I wish I could tell him. But there’s no way to give voice to this thing in me, this contradiction, the pride and the anger, the confusion and shame, the thing driving me forward that I love this man who I don’t want to be and I feel trapped by his choices to either abandon him or abandon my future.
CHAPTER 32
CAN YOU HEAR ME, MAJOR TOM?
The first time I see Drew play his acoustic guitar, it looks to me like something a cowboy would own. Something about the polished wood and the hokey shape reminds me of campfire sing-alongs and country singers sitting on hay bales wailing on about girls named Daisy. It seems out of place among the Depeche Mode poster on his wall, the Meat Is Murder T-shirt he wears all the time.
I don’t see anything broken in Drew, any reason why he would like all these sad songs. Maybe it’s just very well hidden. His brother, the college radio DJ at the U.S. Naval Academy, makes mix tapes for him, for his education: the Cure, the Smiths, Depeche Mode, Red Flag, Jane’s Addiction, the Sex Pistols, the Pixies and Sigue Sigue Sputnik. He tapes these for me like we have a club of two, the only two people who like this music at a school dominated by Tony! Toni! Toné!, Paula Abdul and the Beastie Boys. He’s switched from baseball to volleyball now and looks the part. Six foot three, thin, with blond hair bleached by the sun, tan skin covered in freckles. Sometimes in the middle of basketball at the park, he’ll casually dunk a basketball like it’s the easiest thing in the world. He carries this insouciance with him, like he finds all the effort everybody else puts into difficult tasks charming as he masters them with ease.
Some people are likable simply because they give off the constant impression that they like you, and something about this trait is calming and easy to trust. That’s Drew.
His sister is a straight-A student, his dad is a successful lawyer and sometimes I wonder if it all seems like a big joke to him, like being from this sleepy suburb and having such genteel, well-educated parents give him the confidence to question it, as if charmed by all that uptight, upright nature, willing to laugh at it as one laughs at a certain shape of nose, an inherited feature passed between generations. He could be an astronaut, a doctor, a lawyer, a diplomat, and instead he wants to sit around and listen to the Cure with his former burnout friend. I can’t help but respect that.
We’ve formed a kind of club with other guys who like good music: Eddie, short, kind, who loves Jane’s Addiction; Pete, sarcastic and fearless, who loves the Stone Roses; Tim, who is into student government and Depeche Mode; and Gabe, the catcher from the baseball team with the thick build of an athlete and the mind of an artist. Our pack of misfits has grown. We all know there’s safety in numbers.
The big steel-string guitar looks awkwardly large in Drew’s lap, like some kind of corny prop. But when he starts to play the chords for “Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want” by the Smiths, strumming in a choppy motion, crooning quietly, his nasal voice filling the little room, something amazing happens.
Haven’t had a dream in a long time
See, the life I’ve had can make a good man bad
No matter how clumsy, how imperfect, it seems like a kind of magic to conjure a moment in this way, like the song was sitting in the ether somewhere just waiting for someone to bring it to life. It isn’t an object and it isn’t a person and it isn’t an idea. It’s something else. It contains something. Sadness. Nostalgia, maybe. The sense of a person’s essence, not just lyrics and a melody, but a presence, a feeling like a spirit has joined you. The spirit has a story and that story lives in these words and notes. There is a time and a place, a fact of existence, and we are suddenly not just two awkward boys sitting in a suburb beneath the flight path of Los Angeles International Airport but two people who are part of this world with its morbid wit, its stylish boredom, the layers of irony, the pompadour.
I’m spellbound. Even though the song, as sung by Drew on his acoustic guitar in his bedroom next to his wall-mounted collection of Star Wars action figures, sounds nothing like the Smiths, there is a sorcery at work and I need to learn how to use it. It’s like deciding to learn how to fly, the power to conjure, the ability to transform a space. I want it for myself so I too can carry around these bits of magic.
He hands me his guitar. He shows me how to make a C chord. How to press down hard on the strings until the tips of my fingers hurt, careful to keep them behind the frets so as not to block the other strings. It hurts a little.
“After a while you get calluses. Until then you just got to let it hurt.”
I pluck out the chord, string by string. Then he shows me how to move my fingers to make an E-minor chord, bunching them up near the top of the fret board.
After half an hour I can move between the two chords, tentatively, like a child taking first steps.
“Okay, now strum.” He taps his foot. “Try to switch chords on the beat.” I’m too slow with my fingers to keep up but it’s close. He sings, low, almost in a whisper, with that lazy California drawl of his.
Ground control to Major Tom.
I look up at him, amazed. Jake and I have listened to that song in the garage hundreds of times, wondering about this strange man named David Bowie with his spaceship, this world somewhere far away where people sing about floating away forever. It all seems like some perfect expression of some perfect idea by some perfect artist on a hill somewhere. It never once occurred to me that in our own imperfect way we could sing the song ourselves.
When I get home, Bonnie says Grandma Juliette has an old Spanish guitar in the game room of their house. She used to play it for them when they were kids. It’s just an old ratty thing but when we next go to the house off Fairfax and Wilshire, Grandma Juliette says I can have it. It’s smaller than Drew’s acoustic, with nylon strings and a hole in the front that looks like it was punched by a baby’s fist. It takes a while to tune with the old tuning harmonica I find in the case. I sit in my room for hours thinking about David Bowie. What was he thinking when he wrote this? Where is he now and what would he tell me if he could? About school? About Laura? About the face I hold like a mask and the river beneath where I swim through my life. I alternate between the two chords, until my wrist is sore, until my fingers feel like they are going to bleed.
Can you hear me, Major Tom?
I learn the chords to the “Untitled” song by the Cure and “Ask” by the Smiths, singing in my scratchy, off-key voice that can barely carry a tune.
Sometimes when I’m up late studying, I hear a voice in my head telling me I’m a failure if I don’t ace a test, if I don’t find a way to be better than whatever it is I am. It’s cruel, heartless, mean. You piece of shit. You fucking loser piece of shit. Why do you bother, you fucking loser? I hear the words over and over again on an unending loop. I have nowhere to put them, no way to understand them, only that my world is transformed suddenly and all I feel is this cold, bleak drive to become something else. Or if not, to fail and be left alone.
When it feels like too much, when I can’t quiet the voice, I sit on the edge of my bed and strum the chords to those sad songs.
To know this thing exists, to go somewhere else and hear these words, to conjure them, is a relief, like I can breathe and it quiets that other voice.