Kyle Minor - Praying Drunk

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.

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.