Sinner

  “That won’t happen,” I replied, “because I doubt they’ll leave the keys in the car again. Wish me luck.”

  She did, but I didn’t feel lucky. I went into the diner.

  I spotted them immediately in one of the red vinyl booths. They looked like a strange album cover, a perfectly matched older couple perfectly mismatched with the lime green wall behind them. I had picked this diner as a meeting place because I thought it might be more their style, but it was possible my parents didn’t match anything in this town.

  They’d spotted me. They didn’t wave. That was fair. I deserved that.

  I stood at the head of the booth.

  “Hello, jolly parents,” I said. There was a very long pause. My mother dabbed her cheek with her napkin. “Can I join you?”

  My father nodded.

  The cameras settled across the way from us. My parents eyed them. In unison, they slid menus across the table to me.

  As I sat, my father said, “We didn’t order yet.”

  My mother asked, “What’s good here?” which was much better than any of the other questions I was afraid she was going to ask, like “Where have you been?” or “Why didn’t you call us?” or “Where is Victor?” or “Are you coming home?”

  The problem was that I wanted to answer something like, I’m unsure of this fine establishment’s specialties, but I imagine that friendly staffer there will enlighten us! and then whirl over to seize a busboy for a bit of dramatic theater. But something about how they’d opened the conversation — in the roles of my parents — seemed to block this option. It forced me to be their son. It forced me to be that other me. The old me.

  “I haven’t been here before,” I replied. Meekly. Gutlessly. My voice was a stranger to me. They were dressed the same as the last time I’d seen them, or maybe all of their clothing looked the same. Put my older brother in the booth beside me, and the St. Clair family would be as it always had been. I didn’t know why I had come. I couldn’t do this.

  “We saw where you were staying,” my mother said. “It seems like a nice neighborhood.”

  Venice Beach was paradise on earth, the precise shape and color of my soul, but there was no way to explain it to them. Not in terms they would understand. They would ask how people survived without garages and why the sidewalks were so ill kept.

  My parents shuffled their menus. I moved the saltshaker and the pepper shaker, and lined up sugar packets and sweetener packets according to color.

  “It only says poached on this one,” my father said to my mother in a low voice. “Do you think they will do this with sunny-side up?”

  God, they even smelled like they always did. The same laundry detergent.

  If I could just think of something to say in their language, maybe I could survive this.

  The server came over. “Are you folks ready to order?”

  She was bird-boned, like my mother, and about fifty. She was dressed like an old-fashioned fifties diner waitress, complete with apron. She held a little notepad and pencil. Her eyes looked tired of everything.

  “What is the best thing?” I asked her. “Not just the best thing. The best-best thing. The thing that makes you tie that apron on in the morning each day and think, That is why I am going to work today, to serve that thing to customers who have not yet had that thing and, oh, what a memorable day those unaware initiates are about to have? That is the thing I would like to order. Whatever that is.”

  She just blinked at me. She blinked at me for so long that I took her notepad and pencil out of her hand. I wrote THE AMAZING THING on our ticket. I handed it back to her.

  “I trust you,” I added.

  She blinked at me more. “What about your folks?”

  “They trust you, too,” I said. “Wait.” I snatched the pad back and added BUT NO CHOCOLATE. I put $55 in the total box.

  I handed back the pad and pencil.

  My parents stared at me. The server stared at me. I stared back. I had nothing better to say, so I performed the Cole St. Clair smile.

  She grinned abruptly, like she couldn’t help it. “Okay,” she said, in a totally different voice than before. “Okay, young man. You’re on.”

  As she headed back to the counter, I turned back to my parents.

  And here was the strange thing. I wasn’t sure if the server had been enchanted, or if Grace’s advice had worked a spell, or if it was just that somehow I had finally drawn the logical line between Leon, the server, my parents, and everyone else in the world.

  Because in just the amount of time it had taken to place my order, my parents had transformed. Suddenly, instead of my parents, I just saw two people in their late fifties, tourists in this glittering, strange place, tired from sleeping in an unfamiliar hotel room, eager to get back to routine. Their eyes were the same brand of weary as the server’s. Life had not gone as planned, but they muddled through.

  There was nothing terrible about them. They had no particular power over me. No more than anyone else.

  It had never been them. It had always been me.

  This realization was like a word I had to be taught every time I heard it. The definition never seemed to sink in.

  They were just ordinary people.

  I said, “How was the drive here?”

  It was like they had been waiting all week for me to ask them. The story poured out of them. It took a long time, and it was really boring, and it didn’t include any of the details I would have included, and did include a lot of the details I wouldn’t have. And in the middle of it, the server brought us all passion fruit iced tea, and she gave my mother some fancy crepes, and she gave my father an omelet with avocados, and she gave me a waffle with a Cole St. Clair smile drawn on it with whipped cream.

  None of it was life changing; we didn’t talk about a single important thing. But none of it was terrible, either, unless boring counted. We had nothing in common, and at the end of this meal, we’d go our separate ways — me one way, my parents another, the server a third.

  It used to matter so much. It used to seem like such a struggle to not turn into my father. But now, sitting here, it seemed impossible that that could’ve ever happened. I had wasted so much time on this. I kept finding out that the monster I’d been fighting was only me.

  When we were done eating, I paid cash at the counter.

  The server asked, “How was the food?”

  “It was an amazing thing,” I said. “You chose excellently. Tomorrow you should wield that pad with the confidence of a mental giant.”

  She smiled behind her hand at me. I wanted to thank her for the gloomy realization that in the end, I was my worst enemy, but I couldn’t think of a good way to say it. So I just gave her another Cole St. Clair smile and returned to the table.

  “This was nice,” my mother said. “This was a cute find.”

  They weren’t going to ask if I’d just tried to kill myself. They weren’t going to ask about Victor. They weren’t going to ask about anything unpleasant. But I didn’t know why I was surprised. They never had before.

  My father had folded his napkin into twelve geometric shapes. “We had better call a cab if we want to make it to the airport in enough time. Do you know, Cole, if cabs come here?”

  “Oh,” I said, taking out the keys to the Mustang, “I can take you. I seem to have a sports car.”

  COLE: i survived my parents it’s your turn to text me

  ME:

  COLE: here’s my number in case you forgot it

  ME:

  COLE: please

  ME:

  COLE: isabel please

  ME:

  COLE:

  After I failed to do anything more interesting than putting on pants for several days in a row, Baby called me. “Time’s up, Cole. What are you doing today?”

  I was too devoid of enthusiasm to be creative. I flipped open the little notebook to her original list. “Block party.”

  “Great.”

  Yes. Great. Block pa
rty. Fine. I could throw that together as soon as I cleaned up some of the shit I’d broken in the bathroom when I shifted several nights before. I would have to get the word out via Virtual Cole. I had been desperately trying to avoid texting Isabel until she texted me, but I couldn’t wait any longer.

  Can you arrange for a colebot to win a block party today

  I rewrote the text ten times before I sent it. It wasn’t my strongest work, but it had to sound neither bitter nor needy. Any punctuation I added pushed it toward one or the other, so in the end I went with the good old absence of grammar to indicate indifference.

  Isabel immediately texted back: Give me 30 minutes.

  Her punctuation implied that I shouldn’t think this meant we weren’t fighting. Twenty-nine minutes later she texted me the winner’s name and address.

  Oh, young love.

  Seven minutes after that, I was done cleaning the bathroom, and nine minutes after that, T had arrived with the cameras, and fifteen minutes after that, Jeremy had arrived with his pickup truck.

  When you’re in a band, you spend the first four hundred thousand years of your career dragging around your own crap. Your speakers, speaker stands, mixing head, mics, pickups, power cables, mic cables, speaker cables, instruments, the everything. You forget something, you’re screwed. You break something, you’re screwed. You don’t have a long enough extension cord? Screwed.

  Once you hit it big, though —

  You’re packing your shit into a late-model Mustang and a pickup truck and hoping you didn’t forget anything.

  I was living the dream, for sure.

  “I’d carry something,” T told me apologetically, his camera on his shoulder, “but I’ve got the, you know.”

  “Recording device,” I replied, putting my synthesizer in Leyla’s lap. She didn’t complain, because she was fine with everything that came through the threads of fate and whatnot. This is what I thought: Fate was a lousy lay, and I was over her. I told T, “Yeah. It’s cool. Get this side. This side. It’s my famous side.”

  Then Jeremy and I drove in tandem to West Adams.

  All of the houses in this neighborhood were older, the same age as the ones in my neighborhood back in Phoenix, NY. But the West Adams houses felt exotic because they were pink and lime green, and stucco and tile-roofed, and anchored by filigree metal railings. I wondered how I would have been different if I’d grown up in one of these instead.

  Shayla, the L.A.-area fan who had won (apparently, Isabel had asked fans to identify which album’s liner notes featured a photo of the back of my head), was supersonic with excitement by the time we got to her house.

  So were the two hundred people already there. Virtual Cole had a pretty staggering reach.

  The gathered fans had pretty much already taken over every street-side parking opportunity ever, so we had to chuck our stuff out into the driveway and then decide which of us was going to go find parking and walk back.

  This felt familiar, too.

  “Ohmygodohmygod,” said Shayla. “CanIhugyou?”

  I allowed it. I could feel her quivering as she did. When she stepped back, I smiled at her, and a slow smile spread across her face, bigger and bigger.

  Sometimes, a smile goes a long way.

  This was one of those sometimes. I needed a smile, a lot, and she had a great one. Not in a sexy way, but in a way full of nonjudgmental enthusiasm.

  My brain was shutting off, the complicated part, and the simpler part of my brain, the concert part, was kicking in. It’s hard to explain it. It’s not nerves. It is something else.

  The crowd jostled behind me, buzzed and eager. It was feeding me, evening out the ridges in my spiky, cluttered thoughts. I’d forgotten about this, somehow, this part of gigging. I’d forgotten its hectic erasure of emotions. Here there was no room for anything besides Cole St. Clair, singer, performer, consumed.

  I was grateful for it. I didn’t want my thoughts. Not right now.

  Isabel —

  Jeremy appeared at my elbow, his long hair tucked behind his ears and a pair of blue-tinted sunglasses balanced low on his nose. He looked like John Lennon if John Lennon had been blond and born just outside Syracuse, New York. “Cole. What’s the way?”

  “Music,” I said. It was all I was thinking about just then. These people wanted to hear us play, and I wanted to play for them.

  “That’s it?”

  “Loud,” I said.

  Jeremy scratched his vaguely beard-y face. His hair was light enough that it was hard to tell if he was actually growing facial hair or not. “Old school.”

  I looked at the gathered crowd. “This is kind of old school.”

  So we played music.

  In a lot of ways, a block party takes a lot more work than a concert with a stage. At a big concert, you have a stage, you have lights, you have a way, and half the job of setting a mood is done for you. It’s a show before you ever step up to a microphone. But a block party — you’re just a bunch of kids in someone’s front lawn. There’s no difference between you and the audience except you hold a bass guitar or clutch a mic. Every bit of performance has to be won. Carved out of normalcy and chaos. You have to sing louder, jump higher, be crazier than anyone in the crowd.

  This was the first lesson: Look like you are supposed to be there.

  Fame follows the expectation of fame.

  This was the second lesson: Never rush an entrance.

  Jeremy took his time building us a tempo, stepping us up into a song, the bass leading into the music, not looking over its shoulder to make sure the others were coming. Leyla — damn her, I wanted Victor, I wanted Victor, I wanted Victor — came in then, tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap — and I let it go and let it go and let it go.

  The tension built and built and built. And then, as I did a little twist with my hand so they were paying attention, I hit a single note on my synth:

  BOOM.

  The crowd went wild. And when I dragged the mic closer and sang the first word into it —

  In the beginning, there was the dark and there was the buzz.

  No, let me start over.

  In the beginning, there was the suburbs and the days that looked the same stacked on each other’s backs. Then there was me, and the angels fell.

  No, let me start over again.

  In the beginning, there was me on a high school stage with Jeremy and Victor, and I felt like I’d never known what I’d been made for before that moment. It was not one listener or two or twenty or fifty. There was no magic number. It was this: Me. Them. It was the drums dropping out for my keyboard to tumble up an ascending bridge. It was the heads tilted back. It was the tug and push and pull and jerk of the bass. It was whatever you plugged into the equation to equal an electrical current between us and the audience. Sometimes it took one thousand people. Sometimes it took two.

  In West Adams on that summer afternoon, I crooned and screamed the lyrics at them, and they howled and screamed them back at me. Jeremy’s bass picked relentlessly up the scale. Leyla, face sheened with sweat, thundered in the background.

  We were the living, the reborn.

  People kept coming. The noise of us and the noise of them kept bringing them in, closer, closer, more and more.

  This is why I did it, this is why I keep doing it, this is why I couldn’t stop.

  Suddenly, in the midst of this perfection, there was the scratch of a random guitar chord. Guitar? Guitar.

  You have got to be kidding me.

  Some pale young creature had erupted from the crowd with his guitar. He leaped up and down beside Leyla’s kit, grinding away on his instrument like the world was about to end. All enthusiasm, no malice.

  At a real concert, we had security and stage dudes who took care of this. Our job as the band was merely to keep the show going as the disruption was removed.

  Here there was only us.

  I left Jeremy thrubbing away on the bass and Leyla holding down the beat. My mic still in one hand, I use
d the other to grab the guy’s arms to stop the guitaring. And then I gripped him to me and danced him forcibly to the crowd. I wrapped my arm around him to hold the mic to my mouth.

  “Take him!” I shouted gladly to the crowd. “He is one of yours!”

  I released him. Arms seized him like zombies. He was smiling blissfully up at the sky as they took him. I was face-to-face with the others now. Us and them, and the them was right there.

  And I saw a face from the past.

  It was impossible; it was Victor’s eyes, Victor’s eyebrows. My stomach was falling from a very great height.

  It wasn’t Victor. It was his sister, Angie.

  I hadn’t even begun to parse what this might mean when she hit me.

  It wasn’t the greatest punch, but it landed pretty well — I felt my teeth cut into my lip. My mouth felt warm. Adrenaline hurried to attend to my needs. A wolf stretched and curled inside me.

  Angie snatched the microphone from me, and then she hit me with it. That I felt. It hit my cheekbone solidly, and then, as one hand went up, instinct, she smashed it into the back of my head.

  Skill? Skill isn’t what hurts people. A lack of mercy is.

  I deserved to be hit, too. I deserved everything she was giving me.

  I killed him, I killed him, I killed him

  “You asshole!” Angie shouted at me, and she wasn’t wrong, even taking Victor out of the equation. She punched me again with the microphone.

  T came in close, but not to help: to film.

  Angie hurled her entire body at me. She wasn’t a very large person, but justice and physics were on her side. We careened back through Leyla’s kit, both of us falling. Above me was blue sky and the edge of Shayla’s roof and at least two cameras and now her face blocking everything —

  She still smelled like the same shampoo she’d used when I’d dated her, back when Victor was alive, and I had never hated myself as I did in that moment, not in the darkest and most disgusting holes I had lowered myself into on any of my tours.

  “Angie,” Jeremy said, as urgent as I’d ever heard him. “Angie, come on.”