Dana Spiotta: Stone Arabia

It was also accurate to say that Nik reveled in his solitude and Denise did not. She figured that was the first thing that separated them — that and when she began to become his audience. It wasn’t just that Nik got a guitar from their father. Nik took it, grabbed hard at it, and never let it go. They diverged early, and after that there was no changing or stopping him.

From where she sat at his worktable, Denise could see his original guitar perched on a stand in the corner. An Orlando with a rosewood body “just like a Martin.” Nik had taken good care of it. She knew he felt there was some destiny to the day he received it: the Beatles, the guitar, the last time they would see their father. She knew because Nik felt there was destiny in everything. The story was part of his legend: he hadn’t even wanted a guitar — it never occurred to him, he would claim with a laugh. And yet it changed his life. Which was true, it did change him. It took him over like a disease. From that very evening he would not quit with that Orlando.

He used to sit by his record player and listen over and over to the same song until he figured out how to play a particular lead. He didn’t read music or learn music theory. But Nik had a capacity for dogged devotion. He was doglike, really, the way a dog will chase a car it can never catch or will never tire of retrieving a ball you throw. He would come home from school or a party or a date, and he would automatically pick up his guitar, in just the same kind of habitual and nearly compulsive way Ada would run to her computer. Many times Denise remembered trying to tell Nik something and he would still be playing his guitar, working something out with fingers and string. It irritated her, the way he would sit there, then say, Yeah ? And nod as she spoke, but still stealing glances downward, his left hand depressing strings, his right hand clutching a pick, just touching the pick to strings without strumming. He was showing Denise this great amount of attention and respect by not actually strumming. She said, one time when she really wanted him to listen, “Could you just put your guitar down?” and he looked at her as if she’d asked him to put his arm down.

As it turned out, he was not the world’s most brilliant guitar player. He was good, good enough for songwriting and singing, which were the things he really cared for. He worked at learning the guitar and achieved a high level of competence. Nik taught himself everything about playing, even taught himself the fact that he was not ever going to be a virtuoso.

The actual demise of Nik as possible guitar hero came in 1973. Nik had just begun to play out with his new band, the Demonics. Previously there had been some jam sessions with school friends, but the Demonics were his first band to venture past the garage. He had a bass player, Sam Stone, and a drummer, Mike Summer. (Or maybe it was Dave Winton first and Mike later?) They had scored a regular gig opening for bands at this shitty club called the Well. They played early in the evening when no one was really there, kind of a fill-in thing. But it was a great opportunity — they were just beginners. They still had these long shags and they were a little pimply and peeled. Nik was always pretty good-looking, but he hadn’t found his look quite yet — he was still in the developmental stages. He was on the verge of good-looking. Denise went to all of the gigs even though she was sixteen and well under the legal age. She just slipped in as part of the group. She found a perch near the stage and folded her legs and arms until she felt nearly invisible. The Demonics played the same ten songs over and over. Although Nik had already written hundreds of songs by this point, the only ones they had rehearsed and could even play at all were these ten fairly simple songs. After a few weeks of their boring set, Nik tried to introduce new songs. But something wasn’t working. They would just fade on the stage, already sick of themselves. Then they would get some minuscule amount of money and mope around the edge of the performance area. They’d stay for the next band if they could, but the club knew the Demonics were all underage and they weren’t supposed to hang out after the gig. One night, though, they did manage to stay for the next band, the Cherries. There were four of them — drums, bass, and two guitars. They all had short hair (for that time) and wore collared, short-sleeved tennis shirts buttoned all the way up and tucked in to their beltless, tight, flat-front khaki pants. Nobody looked like that yet.

“Speed preps,” Nik whispered, staring at them. The singer hardly touched his guitar and spent most of his time closed-eyed at the mic, hurling words into the dark. He would hold a chord and then wave his right hand at the strings at crucial moments, giving an underfill to their sound. The other guitar player, the taller, sweatier one, played the leads and sometimes sang harmony — his singing kicked in about as often as the lead singer swiped at his guitar. They played seven hard, fast, close rockers. They wiped the Demonics off the stage. Nik knew it, Denise could tell by how he studied them.

From that moment on, he focused on his songwriting. He recruited Tommy Skate to play lead guitar for his shows. And the rest was history. He understood he wasn’t ever going to be one of those great live guitar players, no matter how hard he worked on it. He didn’t spend forever flogging his failures. He moved things along. Denise slowly began to realize how deeply serious he was.

The Demonics grew to be a pretty decent live band. But Nik preferred composing to performing. He never stopped writing new songs. As devoted as he had been to learning the guitar, his obsession with songwriting trumped everything. He wrote in notebooks, he wrote while he watched TV, and yes, he wrote even while someone was trying to talk to him.

“Yeah,” he said, nodding, but with that dazed noncommittal style the true nonlistener adopts. I’m agreeing with you — just a crapshoot, but why not? But Denise knew the songs were really good, so she couldn’t mind all that much. She figured that’s just how artists were.

The amazing thing was Nik didn’t seem to pay attention to anyone or anything around him and yet then he would write something that seemed entirely to depend on the closest attention. Like “Versions of Me,” his great early song about playing poseur and then wondering why no one knew the real you. He already let the ironic twist come in, the self-admonishment that made him such an appealing songwriter. When he first played this song for Denise, they were sitting in the kitchen of Casa Real. It was late, they had been out at a party. Denise followed Nik in, drunkenly shushing each other even though their mother was still out on a late shift and they were the only ones home. Denise walked straight to the pantry and took out a box of Wheat Thins. She stood with the pantry door open and gnashed a steady stream of salty squares between her teeth. This was her strategy to avoid room spins and subsequent hangovers. She always crammed as many starches in her stomach as she could before she made any attempts to go horizontal. And she always woke up sixteen and fresh-faced.

Nik held his guitar by the neck as he hoisted himself up on the old aquamarine tiled counter. He rested the guitar against his lap and attempted to reach in his jacket pocket for his cigarettes — he shifted his pick to teeth and tried again. He then replaced the pick with a cigarette and started to play. Denise didn’t stop eating her crackers as she walked over to the narrow transom window above the sink and pushed it open.

“I’m not gonna smoke it,” he said without looking up. She put her hand in the Wheat Thins box again and watched him strum. “You want to hear a new song?” he said, looking up. She nodded, leaning against the sink. He began to play “Versions of Me,” and all at once Denise’s very familiar but distant brother became someone else. This was truly the moment when she saw how different he was from everyone else she knew, including herself. He, just by singing his song, could change how she saw the world. He became a vivid human to her, someone who understood her as yet unnamed alienation. She had, all at once, a deep faith in his perception, as he pinpointed the way she often felt, angry at the world for misunderstanding her while playing at deliberately misrepresenting herself. He stopped and shrugged. He lit his cigarette and took a long, proud drag.