Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life (21 page)

Soon, our phone conversations consisted of little more than Ike lyrics. The Close would say, “Well, if I go down in a plane I’ll go to hell, but I’ll leave all my shit to my friends in a will.” And I’d respond, “You can have my Crown Vic and you can have my debt, you can have my weakness and my regret.” And he’d say, “A beautiful girl once said to me, some men’ll rob you with poetry and stay to watch you while you sleep and kiss your ears and make you weep.” And I’d respond, “She’s all whacked out, she don’t back down, I threw my back out whacking that ass now.” And he’d say, “Drink to the party, drink to the host, fuck this party, let’s hit the coast.” And we’d agree that we needed to hit the coast, ideally in a Crown Vic, with Ike and a staggering drug stash.

I knew that The Close would find his way to an Ike Reilly show, but I was out of town on the weekend in question. The Close appeared on my doorstep that Monday with an envelope of photos. “This is me
with Ike,” he said. “This is my girl with Ike. This is Ike looking at my girl’s titties.”

“Wait,” I said. “You
met
Ike Reilly?”

“Hell yeah I met Ike. We showed up three hours before the show and drank with him. He drinks Red Stripe. He jumped off the stage and danced with my girl at the end of the show. Oh hey, I got something for you.” He presented me with a small promotional poster. “That’s signed,” The Close said. “I had Ike sign that for you. Do we got any cigarettes or what?”

He was enjoying himself immensely, in particular the fact that I was infuriated. After all, I prided myself on being a “mature” Fanatic now, the kind who (generally) resisted overt Drooling. But The Close had an entirely different conception of Fanaticism. He weaseled what access he could, then flaunted it shamelessly. As I watched him flip through his photos, a horrible thought seized me: what if the little mooch was right?

I’m going to skip all the begging that led Ike Reilly to allow me to visit his home north of Chicago. It reflects poorly on my begging skill set. I will mention something fairly obvious: in the five years since
Salesmen and Racists
, Ike’s career hadn’t exactly exploded. “Why do you want to come see me?” he said, when I spoke to him on the phone. “I’m not a rock star. I got four kids. Seriously, you’re going to be disappointed.”

Why did I invite The Close to come along? I had two reasons:

1. I was terrified to go alone and envisioned The Close as an ideal co-stalker in the sense that he lacks the capacity to feel shame.

2. If things took a turn for the worse, The Close could show Ike photos of his girl’s titties, which he stored on his phone.

The potential snag lay in our record as road buddies; we had
threatened to murder each other many times. The worst of our misadventures was a seven-hundred-mile trek across the South undertaken on the evening after the 2004 presidential election, the highlight of which was
not
listening to The Close urinate into a Gatorade bottle in the backseat, as you might expect, but listening to him ogle a group of prepubescent Mennonite girls at a McDonald’s outside Roanoke.
“Mmmm-mmmm
virgins,” The Close murmured, as the girls jittered in their bonnets. “Virgins taste good.”

The mood inside our car was pure homicide. About all we could agree on as the black rain beat down was Ike. We had the stereo cranked so loud the crickets in the dark fields were swayed back in terrified silence.

A week before our flight to Chicago, The Close called to announce that his mother had died. To say he was estranged from her understated the situation. She had left her husband and three kids for another man. The Close had bragged to me once that he had spit on her when she appeared at the memorial service for his father.

Nonetheless, I told him I was sorry and I absolutely understood and we could still cancel his plane reservation.

“What are you talking about?” he said.

“The funeral,” I said. “The arrangements.”

“It’s not a problem,” The Close said.

“What do you mean it’s not a problem?” I immediately launched into a big speech about how he had to try to forgive his mother and honor her death and how if he didn’t he’d be hounded by Furies like Orestes and eventually need to be purified with pig blood.

“Hey, pally,” he said impatiently, “this is Ike Reilly we’re talking about.”

And what could I say to that? Can you force people to feel what they need to feel? Can you force them to grieve? You cannot.

Ike lived an hour north of Chicago, in Libertyville, the town where he’d grown up. On the phone, he described his house as a “log cabin.” This made sense to us, because his lyrics suggested a working-class hero, full of contempt for the swells. Thus our confusion as we pulled into the Reilly homestead at nine in the evening—the “log cabin” was actually a lodge, vast, exquisitely gabled, with numerous wings. The driveway was the size of an indoor track.

“Where the fuck are the logs?” The Close said.

Ike wandered out to his driveway. He had striking blue eyes and a nose Picasso would have adored, but his manner was that of a chippy bantamweight, the sort of guy who had spent much of his life beating up bigger guys.

The Close and I stood there staring at his lodge while trying not to stare. Ike coughed uncertainly. Finally, he sighed and led us upstairs to his studio, which looked very much like a ski chalet and included a full bar. He introduced the Craiger, a burly Australian who served as his driver/tour manager. Nobody quite knew what to do. Was this like a journalism thing? Was I supposed to interview Ike? I pulled out a notebook.

“No notebooks,” Ike said.

“Remember me?” The Close said.

Ike squinted.

“Sure you do,” The Close said. “Your Cambridge show, like, four months ago. We bought you Red Stripes.”

“Oh yeah,” Ike said. “The guy from Jersey.”

“That’s right,” The Close said. “Jersey. You danced with my girl.”

This exhausted our small talk. We began chugging vodka tonics, in the hope things would become less awkward. Eventually, Ike played us a demo of his new record. The more we praised the songs, the more he scowled. “It must be kind of hard to listen to your own music,” I said.

Ike wheeled around and glared at me. I’d tripped some kind of
silent Drooling Fanatic alarm. “Hey, you think this matters to me? You think I base my self-esteem on this shit? It’s like I told you, this isn’t who I am. I don’t even know what you guys are doing out here.” The room plunged into silence. “I’m supposed to feel like some big deal because I wrote ‘Commie Drives a Nova’?” Ike sneered. “Please. How pathetic is that?”

I wanted to shout back that it did happen to be a big deal, that I’d watched “Commie” transform confirmed depressives into howling ecstatics and what’s more that Ike was the only songwriter on earth who spoke the common language of punk and hip-hop and blues and Celtic music, the roiling rhyming bluster of motherfucking America. But Ike was still glaring, waiting for me to say the dumb thing that would justify giving us the boot. The Craiger dropped his big meaty fists onto the bar and awaited orders.

Just then, a large, red-faced human burst into the room. He was roaring drunk and eager to announce that his wife of many years, a beautiful woman, a woman he probably still loved, wanted a divorce. This was Sweeney. Sweeney and Ike had been pals since boyhood and their wives were best friends and Sweeney was thrilled to meet us because he was Ike’s “number one fan on earth” and had many secrets to reveal about Ike such as that his real name was Michael but mostly he wanted to go out and
Get More Fucked Up
. “Let’s get laid!” Sweeney roared. “I’m a free man, practically! Who’s with me?”

It was nearly midnight on a Wednesday, but Ike wasn’t going to leave Sweeney hanging and we were along for the ride because Sweeney had decided we were from
Rolling Stone
and were going to make Ike famous. We settled in at a bar downtown, where Sweeney held forth on a variety of subjects, such as the fact that, as a boy, he sat on the lap of Libertyville’s most famous native, Marlon Brando.

“How did that go?” The Close asked.

“Great!” Sweeney bellowed. “He fisted me.”

We stumbled through an alley to a second bar. At two a.m., Sweeney suggested we repair to his basement for alcohol poisoning. “I’ve got Tombstone Pizza! Who’s in?” The Close set his head down on the bar and closed his eyes.

“Ike hates you,” The Close observed the next morning.

It was nearly eleven. I had been up for hours already, fretting.

“Thanks,” I said.

“I mean it; the guy really hates you. That shit you pulled with, like, psychoanalyzing him. Why are you always doing that?” The Close belched. He lay on his bed in our room at the Days Inn, wearing the kind of elaborate mid-length underwear you see on Sears mannequins. “I thought he was going to punch you in the face. How does it feel to know that my friend Ikeal,
¹⁷
who I’m out here visiting as a
favor
to you, who obviously wants to get to know me, this guy now wants to punch you in the face?”

“I wasn’t psychoanalyzing him.”

“Your problem,” The Close said, “is that you’re a Hebrew. Moral instruction is embedded in your DNA. This mentality is the result of being a desert people. Deprivation and excessive nerves activate the prophetic impulse.” The Close got up to piss, then burrowed back under the covers.

“You can explain all this to Ike over lunch,” I said.

“There’s not going to be any lunch, pally.” He shook his head. “Talking to you is like talking to a dog.”

Within a minute, he was asleep.

Ike did not blow me off. On the contrary, he showed up freshly showered, having just run ten miles. This struck me as something close to miraculous, given that he had consumed his own weight in alcohol a few hours earlier. But this was how Ike conducted business. His life amounted to an ongoing struggle between high ambition and low behavior. Years ago he’d refused a track scholarship in order to play rugby. He graduated college with a degree in political science and theology, then blew off law school to take a job as a bellhop at a Chicago hotel, where, if his songs are to be believed, he supplemented his income by serving as the unofficial concierge of drug sales.

His musical career had followed the same twisting path. He played with a series of bands throughout his twenties, including the Eisenhowers (this explained the nickname Ike), but dropped out of the music scene to support his family. He and his wife, Kara Dean, would eventually have four kids. In his mid-thirties, Ike began recording songs with a band of local guys, more or less on a lark. He sent a demo of this material to an acquaintance in L.A. Through a series of events too far-fetched to detail—but which Ike nonetheless detailed, in a series of digressions marked by radical shifts in tone, subject matter, chronology, and pronouns—this disc made its way to Mike Simpson, one half of the Dust Brothers. A few months later, Universal offered an ungodly sum for the record that would become
Salesmen and Racists
.

At this point, Ike did what any self-respecting American would: he bought a house far more expensive than he could afford. In his case, Log Haven, the elegant hunting lodge he’d visited as a kid and dreamed about ever since. It was approximately twenty times as large as the shitbox in which he and his family had been living. When he
took his kids by to see the spread, they stared in confusion. His eldest asked him, “Are you going to be the doorman?”

Salesmen and Racists
remains one of the greatest rock and roll albums ever released, and one of the least heard—which goes a long way toward explaining the chip on Ike’s shoulder. In his mind, the label made at least two major mistakes. First, they chose as the lead single a song that opens with the lines “Last night
I
didn’t make you come/Last night you didn’t fake me out”—delightful lines to be sure, but not for commercial radio. Second, they sent Ike out on the road with John Mayer, which is something like asking Iggy Pop to open for Jackson Browne.

As petulant as Ike can sound about all this, it’s fueled his creativity. He’s released five raucously elegant records since
Salesmen
, all on a small indie label, and built a cult following. The commercial failure of his debut has become an inside joke among his bandmates, one of whom had a bunch of T-shirts printed up when Ike moved into Log Haven. They read:
BIGGEST HOUSE, FEWEST RECORDS SOLD
.

After lunch,
I
went to pick up The Close. He had drawn the shades and lay in the darkness, looking pallid and frankly despondent.
I
wanted to ask if he was all right, if the aftershock of his mother’s death had finally caught up with him, but
I
knew better. So we headed back to the studio, where Ike and his producer Manny hoped to lay down a demo for a new song. The following colloquy ensued:

Ike ducked out and returned a minute later. He pulled a handful of red and white pills out of his pocket, which he began cataloguing for The Close. The Close repeated that he wasn’t in the mood for any pills. Then they both took a pill. Now it was time to record a new song.

Ike had told me about the song at lunch. He’d sung me the chorus, too: “Let’s fight the war on the terror and the drugs.” I didn’t get it—had Cheney’s people gotten to him? Ike picked up a battered acoustic guitar, played a blues shuffle, and began singing: