would be for her to see what a broken toy I was and discard me.
There were so many things trapped inside of me then. But they were things I didn’t know how to express—not just to her, but to anyone.
I wanted to tell her the truth. I wanted to tell her that I’d grown up two miles from where we were sitting. I wanted to tell her about Bob and Ingrid, and Cal. I wanted to tell her how when I was in high school, Phil Lesh saw me play at the Sweetwater and told me I was a better guitar player at sixteen than Jerry Garcia was at fifty. I even wanted to tell her about my brother, and I never told new people about Sam.
Something happened, I imagined I’d say. I’m not supposed to be like this.
To be clear, I don’t blame my brother’s death for who I am any more than I blame Bob or Ingrid, but it’s hard not to wonder how differently I would have turned out had Sam lived. Of course the flip side is that Sam’s death is what led me to the guitar, and to Cal, and without those two things, I’m not sure I would have survived my childhood.
Art saved me too, I wanted to confess.
I would have told October the story of how, exactly one month after Sam died, Bob came downstairs dressed for work, his eyes like two dead rats, and announced to Ingrid that he was getting rid of all of Sam’s things—clothes, books, baseball and swim trophies, even the furniture in Sam’s bedroom.
Ingrid had protested with shouts and tears—“I’m not ready, Bob. Please.”—but he told her he’d called the Salvation Army days earlier. “They’re sending a truck over at noon. It’s not up for discussion.”
Ingrid was so upset that after Bob left for work, she told me to go into my brother’s room and take whatever I wanted before the truck came.
What if Dad gets mad? I wrote in the notebook I’d taken to carrying around.
“Joey, I want you to have something to remember your brother by, and if your father says one word to you about that, you tell him I said he can shove it up his ass.”
I wrote her exact words down just in case the opportunity to show it to Bob ever arose.
Even before I went into Sam’s room, I knew what I wanted: the Martin acoustic dreadnought he’d gotten for his sixteenth birthday. The guitar was brand new, and when Sam was alive he wouldn’t let me touch it because he said my hands were too grimy from petting trees all the time.
The guitar was the only thing I’d ever seen that was as beautiful as the redwoods I worshipped, and I started teaching myself how to play it by studying the Fleetwood Mac songbook Sam bought at a garage sale the same week he got the guitar.
Bob never did get mad about me keeping the guitar, but I figured it was because all I did was sit in my room and play it, and that meant Bob didn’t have to see me or talk to me, or deal with me not talking to him. It was a win-win situation for all.
By the time I met Cal two years later, I knew how to play every song in that book and had moved on to the Eagles Greatest Hits. In fact, the first song Cal and I ever performed together in public, during our sophomore year, was “Take It Easy.” We used the bleachers in the gym as a makeshift stage and played the song during the girls basketball practice because Cal insisted we needed to start getting some live show experience, and because he had a crush on a girl named Nell, who’s family was moving to Frontier, North Dakota, at the end of the summer. Cal had been flirting with Nell for weeks. That day he changed the song’s lyrics from “standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona,” to “standing on a corner in Frontier, North Dakota,” and before Nell left town she gave Cal his first hand job, more than a year before I would get mine.
The second half of dinner went a lot smoother than the first. Brad/Al continued to bring small plates of food to our table—Kennebec fries, braised short ribs, apple cake for dessert—all the while supplying us with the best red wine I’d had since back in high school, when I used to steal Silver Oak from Bob’s fridge.
October didn’t press or pry any further into my life, and that, along with the abundance of wine, put me at ease. I went on to spend a good portion of the meal giving her in-depth play-by-plays of movies she’d never seen—films that were too violent or disturbing for her, like Reservoir Dogs, Goodfellas, and a documentary about whales that I’d recently watched. I undertook the narratives with real commitment—“Mr. Brown? That sounds too much like Mr. Shit. How
