“A gun? You pulled a fucking gun?”
Ethan didn’t say anything. He just stood there. His eyes glazed over. The blood came down his nose.
“It wasn’t loaded,” he finally said.
I looked at Denise’s belly, the small pout of it. Seth’s kid was in there.
People started to come streaming out of the backyard. Terry. Feral. Trish. June. They were all there, looking at us.
“What happened?” I heard Feral exclaim.
“There was an accident,” I said.
Ethan didn’t say a word.
“Stupid fuck crashed his car right into the lake.”
Terry started laughing. No-one else laughed. He was the drunkest … or the highest.
Ethan called the wrecker himself. The tow truck came, hooked the back of the BMW, pulled it out of the lake, and yanked it up onto the flatbed.
Denise was in the house with Trish. Ethan climbed up into the wrecker. I watched from the lawn as the truck pulled away. The muck and filth leaking out of the 5 Series left a wet trail on the road as it rolled away for good.
It wasn’t until later I realized my wrist was broken. My hand was cracked. I’d done it hitting him. Or I’d done it with the gun while breaking out the windshield of his silly white car.
26
I drove K back to college. Providence, Rhode Island. We had one last conversation three hours after the drop off. The phone in my motel room rang.
“You want to come hang out tonight?”
“And do what?” I asked.
“Friend of mine, Jackie, she wants to meet you. It’d be fun. We could come over there.”
“Another time,” I said, hanging up.
Motel
I was outside a dimly lit bar. It was raining. In this time of the world, there were still pay phones, and it was often raining. I dialed Studio Mike’s number. It sounded like I’d woke him. That didn’t surprise me.
“Been trying to get a hold of you,” he said.
“I’ve been around.”
Mike laughed, “Been around? I’m sure you have been.”
“I took that girl back to college.”
“Which one?”
“The one I don’t like as much as the other one,” I said.
“Oh, what a problem to have.”
“Gone,” I said. “The one I liked took a jumbo jet off into the impossible distance. Texas.”
“Hey, listen,” Mike said, his voice low and gruff, “this is important. I’ve been getting phone calls from that label.”
My heart stopped.
“I mailed those demos out. Well, they’ve been calling. A woman. Cheryl.”
Ethan’s sister.
“Been twice now, dude,” Mike said. “I’ve been trying to get a hold of you. You gotta get a cell. It’s 2005, get with it.”
“Alright, alright. What do they want?”
“You gotta talk to them. I’m not sure, but they seem interested in Ottermeat.”
“Did you tell them the drummer’s dead?”
“Absolutely not,” he said. “I didn’t say a word about that.”
I paced around in the booth. The operator’s recording came on, “Please deposit seventy-five cents for each additional minute.” I scrambled in my pockets but didn’t have any change.
“Hey, give me that number!”
“What, the label?”
“The number that keeps calling you.”
“Oh, fuck. Hold on…”
There were shuffling papers. I waited for the line to go dead.
“Here you go, write this down…”
I wrote the phone number on my arm with a BIC pen. It was a Seattle area code … not that I knew that off the top of my head back then. Mike and I didn’t get a chance to say anything else to each other. The line went dead. The rain came down harder.
I didn’t wanna leave the phone booth. There were a million reasons not to leave it. The rain didn’t help things either. It kept coming down harder and harder. The wind sent it sideways.
I smiled like a madman, but my biggest fear was that I was too late. I’d call the label and they wouldn’t know who I was or what I wanted.
I opened up the door and ran out into the rain and down the street. I was parked two blocks away on a side street. I drove like a maniac through Providence, back towards the little ratty motel where I was staying in Warwick.
There, I got on the phone in my room and called the number in Seattle. A woman answered. After I explained who I was and why I was calling, she said, “I have no idea who you are.”
“Well, I have no idea who you are, either, so that makes two of us.”
“OK, I’m gonna hang up on you, now.”
I mentioned Ethan’s sister, their lawyer. That meant nothing to her. She said, “Yeah, I know our lawyer’s name too. I also know our janitor’s name … it’s Paul.”
“You were trying to get a hold of me,” I said.
“Me? I was trying to get you? No, you have the wrong person…”
“I’m looking for Cheryl!”
“Oh … shit.” I heard the girl yell for Cheryl. She came to the phone.
“Hey,” Cheryl said, out of breath. “Who’s this?”
I told her. She seemed excited to talk.
“I was trying to get in contact with you.”
“Yeah.”
She said she was impressed by the tape we’d sent. Not the one with Ethan, the weirder one. The one with all the noise.
“You play guitar?”
“That’s me.”
“Okay. Can you bring the band out here?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I certainly can.”
She gave me an address. “Come to that address and ask for me, alright?”
“Sure thing,” I said.
“Cool. I’m so glad that you’re interested. That makes my night.”
I put the phone down.
Holy fuck. Come out to Seattle and meet with a record label about a deal? That’s what was happening here? I couldn’t believe it. I sat there on the edge of the bed in the rotting motel room, looking at the wall and all of the brown spots from people that’d smoked in there for an eternity.
I didn’t have any money. Barely had enough to pay for the motel room itself.
The next morning, I stuck a For Sale sign on the back of the F-250. Within two days, I sold it to a guy who had a lawn cutting service. He was going to use the truck to haul around lawn mowers. Good for him. I took his cash to the airport, bought my plane ticket, and flew west with my guitar and my tube amp that was still dusty and full of concrete powder.
27
I’d lost contact with everyone. They drifted in and out of my life. I blinked for a second, and those people were gone — replaced by new ones. I found myself in a new city, sitting out on a shaky fire escape and looking down on a new street — brick paved and frost-lined.
Fog in the mornings. Green plants hanging in all the windows. Pretty girls on bicycles with scarves flowing behind them as they rolled downhill. Some wave at you. Some don’t even notice. It’s hard to keep track of all the humanity and what it really means as it comes, as it leaves, as it settles in.
Seattle. I was there … again. I’d just come back from a three-week tour of the west coast. I was playing guitar in a band that the label hooked me up with. Things were good but not smooth. The guys in the band were cold, distant, strange. They played nervy new wave music and had a violin player. Not my first choice.
It was all because of Cheryl, the lady at the label. She felt bad for me, and how could you blame her? I showed up at her office with a backpack of clothes, a broken guitar, and a busted amp. When I broke the news to her that the drummer of the band she wanted to sign was dead, she just sat there with her mouth open.