Raising the Dad Read online

  Another year, and now they’re in junior high. And they’re in a class together, maybe two or three classes. And that sometimes cruel tyranny of alphabetical seating would deliver Kelly Hogan to John Husted with the same glorious inevitability it had throughout grade school. Years later, John would wonder about that. Was that all it took to be swallowed up by that first, all-consuming crush? Proximity? If she had been Kelly Zipperer, would she have meant nothing to him? Was love really that random when you were eleven?

  Who cared? She was Kelly Hogan, and the back of her head was his to gaze upon obsessively for the whole school year. He would stare at her long, black hair—impossibly black, like an infinite void that could consume men’s souls—and fixate on the mole on the back of her neck that would be exposed for tantalizing seconds when she tossed her hair this way or that. It was just a little brown fleck—prepubescent John couldn’t begin to understand why it transfixed him so—but it was a secret about Kelly Hogan he convinced himself no one else possessed.

  Least of all Kelly Hogan.

  Who knows what the back of their neck looks like? John reasoned incisively. As he charted the back side of her upper torso and head throughout seventh grade science—during which he learned alarmingly little science—he came to believe that at least in this very specific instance, he knew Kelly Hogan even better than she did. And while even John was wise enough to know this was an avenue of seduction never to be attempted (“So, um, did you know you have a mole on the back of your neck?”), it was information he held tight to.

  Eric Arndt, stuck there in the first row between fat Carly Abdul and Rich Baderstein, didn’t have a clue about what Kelly Hogan had going on, mole-wise. This was the bond John and Kelly shared.

  And they could have had the arrowhead. He should have given her the arrowhead.

  Instead, on that day so long ago, as she moved away from the hole in the ground and toward him, John moved away from her. Not in full, she’s-got-cooties retreat. Just an instinctive keeping of distance, as if something desperately desired and now unexpectedly within reach could contain unseen peril if one weren’t careful. Best to stay a few paces away to size up all angles before committing to a plan of action. That felt safe.

  The moment passed; Kelly Hogan moved on. Life played out from there.

  * * *

  Staring now at his father for hours in his hospital bed, John strained to remember if he ever tried to confide in him about Kelly when he was a kid. His dad had been there in the same house during those years John ached for her, and moped over a dropped fly ball in Little League, and had his consciousness expanded by the sheer awesomeness of The A-Team when it came on in ’83. He just had no recollection of sharing any of it with his father.

  Which was not the experience he knew with his own daughter. Before Katie started withdrawing as a teenager, John seemed to be privy to every scant fluctuation in her existence: teacher conferences were never missed, soccer games were attended ritualistically, friendships and their bitter breakups (followed by immediate reconciliations) were reported upon by their daughter in long, breathless accounts.

  Robin was more likely to hear about boys and crushes and looming puberty vexations, but John’s head sometimes spun at the amount of insight he had into his daughter. What he didn’t get directly from her, he picked up in carelessly left open social media pages or overheard cell phone conversations or mistakenly forwarded text messages. With way too little effort he knew way too much about Katie. Lately, it was becoming a curse.

  But in those fragile few years before Larry died, when John crept up on puberty and started driving himself inward, John couldn’t imagine his father knowing in the slightest what was going on in his son’s life. The man worked all the time, and when he was home he worked some more or seemed irritated by being kept from it.

  When Walt Bolger told John about his father’s sense of humor, about how moments before being struck down he declared himself down with Daffy Duck over Donald Duck, John felt betrayed. The father he knew was distant and stern and rarely fun. Turned out he saved that for others, outside the home.

  In the early eighties John and his grade school friends were fixated mostly on He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, but there were quantifiable differences between Daffy Duck and Donald Duck. John had opinions on this subject. If he had thought it remotely possible that his father did, too, this is something they could have talked about.

  Having come to consensus on Daffy as the superior cartoon duck, maybe John would have felt comfortable opening up about his mortifying lack of athleticism. And how the growing meanness in Mike was making him sad. And about a girl at school with a mole on the back of her neck.

  Maybe Larry wanted to have those conversations with his young son, but John’s introversion turned him away. Quite possibly Larry tried, but John kept things bottled in and Larry stopped trying.

  The trauma of Larry dying had blacked out much of John’s childhood; maybe he and his father were closer than he recalled. But he doubted it.

  * * *

  For decades, John clung to smudgy recollections of the one extended experience he shared alone with his father. It was the summer of 1979, when John was seven and Larry had committed to sharing Cub Scouts with his son. It was a sincere fatherly gesture only occasionally followed through on, but Larry did his best to attend a camp weekend scheduled for late August.

  The Cub Scout camp took place over two nights; Larry and John made it for just the second. While all of John’s friends and their fathers gathered on Friday and drove up in a caravan that inspired tales of boyish goofery that John would hear about for weeks, he and his father weren’t going to get there until Saturday.

  That one night in the wilderness, though, was magnificent. There was hiking on stony mountain paths, and swimming in the lake, and Frisbees and belching and almost assaultive laughter to the point of light-headedness. A picture of John and his father taken that Saturday, the two of them posing with mock machismo beside the four-inch sunfish that Larry reeled in, sat on the shelves of his mother’s living room for decades. It was the first thing John brought with him to his father’s room in the dead hospital to add to his collection of family memories.

  Later, as fathers and sons sat up late around the campfire, toasting marshmallows and listening to ghost stories, John felt a trance-like calm come over him as an uproarious day folded into the dense muteness of night.

  He still held memories of his father, glimpsed through the smoke of the campfire, showing a relaxation John would never see again. As the men drank beer and passed around a silver flask, Larry unwound, laughing easily and sharing stories John spent years aching to remember.

  When the hour got late and the wooziness of being up way past bedtime kicked in, a guitar appeared. The boys were obligated to hoot derisively as their fathers started to mangle Elvis Presley songs of their youth, but John watched in fascination as his dad joined in. He was shy at first; John watched his father’s lips quietly recalling every word as he held himself back. But as the night got longer and the Pabst kept flowing, Larry ended up belting out those corny old songs as loudly as anyone.

  * * *

  The fathers finally shooed the boys off to their tents, and the men remained around the fire for another hour. Drifting in and out of sleep in the heated embrace of his sleeping bag, the day’s activities having depleted him, John still recalled straining to listen in on the adult male voices whispering and laughing amidst the crackling of the dying campfire and the crisp hiss of opening beer cans. Which voice was his father’s, buried in the soft murmur just outside the tent? Was it something Larry said that caused the others to laugh too loud, disrupting the silence of the slumbering campground? Was this the father he got to take home with him the next day, or would the serious and stern front draw back up by the time the weekend ended?

  John was still awake when his father crawled unsteadily into their small tent. In the near total blackness lit only by the moon pressing through the
trees, John watched as Larry slid into his sleeping bag and emitted an exultant sigh of contentment that seemed to unburden his soul. Father and son lay side by side, face-to-face. In the dark, through half-squinted eyelids, John studied his father’s shadowed face. He reeked of beer and smoke and sweat and the pungent funk of teeth he failed to brush.

  Larry’s breathing was deep and satisfied. He seemed to drift off to sleep almost immediately. Or perhaps he lay there humming an Elvis song to himself.

  Maybe the two of them, lying there inches apart, didn’t know the other was awake and available to talk. For just a few moments, before they both drifted off to sleep.

  Twenty-four

  “What the fuck, dude?” Kurt snarled at Mike.

  The band had just come off stage at the Olde 95 in Cicero, outside Chicago, and were crammed together in the storage closet that passed for the dressing room. Kurt played Mötley Crüe bassist Nikki Sixx and was the leader of the band. He was almost ten years younger than Mike and a really good musician. Theatre of Pain and teaching guitar lessons was the only thing standing between him and getting a real job.

  “Learn the fuckin’ words!”

  Mike fought to meet Kurt’s anger, but the cocksure character he played onstage melted fast. “He dropped a fucking beat! It threw me.”

  Rod, the drummer, just shrugged dimly at the accusation as he pulled off his wig and dug through his bag for a pipe. Glenn, who played guitar, fidgeted edgily until Rod came up with the dope.

  “Don’t fuckin’ pass it off on him. You haven’t gotten through a set yet without fuckin’ up the words!” Kurt shouted.

  Mike felt himself give up the fight as D.J., the band’s manager, came in with a wad of cash.

  “This is fucked, man,” Kurt snapped at D.J. as he pointed at Mike. “It’s fuckin’ Mötley, it ain’t Shakespeare. If the dude’s too fried to remember the fuckin’ words—”

  “Shut the fuck up,” the manager sneered, peeling off some money and stuffing it into Kurt’s hand. “Go buy some Midol.”

  The bassist stomped out of the dressing room. Rod sparked up his pipe as Glenn waited his turn. The woozy bonfire scent of the burning weed stirred something primal in Mike. His nights, like that smoke, traditionally drifted away with the first appearance of the intoxicants.

  D.J. paid Rod and Glenn their share of the earnings, and took a hit off the pipe in return. He then offered Mike his pay, but pulled it away as Mike reached for it.

  “You still got the voice, man, but you’re makin’ us look bad out there,” D.J. said. “You said you were going to study up. The lyrics are all out there on the internet.”

  Mike squirmed. At forty-five years old, he had barely touched a computer, let alone the internet. Back in the mid-nineties, when everyone else his age was all about emails and chat rooms and web pages, Mike was beginning his prison stint. Once he got out, in between all the shorter trips to jail, it was all he could do to hang onto a place to sleep. Besides, computers were for assholes.

  “Don’t worry about me. Once I get ’em down, ain’t gonna be a problem,” he said. “Anyway, the acoustics in this shithole have always sucked. Nobody’s gonna hear if I get the words right or not.”

  “The owner heard. We pack this place every time we play. Sell more beer for him than any other tribute act on the circuit. He ain’t gonna fuck up his good thing with a Vince Neil who needs cue cards. So get it together.”

  D.J. frowned sternly and handed Mike $175, his cut after the rest of the band, D.J., Bob who helped lug the amps and drums, and gas were taken care of. Having gone long stretches when a spare twenty bucks felt like a fortune, the bills felt good in his hand. But he knew this was chump change. And even then, nothing was guaranteed.

  The band had seven more gigs scheduled. After that, Mike could be out on his ass. He couldn’t remember the words, and he didn’t really look like Vince Neil. His gut was losing its rock star tautness, and he struggled to get the hair right. He overheard the bartenders laughing and saying that his hair, bottle blond and teased to ratty heights, made him look like an old whore. If Mike were just a guy in the crowd, checking out the new Vince, he probably would’ve said worse. He clocked a half-assed Jimmy Page in the head with a bottle of beer once when there was a hack Zeppelin playing the tribute band circuit.

  D.J. and the others left the dressing room to break down the gear and see if any girls had stuck around. Mike felt a headache coming on in the wretched little room. The cushions on the two thrift store couches were slashed and duct-taped about a hundred times. Fist-sized holes cratered the walls.

  Mike grabbed Rod’s bag and rooted around for whatever he could find. That pot smelled fine and would’ve taken the edge off, but Rod disappeared with the pipe. Instead, he found an Altoids tin filled with an assortment of pills and some candy corn. He found a blue pill—maybe Adderall, but the markings were faded—and he washed it down with beer. The candy corn was stale.

  It was 2:30 in the morning. It felt like he pulled something in his back during the show, but he knew that if he didn’t help the band haul its crap out to the van it wouldn’t help him keep the gig. After that, there was still a two-hour drive back to Wisconsin in his mother’s car to the bed waiting for him in his mother’s house. All to make 175 bucks.

  * * *

  The first serious talk about a record contract for Gravel Rash had come from Razor Records in the spring of ’91, right before Mike turned twenty-one. An A&R guy named Eddie Kingsolver had been tracking the band for about six months, showing up unannounced at the band’s gigs throughout the Midwest. Heavy metal was in one of its usual transitions, from the hair band glory of the Crüe to the seedy Hollywood grit of Guns N’ Roses to the seething jackhammer barrage of Pantera and Slayer, and all of the record companies tried to stay ahead of the trends.

  Gravel Rash was already something of a throwback; Guns N’ Roses, its most obvious influence, had become a cliché for the band’s dope-addled determination to plow their multiplatinum act into the ground. But Eddie knew that particularly in the dull-minded middle part of the country, there would always be a market for the kind of blues-based debauchery Gravel Rash traded in. Signed at the right price without a lot of perks, there was a buck to be made on Gravel Rash.

  Mike Husted, the band’s lead singer, was a genuine talent: charismatic, fearless, and possessed with a voice that wrung a kind of debased beauty from the sound of vocal cords straining to rip loose from their moorings. Eddie knew that Mike, along with the rest of the band, was seriously fucked up. He worked with young metal bands long enough to recognize the dope-and-excess template that reached backward from Guns to Mötley to Aerosmith to Sabbath to Zeppelin, ending in that great wellspring of rock decadence, the Stones. Most never find a career, many die seedy addict deaths while trying, but just enough bands beat the odds and make the Big Time to keep all the rock star wannabes playing the same deadly game.

  Eddie knew that in the few months he was checking out Gravel Rash, heroin found its way into the band’s bloodstream. When Eddie returned to Chicago that spring to take Mike aside and tell him that his bosses at the label were just tweaking the numbers before a contract was drawn up, he flew in from New York with a taste of Persian Brown meant only for the lead singer. The record company man was careful with these Midwestern bands—the dope in the hick markets was always weaker there, you could trigger an OD with the finer East Coast product—but he sensed Mike could handle it.

  If the band took off, the dope would eventually have its way. There would be firings, interventions, and the predictable plunge into flaccid, unwanted music. Record companies gambled that it wouldn’t come until sometime after the third album, after enough units were sold to clean up on a final “Greatest Hits” album to put a bow on the artist’s career.

  The label would move on to the next fresh new thing, and the discarded artist would spend his time between rehab and sad attempts at career resurrection, clinging to royalty statements and wondering where it a
ll went. If he ended up dying young in some interesting way, his estate would see a bump in record sales.

  * * *

  But this was all just a best-case scenario when Eddie Kingsolver took Mike out for a four a.m. breakfast after a particularly fearsome Gravel Rash show at the American Legion Hall in South Beloit. The band did fewer and fewer bar gigs because of the size of the crowds they drew, and in that rundown theater the record company man saw glimpses of what could be—with some label reshaping—a credible arena band.

  Mike liked Eddie. He was older—close to forty, it seemed to Mike—with that funny New York accent that Mike knew only from TV shows and movies. Eddie knew all about the music business, casually dropping the names of all the major acts he said he knew through the label. He seemed to really care about Mike, singling him out from the rest of the band and never blaming him when fuckups occurred on stage. And he got Mike high—really, really high. That showed how much he cared.

  “How long you known Matt?” Eddie asked as Mike devoured a plate of pancakes. The surge from the sugary syrup rattled interestingly with the heroin bump Eddie provided him.

  Matt Kirkwood was the second guitar player in Gravel Rash, behind Jay Taggert. Together with Kyle Lucht on bass and Terry Lemon on drums, the five had been Gravel Rash for nearly two years. It was precisely the sound and the look Mike honed since high school, and their ascent through the clubs to the point where Mike now sat across a table at Denny’s from a guy with Razor Records was a direct result of the chemistry they had forged and the murderous pace they had maintained.

  “Dunno,” Mike pondered. “Matty’s been with us for, maybe, a year and a half?”