Jonathan Tropper Read online

  “Oh, shit,” Jesse shouts, throwing herself away from me and scrambling toward the back of the van on her ass. I open my mouth to apologize but instead just vomit some more. Jesse opens the rear door and scampers out of the van, only realizing afterward that she’s not wearing a shirt. “Are you okay?” she says, climbing back in but leaving the door open.

  I nod woozily and pass her shirt to her. She examines it hastily to make sure it’s clean and then throws it on. Her bra has not met with the same good fortune and she discards it in the gutter with a shrug. “Listen,” she says, stepping out of the van. “Do you need a hand?”

  “I’ll be okay,” I say, climbing out of the van and wiping my mouth in the bend of my elbow. “I’m really sorry about that.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she says, but she’s already distracted, mildly repulsed, and looking to make a graceful exit.

  “So, I’m going to head back inside,” I say, to give her an out.

  “I think I’ll go home,” she says, relieved.

  I nod. “Well, it’s been fun.”

  “Same here,” she says with a wry smile. I have already faded into a one-dimensional memory, nothing more than a cautionary tale she’ll relate to girlfriends in the years to come during the exchange of drinking horror stories. Realizing this makes me feel sadly unsubstantial as I make my way back into the club, light-headed and heavyhearted.

  Jed is still in his seat, brooding over his kamikaze, and beside him is a new, equally fetching girl. The Gin Blossoms are being played too loudly over the amplifiers, and the houselights are still up, hurting my eyes. “What happened to you?” he says as I half slide, half fall into an empty seat.

  “I got sick,” I say.

  “So I smell.”

  The new girl, a brunette with a pixie haircut and pierced eyebrows, fishes into her pocket and hands me a Certs with a smile. I pop it gratefully.

  “And your friend?” Jed says.

  “We grew apart.”

  “It happens.” Then the girl’s got her tongue in his ear and I don’t exist, and she doesn’t know it but neither does she, so, with nothing else to do, I head unsteadily backstage to tell Matt that I’ll be leaving before the second set.

  Chapter 11

  Sam, the bass player, and Otto, the drummer, are reclining on the stairs, still drenched in sweat from their performance, sipping at vodka shots and working out some details on the set list for the second half of the show. Matt’s the songwriter and front man, but he leaves all other decisions in the hands of Sam and Otto, which probably explains why they’re still playing the same clubs they were playing when they formed the band six years ago. They’re fair musicians, but they’re also potheads and overgrown frat boys, and their vague ambitions don’t extend very far beyond playing gigs and laying groupies. Matt, on the other hand, wants to hit the big time, is counting on it more than he’ll let on, but seems unable to break out of the career dead end in which Worried About the WENUS find themselves. Jed’s been talking to Matt about coming on board as manager, and while the boys are wary of an outsider stepping in, I think Jed could bring some much-needed business acumen and funding to the band. But no one’s asking me.

  “Hey, Zack,” Otto says. He’s a short, overweight guy with thinning hair and comically thick-rimmed black glasses. Sam, emaciated and stoned, nods solemnly at me. The bass players are always the quiet ones, pissed at the world, convinced their contribution is being overlooked.

  “Hey, boys,” I say. “You guys are sounding great.”

  “We didn’t suck,” Otto says proudly.

  “Matt’s all freaked-out about something,” Sam says dully as he scribbles a song list onto a napkin.

  “What?”

  “You’d have to ask him.”

  Otto nods agreeably. “Dude, you better go talk to him. He’s acting weird.”

  I step into the dressing room to find Matt sitting on the vanity table, distractedly tuning his Gibson. There’s a cute redhead curled into a ball on the couch behind him, chattering softly into a neon flashing cell phone. I always experience an acute sense of relief when I see Matt alone after he’s been playing onstage, his face finally composed and at rest, no longer distorted by the angry scowl frozen in place when he performs. He plays with such rage and desolation that I fear one day I’ll come backstage and find him a weeping, cursing mess with a gun in his mouth. Baby brothers and punk rock are a bad combination for a sentimental fart like me.

  “Hey, Matt,” I say, stepping into the room. “Great set.”

  “What the fuck, Zack?” Matt says.

  “What?”

  “What are you trying to do to me here?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He studies my face a moment. “You don’t know?”

  “Know what?”

  He hops off the table and puts down the guitar. “Come with me. You’re not going to believe this.” He hurriedly ushers me to the door, ignoring the girl when she asks where he’s going. Matt leads me to the corner of the stage, just out of sight from the crowd below, and points to a table in the far back corner. “He showed up during the last song.”

  Even in the dim club lighting, Norm’s stout profile is unmistakable. “Oh, shit,” I say. He must have walked in while I was retching in the van.

  “You don’t sound surprised to see him,” Matt says, his voice laden with a range of unformed accusations.

  “I’m not. I mean, I knew he was in town, but I never thought he’d come here.”

  “What do you mean, you knew he was in town?”

  “He came by my apartment yesterday.”

  Matt is stunned. “You invited that asshole over?”

  “He just showed up.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Why would I lie, Matt?” I say wearily. I can feel a major headache coming on. “Did you invite him here? No. He just showed up. Same shit, different venue, that’s all.”

  “Well, you could have warned me,” he said sulkily.

  Matt, as the baby, and a burgeoning rock star, has the unfortunate tendency to believe that he’s still the center of everyone else’s universe, that I’m still standing quietly like a loyal sentry beside his crib, waiting for him to wake up so I can play with him. I’ve got problems of my own, I want to say. I’ve been looking at crop shots of my bladder, at spots that shouldn’t be there, fucking up million-dollar accounts at work, and falling in love with the last person on the planet I should. But all I say is “Believe me, if I had any idea he was going to come here, I would have called.”

  Matt was only seven when Norm evacuated, which means it took him the longest to figure out how full of shit Norm really was, rebounding from every forgotten visit and broken promise to enthusiastically believe the next one. When he finally figured it out, he took it pretty hard. So where I contented myself, at least outwardly, with writing Norm off and cultivating a quiet, simmering bitterness over the long term, Matt went straight to an unmitigated hatred that never seemed to wane, just like, as a child, he’d continue to cry passionately, long after he’d forgotten why he was crying to begin with. Whenever he had downtime, he exacted minor vengeance with malicious little plots, tracking my father through means never fully revealed, taking out credit cards in his name and running up huge debts, calling up and canceling Norm’s phone service, ordering expensive deliveries to his apartment, subscribing him to twenty magazines at a shot. Norm no doubt logged many hours on the phone with various customer service representatives, trying to untangle the web of consumerism Matt was constantly spinning around him.

  Matt looks at me. “What, so are you two now, like, hanging out?”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I say, heading back toward the dressing room.

  “Well, why’s he here?”

  “I don’t know. I guess he wants to see us.”

  “Is he dying or something?”

  “I don’t know. We didn’t get that far.”

  Sam and Otto are waiting for us i
n the dressing room. “Everything copacetic?” Otto asks concernedly.

  “Yo, man,” Sam says. “We’re on in ten and we have to go over the set list. I’ve made some changes.”

  “Fuck that,” Matt says. “We’re not going on. I can’t play.”

  “What are you talking about?” Sam says. “Of course we’re playing.”

  “I can’t, man.” He looks at me. “Not with him out there.”

  “Who?” Otto says. “Not with who out there?”

  Matt shakes his head and collapses on the couch. The girl, now off her cell phone, puts her hand on his lap and looks at him inquisitively, but he keeps his eyes trained on me. He’s been launching his stealthy offensives at Norm for years, and while he’s surely envisioned an actual confrontation in some form, scripting and editing his invective just as I did for so many years, it’s apparent to me that he never really believed it would happen, and now his eyes reflect the fear and vulnerability of a scared little boy.

  “You want me to see if I can get him to go?” I say.

  He nods.

  “Get who to go?” Sam yells. “Who the fuck is here?”

  “Chill out, Sam,” the girl says.

  “Shut your piehole, Yoko!” Sam snaps at her. “You don’t belong here.”

  “Sam,” Matt says, pained. “Just calm the fuck down.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I say, and leave the room.

  “Hey, Zack,” my father says, acting all nonchalant, like it was no trick at all to have tracked us down like this. He motions to the chair next to him. “Join me.”

  “No, thanks,” I say. “What are you doing here?”

  “I came to hear Matt play,” he says, as if I should have expected no less. “And to tell you the truth, I didn’t expect to like it as much as I do. It’s a lot more melodic than I’d imagined, and the harmonies are actually quite sophisticated.”

  “I’m glad you approve,” I say. “Now you have to leave.”

  “He was always so musical,” Norm says, ignoring my entreaties completely. “I would play Sinatra on the stereo, and you and Pete would go about your business, but Matt, he would sit down on the floor, right by the speaker, eyes closed, and tap out the rhythm on his lap. He was so intense about it, so focused. I told your mother, more than once, that she should give the boy piano lessons. He could have been one of the greats. I don’t know why she never gave him piano lessons.”

  “Money was tight.”

  He looks up at me and nods. “Point taken,” he says with an affected gravity, clearly convinced that the concession itself is part of his absolution. I can see why he was drawn to AA. It’s just too perfect for him. He can go through the motions of contrition, wearing his manufactured humility like a badge of armor, and even if we don’t buy it, he ultimately gets to forgive himself and pat himself on the back for working the program and having the serenity to accept the things he can’t change and the courage to change the things he can. And at the AA meetings, they’ll probably shower him with congratulations and praise, and maybe even give him one of those commemorative chips for his efforts. And the bastard will sit there grandly accepting all this uninformed love and support, actually buying into it, thinking himself a hero for facing up to the revelation that he’s done some bad things in the past. The really good liars, the true grandmasters of bullshit, are so damn convincing because they actually believe their own lies.

  “You need to go,” I say. “Matt’s not up for this. You’re going to make him mess up.”

  Norm takes an unhurried sip from his drink. “The hell I will,” he says. “The boy’s a pro. Did you see the way he handles that guitar?”

  “I thought you didn’t drink anymore.”

  He raises the glass. “Club soda,” he says. I resist the urge to grab the glass from his hand and verify the absence of gin. While our relationship may be a huge question mark, I don’t like the intimacy that would be implied by random drink testing. “Although, while we’re on the subject,” Norm continues, looking me over. “You look like you’ve had a few too many yourself.”

  “Fuck off.”

  He raises his hands defensively. “You’re right. Too soon. Sorry.”

  “Norm.”

  “Norm?” he says. “My friends call me Norm. You can call me Dad.”

  “Dad.”

  “Yes?”

  “I will have you bounced.”

  Norm winces at my tone, his shoulders sag, and for the brief second that his expression wavers, I can see the pain and fear etched into his face, the tenuous resolve that’s keeping him here. “Zack,” he says just loud enough to be heard over the house music. “I know you boys have a lot to be angry about, and I’m sorrier than you’ll ever know, than I can ever begin to express to you. But I have to start somewhere. If nothing else, when I’m dead, you’ll remember that there was a point at which I came to understand the nature of my offenses, and I tried, maybe unsuccessfully, but tried nonetheless, to make amends. You’re young yet, and you’ve got decades to waste on your anger. I’m older than I ever imagined I could get, and I am suggesting to you, the one thing I’m sure about, the one thing I can hang my hat on, is that there’s no more time to wait it out, to come up with a plan. So I understand your attitude, but you need to understand mine.” He takes a deep breath and I can see that his hands are actually shaking. “I came here to hear my son play. And that’s what I’m going to do. If he doesn’t play, that’s too bad. But I will not go to sleep tonight knowing that I retreated at the first sign of resistance. So if you want to have Maurice throw me out, bring it on. I wasn’t expecting this to be a cakewalk.”

  I stare at him, momentarily shocked by his little soliloquy. “How did you know the bouncer’s name is Maurice?”

  “I make friends easily.”

  “Are you dying?”

  He sighs and studies his hands on the table. “We’re all dying, Zack.”

  Oh, Jesus. I’m about to lash out at the obviousness of his platitude when the houselights come down and the band takes the stage to raucous screams and applause. “Well,” Norm says, clapping enthusiastically and letting go with a shrill whistle. “I guess Matt’s decided he’s going to play after all.”

  Matt lashes on his guitar and steps up to the microphone. Behind him, Otto begins tapping out a slow, rolling beat on the snare, and my heart sinks as I recognize the introduction to “Saint Mom.” Matt’s apparently decided that having Norm in the audience is too good an opportunity to pass up. What’s the point in writing a song excoriating your father if you never get to see the look on his face when he hears it? The audience, recognizing the slower beat of a ballad, takes their seats. As Matt strums the opening chords of the song, he looks over to my father’s table, eyes on fire, a wicked smile playing across his face. “This is a song I wrote about my family,” he says into the mike. There are some scattered cheers in the audience, maybe because some die-hard fans know which song he’s about to play, or maybe just because people listening to rock bands will cheer just about anything the singer says. Either way, the place falls silent as Matt begins to sing.

  Saint Mom remembers when her life was more than just laying down

  Before Daddy broke his promises and Daddy fucked around

  And all her children’s broken dreams were scattered to the winds

  And Mom climbed up upon her cross to die for Daddy’s

  sins

  Norm freezes like a corpse as the lyrics sink in and stares straight ahead, his countenance fiercely devoid of expression, and I don’t need the houselights to know that all the color has been drained from his face. Matt briefly backs away from the microphone to play out the measure, and then steps back up for the second verse.

  And what were we to do there, how did we survive

  Remembering the light that used to shine in Mother’s eyes

  All I could do is lay in bed and watch the peeling paint

  You’ll never know what hell is till you try to love a saint
<
br />   Then Sam and Otto start shouting, “Saint Mom,” in two-part harmony into their mikes while Matt sings the chorus over their voices.

  (Saint Mom)

  If you’re so good why does it hurt so much

  (Saint Mom)

  If you love me why can’t I feel your touch

  (Saint Mom)

  Dad’s love was a nuclear bomb

  That blew your insides all to hell

  Left nothing but the shell

  Of Saint Mom

  And now Matt’s guitar is thrashing and wailing, and Otto’s laying down the thunder with ferocious precision, and even though the song wasn’t on the set list, the lighting guy has improvised well, suffusing the stage in a hellish amber glow, and the music unfurls like a flag in increasing sonic waves, growing louder with each undulation and practically throbbing with intensity, and Norm sits paralyzed in his chair like the Memorex man, buffeted and paralyzed by the music washing over him, and even though the whole thing shakes me to the core, watching Matt launch his pain out from the stage and watching my father absorb it, I still manage to think that this is what music, at its purest, is supposed to do, and goddamn it, Matt’s good at it.