The Heavy

I was angry as hell because a half-baked Nick wouldn’t let me backstage. The next day I asked him about it. 

It’s not like that, kid. Don’t be like that. 

In the old days, that is to say every day before that day, Nick had my name on a list, which was unnecessary because there was no guard and no list and I have no name. When I walked up to that door and found it locked I was mad as hell. I found a man who looked like the kind of man with keys, the man who lets you in places, but I couldn’t ask him anything. I just kept walking. I walked three miles back to my apartment I share with Lucy Scary and I wept. 

It’s not my fault, kid. I was getting head. 

I needed you. If you only knew, you would have let me in.  

Get some sleep. We can talk about this tomorrow. 

It is tomorrow. I already slept. If it’s not now, then we can never talk about it. If that’s what you want, kid.

It’s not what I want. 

Whatever you say, kid. 

‍ ‍The story of how I met Nick: 

Lucy Scary is not her real name. Her real name is Analise. Analise is the only other person from my hometown who lives here. We didn’t come out together. It just happened that way. 

Analise in high school hung out with this boy Bob. Bob had a curly carrot top head, the kind you hate for being different. He had an eating disorder he was seeing a doctor about and in the winter he’d wear this big fuck-off coat he never took off and you never could tell if he was fat or skinny and I guess it didn’t really matter because he was different and people hated him. 

Bob and Analise were fucking without protection because Bob gave her The Pill he said he stole from his doctor which only made him more desirable. Except the pills he proctored were not The Pill and second semester junior year Analise got pregnant. 

She was a few years my junior. I never saw her pregnant, only heard about it through the pipeline.

By that point I had already graduated with a 3.8 GPA and left. My aunt said if I really wanted to leave, I could live with her if I enrolled in a state college that was trying to pay me for my GPA. 

State school is bullshit, I told her. Why should someone else pay my way through school? I’m a man. I carry a burden. 

You want to go somewhere else; spend your whole life climbing out of debt? 

I’m not going to school. I already went to school. Anything they think they can teach me, I can learn without them. 

You wanna be a dirtbag your whole life? 

Only a dirtbag would fall for school. 

You’re no better than your father. 

She was right. I am no better than my father. I am my father. I am a good man. I am a bad man. If she was not my father’s sister, she would not have said those things. 

I left the state for a better state.

In the better state I had no job and no money. It was a good life while it lasted. I slept in my car. I sang on streetcorners and drummed my knees until the businesses called the cops and the cops came and told me you needed a buskers licence to sing on streetcorners. 

One day the cops were under a lot of pressure because one of them killed an unarmed black kid and people were not happy. They used this fact to defend themselves when instead of letting me off with a warning they took me back in their police car. 

It’s a tough time for us right now. Everyone is talking about this kid. We can’t help but hold you for the night. 

Why do you think he did it? 

Probably thought the kid had a gun. 

But he didn’t. 

Maybe he should have. 

I spent the night in the drunk tank at the station with three other men, none of them drunks. One of them, a father, was trying to get out of going to a middle school band recital where his son played the violin.

There is nothing wrong with the violin, he said. But he doesn’t know how to play for shit. I can’t bear to watch him slaughter that thing. I’ve never been more ashamed of anything in my life. 

The second man was homeless and in the tank for the third time this week. 

I’m trying to get into prison for health insurance. I have a mole on my left shoulder that’s driving me mad. But I’m not a bad person. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I just want to go away for a while. So I sleep in the wrong place at the wrong time and I think eventually they will take me away for good. 

The third man was Nick. Nick had a soft pack of light cigarettes rolled up in a yellowed sleeve. 

You got a light? 

No, I said. I don’t smoke. 

You think any of these cops got a light? 

I don’t think they’ll let you smoke in here. 

Nick shrugged. You never know, he said. 

That’s a cool tattoo, I said looking at a tattoo he had on his right bicep of an old hooded woman with a single oversized blue eye. 

That’s the oracle. When I need something, she tells me. 

What do you need? 

A new lead for this song. 

I sing. Maybe she led you to me. 

It’s not that kind of song. I’m looking for weight. 

Weight? 

Yeah, kid. Weight. 

In the morning, they let us go, except for the father who had to stay to settle an unpaid parking ticket. 

‍ ‍The story of how I came to shack up with Lucy Scary:

Nick took me to his apartment, a room he rented in the attic of a Filipino woman’s single-family home. 

Every month she sent money home to her family so they could come live with her, but every month the family grew and it became more difficult to get out, so she bought this place to rent rooms to upandcomings as a way to help with the income imbalance. 

The house was falling apart and in a bad part of town, but rent was cheap. There were always noises in the walls, but I never met another person in that house. Nick explained that his roommates were tech startups, anarchists, lawyers, and draft-dodgers. I wasn’t aware there was a draft, but Nick said it is never too early to fuck over the selective service. 

When I turned eighteen, my forms came in the mail. They explained how to enroll and that it was a felony not to. 

They won’t take my boy, my mother said. You fill out that card, but they won’t take my boy. They can have someone else’s. 

You would send another mother’s boy to war, my father asked. 

In a heartbeat.

They’d send him back in a body bag. 

Better that boy than my boy. 

My father nodded and went back to his TV program. He was twenty years her senior and was one of the last boys sent to Vietnam. In Vietnam he did good things. He did unspeakable things. Sometimes he says many things. Sometimes he says nothing. Sometimes I am my father. Sometimes he is my son. 

Nick showed me his guitar collection. They were three electric bodies stacked in the corner of his room and none of them had strings. 

The one on the bottom is the heaviest, he said. I keep the others on top to help with the weight. You wouldn’t believe the sound out of that thing. 

How do you play a guitar with no strings? 

You can’t. 

I see. 

No you don’t. You don’t see a fuckign thing because all you do is think about yourself. 

Nick played every weeknight at The Paige, a sweaty dive on the outskirts of town popular with truckers, out-of-town businessmen, and twink hookers. My first time at The Paige I thought it considerate there was an ashtray on the slot machine and ice cubes in the urinals. 

There was a band of punk girls at my high school who used to play dive bars. They would have gone world tour if their drummer didn’t run off with the owner of one of the bars. When the owner’s wife found out she took her son and moved back home at fourty-three. It’s easy to forget that everyone has a back home even in your hometown. The bassist of the band, also an accomplished harpist, played my grandfather’s wake. Her birth name was Sally, but everybody called her Worm. When the wake was over, my mother went up to her and said thank you Worm, that was beautiful. 

I’m sorry about your dad, Worm said. My dad is also dead, so I know how you feel.

You’re just a kid. You don't know how to feel about anything. 

If Nick was in a band, it was nothing like that. He was the only one up there. He brought all three guitars to each set. When he’d get to a certain point in the night, he would unwind the strings on his guitar and put them on the next one. 

I knew nothing about music, but he was right. Each guitar was heavier. By the end of the night the only sound was a deep black hum that thorned the heart. It led you through misery. The crowd at The Paige ate it up, even if they didn’t know it.

The lights at The Paige were set up in a way that Nick was invisible, except for a streak of red that cut right through his hair. As the night grew late and Nick played on, the red light shone through his sweat, breaking every hair, exploding. It was electric sex and I never knew it. 

One night before his set, Nick asked me to stop off for cigarettes before he went on, and I said yes even though I had no money. I’d been living out of his room hoping he wouldn’t notice. Across from The Paige was an old gas station. The pumps were taped off, but the convenience store still operated, though not under the name on the sign. Behind the counter stood, taller than me in purple, glittered heels, Analise. I told her I needed cigarettes, but had no money. She asked if I knew how to eat pussy. 

Yeah, but I’m no good at it. 

Show me what you do. 

I stuck out my tongue and showed her. 

That’s fucking disgusting, she said. 

I told her about Nick and the weight of sound. She said she would front the cigarettes, and if he was as heavy as I said, I could keep them.

Later, in confidence, Lucy Scary told me that she didn’t think Nick was any good. But she took pity on me because I was a dumb lost kid in a world that would spit me back out if it could. I was older than her, but she said that didn’t matter. I was afraid and she was not, and that was the only thing that mattered. 

After Nick’s show, Analise invited me back to her apartment. She said she didn’t know anyone from our hometown lived here. I told her I didn’t know where we were or why. I asked about her baby, and Analise said there was no baby. 

There never was, she said. I faked the whole thing. I even wore a pillow under my shirt that I would stuff with more and more feathers so people thought I was pregnant. Bob was so scared. He changed his name and his parents sent him to live with his aunt and uncle in Arizona. On my due date, I went behind a dumpster and dropped the pillow there. I was back in school the next day. When they asked about the baby, I told them I didn’t know, but it was probably dead. Bob must have found out, because I heard from a friend he was in rehab for a while and eventually killed himself. I ruined his life. Have you ever ruined someone’s life? 

No. 

I’ve never felt so proud. 

The name is as simple as it sounds. Lucy because she was loose, and Scary because people were afraid. But I wonder sometimes if this was just a story too because she was never loose with me and I was never afraid. Instead I felt lucky. I was in the presence of someone bound to make a name for themselves. 

Soon after, Lucy Scary made me an ultimatum. She said I could stay with her, but she didn’t want to go to any more of Nick’s shows. 

It’s all hell, she said. 

And all hell it was. I took my stuff from Nick’s room: a bag of clothes and a pack of matches from Lucy Scary’s work, and left. 

‍ ‍The story of how I discovered love: 

Nick and Lucy Scary got along just fine. They got along better when they were not fucking, but that would always lead to more fucking. There was only one rule: Lucy Scary would not go to Nick’s shows which was fine by Nick. 

Never mix work with pleasure, he told me. That’s a good life lesson. I’ve lived enough lives for a million lessons. I would write a book if only someone would ask. 

What I couldn’t tell Nick is that I was writing a book. I’d been sitting in on classes at the community center taught by a grad school dropout living with his parents. I couldn’t tell Nick or Lucy Scary about the book because it would break them. It was going to make me famous and it would break their hearts knowing I was going to be famous before them. 

When I was a kid I caught my dad smoking weed in the garage. He explained that I should only get involved in drugs if life demands it. He said that weed did not take him away; he didn’t disassociate. Instead, it removed the distance between the past and the present. Everything flooded back, direct, clearer than ever. Your worst years are so close behind, he said. Never think you have a leg up on them. 

My mother never knew about his drug use, or if she did, she never let on. My mother did not condone the use of recreational drugs. She voted conservatively and sent christmas cards out on time. Even while I was staying with Nick and later when I was staying with Lucy Scary, she never sent them to the wrong address. I hadn’t spoken to my mother in years, but that’s the thing about them. They carried you around the better part of a year and know you better than you could ever know yourself. This goes back through her mother and her mother before that until you get to the first mother. 

The first mother, even then, knew everything that was going to happen because she would have to carry it. She knew it all, and even then she said to the first father yes, yes fuck me and let it all happen. 

While my father closed the distance with drugs, my mother knew all the way to the end of the world because she was a mother.

Did you always know you wanted a kid, I asked her once. 

No one wants a kid. They want love. When you’re born you love your parents until it isn’t enough and then you love other people until that isn’t enough and eventually you have a kid because love is nothing like the way you love your child. Tell me, do you think you know love? 

I do. 

You know nothing about love. 

Later, sitting in the back of The Paige working on my book with Nick’s weight sinking the roof on my shoulders, I wanted to ask him if he and Lucy Scary will ever have a child. I wanted to know if they had a child, would they name it after me. 

Nick finished his set and got off stage. I did not follow him because it was too late for me. The whole of life was now and I was nothing. But because I was nothing, I did not weep, for I did not know how.