Bright Shards of Someplace Else (20 page)

But that, thank god, is all in the past now. Five years down the rabbit hole was plenty. I no longer let myself get involved. I've let myself mourn. I've started working at the garden again, dating a woman named Natalie who knows only the basics about Dee—druggie son, liar, a sad part of my past, a toxic person, if he calls hang up. I'm even ready, now, to write again, something that was impossible when I was involved with Dee's dramas. That's why I'm here. I want to make music again with my old partner—it's time to return to who I was before Dee. Levi has been calling me on and off over the past five years, trying to entice me to write another album. He must have been surprised when I called him and finally agreed. If Levi found out about Dee, I thought, it would be through the songs I'd write.

Dee is well into his story now. He's telling us about wandering into a neighborhood he's never been in before, still lost, still looking for his apartment. It's a bad part of town—and bad for Detroit is plenty bad—and everyone in this neighborhood is squatting in vacated homes. No one owns anything. He enters an old church. The stained glass windows are all broken. Lead solder seams that once marked out the profiles of saints now snake through open space. Someone's painted a mural of a pastoral scene on the bare lath—probably an artist trying to bring a bit of beauty, or just intention, to a place marked by ruin and randomness. Dee walks straight into the wall, thinking
he's mounting a velvety hillock. He passes clusters of gang members who ignore him out of sheer surprise, the way a cat will back away from an approaching mouse, as if out of respect for the depth of its suicidal impulse. He stumbles into a huge plastic bag filled with pop cans dragged by an elderly lady riding a Hoveround stamped with the logo of a long-closed supermarket. “There was nothing keeping me going,” Dee explains, “but the thought of ‘getting home,' which itself, repeated in my head, was basically just a mindless chant. You know, how your name sounds if you repeat it too much? Not only does it not seem like ‘you,' it doesn't seem like anything. It seems to just erase more of you the more you say it.”

Lucinda makes small, sweet little coos of sympathy with regularity. Levi's two silent, sphinxlike dogs pad in and lower into the sentry position by our chairs, their legs folding under with a perfect, luxurious grace, like the smooth mechanism of a fine pocketknife. Levi's chin is cupped in his hands as he nods along to Dee's words. It's shocking how little Levi has changed over the years. His face is still handsome, just blurred at its edges, his jaw softened in flesh. This does not make him look old but rather uncontained, a face rimmed by a diffuse halo of skin. The skin under Levi's eyes, unlike mine, is pristine and glowing, bright as if someone had dropped a tea light in his empty head. And he's maintained his general expression—the familiar empathy and knowingness that used to make me feel both understood and in-substantial, as if the largesse of his person were being wasted by turning its focus on me.

“Then I walk past these screaming people. Someone grabs my shirt. I think I'm about to be mugged, but I can't get away. It's like I'm moving underwater and everyone else is on dry land …”

The story is reaching its climax, I can feel it. The drugs, it seems, have impaired everything in Dee but his grasp of the story arc. A bathroom break might spare me the triumphant rise of Dee's voice, the careen into lyricism. I get up without a backward glance, although I can hear Dee taking a breath, the silverware clinking again, attention
turning to the dogs. The bathroom is down a hall so wide that it seems like another room. This whole place is cavernous, open-plan: cathedral ceilings, massive reclaimed wood beams hung with art prints. There are a few framed gold and platinum records on the wall and a picture of Levi and me in the early seventies, both of our feet propped up on a rock, the guitar resting between us. I had a kind of sleepy-eyed shy smile, a look that spoke of both bliss and nerves—Levi's talent intimidated me then, though I was thrilled to be part of it. Those feelings seem so long ago, and I doubt if I ever have that look on my face anymore. Maybe expressions rotate out of a person's face for good, like a song dropped from a set list.

I splash water on my face and try to clear my head. When I turn off the sink, someone's ring slides off the basin and pings around the bowl. It's a little silver seahorse, curving around to touch its snout to its swirled tail. I slip it in my pocket, since I don't want to leave it out for Dee to lift. It's late and Levi's already invited him to stay the night, but he'll be gone tomorrow morning—I'll make sure of it. No reason to worry. But why show up now? Here? I haven't seen him in a year or heard from him in weeks, and even then the calls were brief, garbled, raving pleas for money that ended when I put the phone down with a soft click, a humane death to his voice. It's like he's intuited how important this is for me, how potentially cleansing and healing, and he's made sure to inject his toxic presence. So much effort to find me, too. Vicki had mentioned where I was (why did I tell her? And she him?), and then he got online and scoured Levi's fansites and an aerial map for the compound's location. He was lost for a few hours on the twisty mountain roads but then found it—a miracle, he claims, another shimmering link on the chain of serendipity that includes the amazing story he's got to tell.

When I get back to the table, Dee is speaking in low, incantatory tones.

“The lights were flashing all around and I was so high that every one of them had tracers coming off it, as if I was walking under this
glittery web. There was broken glass all around but I didn't notice it. This guy was laying there and people were screaming and running around and I guess—this is what people tell me later—that I walked up deadly calm and started performing
CPR
. We were so far out the cops were really slow getting there—this is Detroit, after all. I was giving compressions, like two hundred a minute, for ten minutes. This is almost humanly impossible. Some say it might be a world record. I didn't even realize what I was doing. I was so messed up I thought I was still in the club and this was some dance. I just kept going. It felt wonderful. I just remember seeing these lights going up and down and hearing this
click click
sound. That was the cartilage over the sternum, I'm told. The guy was certainly dead for most of that time. Then, right when help got there, he coughed, arched up under me, looked me in the eye. I just walked away and down the street … and all these people followed me, trying to thank me. They took me to the hospital with them and I slowly sobered up. The guy was alive. And here's the thing …”

Dee tries to catch my eye but I duck down and pet the dogs. “The thing is, when I felt that man—Miguel's—life return, something happened to me, too. I mean, I literally felt the force of my own life—before all the drugs and issues—leap back into me. I realized, then and there, that I would never use again. For real. And I haven't. Three weeks and going strong. It's like … not only did I restart Miguel's heart but my own.”

Levi watches Dee with a twitching mouth that flicks into a small smile whenever Dee drives his story into a new absurdity. Of course they aren't absurdities to Levi. He's positively moved. When Dee falls silent, Levi springs forward, knocking down a salt shaker. “That is amazing, man. I have never heard anything more beautiful. You are so much like your Dad … you just have a way with words! God, Danny. I can't believe this kid!” He turns to me with his familiar look of awe (for what doesn't awe Levi?) and points from Dee to me and back. I shrug.

“He knows how to spin a tale,” I say, echoing what the cops had said to me the first time I picked him up from an overnighter in jail.

After dinner, I head straight to my cabin, locking it in case Dee gets any ideas about dropping by for a little heart-to-heart. Then I call Natalie. She picks up right away, her voice sounding warm but a little edgy, as if whatever she's about to hear might require her to shift quickly into tough love. Natalie teaches in one of the worst schools in Detroit, where she is beloved and feared. There was a rumor going around that she reduced the superintendent to tears at a board meeting, then stopped anyone from offering him a Kleenex so he could experience the discomfort and filth his students did every day. This boldness is all the more disarming considering her face—pale, round, with an inexorable, stony quietude. Everything—from the way she kisses to the way she orders a bottle of wine—is done with a kind of resolute deliberateness, as if she'd considered the smoothest, truest way long before she had been called upon to act.

She listens for a few moments—but right when I'm getting to the nonsense about the
CPR
world record, she interrupts me.

“I don't think you should be putting this much energy toward him. Just don't engage. If you tell him to leave because he's on drugs, then he's got to stay to show you he's not. Attention will encourage him. Believe me, I know how this works. And it's not as if Dee has a long attention span anyway—remember what you told me about his landscaping business? He'll leave. Give it a few days.”

She's probably right, but I don't like how she just rolls over the fact that I might be rattled at Dee's sudden appearance, especially when I'm just now feeling ready to song-write again. But Natalie's an emotional minimalist who doesn't need the gory details to read a situation correctly. And she's right about Dee—the landscaping idea, which occurred to him during a brief sober period, lasted less than twenty-four hours. He spent a solid twenty of those hours designing the tree logo
that would go on his business cards—drawing and redrawing it in my living room, making it more and more fantastical and symbolic, using up every scrap of paper on a swirling design that incorporated the whole universe into a knothole in the tree's base. For years afterward I'd find them: a bird's nest scribbled on an old TV guide, a root system on a receipt, a bough creeping over the stamps in my passport.

The next morning, the first thing I hear upon waking is a high, squeaky warble and the sound of a lazily plucked guitar. I recognize that I'm-afraid-to-sing-for-real falsetto—Dee. And the guitar, Levi. The studio is next door to my cabin, and the unwelcome sounds come through the open window. I get up and see my computer is still open from last night, when I tried to verify Dee's story. Had he really set a world record for chest compression per minute and saved a man's life? But even if was true, did it matter? The ridiculous turns of his life seem like just more evidence of his addiction—it's like a stoner is writing his fate. I get out my notebook and try to remember some ideas I jotted down last night. After a while, Levi knocks on the door.

“Danny-boy, get up and jam with us! We're having a blast.”

I step outside to talk to him.

“Look, Levi, I'm not going to jam with him. He's a junkie. I'm sorry he showed up here. You don't want to get invested in anything he does; he's not reliable. He needs to get back into rehab.”

Levi looks me in the eye for a long moment. His gray hair stands up in a fuzzed swirl atop his head, like a novelty halo. He lifts his hand briefly and makes a loose cup around his ear, as if he misheard. Then he turns both hands up and speaks.

“Are you serious, Danny? Didn't you hear him last night? It sounds like he's over all that. Why not give him a chance?”

I can't blame Levi for being charmed—I've been there enough myself—but his words make me think he's unusually gullible. Dee's story was the kind of improbable drama that users cling to. Real recovery
doesn't come from the flash-pop of some crazy encounter, and Levi should at least know that.

“Levi, I'm serious. You don't know him. He's just pretending. This is some ruse, some ploy to get into my good graces or get money or I don't even want to think about what he's trying to do. You don't know the history here—”

“Danny, let him stay here for now. Come on. We'll ask him to leave if something goes wrong, but otherwise? It might be fun! We've got plenty of room here. We need a young guy around to keep us two old goats fresh …”

Levi glances at the main house, where Lucinda, blue scarves streaming off her neck, bobs past the window like an exotic fish. “Dang it, Lucinda's waiting for me. Totally forgot! I'm supposed to take her to the garden this morning to harvest some stuff for tonight. Did you know we have a farm share down the road? It's a great place—the old guy named Gregors owns it. When he learned I was a rock star, he said that originally Woodstock was going to be on his property but the hippies got a bad vibe from his sheep, since they all were so well-behaved and lined up for their feed. They thought he was fascist and split …”

“Levi, I don't want to get into too much detail but Dee—”

“Hey, Danny, I've got to run. We'll talk later. Lucinda's giving me the eye. Women! You know what's scary? Watching her weed. Ever notice how aggressive women are about stuff like that? They can be all butterflies and rainbows but let them loose on dandelions and they become these focused little wildcats all claw, claw, claw …” He continues talking as he backs away, his step so light on the autumn leaves that he could be mistaken for a bounding squirrel.

It's not particularly to my son's credit that he's seduced Levi with his storytelling. Levi, for all his sophistication as a performer and musician, is a strangely guileless man, the kind of person whose brilliance,
you might say, comes from that ability to be seduced, to emotionally connect with anyone and anything. No matter what he sings, he finds something beautiful and authentic within the words. I've always seen him as a kind of idiot savant, a brilliant, complex performer unburdened by actually being brilliant or complex.

Levi and I had a good string of hits from about 1973 to 1980. I'd even toured with him, generating new songs on the road. But by the eighties, our music had fallen out of favor, and we both used this as an opportunity to pursue other projects. Neither of us really recreated our early successes, but Levi did as well as an out-of-vogue folk rocker can reasonably expect, landing soundtrack work (“Cloud Tears” for that cartoon, “Davy Jones' Lockdown” for that ridiculous pirate/prison film). He elevated even that schlock to the point where I had tears in my eyes when I took my kids to see them and heard Levi singing over the credits. I did okay too, for a while, and landed on the adult contemporary chart with one forgettable tune. Then my career stalled out on one particular song I'd been hired to write for an up-and-coming neo-soul songstress. Her manager was looking for a simple Motown classic that would show off the girl's voice, but I became so taken with her tone and phrasing that I wanted to do something more ambitious, a little opus, a kind of Chapin's “Taxi” with a high-flying bridge. I wrote pages and pages, fifteen minutes worth of bittersweet sentiments (nothing the girl could have sung convincingly—she was just shy of twenty), wrote long past when the manager needed the lyrics, long past when the singer put out her first and last small-label album, long past when she gave up her music career and got into real estate (last I heard). I planned on finishing it for someone else—or for its own sake—but it never got done. The longer I worked the more tight and convoluted it became, and the simple thread of loss I hoped to convey became a hopeless tangle of abstraction and symbol that I tried to unweave for years before giving up.