Raising the Dad Page 17

  He fell into a panicked spin, looking for landmarks that were never going to come. People began to stare at this lanky, tattooed scuzzball in a too-small yellow blouse and what appeared to be blood on his face. He caught their looks and fell back into his driven walk.

  A liquor store. A rack of the town’s free alternative paper. Mike stopped, feeling like a genius. He tore through the paper to the club listings. There was his Gravel Rash logo, hyping their show at The Station in West Warwick the night before.

  The club was on a main drag, he knew it. Maybe the next one over. He could see golden arches two blocks down; that could be the McDonald’s where they ate the night before.

  He jutted into the busy street to get to the other side, but he misjudged the pace of the oncoming traffic. He had to hit a complete run to make the curb within the short break in cars. There hadn’t been time to get his socks on. His cheap boots rubbed his bare feet raw.

  And there was water in his ear, fucking with his balance. The sun beating down on him, cars beginning to honk, the other sidewalk still too far across. The more ground he covered, the farther the opposite side seemed to be retreating.

  One car nearly clipped him as his legs began splaying clumsily. He instinctively tugged at his ear, trying to right his equilibrium. His finger came away, and the jolt at finding the girl’s blood in his ear finally threw his legs into a tangle. He hit the asphalt hard, his face sandpapering across the grit as his front teeth snapped at the roots. His right leg twisted crookedly at the knee.

  A car swerved to miss him, diverting another driver straight into a light pole. More squealing brakes, more sour metallic thumps as fender benders dominoed in both directions.

  People leapt angrily from their cars to inspect the damage and ream out the long-haired dumbfuck bleeding and crying in the middle of the street.

  An hour later, as a cop lowered him into the backseat of the squad car, bystanders clapped cruelly. It would be the last applause Mike would hear for a long time.

  Thirty-seven

  The girl was nineteen. Her name was Courtney. She had a long narcotics record and a reputation for running wild. She also had a four-year-old son, whom Mike met as he ran away.

  The district attorney intended to make an example of the degenerate rock star who blew into town, shared heroin with the single mother of a small child, and then fled the scene, leaving the boy to find the body. The DA got $300,000 bail imposed as he began determining what all he could throw at him. He speculated in the press about reckless homicide.

  The band didn’t find out until they arrived at their next scheduled gig in Maine. The bus had waited in West Warwick as long as it could, but with another show that night and a five-hour drive ahead of them, they took off before lunch.

  Scott, the road manager, stayed behind. Mike had done this a couple times before, passing out and staying in some girl’s bed too long. Scott always managed to get him to the next stop by show time. But now Scott was waiting for a call back from Eddie Kingsolver to hear what they should do next.

  * * *

  When another show was canceled and Eddie still wasn’t returning calls, Taggert finally called Mike’s mother back in Wisconsin. The tour was dead: none of the clubs were willing to risk riots by putting out a metal band without its charismatic lead singer, and even if Mike made bail the DA warned him about leaving town.

  But somebody ought to get him out of jail. The phone call rattled Rose, who only knew Jay Taggert as the sullen, long-haired boy who skulked in and out of her basement when not disappearing for weeks with her son’s band. She had no idea how to proceed when Taggert suggested she wire $30,000 to a bail bondsman in Rhode Island.

  John was twenty-one in 1993. Having scraped his way into his junior year of college, working third shift in a UPS warehouse and enduring so-so grades and a dismal social life as a result, he raged to hear that his mother had cut a check to Mike that was almost greater than his entire college tuition. It was the only time John ever yelled at his mother.

  “What the fuck, Mom!” he shouted over the phone.

  “John…”

  “I mean … What the fuck? Are you paying for his lawyer, too?”

  Rose’s voice was tiny. “I don’t know. The record company people, maybe they will…”

  John stomped his way around the small off-campus house he shared. “Did he do it?” he demanded. “Did he kill this girl?”

  “John,” his mother gasped. “He’s your brother.”

  “You don’t have a fucking clue who he is! He could take every dime you have and still get convicted!” John sneered. In an instant, he knew he cut too deep. Rose spent years denying what she knew was true about Mike. Now it came crashing in on her, with big bills to be paid.

  John churned in the silence, caught between wanting Mike to go to hell and not wanting Mike to drag his mother there with him.

  “There will be a trial,” Rose pressed on. “Nobody knows when. Mr. Kirschner, our lawyer, is making some calls, but he says Mike will need someone there, in Rhode Island. He’ll get out on bail and hopefully he can come home until then, but when the trial comes we’ll need to…”

  John’s brain roiled as he understood what she was saying. “We? I’ve got school! I’ve got a job! I can’t go!”

  “Fine, I’ll go alone,” she snipped brittlely. “I’ll sit by myself, in a strange town, for who knows how long, while your brother is on trial for his life. Your father would be very proud of you for the choice you’re making.”

  Rage and indignation xylophoned its way up John’s spine. He spun furiously, fast-balling his phone into a Miller Lite sign on the living room wall.

  * * *

  Buried in Mike’s contract with the label was a morals clause that in the best of circumstances would have been moot. If Gravel Rash became a big earner, no amount of foul behavior would have caused the label to break its contract. If, as was more likely, Gravel Rash amounted to not much at all, the label would simply drop the band long before lurid rock star behavior had a chance to inconvenience shareholders.

  Either the act would get so big that the label would forgive them anything, or they would drop them by the time their first album was going unsold for nickels on eBay.

  So it was Mike’s considerable bad luck to wake up in a bloody bed before the first album was done. Gravel Rash was not a priority signing at Razor Records, and no one would stick their necks out for the likes of Eddie Kingsolver. When word reached New York that the band’s lead singer was dumb enough to wake up with a dead junkie before he even had a record out, it was just smart business to invoke the morals clause and cancel the contracts. Eddie, who had a roster of other acts to keep him in the game, didn’t put up a fight.

  * * *

  By the time the case came to trial, the DA’s options were limited. Courtney’s drug history, the dope-fuzzy nature of the events, and the lack of Mike’s prints on the syringe gave his lawyer ample ammunition to slap down the reckless homicide charge. Still, the defendant had shared hardest of hard drugs during an evening of carnal degeneracy, and he fled the scene rather than seek help for the deceased and her orphaned son. A prison sentence of five years or more was threatened.

  John agreed to travel to Providence with Rose for the opening of the trial. It was almost worth it, watching Mike led into court the first day, his rock star locks sheared off and his gangly frame wedged into a cheap suit.

  Mike’s swagger was gone, his broken slouch and sallow skin making him appear ten years older.

  The DA came out firing, having stitched together a lurid account of Mike’s sordid past. He tried to get past examples of statutory rape with young female fans introduced to the jury before the judge ruled them out-of-bounds. Mike’s lyrics about drugs and fucking and talking about women as whores and playthings were read into the record. Rose, who could never understand the words her son shouted over the sonic maelstrom belching up from her basement, grew ill.

  Mike’s lawyer rigorously kept t
he focus on the law. He brought detailed attention to the time of death and the futility of medical intervention by the time Mike ran away. Yes, the defendant engaged in illicit drug use, but with a consenting adult whose own actions contributed to her death. Mike may need to bear consequences for the regrettable way he chose to extricate himself from the situation in an understandable moment of panic, but enough doubt existed about his role in the death of young Courtney to justify a severe penalty.

  Sensing defeat, the DA offered a deal: no more than three years at a medium security facility just outside Providence, followed by five years of parole back home.

  Mike went in in 1993, and got out in a little over two years. He came home with an even stronger drug habit and a vacant sullenness that John suspected had something to do with violence he endured while behind bars.

  Thirty-eight

  With Theatre of Pain on a break, Mike learned enough about the internet to find a collection of Mötley Crüe lyrics, and he diligently tried to memorize the words. He got John to download the Crüe’s hits onto one of Katie’s tossed-aside, early issue iPods, and he spent hours walking the neighborhoods around his mother’s house, blasting the music while—he hoped—working off his thickening gut.

  Usually after Days of Our Lives, he’d strap on the iPod and walk until dinner. With the volume in his ears cranked up to stage levels, sometimes he got so caught up in the music that he’d let loose with lyrics right there on the sidewalk. During Crüe classics like “Same Ol’ Situation” or “Girls Girls Girls,” he would spontaneously start aping the histrionic stage routines. With his long hair hiding the headphones, even those who passed close by couldn’t tell he was plugged in. He was just a wild-haired, seedy-looking forty-five-year-old, gesticulating madly while shrieking about the need to shout at the Devil:

  “He’ll be the blood between your thighs!!!”

  He learned how to lighten his own hair and tease it up so as to disguise the thinning parts. He recorded a Mötley Crüe concert on VH1 Classic and studied it like the Zapruder film, learning all of Vince Neil’s moves. John always ragged Mike about his laziness, but he resolved to become the best pretend Vince Neil the tribute act circuit ever saw.

  So it was a humiliating blow when D.J. called to fire him.

  “What the fuck, man?” Mike demanded.

  “Dude, it just wasn’t working. We had a chance to pull this Danny kid out of a Poison act in Gurnee, we had to go for it. It’s just a better fit.”

  “Poison is not the Crüe!” Mike sneered, genuinely offended.

  “Dude, they really kinda are.”

  An awkward silence fell over them. Mike was planning to play his trump card under better circumstances, but suddenly this was it.

  “All right. Well, look,” he began, shifting gears quickly. “I was waiting to find the right time to bring you in on this, but…” He paused for effect. “I want to get Gravel Rash back together. I want you to manage us.”

  D.J. coughed.

  “Enough with this tribute band bullshit,” Mike said haughtily. “Gravel Rash never had its best shot. I still got the chops; you said so. So I couldn’t remember the words to fucking Crüe songs? Watch how I still kick the shit outta ‘Do Ya Like a Dog.’”

  “Dude…”

  “Taggert hasn’t lost a fucking step. The band was always just me and him. We’ll fill in with some kick-ass local guys, dust off the old set list. Start writing again. The Rash is back, motherfucker!”

  “Dude,” D.J. said with zero tact. “Nobody knows who the fuck you are.”

  Mike took the gut shot. “Bullshit! You did! The first time I got you on the phone, I thought you were gonna cum in your pants, you were such a Rash fan.”

  “Yeah, when I was seventeen. Everybody around here knew who you were when they were seventeen. Now they’re, like, forty. They got jobs, kids. If their wives let them out of the house at all, they’re gonna go see the real Ozzy, or a fake Crüe, before they waste time on some band that never even got an album out to help them remember who the fuck you were.

  “And if they do remember you, they’re remembering you at your peak. Time has fucked you up, man. And I’ve seen Jay Taggert.”

  Mike simmered to keep from getting sad.

  “Look,” D.J. said earnestly. “Thanks for filling in for us, we appreciated it. Hey, that Poison in Gurnee is still looking for a Bret Michaels. I could make a call, if you—”

  Mike slammed shut the cell phone.

  * * *

  While licking his wounds with Taggert a few days later, Mike was offered a job. Taggert played with Cashmere, a steadily employed wedding band. Their set list ranged from the fifties to Kings of Leon, with enough white boy hip-hop and cowboy hat shitkickers to play to the widest demographic possible. Taggert, who took over his father’s carpet store over ten years ago, considered it a sweet deal, pulling in some extra money with his guitar while also getting out of the house most Saturday nights.

  The wife of their sound guy just had a premature baby and things were dicey at home, so Cashmere needed someone for the next several weeks. Taggert could tell that Mike was hurting from the Theatre of Pain thing, and he also knew Mike needed money. If the job lasted into the busy summer season, he could clear a few grand, easy.

  The first job with Cashmere was at the Radisson in Delavan, between Holt City and Milwaukee. Taggert insisted that Mike find himself a tuxedo, such was the level of panache that Cashmere brought to their gigs. After learning that renting a tux would almost eat up his whole take for the evening, Mike asked his mother about the boxes of his father’s things still in the walk-in attic space over the attached garage. The old man, with his cocktail parties and big fucking deals, must have owned his own tux.

  “It’d be thirty years old!” his mother said doubtfully, surprised and skittish at the unexpected mention of those boxes of Larry’s things. “Who knows what the moths have done?”

  “It’d be fine for one night,” Mike said. “I just need to take this one job to see if it’s even anything I want to do. It’s probably bullshit.”

  “Mike,” she scolded.

  “Sorry,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Come on, will you help me dig through his stuff?”

  Her resistance to revisit the past seemed to fade as her troubled, distant son asked for her help. He took things from her all the time, but she couldn’t recall him ever asking for something.

  “It might just fit,” she said, stroking her chin and studying his narrow frame as she warmed to the project.

  * * *

  Mike brought in a folding chair and settled his mother into the attic, its chalky air made thick by the sun beating down on the garage roof. Mike marveled at the crap thrown in here: an old toboggan, the cage for a pair of gerbils John and Mike tried to raise when Mike was barely ten, his father’s golf clubs. The boxes of Larry’s clothes were stacked neatly in the center of the space.

  Rose sat with silent apprehension as Mike pulled open the first box. She sighed as she stood and walked to the box, touching the fabrics lovingly. She brought the lapel of one of the suit coats to her nose and breathed in hopefully, but found nothing of Larry there.

  Uncomfortable with the moment he was sharing with his mother, Mike dug deeper into the box. He stopped with a jolt as he came to a jade blue jacket that cut through the muted tones of all of Larry’s other wardrobe.

  “It’s the suit. From the picture,” he smiled. “The James Bond suit!”

  She smiled as she took the jacket. “Oh, how I hated this thing. I thought it made him look like a gigolo.”

  The memories rode in like a warm breeze, and then Rose lowered the jacket back into the box.

  “No, wait. This is it,” Mike said with restrained enthusiasm, holding the jacket before him to estimate its fit. “This is hardcore.”

  “You said you needed a tuxedo.”

  “Nah,” he said, warming to the image. “This’ll be all right.” He pulled it on over his mangy T-shirt. “What do you
think?”

  The sleeves exposed his wrists by over an inch, and the jacket hung loosely on his wiry frame. But the intense blue and the retro cut had a certain rock-and-roll flare.

  Rose delighted in seeing Mike wearing anything resembling adult clothing. “It’s not bad,” she said, still unsure.

  Mike felt her hesitation and thought he was being insensitive to her memories being stirred up here. “I don’t have to, if…”

  She straightened the lapels, then stood back to admire the view. “If this will help get you a job, your father would be happy for you to have it.”

  Thirty-nine

  “That’s not a tux,” Taggert complained as the band set up in the empty ballroom. Taggert’s tuxedo was black and spangled with red accents. He matched all the other band members.

  “I’ll be in the back of the room, in the shadows,” Mike said dismissively. “Give me a fucking break.” He was already one whiskey in, having charmed the bartender as she began setting up the bar.

  “Cashmere is a first-class operation. People expect that of us,” Taggert said sternly, his bald head turning pink with worry.

  “This was the best I could do on short notice,” Mike said. “I’ll get us through this one, and by next time I’ll have it together. All right?”

  Taggert realized he didn’t have a choice. “All right. We’re cool.” He took a deep breath to center himself. “Are we ready to rock and roll?”

  Tiffany and Brad, the bride and groom, were somewhere between twenty-five and thirty. The formative rock-and roll-years for themselves and their friends were the early 2000s. This meant a set list full of Matchbox Twenty, Nickleback, and Maroon 5—a bunch of pop rock wienies Mike didn’t know by name but whose jangly, ball-less hits made his teeth grind.

  * * *

  The sound job was as easy as Taggert promised: knock back the volume if feedback bled through, keep the mud out of the bass notes, hit some simple lighting cues, and turn on the recorded music when the band took its breaks.