Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life (22 page)

The song carried on in this manner for several verses. Then Ike’s voice, which is most often a keening tenor, dropped to a whisper:

At which point he roared into the chorus, and by which time I was roaring too (though softly), because the true purpose of that chorus had been revealed. It was a sly parable about the artificial wars cooked up by political admen, and how they obscure our true fears—the terror of losing those we love. This was classic Ike Reilly, a composition bristling with moral outrage but loyal to the needs of the pub crowds.

I had just watched my hero record a new song.
Boy
, I thought
, that wasn’t so hard
. In fact, Ike spent the next six hours playing the same song, trying to settle on the right key (A to B to B-flat) and the right lyrics, which he had not bothered to write down and therefore kept tinkering with or forgetting or both. There was also the tempo, the phrasing, the best way to segue out of the bridge, and how to arrange the song for a full band. It was beginning to dawn on me how many decisions a musician had to make, which made the job seem—even in this most generative phrase—depressingly similar to writing.

Except that Ike would get a demo out of these sessions, which he could then give to his mates so as to effectuate that loud, collective feeling of
rocking
, to be transmitted (eventually) to a room full of sweaty fans, some of them young women whose beautiful tits would bounce up and down as Ike sang about the terror and the drugs and whose throats would produce lovely shrieks. This was not how writing worked.

The most charming aspect of watching Ike record a song was the constant intervention of his kids. His eldest son Shane called with a report from his soccer game. “How many did you score?” Ike shouted. “Against
them
? They suck. Yeah, well they
used
to suck.” A bit later, we heard a loud scraping from outside. This was his ten-year-old, Kevin, tearing down the driveway on a new and spectacularly dangerous variety of skateboard. “Hey, Dad, check this out!” Ike stared at the boy. He clearly wanted to be down there watching his kid possibly crack his skull open, rather than recording a song about how frightened he was that his kids might crack their skulls open.

Then his oldest daughter, Hannah, appeared. She was a junior in high school, blond, beautiful, a star long-distance runner like her pop. Ike said that she might be visiting Boston to scout schools and The Close, who had mentioned that he taught at Boston University perhaps a hundred times by now, immediately got very close to her. “All right,” he said, “the first thing is I’ll give you a full tour. Then you can sit in on my class. Then we’ll get you set up with the track coach. I’ll call him when I get back.”

“You can do that?” Hannah said. “You know him?”

The Close waved his hand like a magician.

“She’s going to need a scholarship,” Ike said.

“Not a problem, pally,” Close said. “You just get in touch with me and I’ll take care of everything.”

Ike hadn’t forgotten that we were Drooling Fanatics. But our presence in the studio had softened his basic contempt for us, so he took us to his favorite sushi place and we got shit-faced on sake. This made us all sentimental. Ike decided we needed to see a few of the local sights: the old frame house where he’d grown up, the alley garage where he and his pals came to get loaded, Brando’s place. “There were times when I hated this town,” he told us. “It was crawling out of me. That’s why I identified with Brando. Terry Malloy. The Wild Ones. The group of guys I ran around with, that’s who we wanted to be. I still lie to myself about where I am.”

It occurred to me, as we cruised along the darkened shoreline of Minear Lake, that this was the central allure of rock and roll: the creation of a personal mythology. Rock and roll allowed people to lie about themselves, and to be sanctified for the extravagance of their fictions. This was how a mama’s boy from Tupelo became our gyrating Jesus, how a nasally Jew from Hibbing, Minnesota, reinvented
himself as a hipster messiah. Rock had enabled Ike Reilly to buy Gatsby’s mansion and still shout the savage truths of punk rock.

We drove around for another hour. It was like touring the Stations of the Cross for a proud sinner. This is where Ike punched a guy through a storefront window. This is where Ike dangled his pal over the highway. At home he allowed us into the main living quarters, with its mighty beamed ceilings. The living room had been converted into a basketball court with a regulation-size hoop for his boys, over which a giant poster of Dylan kept watch. We met his lovely wife, who faithfully recounted Ike’s domestic misbehaviors (Ike blasts the TV with a shotgun, Ike burns her wicker furniture in the backyard, etc.).

The night wore on. New drinks slid down our throats. Ike prowled from one room to the next and we stumbled after. We’d awoken his need to be perceived as something more than an aging rocker trapped in his hometown. Outside, the depraved winds of January howled. The moon hung like an ice chip. Ike played us song after song, the unreleased shit, the heavy shit. He rang our ears with incandescence and would not let us sleep.

And weren’t we, as Drooling Fanatics, thrilled? I certainly was. But The Close had descended into a funk. He pulled me aside and insisted we leave.

“Are you crazy? Ike’s playing us the unreleased shit!”

“I gotta get out of here,” he snapped.

We drove back to the hotel in silence, and I knew what it was really about because, for all our teasing, I had come to love The Close, and he was an orphan now, whether or not he chose to admit that to himself. His mother was gone, he’d refused to make his peace with her, to forgive her transgressions, and so, by the dependable math of
Catholic guilt—and The Close, like Ike, was nothing if not a Catholic—he was now carrying her body on his conscience.

I thought about the afternoon, five years ago, when The Close’s phone had rung and his voice had gone eerily flat. “How did you get this number?” he said, over and over. Then he hung up.

“Who was
that?”
I asked.

“My mother,” The Close said. “The whore.”

It was like staring into a part of him I’d never seen before. Because The Close had always portrayed himself as a comic figure, a profane braggart who enjoyed discussing the size of his cock and the sexual damage it might inflict on his lovers. I’d always laughed at this trash talk, but now it was seeming much less funny, more like the revenge he sought for his mother’s betrayal.

The Close had been her firstborn, after all, and loved by her with unusual fervor. He had loved her too, as a child does, which is to say helplessly. He was a sensitive kid, melancholy, the sort who needs a mama. But she’d split, and he’d turned to his father, a paragon of male virtue. The Close spent his life trying to live up to that paragon, often to the point of caricature. I’d seen pictures of him in his early twenties, when he was a semiprofessional bodybuilder, a ’roid monkey down in Myrtle Beach, greasing his delts and posing in banana sacks. This was all part of the act.

But it didn’t last. Depression walloped him into the waiting arms of literature. He left central Jersey behind and shipped off to grad school and found in words, in the turbulent rhythms of Gerard Manley Hopkins especially, a new passion. How did one explain this to a family of blue-collar Italians?
Hey guys, I’m in love with a repressed homosexual Jesuit priest poet. No, it’s not like that. Really
.

Even before literature, though, he’d found music. His life was like mine, like Erin’s, like the lives of all Drooling Fanatics, a struggle to reach the feelings forbidden within the confines of our families. He’d measured that life not in coffee spoons but in rock
stars—Springsteen, Axl Rose, and now Ike, men who affirmed for him the rescuing power of personal mythology. This was why he’d insisted we split: it had been too painful for him to see Ike in such a needy state.

He’d never admit to any of this, of course. That was part of his confounding charm. But I knew he was hurting, somewhere beneath the bullshit. Just before sleep, I asked The Close if he was doing all right.

There was a lengthy pause.

“I feel like Ikeal got very close to The Close today,” he said, in his loud Jersey voice. “He had a Close encounter. And as you could see, he did not want me to leave. He gave me drugs. He gave me songs. He damn near gave me his daughter.”

“I meant more on an emotional level,” I said.

“I think it’s accurate to say that she’s in love with me,” The Close announced. “She’s a girl of great heart and she recognizes another great heart.”

Was Ike Reilly sorry to see us go? I still can’t decide.

I know only that we were ready to go, having put undue pressure on the tenuous bond that exists between the Drooling Fanatic and his or her beloved. It wasn’t that Ike had let us down. On the contrary, we left Libertyville more convinced than ever of his genius. It was what lived beneath his genius that spooked us, the immense doubt. We want, more than anything, to preserve our mythologies.

We sloshed south toward O’Hare under clouds the color of old nickels. Our rental smelled of chemical despair. The Close drove with the casual belligerence of his native state. I wanted to be able to do something for him. I knew he’d make himself pay later for this trip and this made me feel very tender toward him, very responsible. Only I didn’t know what to do. Men can so rarely talk with any degree of honesty.

So I let Ike rescue us, as he had so many times before.
We are only here in moments
, he sang. And later, from another song,
Today we buried our mother/We laid the poor woman to rest/Everyone got a new suit/And my sister wore an ivory dress
. And The Close—poor Close!—who so loved his mother that he could only hate her, smiled and sang along.

List #5        

I hope it’s good and clear by now that I have no business rendering critical judgments of pop music. There is one area, however, where I lay claim to being an expert: cover songs. I attribute this not just to my ongoing effort to convince every musician I’ve ever met to cover the song “No Scrubs” by TLC, but to the fact that in 2003 my pal Tim and I launched a series called Cover 2 Cover. Writers read their favorite writers, bands played their favorite covers, people got drunk, Tim flirted incessantly, and I got to be the DJ. This required me to compile a library of five hundred covers, from which I now happily skim the cream: