All the kids were home next door, and it was a Wednesday. I was positive that it was a Wednesday. Pretty sure. Or Thursday, maybe. I woke up at 7:30 because of the racket over there. Somebody got all of something and didn’t leave any for anybody else. But it was nothing to cry about. Their mother, Robin, would get some more; she promised. But today? Would it be today that she would get some more, or in a long, long, long time? It would be today. She promised that, too. Really.
It was some kind of cereal that they wanted, probably. Or gum. These kids had an irrational passion for gum. I had overheard a lot of these conversations. But you said you would yesterday, the complainer insisted, you promised. I said I would try, came the response, and I did try, but there wasn’t enough time left and then I had to pick you guys up. It isn’t my fault. I didn’t say it was your fault, I said it was time for me to pick you up. And so on. Back when the husband was here—Vic, his name was—he would eventually explode, then there would be silence, followed by crying. I wasn’t sure which was worse, the yelling and crying or the whining and promising.
At 8:05 exactly, they all started crashing out the side door to go to their car. Now it would be quiet, and I could go back to sleep.
Trouble was, I didn’t. I lay there and surveyed my apartment again. Usually, my belongings were invisible to me, I was so used to them. Now that I had found out about Diana and her son, I was staring at everything as if I were about to file a detailed report.
From the survey of the shortcomings of my belongings, I moved on to a review of my scene with Diana the night before. I handled that wrong. I hadn’t said what I wanted to at all. Now the two topics converged, and all I could think of was what Diana would see if she walked in here. She wouldn’t like it at all, I knew that. She wouldn’t like my patterns, if you know what I mean, and they were far too well established for Diana. I could just see the way she would count off my patterns on her fingers:
Clothes: I only wore certain clothes. In my early twenties, I developed a kind of uniform that didn’t vary too often, the pocket T-shirts from Kmart and Levi’s and cotton sweatshirts from Miller’s Outpost. I did my clothes shopping in one day, once a year. I did not own a pair of shorts, pajamas, a bathing suit, or a raincoat. These were extra things that I did not need.
Food and drink: I drank flavored instant coffee that came in a can. You could get it in vanilla, hazelnut, and chocolate mint. I liked chocolate mint the best. For breakfast, I had frozen waffles with syrup. There were a lot of vitamins in those. They added that. For lunch, I bought sandwiches from different places. If I wasn’t working, I ate a frozen dinner. There were spinach lasagna, tofu meat loaf. There’s a lot of really good stuff out there these days. That was my diet. Oh, and orange juice with ice cubes. I thought it was varied enough. Occasionally, someone—my sister or a woman I was seeing—opened my fridge and had a fit about how little was in there. But what was I going to do—buy a whole bunch of stuff that was just going to go bad? Anyway, it didn’t happen that often that someone opened my fridge, which brought us to…
People: My social circle was small. Tiny. Ellen may have been the one person I saw on purpose in those days.
At least I was aware of it. And when you’re aware of something, you can change it, right? It’s just a matter of deciding you want to.
Working in The Club wasn’t all I did. Being a bartender was just a minor part of my existence. The rest of the time I played guitar. I wrote songs. That’s the way I spent most of my time, as a matter of fact.
I used to be in a band. Not just a band, a band you’ve heard of, a band you know, a band almost everybody knows. It was possible that even Jeanette, my elderly landlady upstairs, had heard of my former band. It was Point Blank. I didn’t usually talk about this. I avoided the topic as much as possible. Occasionally, a rock journalist or an avid Point Blank fan would hunt me down and feel convinced that they deserved answers to their questions about my life as a reward for their effort. But they were wrong. I didn’t have to tell anybody anything. So they described me as “reclusive.” Ha! The reclusive bartender.
You know the song “I’m Losing My Mind,” right? Maybe you know all the words because at the time it was big, you were in love with your math teacher. Or you had just broken up with someone, and it fit so perfectly. Or maybe they played it at your wedding. Or you heard it last week on your parents’ oldies station. Or you heard it in a couple of movies. Anyway, I wrote that song. And what about “Self-Destructive Tendencies”? You might be familiar with either Point Blanks version or maybe Aerosmith’s. They were the first to cover it, and theirs was considered a “classic,” if not an original. Then Sting did it, followed a few years later by Gloria Estefan, at which point the song reached a new audience, and so did Gloria. It was also in a bunch of movies that I’d never seen. And then there was “Worse Than Ever.” As soon as you thought that the world had heard enough of that one, someone else covered it in some different musical genre. Last year, Clint Black did it. That one’s mine too.
These songs and a few others had given me some income over the past twenty-odd years. I never added it up for a grand total, but you might be surprised at what a popular song can do for a person. I had a lot of the money still. I didn’t do anything with it. What would I spend it on? I didn’t need anything.
A long, long time ago, I left Point Blank, a band I had started myself. I quit. This was before they were famous, but things were just starting to come together. All the hard work was finally paying off. Their biggest gig at the time was playing The Club. Ironic, isn’t it? I had gone no further.
Don’t ask me what happened.
There had been lots of stories about it. I was a drug addict and/or a boozer, and the band threw me out. Or I was this egomaniac who insisted on having the band named after me. The Tom Good Experience, maybe, or The Good Band or something. Or there was a woman involved, and Adam Blackburn, the lead singer, and I were both in love with her. He won. He got the woman and the band. Or I got the woman, and he got the band. Wrong. Not true. None of the above. I didn’t drink, and I’d never done drugs. I truly did not care what the band was called. Adam had been with the same woman since ninth grade, and I’d never settled on anyone in particular.
I had been asked why I left the band so many times that the faintest possibility of this question coming into a conversation caused me to grit my teeth and clench my fists. How could I give it all up? I just did, that’s all. I quit. I didn’t want to be in that band anymore. “So, why don’t you write some more songs?” you probably want to ask. I did write songs, all the time. I wrote them and I played them and I recorded them. I had all the tapes. I worked on them every day of my life. In my music-studio closet.
“Why don’t you start another band?” you probably want to know too. And “Why don’t you choose some of your songs and play them all around the country and make a million dollars?” Or, “Hey, you work in a club! Why don’t you play there?” You know, I’d been over this stuff with all kinds of people for years. I didn’t do those things. Period. I played every day. I practiced, and I wrote songs. It wasn’t a career; it was something I did. Alone in my closet. With the door shut. I liked it that way.
I met Diana at The Club, and we were together for a couple of months. I was crazy about Diana. Just hearing her move the water in the bathtub in the next room was a thrill that could give me goose bumps. I wrote about a thousand songs about Diana. OK, maybe it was more like eight directly about her and another twelve or so with portions she inspired. What can I tell you? I loved her. The band sent me two tickets to the Grammy Awards that year.
After we had that big fight, I came back to the apartment after work one night and there was a note, just like in a movie. It said.
Dear Good,
It won’t be a big surprise to you to find out that I’ve decided to go. This is not working for me, as I’ve told you many times. I don’t believe my future is here. Take care!
Diana
It was a surprise, of course. A more sensitive, less self-absorbed individual than myself might have seen it coming. I did not. Sure, we were arguing about my not having a “real” job or even ambition, my not having a “real” house, clothes, vehicle, etc. But that wasn’t at the center of what was happening with Diana and me. At the core was this: I could have been perfectly happy just looking at her every day for the rest of my life, watching her drink ginger ale through a straw or tuck her hair behind her ears. For that, to earn the right to look at her, smell her hair, and see her toes disappear as she put on her socks, I was willing to do just about anything. Anything. I would even have been willing to rake over my past and rethink some of those “patterns” that she found so offensive.
The night I got the note, I had looked in the two dresser drawers I’d cleared out for her to put clothes in—empty. I looked for her bike, which she kept locked and leaning against the side of the house—gone. I searched in the bathroom for her toothbrush— not there. I did find a few traces, which as I’ve mentioned, I put into a paper bag. She would have to come back for her things, I had told myself. I repeated these words many times for many weeks, finding them less and less convincing. As it turned out, conditioner was not a thing you come back for in a situation like this. Time passed, and I was glad that she left a few belongings, or I might have thought that I’d made her up. I didn’t know where Diana went when she left, because she didn’t get in touch with me again.
She left because she was pregnant. Ah. I saw that now. I did. All those discussions about whether I was ever going to do anything differently were about the baby she was going to have. Yeah. OK. It made sense now. She knew that being a father was not on my to-do list. She kept asking if I would ever buy a car. And here I was thinking those discussions were about, well, whether or not I wanted a car.