I wonder if he ended it with her the same reason he pitched the pills. It’s dark now. Somehow we make a wrong turn, then another and another. Dirt road shortcuts and switchbacks don’t yield much. We stop at a rural jiffy and a Mexican man points us half a mile down the road. By time we arrive the service is over. We first take the mother for catatonic in the foyer, but then she raises up and runs screaming through the sanctuary doors, and toward the open casket and throws herself over the body. Four of the men, one an ex-husband, pick her up and carry her to a grieving pew. We watch this through the floor-to-ceiling window separating foyer from sanctuary. “Don’t go in there,” my brother says to me. “I have to do this myself.” I watch him through the window.
The frame the window makes puts me in mind of a TV, and me deaf. If there were closed captions, they’d be sending pleasant words. Her family wants to comfort my brother. Their arms around him are fatherly and motherly. Even her mother calms herself and rises to kiss his cheek. When we leave he says, “I am a horrible person.” He is not, but there is no use saying. We retire to his house in Murfreesboro and recline in beanbag chairs and stare at the chalkboard walls of his recording studio and don’t speak or sleep. A pattern randomizer bounces lines and shapes across a spectrum of bright colors on the monitor beside the TV, which broadcasts chef shows all night from Chicago, Atlanta, and Tokyo. In the morning we eat biscuits and sausage gravy and bacon and cornbread at the Cracker Barrel by the interstate, and try not to talk about her at all. Before I leave town, he says, “It would have been better if it was me instead of her,” and what haunts me all the way home is I’m glad it was her instead of him.
2.
Another theft. Another embezzlement. A trail of broken promises from L.A. to Nashville. No reason to say whose story it is or who is telling the story or who went bankrupt or who got evicted, because every visit to Nashville you hear the same stories about different people. At the Sexy Sadie I say this to my brother, and he says, “Liam, tell him a story he hasn’t heard before.” Liam takes me down to the basement and kicks the wall and some of the mortar falls away. “Only thing holding this place together is the horsehair in the mortar,” he says. “This foundation was laid in the Civil War. This basement was a stop on the Underground Railroad. There’s still secret tunnels if you knock out that cinderblock right there.
“That’s your portal to a whole tiny city. It’s a merchant city, and what it’s moving is crack, meth, and heroin. Have you ever done coke and stayed up for seventy-two hours straight? Once this black guy pulled up in a limo and took us to this club where everybody was wearing a suit and a tie. He said once you go in there you can’t tell anybody what you see and you can’t come out for forty-eight hours. I can’t tell you what went on inside but I can say there were city councilmen in there, high-ranking police officers, firemen, A&R guys, ministers, hotel guys — and I mean real high-up execs — and prostitutes galore. Nobody could say whore in there. There were these big black bouncers who kept saying respect, respect. Nobody wanted to mess with these guys, and nobody would. I slept for like two days when I got out of there.”
He kept on this way throughout the tour of the house. Every room kept secrets, only some of which he knew. In this room, somebody blew somebody. In this room, somebody OD’d. This is the room where that girl took off her clothes and painted her body red. This is the room with the stolen lava lamp. This is the room with the toy piano. Skip the studio, you’ve spent enough time in there. That’s the boringest place. That’s my whole life, boring. On and on, and all the way he was promising the highlight of the tour would be the third-floor balcony. Nobody had so much as touched the third-floor balcony in the three years he had run the Sexy Sadie. As a matter of pride, no one would. Three cats had lived up there, and now three cat skeletons. Three cat skulls. But we never made it to the third-floor balcony.
A photographer arrived from Indianapolis. The other two members of the side project arrived carrying borrowed Diesel jeans and tight black Western dress shirts and Liam and my brother and the other two side-project guys changed into them for the photo shoot. The six of us piled into a black SUV. Liam said he was hungry. We detoured to a soul food place around the corner. Liam said we all had to eat chitlins and we did. We ate and Liam talked and ate. He said his parents were missionaries. He said he was a missionary kid. He ate chitlins and said he fucked eight girls this week. He said somebody blew him while he was doing blow. He said everybody went to sleep and he mixed down two songs overnight so he could free up the console for his own shit. He said don’t let anybody fool you, all anybody cares about is their own shit. He left the table for a few minutes and talked to some church ladies drinking coffee two tables over. They gave him hugs before he left their table. He came back and said, “Tell you what. These yellow tablecloths are the shizz.”
We got back in the SUV and went around looking for places to take pictures. The photographer said he wanted gritty. Liam said if gritty meant industrial, he could offer a whole city. We stopped first anyway at a practice studio and took some pictures in the practice space where my brother’s old band used to rehearse, and he said here’s where we kept the piss jar and here’s where the guitarist slept while we worked out the drum and bass problems. Liam picked at the acoustic foam on the wall. He said it was expensive but that didn’t keep it from being cheap. He said he could get an industrial spray foam that would do a better job for practically nothing, but no one would respect it because what people really care about is that a studio look like some picture of a studio they saw in a poster from a guitar magazine when they were thirteen years old. We went out through the emergency exit, which was propped open. We stepped out into an overgrown field of green grass and green weeds. There was an eight-foot fence behind us and what looked from a distance like a baby’s head pushed between the links. “That’s it, right there,” the photographer said. “That baby doll head. That’s it.” When we got closer we saw there were baby doll parts all around. Arms and legs and plenty of them, but no other heads. Behind the fence a boarded-up building rose to four stories. The metal siding that hadn’t been stripped away was black with long streaks of brown where the rust was making a meal of it. The side-project guys stood in front of the fence, with Liam in front, and the baby doll head just off-center, and when they were done, the photographer showed them the previews on his digital camera.
Soon they bought a van and went on a club tour and abandoned my brother in a youth hostel in Boston, above a barroom where people were watching World Cup soccer, and fighting, and the band wasn’t allowed to play even though they had driven 350 miles to play at the club’s invitation. Everybody thought Liam owned the Sexy Sadie, but it burned down, and after it burned down it turned out somebody else owned it. Liam got a co-write on a hit country record and made a lot of money and moved into the building next door to where the Sexy Sadie had burned down and he called the new place the Sexy Sadie. My brother had written the hook for the song but nobody remembered. He said it was because everybody else was high when he wrote the hook. I want my brother to fight for a co-write, but he says life is too short and moves to Chicago for a while.