3.
Another phone call home. Another problem with money. Another problem with women. In Sacramento, somebody offers my brother sixty grand a year to play guitar and sing at Sunday church services and he says no because he doesn’t believe in God anymore. He gets a gig with a lady country singer but she fires him because he doesn’t play the Steve Miller Band cover the way she likes. For a while he’s Britpop and briefly big in Italy and Holland, but this girl who wears denim skirts wants him to quit and marry her and make babies, so he quits, but she asks him to do things he doesn’t want to do like choke her while they’re having sex, and eventually she leaves him.
The real money’s in Christian rock, a scene that’s a hammer-blow, every flirtation leaving him for weeks on the beanbag chairs in Murfreesboro after he’s been stiffed paychecks, accused of creepiness with underage fans, ratted out to image-conscious A&R guys. He does the same stuff everybody else does. One night he’s smoking pot with a teen pop idol while members of her entourage tryst on dingy apartment couches, the next night she’s on the late night shows talking about her virginity pledge. What sets my brother apart is he says the same things no matter who is in the room, and most people prefer what passes for the truth to what’s actually true. So he calls and says, “Enough. I quit. Enough.” No more touring, no more producing, no more engineering, no more songwriting, no more so much as sitting at the bar at Boscos with anybody wearing Diesel jeans, anybody with spiky hair, anybody with eye makeup, anybody in Nashville who’s ever been to San Francisco.
He applies for thirtysome jobs and nobody calls for an interview. There’s an ad in the classified section of The Tennessean for an administrative assistant position at a trucking company an hour out of town, and they don’t call either, but he has a feeling, so he gets in his truck and hand-delivers another resume, and then the fiftysomething manager, an ex-cop named Dickie, calls to say why should he hire a musician? Everybody knows musicians aren’t dependable, and anyway they leave without giving notice as soon as they get another music gig. My brother says he’s not a musician anymore. He was, but not anymore. He says, I’ll do anything, I’ll sweep your floors, I’ll make you coffee, I’ll pick your nose.
It’s this last thing, this I’ll pick your nose, that does it. Who talks like that? Dickie asks. Anybody so unpolished is somebody I can trust. You’re not trying to pull the wool over anybody’s eyes. I like you. You’re a straight shooter. So soon it’s eight-hour days, ten-hour days, twelve-hour days, fourteen-hour days. Truckers never rest. The road, the road, the road. My brother does dispatch, payroll, troubleshoots, schedules, oversees the truckers, oversees the warehouse guys, makes sure nobody’s falsifying paperwork, makes sure nobody’s hitting anybody else over the head with a wrench.
The truckers are contract workers, mostly. They get paid by the mile. They want work and lots of it. Buddy, can you get me a trip? Buddy, can you get me a run? They curse and he curses back. They want to take a load off in the chair by his desk and tell a story, he listens. Buddy, she hit me with a restraining order again. Buddy, she said don’t call no more. Buddy, I followed her over to this house and won’t you know it’s a swingers party. Buddy, you ain’t seen a fellow try harder to stay married. Buddy, you ain’t seen a fellow cry more. Buddy, I told her you get it out of your system, then you come home to me where you belong. Buddy, you wouldn’t believe this little schoolteacher — blonde hair, glasses, teeny tiny mouth — could have some sex fiend hiding inside that little body. Buddy, I’m gonna be a little late, gotta take a run with this honey I met over here by the elementary school. Buddy, I been going down to one of these swinger parties. Private club. Twenty bucks at the door, two-drink minimum. I figure good for the goose is good for the gander. You ever want to come with me, I’ll take you down there, you don’t have to do nothing, everybody’s cool down there, you can keep your shirt and pants on. I don’t hardly ever take my shirt and pants off. No, buddy, all I ever do down there is watch. Sometimes I get so sad watching, I’m thinking about her, buddy, parading around some lowlife place like where I’m at, I’m crying in my beer. Last week I was sitting on the couch with this old boy, naked as a jaybird, I’m telling him about my wife, and he says, Friend, I feel real bad for you. Tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to have my wife here suck your dick. No, buddy, he didn’t get off on it or nothing. Decent guy. He just sat there and drank his beer while she done it. Buddy, it felt real good but it didn’t keep me from getting lonely. Buddy, I miss her so much. Buddy, I’m gonna go over there right now and see how she’s doing. On and on, this talk, and my brother starts to care, and my brother starts going down to the dive bar some nights with the old truckers while they sing karaoke to the old ladies they go home with, and he listens to their stories about wife number four, the one with the kid you start to love so much it’s like the kid’s your own, and then three wives later, the kid’s still like he’s your own, and you’re sending checks for community college, and you’re giving advice, you’re giving up the spare bedroom, you’re driving cross country to bail him out of jail. This is the real America, right here, among the tractor-trailers without any heat and the tractor-trailers with satellite TV and Internet and the cowboy books on CD and the heavy metal mixtapes and however many milligrams of speed or cocaine or meth or whatever combination thereof it takes to keep you going 48, 54, 72 hours, although not on your runs, buddy, not for the hauls you call in, all that drug shit’s in the past and maybe the future too, you know how life is.
For a while my brother stops calling so often, and I worry he’s sinking into some dark hole he can’t get out of, all those long hours of guitar practice upstairs in his bedroom all through junior high and high school, and all those hours, days, weeks, months, years, by now almost a decade cramped in shitty band vans, logging miles, losing sleep, playing shows for thirteen or thirteen thousand, all of it wasted now, and him locked into some blue-collar management slave life not unlike what we watched our dad do all those years among air-conditioning men and sheet-metal men before he went back to college and clawed and scratched his way up to the corporate life, the desk and the dictaphone. My brother calls and says that’s the kind of thing that sounds good to him now, the desk and the secretary and the screaming boss and the health insurance plan, HMO or PPO, I care not which. I want to go home, he says, and watch TV and chop vegetables like Emeril Lagasse and melt butter and sprinkle garlic on top. I want to mow the lawn and take my dog outside to walk and lift his leg by the neighbor’s mailbox. I want to paint the walls whatever color I want and go to the Baptist church and find some saved bad girl who wants to be monogamous and watch Scooby Doo and laugh at my corny jokes and get married and cook me dinner and take vacations to the Magic Kingdom or Epcot Center and ride the monorail from the Contemporary Hotel to the Polynesian Village. To me it all sounds terrible, and I tell him so. I tell him he was the reason I became a fiction writer and stopped being a preacher and stopped believing in God. I tell him he was the reason I was able to quit home and quit life and make a new life for myself based upon an idea of myself as a new kind of person I could invent and become, and I was able to do it because he did it first. “When you quit school,” I say, “and moved to Nashville and dyed your hair blue and started wearing eye makeup, I looked around me and said, What’s keeping me here? and the answer was nothing was. The only thing keeping me from becoming me was me. Me listening to what everybody else said life had to be, and me trying to believe what everybody else said I was supposed to believe, and me being somebody that other people could get behind. Just me. And that would still be me if it wasn’t for you doing what you did.”