They gave it to him. That fall, he took Music Appreciation, Sociology, and English, and that winter he took Music Appreciation II, Music Theory, and History of Modern Music. Every so often he called home and, after saying, “How’s it going?,” brought up a problem he was having with the car, elaborated his penury, or asked Lydia to sew something for him. Most of the time, when Lydia invited Barry to dinner, he answered that he had other plans, but once in a while he said yes and showed up with baskets of laundry. Over dinner he made use of face time with his parents to reiterate his car problems, until Walter offered to look under the hood. Before leaving, Barry ritually went to the basement to search for things he wanted in the junk pile he’d left behind.
In 1977, Barry didn’t make it home for Thanksgiving because of a car trip with friends for something music-related. For Christmas, though, he showed, and so did Tina, who now lived in a dorm at the University of Washington instead of with her parents, which would have been cheaper. “Ingrates,” Walter muttered to Lydia in the kitchen, after the kids responded to their gifts with nonchalance. “At least they’re here,” she replied.
Tina gave Walter a used tennis racket and tennis balls, and Barry gave him a pine-scented car freshener, three twenty-four-ounce bottles of beer, coasters, and a harmonica he blew demonstration riffs on with expertise. Praise from Lydia led later in the day to the loud revelation that Barry was a good guitarist and an even better drummer. Barry now wanted to apply to Washington State, about three hundred miles away, in Pullman, to study political science. Also, he knew a couple of guys there who wanted him in their band, playing drums. “A band,” said Lydia. “What’s its name?”
“They started out as Vomit in high school but now they’re called Kill All Parents,” answered Barry. “Just in case you’re clueless, that was sarcasm.”
“Okay,” said Walter.
“I actually want to go to WSU just to get stoned and rock out.”
“Barry,” said Lydia.
“And take acid and get arrested and hang out with devil worshippers.”
“Barry,” repeated Lydia.
“And fuck some farm girls—preferably virgins.”
“Hey,” countered Walter.
They made a deposit to hold Barry’s place at WSU. That summer, Barry quit his restaurant job and played gigs with—the real name—DeathTrap. DeathTrap, explained Barry, was “parody of heavy metal. Really bad metal. Doom metal. We’re a parody band.” They heard from him only once all June, when he called collect to say his car was overheating and to ask Walter for suggestions about addressing this problem; he wanted to know what cheap solutions he could try before taking it into a shop. Walter made a phone diagnosis of “either thermostat or water pump,” then asked, at Lydia’s urging—and scrutinized by her as if she was sure he’d say the wrong thing—if they would see Barry on the Fourth.
“Lemme get my car straightened out,” he answered. “I can’t think that far ahead right now.”
“It’s next week.”
“Okay,” said Barry. “Good to know. But right now my car is, like, steaming all the time. It—”
“Bring it to the island,” Walter urged. “Keep it topped off between now and then, and when you come for the Fourth, we’ll work on it.”
Barry said, “Uh, I’m pretty sure we have, like, a huge gig then. Like a huge, patriotic, America thing. A Mom-Dad-and-apple-pie thing.”
He called the next time in mid-July, saying, “Now something’s really wrong with the car,” before describing, at Walter’s behest, all the noises it made while dying on a lonely highway in eastern Washington. Lydia, on the other line, said, “So how did you get to a phone?”
“Hitched.”
“You should never hitchhike, Barry,” said Lydia. “Never, ever, ever. Please.”
“Okay, great, good advice, I got that. But the main thing is, my car’s fucked.”
Walter sighed loudly into the receiver. “How often,” he asked, “did you check the oil?”
“How would I know?”
“Did you ever check the oil?”
“I don’t know.”
“You either checked it or you didn’t check it. It’s not that complicated. It sounds to me like you never checked it.”
“Oh,” said Barry.
“You can’t just drive and not check the oil.”
No answer came.
“That was a good car before you didn’t check the oil.”
“Right,” said Barry. “I fucked up the car. I totally fucked it up.”
“Help him,” put in Lydia. “He needs help, Walter. This is a cry for help.”
This was also, thought Walter, typical of her, typical of his marriage, and typical of what happened, every time, with the kids—this was typical of everything. “I am helping him,” he said.
“You’re not helping anything,” Lydia snapped. “Barry,” she went on, “let me give you a credit-card number. That way you can have it towed.”
“Go ahead,” said Barry. “I’ll write it on my hand. I’m in a phone booth in Walla Walla, and it’s a hundred degrees—I’m fucking boiling.”
“Drink water,” said Lydia. “Are you ready?”
She gave him the number, and when she was done, Barry said, “I gotta go. It’s way too fucking boiling.”
“The language,” answered Lydia. “Your language really hurts me. I know you use that language in your world, but I would appreciate it if you didn’t put it in my ears, please. It’s like I’m being stabbed in the heart when I hear you talk like that. You’re my son.”
“Okay,” said Barry. “Gotta go.”
He went. Lydia and Walter remained on the line, though, in different parts of the house. “I suppose this is my fault, too,” said Walter, over a static-filled and freighted dial tone.
“He called for help.”
“I’m right,” said Walter. “Everything’s my fault. Nothing that happens isn’t my fault. Dear.”
“Now you’re being sarcastic again. Why are you being sarcastic again? I don’t understand why you do that.”
“I’m sorry if I’m being sarcastic again. I didn’t mean to be sarcastic,” said Walter. “My sarcasm is something I battle with.”
On they went, in that vein, as they always did.
In late August, Walter got the chance to do something good, because Barry called from WSU, and the upshot was, there were things Barry needed, mainly an amp he’d stored in the basement, but also some clothes he’d left behind, and all of his Dungeons and Dragons stuff, which he was going to sell. If anyone, said Barry, happened to be coming this way in the near future, maybe they could “just throw it all in” and Barry could “meet them or something.”
Lydia leapt at this opportunity and made a plan. She would bake peanut-butter cookies, because Barry liked them, and Walter would take to Pullman the cookies, amp, clothes, Dungeons and Dragons box, and a new men’s winter coat Lydia had bought at Penney’s. He would leave on Saturday morning, meet up with Barry—Barry had told Lydia, “Dad can come up to my room or whatever”—they would tour campus together, eat a restaurant meal, and, said Lydia, “most importantly, connect.” Then Walter would turn around and drive back, even though a normal person—obviously—would stay overnight after a trip of nearly three hundred miles. But, having wandered out of his marriage, and having gotten caught at it, Walter was in no position to argue about the plan. He would have to drive ten hours in one day. Overnight was for trustworthy husbands.
On Saturday morning, Lydia was up at four. She told Walter, getting out of bed, that she needed time not only to bake the cookies but to let them cool before putting them in a tin. “She makes such a big deal about everything,” he thought. “Barry doesn’t care about cookies.”
Lydia pecked Walter on the cheek before he left. “Be nice, now,” she said. “Give Barry a kiss for me. Will you give him a kiss? And make sure he gets his cookies.”
Walter did what he always did while driving—fiddled with his radio,
got irritated at other drivers, changed lanes a lot, and thought about his problems. There were a number of late-summer RVs on the road, driven by retired guys who, glimpsed in passing, made Walter’s heart drop. “I’m not there yet,” he said to himself, “but the fact is, I’m getting there, either that or die first—please, God, don’t let me ever buy an RV, let me die before that happens; if I ever start thinking about buying an RV, kill me.”
After ninety minutes, Walter’s discipline broke down and he ate two peanut-butter cookies. He noted how they’d been arranged carefully in the tin, with wax paper between the layers. After taking a third, he did some rearranging to make it look like he hadn’t pilfered. At Ellensburg, where the usual strong wind was blowing from behind a slaughterhouse, he stopped for gas and ate a fourth cookie. Thereafter, he had minor fun passing other drivers, but mostly it was just a long grunt over bad roads with no cars on them. Tired of driving, and knowing he shouldn’t make any more incursions into Lydia’s sacred tin, he stopped in Washtucna and bought a package of Chips Ahoy! Walter ate them on a park bench while watching, as if not watching, two young mothers pushing kids on swings. One had a well-shaped, elegant ass—too elegant, he thought, for a woman in a wheat town. He imagined she wanted to leave Washtucna for a bigger place with more interesting people. He imagined he might represent this opportunity to her. Eventually, he just felt ridiculous—a grown man sitting by himself on a park bench, eating Chips Ahoy! and leering at innocents.
Back on 26, after passing through what felt like limitless wheat fields, he arrived in Pullman. Pullman turned out to be a few blocks of brick buildings plus some sprawl and a good-sized campus. Walter tracked down Barry’s dorm room, but Barry wasn’t there, and none of the diffident denizens Walter encountered, on Floor Three or elsewhere, knew a thing about his whereabouts. Walter retreated to the passenger seat of his car, where he lay back with his windows open and watched girls from behind his sunglasses. “They wouldn’t give me the time of day,” he thought. “I’m too old.” On the other hand, the sun felt pretty grand, and a golden late-summer light suffused the youthful scene. The kids were winsome. The air was clean. Nevertheless, still no Barry, so after a while Walter went back into the dorm and explained himself to the farm boy in the office, who just sat there looking at Walter’s driver’s license and tapping an empty Pepsi can. Walter, taking the bull by the horns, asked if there was a storage room on the premises. “No, not really, but I guess you could just like leave your stuff here in the office,” the boy answered, and giggled nervously.
Wondering why this labor had fallen to him, Walter hauled Barry’s crap inside, but left the tin of cookies on the car seat for—at some point—a direct hand-over. Then he sat in a dorm commons watching televised golf with two Cougars. He said, “You guys have a blowout last night?” and one answered “Mmmmm,” and then he asked, “Big party?” and the other guy answered, “Massive.” They henceforth ignored Walter so completely that he began to understand his presence as an offense. Between that, the waiting, the long drive, and the farm boy in the office, Walter now felt darkly angry. Where was Barry? What was going on? “I’m not a delivery service,” he thought, “and I have a right, at the very least, to a timely greeting from my son, and maybe even to some gratitude for the fact that I drove all the way out here.” Then he got up and stuffed coins in a pay phone. “This is what I mean,” he told Lydia.
“Try to be patient.”
“I am being patient.”
“You don’t sound patient, Walter.”
“You’re reading my tone again. It’s my words, not my tone.”
“You’re never patient, though. It’s not just now.”
“Where’s Barry?”
“Patience.”
Walter drove around until he found a café, where he ate a patty melt and scanned the campus newspaper. Every page was poorly laid out, and most of the articles, instead of supplying news, hammered readers with sophomoric opinions rendered as the final word. Barely engaged, Walter flipped from “Campus Life” to “Letters and Comments” and finally to “Arts and Entertainment,” where the lead story was a double movie review—Bill Murray in Meatballs, Roger Moore in Moonraker. Walter wished he had a different newspaper.
Then, lo and behold, in the bottom corner of page 8, an article promoted a “Battle of the Bands” to be held at Ensminger Pavilion that night, and one of the bands, it said, was “eclectic, cerebral, hard-core DeathTrap.”
Once again, Walter called Lydia. “Overnight?” she said. “I guess you have to, if you want to see Barry, and I support that kind of thing completely, you know, you spending time with Barry.”
“It sounds like you still have a big trust issue, though.”
“I still have a gigantic trust issue, Walter.”
“Lydia,” he said, “I love you.”
He hung up and got a room at the Cougar Land Motel, where he watched the second half of a Rock Hudson movie. When it was over, he called Barry’s dorm and let the phone ring interminably. Finally, someone picked up and said, “He’s not here. I don’t know where he is,” over the top of loud music, and promised unconvincingly to tell Barry that his father was in town, staying at the Cougar Land, in Room 15. Next, Walter watched bowling and toyed with the idea of finding a decent happy-hour bar. It was just a thought, though; instead, he took a nap and a shower and, after eating a hamburger from a bag, found his way to Ensminger Pavilion, which looked like what it was—a hayseed concert hall smelling of livestock, with five hundred college kids packed in like cows, yelling, reeling, drinking, and smoking pot, while something vaguely resembling music was emitted by a band with no talent.
At ten-thirty, DeathTrap came onstage, and there was Barry in black leather pants, shambling toward a battered drum set, shirtless, pale, stringy, even gaunt, but with a splooch of stomach hanging over his pant waist and a drumstick between his teeth. He’d changed his hairstyle to bald, and, if Walter was seeing right from the back of the hall, he’d painted his lips like Dracula’s after a kill.
There was nothing for Barry to do at first except beat on a tom-tom and crash a cymbal while six college girls in white dresses were “sacrificed” onstage, one at a time, by a studly-looking guy—the band’s lead singer—who bit each, from behind, on the neck, hard, which appeared to elicit, from each, a fantastic orgasm. All of this while a dwarfish sideman chanted things like “The dark one has come!” and “Lusty wench, let thy blood feed Lucifer!” “Lydia would hate this,” thought Walter.
After each girl had come, and dropped to the floor, they suddenly all rose from the dead as one and, standing at six mikes, sang, to Barry’s beat, “Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL!” With that, the lead singer took center stage.
The other bands had been loud, but DeathTrap was louder. The resurrected girls got down on all fours, and the lead singer, sporting a codpiece, cavorted among them with theater and irony, stopping now and then to straddle one and hump her, much to the delight of the crowd. Barry pretended not to notice, and wailed away primitively, and threw and broke sticks. To Walter he seemed desperately self-aware, as though, instead of playing the drums for an eclectic, cerebral, hard-core band, he was making fun of someone who played drums for a group like that. Walter felt hollow—ill in his soul. It was so inexplicable, wounding, and tragic that his son had chosen such dark perversity from among all the choices life offered.
After its forty-five-minute assault on good taste and social norms, DeathTrap gleefully left the stage, Barry sieg-Heil-ing and goose-stepping away with a drumstick protruding from the fly of his pants like a long and very thin erection. Walter hurried outside, to a set of double doors at the back of the pavilion, where he was stopped by a bouncer with a badge reading manager—actually, a kid who’d spent a lot of time in a weight room. “I don’t care if you’re God, sir,” he said, “you have to have a pass to go in here.”
“Come on,” said Walter. “Be logical about it.”
“I am being logical.
And the logic is, you can’t go in without a pass.”
“But that’s not logical,” Walter insisted. “Obviously, you don’t care about being logical, because if—”
“Hey,” said the bouncer, blocking Walter’s way when he tried to bluster past, “get the fuck out of here.”
Walter sat in his car for over an hour, watching the back entrance for a sign of his son, who finally came out with a cigarette between his lips and his arm around the waist of a girl Walter recognized as a sacrificed virgin. “About time,” thought Walter, then struggled out from behind his steering wheel and, feeling heartless now, headed for a showdown. The tang of pot hung on the air, and the stars and moon looked more vivid than at home. Many of the Battle of the Bands fans were leaving. Walter, despite his foul mood, saw beauty in the moment: the concert dénouement, the August warmth, the young people showing off attractive skin, and—the main thing pervading all of it—the probability that a lot of them were going to have sex in the next hour. It was great, except that he was so pissed at his son that everything else was in the background.
“Barry!” he called. “Jesus!”
Barry turned toward his father’s voice, took the cigarette out of his mouth, tossed it, and disengaged from his virgin. “Barry!” repeated Walter. “What the hell is going on with you?”
When he got close—close enough to smell pot on his son’s breath—Barry was staring at the ground. The virgin, who wasn’t really all that cute, looked Walter over and then looked away as if at something across the parking lot. He could see, in her face, that she’d decided to keep mum, and to stay invisible, through whatever was about to happen between this middle-aged guy and Barry. “Hey,” said Barry, “how’s it going?”