The Disenchantments Read online

  Meg dances around us. “Let’s find more junk!”

  But Alexa stops gazing at her harmonica and tells us we have to go. On our way back to the car we gather more driftwood for Bev. She walks ahead, pointing out the pieces we should take, filling her pockets with pieces of glass.

  The address Alexa has written in her tour planner belongs to a boarded-up house nestled in a block of several abandoned houses. We stand outside its front door as she flips through her notes, searching for a mistake or an explanation.

  “Everything will be fine,” she assures us. “We are here for a reason.” Then, more to herself, she says, “But it just doesn’t make sense. It says it right here. I have it written down in two places.”

  We’ve just been standing on the sidewalk in front of the house, so I walk up to the door. The sky is darkening, the window next to the door reflects a streetlamp. I cup my hands over the glass and look inside. An old, ripped chair. A coffee table. Nothing else. I take a step back, ready to tell Alexa that if there is a reason for our presence here, it isn’t clear to me.

  But then I see a piece of paper on the ground below the window. I pick it up. It has a piece of tape on the top and typed words that read: SHOW TONIGHT. USE BACK DOOR with a hand-drawn arrow pointing to the left.

  Alexa appears stunned but Bev nods decisively and starts unloading the equipment from the back of the bus: the drum kit, the guitar, the bass, the microphone stand, the amps. We carry everything around the overgrown side yard, step over a fallen fence, and stop in front of a screen door.

  I can make out movement from the darkness inside.

  “I think someone’s in there,” I tell Alexa. She consults her notes, walks in front of me, and opens the door.

  “Walt?” she asks.

  An incredibly tall man in a ratty T-shirt and sweatpants appears in the doorway.

  “Alexa,” he says, smiling down at her. Then, he surveys the rest of us and adds, “The band.”

  He steps back, extends his arm toward the inside of the house. “Welcome to my basement.”

  So I’m pretty sure that this is the kind of situation parents have nightmares about: towering slobby guy in his thirties smiling down at a group of teenagers, gesturing to welcome them into the dark basement of an abandoned house. But maybe because of the instruments, or the fact that at one point he and Alexa spoke on the phone, or the semiprofessionalism of the typed-up sign that was supposed to hang out front—or maybe because of all of these things combined with the fact that only one of us is not officially an adult yet, we say “What’s up, Walt,” and walk in.

  Walt pulls a cord and a combination light/ceiling fan switches on.

  “Okay, so uh . . . here’s the stage.” Walt walks over to a line of duct tape that runs the expanse of one side of the concrete floor. “Everything from here to that wall is yours. Everything on the other side is for the rest of us. The tape is largely symbolic but I’ve found that it works.”

  I nod as if this is perfectly normal. Meg’s nails are digging into her hand, something she does when she needs to suppress inconvenient laughter, which is often. Alexa has already moved past shock to practicality: her eyes scan the stage section of the basement for electrical outlets. Leaning against the wall, Bev appraises Walt with tremendous enjoyment.

  Walt leads us on a tour around the rest of the basement. It is not a generous space, but he has it broken up into sections. In one corner is The Bedroom (unmade bed and chest of drawers) and in another is The Living Room (a sagging, floral-print couch). Next to The Living Room is The Kitchen (a mini-fridge, a cooler full of beer, a hot plate, and an overflowing trash can). And then we are back to The Stage.

  “Oh,” he says. “I almost forgot.” He takes a couple steps backward until he is in the middle of the room, extending his arms to either side.

  “The Dance Floor.”

  Meg can no longer contain her laughter and, thankfully, Walt joins in.

  He points a smudged finger at her.

  “I like a lady who knows how to have a good time,” he says.

  The completion of the tour seems like a good opportunity for me to show Walt the sign.

  “Should we get more tape?” I ask.

  “Meh,” Walt says, giving an exaggerated shrug. “Everyone knows where to come. That was basically just for you guys.”

  Soon the girls are unfastening cases, untangling cords, plugging things in, testing sound. As they move across the basement floor, Walt gives the impression of tidying up. He circles the room slowly, ignoring the piles of dirty clothes and pizza boxes, fluffing a pillow on the couch instead, walking past a table strewn with crusty dishes to straighten a framed Heart poster. When the first person arrives, he gives up the act and grabs a beer.

  Soon people are streaming in, heading straight for the cooler. A guy with a Pabst Blue Ribbon shirt and a Pabst Blue Ribbon in his hand asks me if I’m with the band.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “Cool,” he says.

  We stand next to each other for a minute.

  “I already knew that,” he says.

  “Knew what?”

  “That you were with the band. We all know each other. We all went to high school together or some shit like that. But you, A) are younger than my youngest brother, and B) have a mug I’ve never seen before.”

  “Oh,” I say.

  “What kind of beer you want?”

  I shrug. “Any kind.”

  He narrows his eyes at me. Apparently, this was not a good answer.

  “I’ll take a beer,” I say. “I just don’t really know what kind I like.”

  When he continues to look at me like I’m crazy, I add, “I’m eighteen. I’m used to taking whatever I can get.”

  “Walt,” PBR guy barks, and Walt appears beside him, slinging his arm around PBR’s shoulder.

  “It’s gonna be a good show tonight,” Walt says. “Did you see those girls? Those girls are smokin’.”

  Walt turns to me.

  “I mean that with the greatest respect,” he says. “Your friends are ridiculously talented and special.”

  “Walt,” PBR guy says, ignoring everything Walt has just told him, “we need to determine what kind of beer is this young man’s kind of beer.”

  “I need a particular kind?” I ask.

  “Everyone needs a kind,” Walt says.

  PBR points to his own shirt. “You see that I take this seriously. You need to know what kind of beer you drink to know what kind of man you are. I, for example, am a cheap bastard.”

  They lean back a little to get a good look at me.

  “He wears old-ass Nikes,” PBR says. “Now those are some vintage sneakers. I think I had a pair like that in junior high. Where’d you find shoes like that?”

  “Thrift store in the Mission,” I say.

  PBR nods knowingly. “Lift up that shirt a little, kid, let me check out that belt,” he says.

  My belt is lime-green canvas with a silver pull-through buckle.

  “A little ostentatious,” Walt says.

  “Yeah,” I say. “But it’s always covered.”

  PBR nods. “Covered by a somewhat formfitting gray T-shirt.”

  “And unafraid to wear a stranger’s old shoes. What do you put on to keep warm, kid?”

  I pull a flannel out of my backpack.

  “Yes, yes,” PBR says. “I could’ve called that.”

  “Young man,” Walt says. “Let us now lead you to The Library.”

  We push through the crowd to get to a shelf of books above the bed.

  “Peruse these titles if you will,” Walt says, “and tell us which, if any, you’ve read.”

  I scan Walt’s collection of books: some thrillers, some Hemingway, three dated issues of Hustler, a few contemporary novels.

  “The Sun Also Rises,” I say. “And For Whom the Bells Tolls. Oh, and some of that Raymond Chandler collection, too. ‘Red Wind,’ right? That story’s rad.”

  “I don’t want to appe
ar obsequious, but you’re a smart kid.”

  “Put together, but not fussy,” PBR says.

  “Good-looking guy for sure. But not pretty. Strong jawline. And masculine taste in books.”

  “Yeah, well I don’t think you had any books by women,” I say.

  Walt hesitates, surveys his shelf.

  “Observant,” he says to PBR.

  “Calls it like it is.”

  “Mellow,” Walt adds.

  “So we good?” PBR asks.

  “Yeah,” Walt says. “I think we’ve found a beer for our young friend.”

  Walt returns with a Guinness for himself and a Guinness for me.

  “Welcome to the club,” he says, and moves on to a group of arriving people.

  PBR and I lean against the wall of The Bedroom and drink our beers.

  “So what’s up with this place?” I ask.

  “It’s a long story but I’ll tell you,” PBR says. “Story is that Walt never left his parents’ house. It’s fucking pathetic. And then his mom got sick and died, and his dad never really had a job, at least not that I can remember. You like your beer?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. Walt had a job at the hardware store once, but he got fired for stealing a tool kit and no one really wanted to hire him after that.”

  “Why’d he steal a tool kit?”

  PBR guy takes another swig of his beer.

  “Why the fuck not steal a tool kit? That shit is useful. Anyway, no one was paying the mortgage so eventually the bank kicked them out. Walt’s dad moved in with some family in Redding and Walt couch surfed, mostly on my couch. Unfortunately. That was maybe seven months ago. But the bank never did anything with the place. It was just sitting here unoccupied, so eventually Walt was like ‘Screw it,’ and moved back into the basement. And then—as an extra little fuck you to the man—he started hosting shows here.”

  As if on cue, Walt’s voice comes thundering out of the speakers.

  “What’s up party people? We have a special band tonight. All the way from Frisco. They call themselves . . . The Disenchantments!”

  Meg and Alexa are in position behind Walt. Bev isn’t there. I scan the room for her and find her off to one side, talking to some guy who must be at least Walt’s age. The guy is leaning into her, talking all close with his mouth by her ear. Bev pulls away from him and gives him this look, all aloof and mysterious but also inviting, and even though I’ve seen her give that look a million times before, it makes me feel sick. For the first time it strikes me, how it’s so calculated. She knows exactly how pretty she is and exactly how to play it. It’s one thing to do that to some sleazy stranger who’s at least ten years older than you are, and another thing to do it to your best friend. And now that I know that she knows how I feel about her, that she’s probably known for years, it’s even worse that she’s doing this in front of me. Yeah, we’ve both made out with a lot of other people, but if I ever thought she might want something more with me, I swear, I would have forgotten about every other girl.

  Alexa gives a weak hit of a drum to kick off the first song. Bev picks up her guitar and strums a chord that has no place in any tuning, standard or otherwise. The amps thunder static, unable to endure Meg’s low notes. For a minute, before Bev starts to sing, they sound so terrible that anyone with a sense of humor would assume they were joking.

  But as soon as Bev starts singing, two things register: first, that Bev is the most beautiful being on Earth, and second, that they are playing in earnest. That they aren’t going to stop and laugh and say, No, really? You guys thought this was real?

  As usually happens when The Disenchantments start a show for strangers instead of just kids at our school, the crowd stares at them in a stunned silence. Soon, I know, the audience members will regain their composure and start to talk loudly enough that the music is irrelevant. Once in a while they’ll glance away from whomever they’re talking to and remember that there’s a band up there. They will admire the guitar player’s gorgeous face, regardless of the fact that she can’t tune her own instrument. They’ll move on to the drummer and think, Who cares if she’s too blissed-out to pound a beat—that concentration! Those blue-inked hands! They’ll look at the bassist, too distracted by her great legs and pink hair to be bothered by the terrible static that thunders with every low note. And when Bev is singing, devastating and breathy, above the sound of everything else, they’ll either want to be her or to be the person she loves, and they’ll know that in spite of the cacophony of everything else, she is worth staying for.

  Eventually they will remember where they are and to whom they are talking, and they’ll sip their drink and say, So anyway. . . . I know this will happen, but I don’t wait around to see it, because I keep looking at that guy looking at Bev like he’s expecting her to take her clothes off for him later. And even though I know Bev wouldn’t do that, just the thought of it is too much for me to take.

  So I take my Guinness and walk outside to find that night has fallen and fallen hard. I can’t see more than a few feet in front of me but I head away from the house anyway. The flimsy back door slams and swings open and shuts again. As soon as I get to the front they sound distant, like people I don’t even know. “You look so pretty, you look so pretty, like I cut you from a magazine,” Bev shouts.

  I cross the street and listen: nothing.

  When Bev and I were kids we would sing my dad’s old songs together. We listened to his cassettes until the tape thinned and broke and we had to pull the unraveled, tangled mess out of the tape deck and ask for another copy. He had an endless supply in a box in his closet. He pretended to be upset about the broken tapes, but it was no secret he was flattered. The band was long forgotten by then, but we memorized all the lyrics and learned the harmonies that he and Uncle Pete had arranged. We were a two-person cover band devoted to music that only my dad and my mom and her brother remembered.

  I’ve walked several blocks now, away from Walt’s house, toward the water. Soon I’m on the path we walked earlier, heading back to Glass Beach. A car idles where I parked the bus this afternoon and a bunch of vagrant kids gather around it, their huge, worn packs cast aside on the street.

  “Hey, man,” one of them says.

  I tip my beer can at them. They raise brown bags in return. I keep walking, wondering what it would be like to be one of them, traveling around with no specific destination, just moving for the sake of it.

  The moon is out over the rocks, bright enough that I can climb down to the water. In the darkness, the beach glass is colorless, unremarkable. Waves crash against the land and drown out the sound of my footsteps. I keep thinking about those recordings Bev and I used to make. There was one song we sang more often than all the others.

  I hum the melody; the words come back to me.

  Soon you’ll be leaving, I sing.

  I sound good. I sound older. More like my dad in the original than the kid-me in the recordings.

  I sing the whole verse louder. I really belt it out.

  Soon you’ll be leaving

  And I don’t know what I’ll do

  You pull on my heartstrings

  Till I’m tied up in you

  Dad and Uncle Pete must have spent days on these songs, getting the words just right, all sweet and simple like they wanted them. They didn’t even have girlfriends. All the heartbreak was hypothetical. For some reason I start thinking about Walt living in that house with his dad all his life. PBR was right—it is pathetic. Which makes the thought of going home after this trip terrible. I can see it: me, Dad, and Uncle Pete. Drinking coffee together every morning. Taking day trips in Melinda. Listening to records and getting high on special occasions. Once in a while my mother will call from Paris and we’ll huddle around the phone to listen to the news of this one woman, the most important woman in all of our lives.

  As I turn back I decide, No. I don’t know what I’m going to do now, but I promise myself that it won’t be that.

&nbs
p; The post-show scene at Walt’s house is less than beautiful. Bev and the guy from earlier huddle outside, smoking cigarettes. I pretend not to notice them as I walk past, and Bev doesn’t say anything to me, either. Empty cans and bottles cover the basement floor, rendering the room demarcations irrelevant. Most of the people have already left, and those still here look drunk and tired and a little bit sad. PBR rests on the bed, a passed-out girl slumped against his shoulder. Across the room, Walt is stationed at a flimsy table, playing cards with Meg and two other guys.

  I take a seat next to Alexa on the sofa, next to the card table. I’m feeling better after having had some time away. A little more like myself. She has the insert from a cassette tape unfolded, spread across her lap.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Reading along with the lyrics.”

  Classic rock crackles from a corner of the basement where Walt has set a boom box on top of a pile of laundry. It looks like it could tumble over at any moment. Women with strong voices sing over a muted electric guitar and synthesized keyboard.

  “It’s so eighties,” I say. “Who is this?”

  “Heart,” Alexa says. She extends her hand, painted with the blue peace sign, and points to Walt’s poster that I noticed earlier. I take a longer look at it now as a song fades out, and Walt crosses the room to turn the volume up. Two girls with heavy eyeliner and blue eye shadow stare at the camera. They’re wearing black lace around their necks. One brunette, one blond; one expectant, one wistful. Skinny, some cleavage.

  “Listen,” Walt tells Alexa. “This one’s very special.”

  He returns to his seat at the card table but keeps an eye on Alexa to watch her reaction. A keyboard or piano starts—I can’t tell which—and soon one of the women starts singing about lying awake at night, wondering about the guy she loves. Then the drums and harmonies kick in, and she sings with this powerful classic rock voice about how she used to be independent and carefree, and now she’s consumed by desire. Apparently this was the night she was going to confess her love, but he hasn’t answered the phone or shown up to see her, so she lets out this kind of screaming wail and belts out the chorus again. I glance at Alexa, ready to say something smartass, but she blinks back a tear. Crying over these pathetic lyrics and synths? It knocks me speechless. I can’t even tease her.