Bonnie lets out a gasp. She grabs the doctor’s hands and puts them to her forehead. “Thank you. Thank you. I don’t know what I would’ve done.”
I feel a wave of relief wash over me. It’s instant. Like a blast of hot air. Suddenly the world is warm again and light again and there is a future in front of us and the room has lost the nightmarish proportions. We are lucky.
An hour later we walk in to see Dad in the post-op area. He looks frail and thin in the small bed. It’s hard to see him this way, the strong man who held us in the waves, tired and frail, covered in white wires running beneath his hospital gown, the steady beep of a heart monitor next to his bed. I grab his hand. He opens his eyes. “Heyyyyy, duuuude.” He blinks. I kiss his cheek. I want so badly to protect him.
Bonnie keeps kissing his forehead, sobbing as she leans over him and says, “Oh, baby, I was so scared. I’m so glad you’re all right.” She cries onto his hospital gown.
Tony arrives. He’s been living in a halfway house in Culver City. He goes to work every day and to an AA meeting every night. He looks better. Still haggard, tired, fuzzy and quiet. But there’s a healthy glow to his cheek instead of the strung out, gaunt, exhausted, dehydrated look he had when we dropped him off at rehab. The light is returning to his big blue eyes.
He leans over the bed and Dad grabs his hand with one hand and my hand with the other, nodding, looking back and forth between us. “We’re all right,” he says. “Everyone’s still here.” We lean in and hug, our foreheads pressed together.
I grab on to Bonnie, who’s sobbing. “It’s okay, Lou. We’re all okay.”
Dad looks up at me and asks, “Don’t you have a show to play?”
I’d nearly forgotten. I kiss Dad on the cheek and hug Bonnie and Tony. I run through the halls of the hospital, feeling like I’m practically floating, past the old men coughing in their beds, the women sleeping on their backs with their mouths open. The unlucky ones. My father is alive! My father is alive!
In the parking garage I nearly crash into another car. Turn right out of the driveway. Left on Third. Head east. The radio is on. I hear a DJ mention my show at Spaceland. It all seems so abstract, like something happening to other people in another part of the world.
When I get to the club in Silver Lake, there is a line around the block. It doesn’t make sense. The club holds only about three hundred people, but there must be eight hundred snaking down the street, around the auto shop, up the next block. I don’t know these faces. Who are these people? Was there a fire?
The band is waiting in the tiny greenroom behind the stage. Daren looks up at me when I walk in. “Is he okay?” I nod my head with a smile and Daren gives me a hug. “Fuck yeah.” I feel at this moment so grateful to have a fellow traveler, a friend, another imaginary boy who knows how precious this imaginary world is.
CHAPTER 41
“GOOD EVENING. THIS IS ALL I HAVE”
By the time we play the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, by the time we stand on that enormous main stage under those massive black speakers, looking out over an audience that stretches for five football fields in front of us, just two spots before Morrissey himself with his pompadour and lyrics written as if in blood across my heart, it feels like the idea of the band no longer belongs to me. It belongs to others.
It’s strange when that happens, when something that was once in your mind becomes an object in the world with a size and a shape, a thing that can conjure ideas in the minds of others. The songs seem like children who left home and traveled the world. They had their own experiences in the minds of others. It’s imperfect, this form of telepathy. And it’s wonderful. It’s also disappointing. To feel simultaneously seen and invisible.
I threw up backstage before our set, in the grass behind our trailer. I was certain nobody would come, that the crowd would disperse when we took the stage. Or they would jeer, maybe throw things. Or worst of all, they simply wouldn’t pay attention.
Shyness is nice and shyness can stop you from doing all the things in life you’d like to.
After the record came out on a local indie label, we went on tour. We rented a black Sprinter van that looked like an airport shuttle and booked shows in every major city in the United States. The strangest thing at first was the simple fact that people kept showing up. It was one thing to play a show in Echo Park, quite another to arrive in Philadelphia or Austin or Chicago and see two or three hundred people waiting in line outside the club. I didn’t understand it. I got the logic that the record was being shared and a song was on the radio. We sat for interviews and people asked me questions just like the ones I used to ask other musicians, and I answered them. But there was an unreality to it all, like it was a dream from which I was about to awake. Each night, I left the stage with the feeling that I wanted to take the audience home. I’d meet them in a line after the show, shaking hands and taking pictures, and notice some people with actual tears in their eyes, looking at me as if to ask if I understood. Yes, I do. I’m glad you’re here. Why did you come? Is it because you have a Secret Place too? Did you invite me in for the same reasons I once invited others into mine?
It felt sacred, this place, to stand on the other side of the bridge I imagined at twelve years old and know it was all real, these feelings that connect us like lost children.
I would lace up my big brown boots, put on my sweat-streaked jeans still wet from the night before and twiddle with the guitar pedals at the front of the stage, the distortion, reverb, delay. Microphones were plugged in, cords taped in arcs across the stage as I stand on an X during sound check while someone focused the spotlight. From the back of the room the tech would yell, “Let me hear the kick! Okay, now the floor tom! Vocal stage right!” Backstage in a tiny greenroom, there was always beer on ice, wine bottles open next to vodka, whiskey, mixers. The conversation is light before the show. Did you see that scene by the lake when we drove in? I think there was an accident. There were three ambulances. I think a man was killed. No. Wait. Was I still asleep? Did I dream that? Did anyone else dream that?
The taste of salt in my mouth as I swallow spit to sing, the sting of hair product in my eyes from the sweat beneath those hot lights, an electric shock from an ungrounded microphone when it zaps my lips and I jump back, the faces, all the different faces I don’t want to let down as I un-focus my eyes and peer around the room. We begin. A blur of energy. Dizziness. Sweat. Stomping and clapping and screaming and singing. I wake up in a cheap motel next to Daren or Steven or Noah. We get some coffee from the breakfast bar. We drive to the next city. We set up our gear. We search for food, then go to sound check, then back to the motel to shower. We go over vocal warm-ups and set lists. Then the show, the dream come to life, the bursting lights and screaming and wailing, a place to find that connection, that thing I long for. Then it’s quiet again as we watch the crowd file out from the rafters above the stage, hoping our colds don’t get worse, drinking tea, or whiskey, or whiskey with tea for our stuffed noses and froggy throats. We go wilding through the streets to find a local bar at midnight, to savor this moment, this one precious moment: alive and awake in a rock-and-roll band in some dirty back alley on the moon. Sometimes we end up in a living room or a city park at 2:00 A.M. lighting fireworks, howling and jumping, then stumbling back to the motel to sleep before it is time to drive to the next town. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next.