After you find out for the first time that you have a kid, it is hard to know what to do with the rest of your day. First, I called a somewhat new bartender, who I knew was saving for a better car, and I asked him to work for me that night.
“Sure,” he said easily, without even thinking about it.
“’Predate it,” I said.
I hung up. Now I had given myself this whole load of free time, but I knew how to fill it up. I chose a guitar and went into my music room to play it.
When I first moved here, I built a miniature music studio in my place. It was off the main room in what used to be a closet. It was a walk-in closet, almost a small room. I saw the potential the first time I looked at the apartment. It may have been the reason I decided to move here. So I soundproofed it with some dense foam. I rigged it so that there were plenty of electrical outlets in there. The cracks in the door were covered with extra strips of foam. I had never had a complaint about the noise, and I played in there every day. I didn’t think Jeanette, the old lady upstairs who owned the house, even knew I played guitar. I had all my recording equipment on shelves along one closet wall. It was old stuff that I got a long time ago, but it still worked. On a shelf above that were all the tapes I’d made.
I must have stayed in there for over two hours because when I came out, I could hear that the kids from next door were home from school.
I got my keys and went outside. The oldest of the neighbor kids, a skinny girl with hair the color of wet straw, was nine. I knew this because she had recently had a very noisy Saturday morning birthday party that woke me up at ten o’clock, hours before I was ready. Her name was Elise, pronounced “A Lease.” Mike was a few years younger than Elise and stockier, with their fathers brown hair and eyes. Then came Maddy, a girl who had curly brown hair, followed by Ray, who looked like Elise, long and thin with light hair. He was still in diapers. No, wait, checking him out now, as he scooped a shovelful of dirt into his empty shoe, I saw that he wasn’t wearing a diaper. Maybe he hadn’t been for a while. Their mother, Robin, must be inside, watching from a window. Their father used to live here, too, but he’d moved out some time ago.
Elise was loading Maddy and Mike into an orange plastic wagon, while Ray added more dirt into his shoe. The two passengers jerked backward and then forward as Elise took off too fast. There was a slight slope to the sidewalk and she started to trot down it, with the two of them screaming with joy. They were getting awfully close to the end of the sidewalk, I noticed, craning my neck and taking a deep breath. But just before she reached the stop sign and the traffic, Elise turned the wagon sharply to the left. Maddy and Mike tumbled out onto the sidewalk and started to cry.
Elise said, “You guys didn’t hold on! I told you to hold on tight!” She dropped the wagon handle, crossed her arms, and started to walk back to the house. “Babies!” she snarled over her shoulder. Then she lifted her eyes and saw me.
Elise went back to Maddy. “Are you OK, honey?” she squeaked in the voice of a girl playing mother to her dolls. She patted Maddy s back. “I’ll get you guys some juice.” She hugged Mike hard, glancing over her shoulder to make sure that I was getting this.
I looked at the mailbox, walked to it, opened its door, and removed a pile of crap addressed to me, “I’m not the kind of adult who will get you in trouble,” I wanted to tell Elise. “You’re thinking of real grown-ups—parents and teachers, not me.” I looked through the mail, put it back in my box, and closed the little door.
I put on my helmet, got on my motorcycle, and took off as though I had a destination.
I ended up at a shopping mall in a part of town that I hardly ever visited. Everywhere I looked today, there seemed to be children. Since the last time I came here, they’d put in a fountain, a thing that shot water up out of the pavement in unpredictable squirts that seemed to invite kids to get their clothes wet. And there were all these stores that specialized in cartoon characters and tiny clothes and toys.
I walked into the Discovery Channel Store and wandered around, picking things up and putting them down. There was music on, of course, the way there was music everywhere these days. I had a problem with this. The song playing in the store was Sinéad O’Connors “Nothing Compares 2 U.” And right there, in the middle of the store, I had what I called a music-induced flashback. It happened all the time. I had strong associations to most pop songs going all the way back to the sixties, I heard a song and everything that was going on at the time came pouring into my head.
Diana happened to love this song. She had blond hair that she washed every morning. Her conditioner smelled really excellent. Her parents lived in Encinitas. She didn’t like mushrooms or any kind of nuts. She was extremely ticklish. Right before she left, we had a horrible fight. She cried. I remember what she said. I remember all of it, and now with this song playing, there wasn’t any way in the world I was going to be able to get her words out of my brain. She said, “Are you ever going to buy a car? No, you are not. I don’t believe you will ever, ever buy a car. Your whole life. You should get a better place to live and some different clothes. Why on earth do you have to buy your T-shirts, socks, underwear, jeans in quantity once a year at Kmart? Couldn’t you just go shopping at a different store every now and then? A normal store? Does every single shirt have to be a pocket T from Kmart? And why would a talented person like you waste his life being a bartender? I really want to know. Really.”
Here she waited for me to say something. She was crying. I didn’t say anything, so she went on.
“Why can’t you just be normal?” I think she asked me that. But maybe I just remember it from knowing what she meant. I didn’t have any satisfactory answers to any of her questions. She left. I thought she was coming back. I really did, and I planned to explain myself to her. I was going to sit her down for a long talk. I would start from the beginning and not stop until I got up to the present day. I thought she would be gone a few hours at most. She left a turquoise sweatshirt that said GAP on it; a book she was reading, opened to page 261, her toothpaste, shampoo, and some of that conditioner I liked.
She didn’t come back. I was wrong about that. I still had her stuff in a bag from Trader Joe’s in an upper kitchen cupboard. The conditioner had probably completely solidified by now.
As I was looking at a small fountain suitable for use on a coffee table or desktop, “I’m a Believer” came on. With a song like that, I had a double-decker dose of memories. First came a flash of the Monkees’ version and the pin-striped bell-bottoms I had in seventh grade. Then came this new Smash Mouth version that I heard for the first time over at my sisters place. She was depressed about her job; we were eating minestrone. It’s not necessarily a pleasant experience to continually rewind your own life and the history of rock and roll and watch it again and again in unrelated sections as you walk through grocery store aisles or wait in line at the bank or fill your tank with gas or watch a car commercial on television. I took earplugs with me wherever I went, and I wished they worked better. I wished they were 100 percent effective, because to be honest, there wasn’t much about my life that I want to relive.
Just then in the store, I saw something that seemed to be exactly what I had been looking for. I picked it up. It was a lightning maker. Inside a glass bulb, flashes of purple lightning were happening over and over again. How did they do that? I wanted it. I put the sample back on the shelf, picked up one of the boxes, and walked to the counter with it. I pulled a wad of one-dollar bills out of my pocket—tips—and counted out the right number.
“Would you like to join our Discover Club?” the boy behind the register asked me.
“What? Oh. No,” I said.
“It’s a really good deal,” he told me. “See every time you—”
“No,” I said. “Really, no, thank you.” I didn’t plan to make a habit of this. Besides, I wanted to get out of the store before another song came on.
I walked out with my lightning ball. I was going to put it on a shelf next to my bed and watch it at night when I couldn’t sleep. I was looking forward to not being able to sleep.