When we get to Portland, Jake is waiting at the back of the venue, his hands in his pockets, an enormous grin on his face as he watches me on the stage. The Wonder Ballroom is a big box with polished wooden floors that looks like the kind of place where they once held sock hops in the 1950s. The room has good energy. Jake is hard to miss, as always—my friend who looks like a six-foot-six, 260-pound Viking with a long blond beard smiling at me from the back of the room. He’s married now with two daughters. Tony and I both attended his wedding, flying up to Oregon to watch Jake cry like a baby, red in the face and swaying for the entire ceremony while his bride looked on, mildly annoyed, mildly amused.
He greets me with a hug, practically lifting me off the ground, and says, “What is up, you big fucking rock star? How did you convince all these people you were important?”
“Oh, believe me, nobody thinks that.”
“Yes they do, man. There was a line out front. I had to push my way to get in. People were upset.”
We settle in at the bar with a couple glasses of scotch on the rocks so I can “ice” my voice, which has been failing me for a few shows now, all sung out, screamed out, talked out.
He puts an enormous hand on my shoulder and shakes me like a bear. “So what’s it like, man? You got, like, groupies and shit?”
“No. It’s hardly Led Zeppelin around here. Backstage is usually a plate of hummus and, like, someone’s aunt.” I tell Jake about the tour, how strange it is that though I’m so far away from home all the time, the band has become a kind of meeting point for the family.
My aunt Pam moved to Atlanta, and when she heard her nephew’s band was coming to town, she was determined to watch me play, even though we were in a tiny beer-soaked club called the Drunken Unicorn in which my matronly, kind middle-aged aunt watched me play from the back of the room while the exposed pipes dripped condensation on her from the ceiling. She told me that after the show, as she was heading upstairs, some guy stopped her and said, “You know where you are, right?” Yes, she said. I’m here to watch my nephew.
My uncle Jon came to a show with my cousin Heidi. He still had that long beard, that soft, affable way of his. Both of his boys grew up to be gymnasts like their grandfather, learning their skills in a gym he owned. There’s a new sadness around his eyes, a hint of tragedy since his wife, Andy, died. She was exercising in the front yard outside the third house they built by hand in Nevada City. She came inside with a terrible headache. Jon got her some water. When she threw up, Jon called an ambulance that arrived shortly. They joked around with her because she was the nurse who had conducted their training. They placed her on a gurney and loaded her into the ambulance. When my uncle got to the hospital, they told him she had a subdural hematoma and died before they even got to the highway. He asked me about the tour over dinner and seemed genuinely charmed by the fact that his nephew’s life took the turn it did. He’s a kind man. You can see the kindness in his eyes from behind his big bushy beard and I can’t help but think of the life others are leading, filled with promise and tragedy, while I attend sound checks and sleep off hangovers in cheap motels.
“It must be weird to have all these people knowing your songs,” Jake says. “I mentioned you to one of my co-workers the other day and she couldn’t believe I knew you. I was like, Know him? I fucking made him.” He laughs, checking my gaze. “Well, not really, but you know what I mean.”
“It is weird. I don’t know how to explain it.”
“I saw you guys on Letterman. It seems like he really liked you.”
“It helped to have that string quartet playing with us.” Anna’s brother Andrew is also a classically trained violinist whose ensemble, the Calder Quartet, flew to New York to play Late Night with David Letterman with us. It did feel like a kind of arrival, like the joke was spiraling out of control: this song that was just a sad story about Amber that so many people knew by heart, this record about restlessness, about wanting to be anywhere but my own head, taken seriously by so many people.
There is a giddiness to it. We all feel it. We get compared to bands we love; we’ve made (a little) money, enough to buy an actual car and still pay rent. We’re all aware of how rare a thing it is and the best nights are the ones when we play a show and we know the audience loved it and we’re practically leaping arm in arm as we exit the stage. It’s a wonderful feeling to be able to live a dream.
But the irony that keeps occurring to me as I sing these songs night after night, as they conjure the image of Naomi dancing sweetly around her place, her colorful acrylics scattered on the floor beneath her feet, or of Amber balled up in the corner of that dirty yellow couch in the trailer on the edge of the world, is that I couldn’t actually have the relationships. I could only sing about them. I couldn’t be in them, so I wrote these stories to try to make sense of them. It’s so much easier to sing these sad songs than to live out the relationships they are about, easier to simply climb up the stone tower in the sky where I feel safe.
I smile at Jake. “Yeah, it felt like being launched into space. You know that scene in The Right Stuff when they’re walking in slow motion and the rocket is warming up in the background? It was like that.”
“That’s so fucking cool, man. Goddamn.” He shakes me again.
I want to laugh with him, to pretend all of this isn’t overwhelming. It’s just that it never occurred to me how I might appear to others in this hall of mirrors I’d constructed, that there would be these thoughts I would guard, private things I kept to myself. Performing on the stage on a good night leaves a buzz in my chest that I carry with me like a secret. I return to it again and again, the look on their faces, the roar of their voices as they meet mine, a place where I felt anxious, then bold, then elated, then floating as if lifted by the energy in the room. Walking down the street with headphones on some quiet afternoon in yet another faceless town, I think, None of these people know and I’m not going to tell them.
But when those moments end and the buzz is gone and the reality sets in that I know I am lost and that this facsimile, however splendid or romantic, cannot erase the basic feeling that I am alone and it is because I am damaged and it will always be that way, the whole thing seems less like a romantic story and more like an intoxication from which I awake to see the consequences, like those kids on LSD in the 1960s who died thinking they could fly.
And now we’re at Coachella, the same Coachella I attended three times as a journalist. The same one where I flashed my backstage/VIP credentials as I followed rock stars around, secretly hoping somebody might mistake me for one, the same Coachella where I watched from the back as the tiny speck of rarefied artists took the stage, as the din came to a standstill, and the artist began to sing, my heart soaring. That Coachella.
It’s different from up close. Nerve-racking. We mount the rickety steps at the back of the stage. Everything seems bigger than everything else. It’s hard to hold one thought in mind, my chest all nerves, my head spinning. We swat each other and pat each other and hug each other, holding on for comfort, for strength, fellow travelers on this road we never really thought we would walk down. I can’t feel my feet or the air on my face as we emerge from behind a side-stage curtain and see the people, some leaning on banisters at the front, some lying on blankets in the back smoking weed. I walk to the microphone at center stage, close my eyes and begin to play. Soon there is a drum behind me and I see the faces in the front row, some singing along, some beginning to clap. I start to feel like I can move, wandering over to Steven as he plays his perfect riffs on guitar and we exchange a smile. I sing until I lose my breath, I pant and run, thinking, Show them, just fucking show them. And when it’s over, when we walk off that stage and hug in the field behind it, we are relieved, intoxicated from the moment, downright high. And this, too, becomes a feeling I guard like a jealous secret.