Bright Shards of Someplace Else Page 15

  I try not to listen. I’ve heard all this before, and I’m pretty sure it will end with him confronting the godhead. I’ve gotten enough midnight calls about his drug-fueled encounters with an encyclopedic list of spiritual figures: Jesus, Buddha, Allah, The Spirit in the Sky, and Mother Nature herself, who held out long arms made of saplings and drew him to her leafy bosom while nibbling a Morse code of secret truth on his earlobe. As much as I knew the source of these visions, it was hard not to be swept along by his telling. Because Dee got one thing from me: my ability to spin a story.

  Sometimes Dee’s language was so striking during these soliloquies that I would find myself jotting down phrases without thinking. I can’t believe you mined your drugged son for a good turn of phrase, I’d think, looking down at the pad the next morning. Then, a preposterous jealously: Why can’t I think of phrases like that? I’d want to use the words in my work, but that seemed somehow wrong, given what they sprang from. But to let that language, no matter how destructive its origin, simply be forgotten seemed wrong, too. So I simply recorded it on little sheets of notepaper that I stored in a shoebox under my bed. I guess I figured I’d decide what to do with it all someday. I suppose it’s a bit like the newspaper clippings proud parents keep of their kids’ accomplishments, for they were, in their perverse way, Dee’s accomplishments.

  “Man, have I been there!” Levi is staring at my son, a smile playing about his lips as though he knows he’s going to hear something great. He looks at me and gestures with his fork, flinging bits of food into his drink. “Danny, remember when the tour bus got lost on the way to Santa Fe? And how we hopped out and started looking for street signs and ended up at that crazy pueblo with those cult people? The ones with all the chickens wearing stuff?”

  I nod. I remember the chickens and their colorful neck warmers, scratching around in the sand while a few children sat in the sun with looms on their knees. They’d looked at the group of us—back then Levi was a bona fide rock star—with a somnolent disinterest, as if we were deeply beside the point. There’s more to the story, but I don’t want to tell it with Dee here. It’s a funny story, and telling a funny story is an act of generosity and welcome that I certainly don’t feel.

  “So you were stoned and lost. And …?”

  Dee fixes his left eye on me and then flips his hands upward in an emphatic gesture. There’s a faint purplish streak coming off his tear duct and down his cheek, like a magic marker he’s tried to wash off. His inner elbow is blotchy with thick pancake makeup, but track marks peek through like the bubbles of crabs submerged in wet sand. He leans over the table, as close to me as he can get.

  “I brought a man back to life. That’s what happened.”

  Only one of my two sons Dale is a druggie. That’s right: I have two sons by the same name—the absurd result of a tanking romance. That’s why this Dale goes by Dee. He’s the younger one—just twenty-four—the son of my second ex-wife, whose love for me primarily manifested itself in an intense jealously of my first wife, Gina. Vicki had the notion that she was simply a placeholder for that old passion. This was hardly the case—far from being a woman I pined for, Gina had morphed, for me, into the kind of pleasant asexuality that one associates with kin of the fun-cousin variety. I tried to make that clear, but simply hearing Gina’s name on my tongue was all it took to send Vicki off the edge. “Listen to the way you make love to the very syllables!” It came to a head when she was pregnant with our son. “I want to name him Dale,” she told me over dinner, a wine glass half-filled with grape juice shaking in her hand. “But Vicki, I already have a ten-year-old son by that name,” I said slowly, as if to a child. “Gina’s son,” was all she said in reply. I gave in, figuring that naming my second son the same name as my first was such an extreme testimony to my love for her that it would cure her jealousy for good. But within a few years I had not only another Dale, but another ex-wife.

  After the divorce, Vicki and Dee moved to Dearborn, where she immediately married a gruff, possessive pharmaceutical salesman who picked up the phone whenever I called her to discuss our son. So all the calls—even the later ones where we grimly discussed Dee’s drug problems—were set to her husband’s breathing, as if the call were coming through a conch shell. Weekend handoffs were tense, and I always felt I was smuggling the boy away as I hustled him to the car while Vicki and the husband stared through the bay window, blowing Dee kisses and making theatrical frown-faces. Once Dee and I were safely on the highway, I’d look over at him—slumped in the passenger side, his bag on his lap, his watery blue eyes turning in their sockets with a reptilian jerkiness—and feel as awkward and duty-bound as a cop entertaining a lost kid while the mother was rounded up.

  I’d like to say that it was just Dee’s addictions that had cooled me on him over the years, that had frayed the precious father-son thread. But there were things in Dee that had bothered me long before he started using. Even as a little boy, he was always selling himself too fervidly, selling whatever he cared about. When he was fifteen, it was Stanley Kubrick’s body of work, and I spent many an afternoon watching him pause A Clockwork Orange frame by frame while he explained the brilliance of the shot—the shifting chiaroscuro that played against the elegant curve of a kicking foot. By the time Dee was eighteen, Kubrick was forgotten, and all Dee spoke about was music. He listened nonstop to what sounded to me like the drippings of a leaky pipe in an echoing room mixed with a duck call. Dee claimed that the absence of voices and recognizable instruments represented a higher form of music, untainted by human expression. “These sounds are incidental, you know, found sounds,” he explained. “Then they’re spliced and looped. That’s all that’s been done to them. Isn’t it beautiful?”

  I liked that Dee was passionate, even artistic. Unlike my other son Dale—a bakery franchiser whose imagination stretches no further than how to rebrand the cupcake—Dee seemed more like me, a thinker, someone interested in ideas and art. Yet it was hard to really engage with him. His typical response to anything I said was a wave of a hand and a wincing squint, the same gesture one would use when walking into a smoky room. Still, I loved him. I imagined that when he grew up a bit—got out of Vicki’s control a bit more, saw more of the world—that he and I would have a fresh shot. The good times we had (racing down the dunes in northern Michigan and splashing into the lake, paging through catalogs of specialized recording equipment, waxing philosophical about the state of pop music) seemed to contain within them the seed of something better, something more solid. I can wait. That’s what I told myself.

  But Dee’s habit ruined whatever fragile relationship we’d been building. He stole from me, screamed at me, punched me, came onto my then-girlfriend’s mentally disabled daughter when she was staying with me (a disaster that was only averted because I walked back into the living room in time), and even accused me, during an acid fugue, of abusing him as a child. Of course that was laughably untrue—I’d hardly touched him at all, much less hit him. I’d been raised by a cold, withholding father who demanded dark and silence whenever he got home from work. When I would fix him his drink, I’d place it into his hands with the gentleness of a small spider, its legs no more than filament. I treated Dee with the same delicacy, only touching him lightly, if at all, and when I hugged him I did not even press away the air under his baggy shirt.

  Vicki and I did our best for him. We sent him to the top rehab facilities in the state, even an experiential sailing adventure where the organizers likened ducking to avoid the boom to avoiding drugs, and gathering up the lines to organizing one’s life and getting a job. I tried everything I could think of or read about—too much to even recall. And Dee would have good days, of course. They always do. He’d show up at my door and apologize. He’d talk in a low, exaggeratedly modulated voice, as if luxuriating in his ability to speak in something other than an accusatory shriek or a paranoid mumble. We’d go somewhere to eat and he’d stare at his plate in wonder, as if his reentry into the world had given
even his limp house salad a kind of sheen. Being with him as he reentered regular life, watching him acquaint himself with all of life’s serene pleasures, was bracing and thrilling. It made the world feel new to me. All he’d said and done shed off me like it was nothing. And then—relapse.

  Before Tonya, my ex-girlfriend, decided she’d had enough of me, she told me that my willingness to ride the rollercoaster of Dee’s deceit, lies, and false recovery so many times was an addiction in itself. “What do you do all day? Read books about recovery. Call his phone constantly. Drive around town looking for him. All for a kid who pretends to be clean once a week, like clockwork, usually to get some money out of you. This kid will get better, or he won’t. It can’t be on you forever.”

  She was right. I’d been living off dwindling royalties from my career with Levi, refusing new songwriting work, even from artists I once desperately courted. There was no time for friends. I never bothered to see my other son, even though he lives only a few hours away. And the rooftop community garden, where I had once so enthusiastically volunteered, had taken me off its work schedule since I’d been a no-show too many times, times when I drove right by the garden to hunt down Dee, parking my car by a dark overpass or barren lot, leaping out with a flashlight and calling out his name, raking the light over the faces of those bums and strays he ran with. Each face was lit with a chemically restored naïveté, so even the roughest slow-grinned like toddlers caught in the act of scrawling on the nursery walls. I’d grabbed one I’d seen before—a man who always wore brass-buckled pilgrim shoes and drank from a horn flask—and demanded to know where Dee was. He cocked his head and called out “deedeedee,” a sound that rose, echoed, and converged with the faraway car alarms, bird calls, and every other ambient long e in the city. Dee was lost and unavoidable. I’d find him dead one day, I thought, or get killed looking for him. There’s no other way it could end.

  But that, thank god, is all in the past now. Five years down the rabbit hole was plenty. I no longer let myself get involved. I’ve let myself mourn. I’ve started working at the garden again, dating a woman named Natalie who knows only the basics about Dee—druggie son, liar, a sad part of my past, a toxic person, if he calls hang up. I’m even ready, now, to write again, something that was impossible when I was involved with Dee’s dramas. That’s why I’m here. I want to make music again with my old partner—it’s time to return to who I was before Dee. Levi has been calling me on and off over the past five years, trying to entice me to write another album. He must have been surprised when I called him and finally agreed. If Levi found out about Dee, I thought, it would be through the songs I’d write.

  Dee is well into his story now. He’s telling us about wandering into a neighborhood he’s never been in before, still lost, still looking for his apartment. It’s a bad part of town—and bad for Detroit is plenty bad—and everyone in this neighborhood is squatting in vacated homes. No one owns anything. He enters an old church. The stained glass windows are all broken. Lead solder seams that once marked out the profiles of saints now snake through open space. Someone’s painted a mural of a pastoral scene on the bare lath—probably an artist trying to bring a bit of beauty, or just intention, to a place marked by ruin and randomness. Dee walks straight into the wall, thinking he’s mounting a velvety hillock. He passes clusters of gang members who ignore him out of sheer surprise, the way a cat will back away from an approaching mouse, as if out of respect for the depth of its suicidal impulse. He stumbles into a huge plastic bag filled with pop cans dragged by an elderly lady riding a Hoveround stamped with the logo of a long-closed supermarket. “There was nothing keeping me going,” Dee explains, “but the thought of ‘getting home,’ which itself, repeated in my head, was basically just a mindless chant. You know, how your name sounds if you repeat it too much? Not only does it not seem like ‘you,’ it doesn’t seem like anything. It seems to just erase more of you the more you say it.”

  Lucinda makes small, sweet little coos of sympathy with regularity. Levi’s two silent, sphinxlike dogs pad in and lower into the sentry position by our chairs, their legs folding under with a perfect, luxurious grace, like the smooth mechanism of a fine pocketknife. Levi’s chin is cupped in his hands as he nods along to Dee’s words. It’s shocking how little Levi has changed over the years. His face is still handsome, just blurred at its edges, his jaw softened in flesh. This does not make him look old but rather uncontained, a face rimmed by a diffuse halo of skin. The skin under Levi’s eyes, unlike mine, is pristine and glowing, bright as if someone had dropped a tea light in his empty head. And he’s maintained his general expression—the familiar empathy and knowingness that used to make me feel both understood and in-substantial, as if the largesse of his person were being wasted by turning its focus on me.

  “Then I walk past these screaming people. Someone grabs my shirt. I think I’m about to be mugged, but I can’t get away. It’s like I’m moving underwater and everyone else is on dry land …”

  The story is reaching its climax, I can feel it. The drugs, it seems, have impaired everything in Dee but his grasp of the story arc. A bathroom break might spare me the triumphant rise of Dee’s voice, the careen into lyricism. I get up without a backward glance, although I can hear Dee taking a breath, the silverware clinking again, attention turning to the dogs. The bathroom is down a hall so wide that it seems like another room. This whole place is cavernous, open-plan: cathedral ceilings, massive reclaimed wood beams hung with art prints. There are a few framed gold and platinum records on the wall and a picture of Levi and me in the early seventies, both of our feet propped up on a rock, the guitar resting between us. I had a kind of sleepy-eyed shy smile, a look that spoke of both bliss and nerves—Levi’s talent intimidated me then, though I was thrilled to be part of it. Those feelings seem so long ago, and I doubt if I ever have that look on my face anymore. Maybe expressions rotate out of a person’s face for good, like a song dropped from a set list.

  I splash water on my face and try to clear my head. When I turn off the sink, someone’s ring slides off the basin and pings around the bowl. It’s a little silver seahorse, curving around to touch its snout to its swirled tail. I slip it in my pocket, since I don’t want to leave it out for Dee to lift. It’s late and Levi’s already invited him to stay the night, but he’ll be gone tomorrow morning—I’ll make sure of it. No reason to worry. But why show up now? Here? I haven’t seen him in a year or heard from him in weeks, and even then the calls were brief, garbled, raving pleas for money that ended when I put the phone down with a soft click, a humane death to his voice. It’s like he’s intuited how important this is for me, how potentially cleansing and healing, and he’s made sure to inject his toxic presence. So much effort to find me, too. Vicki had mentioned where I was (why did I tell her? And she him?), and then he got online and scoured Levi’s fansites and an aerial map for the compound’s location. He was lost for a few hours on the twisty mountain roads but then found it—a miracle, he claims, another shimmering link on the chain of serendipity that includes the amazing story he’s got to tell.

  When I get back to the table, Dee is speaking in low, incantatory tones.

  “The lights were flashing all around and I was so high that every one of them had tracers coming off it, as if I was walking under this glittery web. There was broken glass all around but I didn’t notice it. This guy was laying there and people were screaming and running around and I guess—this is what people tell me later—that I walked up deadly calm and started performing CPR. We were so far out the cops were really slow getting there—this is Detroit, after all. I was giving compressions, like two hundred a minute, for ten minutes. This is almost humanly impossible. Some say it might be a world record. I didn’t even realize what I was doing. I was so messed up I thought I was still in the club and this was some dance. I just kept going. It felt wonderful. I just remember seeing these lights going up and down and hearing this click click sound. That was the cartilage over the sternum,
I’m told. The guy was certainly dead for most of that time. Then, right when help got there, he coughed, arched up under me, looked me in the eye. I just walked away and down the street … and all these people followed me, trying to thank me. They took me to the hospital with them and I slowly sobered up. The guy was alive. And here’s the thing …”

  Dee tries to catch my eye but I duck down and pet the dogs. “The thing is, when I felt that man—Miguel’s—life return, something happened to me, too. I mean, I literally felt the force of my own life—before all the drugs and issues—leap back into me. I realized, then and there, that I would never use again. For real. And I haven’t. Three weeks and going strong. It’s like … not only did I restart Miguel’s heart but my own.”

  Levi watches Dee with a twitching mouth that flicks into a small smile whenever Dee drives his story into a new absurdity. Of course they aren’t absurdities to Levi. He’s positively moved. When Dee falls silent, Levi springs forward, knocking down a salt shaker. “That is amazing, man. I have never heard anything more beautiful. You are so much like your Dad … you just have a way with words! God, Danny. I can’t believe this kid!” He turns to me with his familiar look of awe (for what doesn’t awe Levi?) and points from Dee to me and back. I shrug.

  “He knows how to spin a tale,” I say, echoing what the cops had said to me the first time I picked him up from an overnighter in jail.

  After dinner, I head straight to my cabin, locking it in case Dee gets any ideas about dropping by for a little heart-to-heart. Then I call Natalie. She picks up right away, her voice sounding warm but a little edgy, as if whatever she’s about to hear might require her to shift quickly into tough love. Natalie teaches in one of the worst schools in Detroit, where she is beloved and feared. There was a rumor going around that she reduced the superintendent to tears at a board meeting, then stopped anyone from offering him a Kleenex so he could experience the discomfort and filth his students did every day. This boldness is all the more disarming considering her face—pale, round, with an inexorable, stony quietude. Everything—from the way she kisses to the way she orders a bottle of wine—is done with a kind of resolute deliberateness, as if she’d considered the smoothest, truest way long before she had been called upon to act.