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TIM AND I ARE AT THE GATE, waiting to board our plane to Orlando. I am psyched that he agreed to this spontaneous trip. We are way overdue for some fun, but so far it’s been anything but that. Right after we got through security, he implanted his Bluetooth into his ear so he can wrap up last-minute business before he has to turn off the phone. So much for having a conversation about all the plans I’ve made for us in Orlando.
Tim is pacing and speaking urgently into his cell phone. “Make sure you process Mrs. Keene’s insurance paperwork first thing in the morning. They’ve been giving her the runaround, and I want to help her out.” He’s going to be bummed when he has to turn the phone off. I leave him in the waiting area and walk over to the newsstand to get some snacks for the flight.
When I get back to the gate, Tim’s still on the phone. “A debate with Mitch Goldstein on NPR? Hell yeah, I’ll do it.” I figure he’s talking to Aria again. “Wait,” he says, “that’s the day after I get back from Orlando. I don’t know if I’ll have time to prepare.” He paces and runs a hand through his red hair. I can tell he regrets going on this trip already. “It’s only April, and the election isn’t until November. Why does it have to be now?” I hold out the bottle of Coke I bought for him; he waves me off, turns his back on me, and keeps talking. I know he’s tense, but this stings me a little. A moment later, though, he seems to realize what he’s done and turns to face me again. He holds out his hand, and I put the Coke into it. He shakes his head and takes my hand, instead. He kisses the back of it and apologizes with his eyes. I smile at him while he opens the Coke and takes a sip. He mouths, “Thank you” to me. I nod in response and then sit down.
We haven’t started boarding yet. Tim likes to get to the airport insanely early, so we usually end up sitting around by the gate for nearly an hour before we board. Judging by how things look, he’ll probably be on the phone the entire time. That’s okay; I can dig into Keith Kutter’s book.
I remember exactly when I first fell in love with Hydra. I was in eighth grade and getting ready for school; my clock radio with the tinny speakers was on. I was sitting on my bed facing the dresser with the mirror on it. I’d purposely arranged my room that way so that the bed and dresser would serve as a vanity table, and I had all my various hair products and makeup strewn all over the surface. The doily that my mom insisted on keeping on the dresser had been irreparably stained from spilled eye shadow and from my compact exploding in a flesh-colored powder bomb one time when I’d dropped it.
I was smudging my black eyeliner as fast as I could, because I was chronically in danger of missing the bus. WYNH, the radio station out of New Haven, which was my source for new music at the time, was surprisingly clear in its broadcast from sixty miles away. First, I heard the bass drum beating over the last few seconds of the traffic report. It was like the song was bursting in and didn’t need any introduction. The cliché had always been to make it sound like a beating heart—like in that Huey Lewis song about the “heart of rock and roll.” But this drummer didn’t do that. It was a simple four beats in eighth notes. Bah-BUMP bah-BUMP. A silence followed for a moment—almost like an intentional affront to ‘ol Huey. Then, right after the bass drum pounded out the four beats again, Keith oozed in on his bass guitar and took over. It obscured the bass drum, until the lead guitar burst in and whipped tension into the melody with its gritty distortion. I was captivated from the first four beats. The introduction to this song was so dramatic that I had to set the eyeliner down and listen with my full attention. The vocalist, whom I’d never heard before, described a soldier returning from a battlefield, where he’d learned that the generals had intentionally sent the army into a losing fight. The singer described the blood and the wailing mothers and widows. And then the song faded out. Whoa.
“New guys from down under hitting the scene,” the DJ shot out over the last few notes. “That was ‘Battleground Zero,’ by Hydra. Remember, you heard it here first on WYNH, because they are going to be hot, hot, hot in the next few weeks.” I scribbled down the band’s name on the doily with my black eyeliner.
“Brenda, you’re going to be late,” my Mom said, bursting into the room. “What are you doing?” I was sitting there with my mouth hanging open, eyeliner on only one eye; she probably thought I looked like a spaz. She switched off the radio, spotted my writing on the doily, and shook her head. “Brenda, it’s a doily, not a notepad.” I wished I had thought to tape the song off of the radio; I knew I’d need to hear it again and soon.
“Mom! Wait! That was Hydra!”
“Who cares? You have school. March!” She pointed to the door.
“But I have to finish getting ready,” I said. I picked up my eyeliner, now dull from using it as a pencil. “I can’t go like this,” I said, pointing to my eyes.
“Five minutes, Bren. I mean it.” She turned on her heel and walked out of the room. I drew a heart around the word Hydra with the hot pink Clinique freebie lipstick I never used. It was at that point I became Hydra’s biggest fan at East Windsor Middle School and began buying every single thing they released.
My bedroom soon became plastered with Hydra posters, pictures torn from magazines, really anything I could apply Scotch tape to. Keith Kutter never looked directly at the camera in any of the pictures—even in the liner notes—which added to his mystique. I scoured the teeny bopper mags for some secret about his life that nobody else would notice. I learned his birthday from Heavy Beats Magazine—January seventh. From Rock Insider, I learned his favorite flavor of ice cream—mint chocolate chip. And People Magazine told me he had a Dalmatian named Winston. But everyone else knew those secrets. What about his really dark secrets? In which closet would I find his skeletons?
The teeny bopper mags didn’t have to publish his skeletons; Keith Kutter eventually published them on his own. I thought I’d heard about him publishing his memoir, but by then I hadn’t given it much thought. Of course, my sixteen-year-old self would have devoured the book the moment I’d gotten home. But my thirty-five-year-old self merely packed it into my carryon bag for the plane so I could have that forced inactivity of a plane ride to devour it properly.
While I wait for Tim to finish his call, I fish out Colors Fade from my carryon and thumb through the pictures in the center pages. Whenever I read a memoir, I always try to wait until I’ve read to that point before looking at the pictures in the middle, but I always end up giving in to the temptation to peek. Keith didn’t include any pictures of Hydra, as this book isn’t about the band. It’s about the tragic accident that tore his family apart. First, there’s a wedding picture of him and his wife Tamsen, then baby pictures of his son Damien. Even in the baby pictures, I can see Keith’s dimpled chin and square jaw in Damien’s face. I wonder what our baby will look like, if Tim and I ever get around to having one. I always picture our daughter as a red-haired little girl named Zoe, because I’d rather our daughter have Tim’s vibrant hair than my drab brown. I look at the rest of the photos: there’s a picture of the destroyed car and one of Damien, drowsy on painkillers, in traction.
By the time I got to college, I’d stopped listening to Hydra. I volunteered at the campus radio station and even had my own radio show. Hydra slipped away from me the moment I encountered the seemingly endless stacks of CDs at WRIU. I used to run my fingers along the shelves and count to seven. Whatever CD was under my finger when I arrived at seven was the one I played on my show. I discovered some really bad music that way—but I also found some hidden gems that I still have on my iPod. I knew that the band had put out a few albums since I’d stopped listening to them, but I never bought them, and I never really noticed when they were played on the radio. I had stopped paying attention, with the result that, today, I don’t know whether Hydra has become one of those aging metal bands who started calling their music “art” as they get older. I hope they haven’t.
In my mind they are still wearing the same tight spandex pants and barely buttoned billowing shirts they wore in their videos on MTV. They had big, permed hair that flowed in the fan’s air current in their videos, but they weren’t into eye makeup, the way Poison or even Motley Crüe were. I know that their reputation has taken a hit as the band has declined into semi-obscurity. I’ve seen a few Twitter hashtags about them behaving rudely to their fans. In one instance, I dug into it a bit more and found an article, written by a blogger, recounting how she’d met Keith Kutter in person. She’d said hello to him, and he’d responded by snarling at her. The blog entry had gone viral. I guess a band that was that big in the ‘80s doesn’t always have the sense to worry about what is said about them on today’s social media. I would love to formally pitch them as a client at work. I know that, if I were their publicist, I could fix Keith’s reputation, and there would be no negative blog entries about him snarling at anyone.
While I dug into the gossip about Hydra’s reputation, I also Googled the story behind Keith’s memoir. I learned that he and his family had been driving back from a barbeque at which Keith had had too much to drink. He’d lost control of the car, and as a result of the crash, his twelve-year-old son, Damien, had been rendered a quadriplegic. Keith had broken his collar bone. His wife, Tamsen, had been banged up but was otherwise uninjured.
After the accident, Keith went on a pharmaceutically-induced bender. Tamsen kicked him out after she’d found him raiding his son’s medication bottles. She was afraid of what he would do while under the influence and frankly didn’t want to take care of Keith on top of taking care of Damien. I don’t think anyone can say they blamed her.
I vaguely remember the media outrage at the time over why Keith hadn’t been thrown in jail over the accident; after all, he’d been drunk while driving. Later, I stumbled on a YouTube video of a rare interview with him on one of those Where Are They Now? shows on VH1 or MTV. Tears streamed down my cheeks as I listened to Keith describe the guilt he felt for stealing his son’s life. That was the only interview Keith had done since the book came out, and he declared the topic officially closed to the media. That’s understandable. Why would he want to rehash that, over and over, in each interview? Still, I would think that he could find a way to use the media as a way to move the world past its outrage. I know that, if I were his publicist, that’s what I would do. Still, talk about a publicity disaster.
I flip back to the beginning of Keith’s book and devour the first chapter before it’s finally time to get on the plane. People approach the counter beside the gate, trying to score a last minute seat upgrade. Tim checks his boarding pass and his watch; his knee bounces impatiently.
I reach out to still his leg. “Hey, what are you thinking?”
“Bren, I don’t know why I agreed to this trip. There is just too much going on.”
“That’s the point, Tim. We barely spend any time together anymore.”
“What do you mean? We have dinner together every night.”
“Yeah, in front of the TV. We’re in the same room, but we’re not really in the same place.” It’s not just his fault—I am guilty, too.
“Can we please not do this right now?” he asks.
“Then when, Tim?”
He doesn’t answer. His phone rings. I see it’s Jimmy from the shop. And now I’ve lost him again. “Shit,” he says. “I completely forgot that Rhode Island List is coming to the shop today.” He glares at me as if to say, If I wasn’t going on this trip, I’d be on top of it. His shop was recently voted the number one small business in Rhode Island List Magazine. As a result, business has been pouring in—which is great. “Call Aria,” he says into the phone. “She has photos of me in the shop that you can give to them to use for the magazine story.”
Aria has photos of him in the shop? Just how much time is she spending there?
Don’t get me wrong. I am proud of what Tim has accomplished with the shop. But the downside is that he’s working around the clock and never gets the chance to unwind. That’s the dilemma when it comes to being married to a small-business owner. He needs a vacation to recover from the stress, but it’s often the vacation that causes even more stress.
I am hoping that this will be one of those trips where we’ll just forget everything at home and have fun. I’ve managed to get us signed up for a habitat tour at SeaWorld, as well as a few other activities. Then maybe we’ll have one of those nights where we sit up all night talking. I can’t remember the last time we did that.
Tim hangs up his phone, and I watch his jaw clench and unclench. When he’s ready to unwind, he will. I can’t force him, so why pick a fight? After we finally board the plane and are settled into our seats, I squeeze his thigh, which I hope he’ll take as a relaxing gesture. I wait a few moments for him to respond and then I allow myself to get sucked back into the book.
The writing style Keith used is dreamlike, which perfectly expresses the drug-induced haze he was living in immediately after the accident. I can feel the raw emotion coming through the early part of the book, and my heart pounds as I burn through the pages. By the time we land in Orlando, I am at the part where he’s failing miserably at rehab. Then, as the plane pulls up to the gate, Keith has checked himself out of rehab and set off on his sailboat for months on end to heal himself on his own. That’s an interesting way to kick a drug habit, I think to myself. Go out to sea, and don’t bring any drugs with you. Although I do wonder how safe it would be to detox while alone and offshore. I am picturing him going stir-crazy for the first few weeks, while the drugs work their way out of his system—just like in the movies, when people try to kick the habit. I imagine him scratching at his arms and talking to people who aren’t there. I really hope that sort of behavior is over-dramatized for the movies, because I think it would be a horrible thing to experience while alone and surrounded by ocean.
“So, is this one any good?” Tim says to me, gesturing to my book as I shove it back into my carryon. “You barely looked up from it for the entire flight.” Tim had had his headphones on, watching a movie on his iPad. I like to read on planes; he likes to watch movies. So we usually don’t talk the whole time. Sometimes we hold hands, but during this flight, we didn’t.
“It’s one of the guys from Hydra,” I say to him.
Tim pulls the book from my bag. “I remember this guy. He’s the one who was drunk and broke his son’s arms and legs in a car accident.” He snorts as he thumbs through the pictures. “And now he gets to write a book to glorify how irresponsible he was?”
“It’s more than that, Tim. He’s recovering from an addiction to painkillers and trying to figure out how to cope after a traumatic event like that.”
“He has to learn how to cope? What about his kid? Does he get to write a book, too?” He points to the picture of Damien in traction.
“It’s still an interesting story. I grew up listening to this band.”
Tim always laughs at me when an old Hydra song comes on the radio. I still know all the words to those oldies. “Plus, all the proceeds from his book are going to the Rainbow House—they help families with kids who ended up quadriplegic like Damien. At least he’s trying to make it right, you know? He’s still not allowed to see his son, so he’s trying to help other kids.” I think that’s pretty cool of Keith Kutter. It’s a step in the right direction to improve his reputation, if he tries to make something positive out of a bad situation that he actually caused.
Tim and I make our way off the plane then wind our way to baggage claim. While I wait for the bags, he goes to the rental car counter.
Tim comes back to the baggage claim just as our bags are sliding onto the carousel. He smiles as he jingles the keys at me. “Free upgrade. Convertible.” He tosses the keys at me. I catch them and smile back at him. Maybe this weekend getaway will be just the ticket for us after all.