round 2
(4) CHRISTOPHER CROSS, “SAILING”
sailed by
(5) michael damian, “rock on”
179-129
AND WILL PLAY ON IN THE SWEET 16
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 11.
lee anne gallaway-mitchell on “rock on”
1989: Where do we go from here?
In 1989, I graduated from elementary school, and to celebrate a group of moms organized a party with a 1950’s theme.
In one picture from the party, I stand next to a friend who wears a pink poodle skirt and white t-shirt, bobby socks and saddle shoes, all specially made or purchased for the occasion. All the girls whose families had money managed this head-to-toe look. I am wearing an ensemble of keds, rolled-up jeans, and an oversized white button-down shirt that my dad, a farmer, never wore. My dad’s letterman jacket from high school is slung over my shoulder. Lockney High School. Quarterback. #12. Class of 1966. My grandmother, former Miss Memphis 1952 (Texas, not Tennessee), gave me a scarf to tie around my ponytail. My ponytail hides the fact of my frizzy mullet perm. In the picture, I look appropriately 1950s, just a teenage girl on a Saturday afternoon hanging out at home, listening to records, writing in my diary. I was not dressed for a sockhop.
While the other girls looked like girls dressed up as teenagers from the 1950s, I looked like a teenager. I stood a head taller than everyone in my class, and I had breasts past the training bra stage. My period was no longer a surprise. I was eleven years old.
The other girl in the picture had both cassette box sets of all of the relevant 1950’s music. Both sets came in a plastic jukebox, one pink and one blue, with a stack of about ten cassettes each, a cassette for every year, I think. My friend listened to them constantly. Going 50s was probably her mom’s idea for the party in the first place.
My family could afford the Stand By Me soundtrack (1986), which we had to buy twice, because we wore it out. We learned to make copies. The action of the movie takes place in 1959. The boys are 12, about the age my dad would have been. These boys would most likely go to war.
Three years later, in 1989, Corey Feldman who played Teddy in Stand By Me, starred opposite the other Corey (Haim) in Dream a Little Dream, a film that featured Michael Damian’s hit song “Rock On.” In the song, Damian asks “Where do we go from here?” and honestly, when talking about “Rock On,” I don’t know where to start. Even at age eleven, I didn’t like this song. I was too busy listening to Bon Jovi’s New Jersey.
Now: Hey, kids, you boogey, too, did ya?
If it’s your first time hearing this song, do not watch the video. Go do something else, but listen. Maybe go for a drive. Why? I cannot hear the song without seeing the video—one played repeatedly on MTV and on “Night Tracks” (the weekend music video show on TBS for those of us in rural areas and with limited cable). However and whenever I heard the song in the past, I had to leave the room. It’s like when I have to cover my eyes when someone on television is about to get humiliated. I just can’t endure it.
So, imagine my discomfort when I began listening to it repeatedly these last couple of months. It helped to have other people hear it with me. My children, ages 10 and 8, found it “confusing.” My students in my intro level creative writing class at the university also used the word “confusing.” One student declared, “It’s just so awkward.” And a few students agreed with what I had known all along: The song is forever frozen in time, stuck in its own identity crisis.
If I find the song awkward, the movie is hopelessly so.
My husband and I watched Dream a Little Dream, and neither one of us could figure out this self proclaimed teen “metaphysical drama” of body swapping (another 80s trope). I’ll try to explain, and to keep things simple I’m just going to use the actors’ names instead of the characters. Jason Robards, wishing he could be young again, somehow implants his soul in Coery Feldman’s body. Robards through Feldman convinces the pretty dance team member played by Meredith Salenger to help him get back to his old body so he can be with his wife again and they can continue to grow old together because being young can sometimes suck, too, and in ways that are suckier than being old.
There’s a disturbing side story involving Salenger’s character, Lainie. She dates the rich, abusive asshole, and her mother roofies her (her own damn daughter!) in order to keep Lainie from hooking up with the Feldman/Robards hybrid. Rich asshole kid and Feldman have a confrontation in the alley, the very same smoky alley in the Damian video. And, it is this scene in which “Rock On” plays its part. However, the song shows up in snippets throughout the movie whenever there’s an increase in tension between characters or when time is starting to run out. It’s only the opening measures of the song, the pulsing baseline, a kind of heartbeat of the movie, I guess, and then nothing. Next scene. Somehow all the souls end up back in their proper bodies, and Salenger and Feldman end up together with Feldman’s misfit character more confident and wise but still true to his own way.
At the end of the movie, my husband looked at me strangely and was all, “Uh, thanks for the movie night, I guess?” And, “That movie required way more alcohol than we had on hand” because what in the hell did we just watch?
A side note on Dream a Little Dream: I needed help at our local video store, Casa Video, here in Tucson to find this movie on the shelves a few months ago (a thriving video store, y’all!). I told the clerk that I first watched the movie a week before its VHS release because my uncle ran the video store in our very small town and I was able to “preview” movies. I didn’t like it at age eleven, and I doubted I would like it again at forty-one. We had a fun conversation about the Coreys, about the great talent of Jason Robards, about our surprise that Harry Dean Stanton had a starring role. And, then, hey “That’s Natty Gann who’s now married to Patton Oswalt!”
While it’s a side note, it does return us to the fatal flaw of the song and the movie: the crisis between all the things it aspires to be and what it becomes. What if we went back to the beginning, to how “Rock On” became a song?
The Lyrics: Jimmy Dean vs. James Dean and Other Confusions
David Essex wrote “Rock On” for the 1973 film That’ll Be the Day, but the song was considered too weird to be included. It did, however, manage to make the closing credits of the American release of the movie. “Rock On” (1973) had a respectable run on international music charts.
That’ll Be the Day was a kind of retrospective of early British rock in the 1950s and a documentary-style exploration of wandering youths working carnivals in post World War II England. Ringo Starr plays Essex’s friend. And, frankly, both musicians portray terrible characters. Starr talks about “bagging birds” (and he ain’t talking pheasants though the hunter metaphor is apt), and the main character played by Essex actually rapes a young woman outside the fun fair where they work the Tilt-a-Whirl. Even so, That’ll Be the Day was successful enough to spawn the sequel Stardust. It’s tagline is: "Show me a boy who never wanted to be a rock star and I'll show you a liar." It was another movie featuring a cast of musicians playing young and hungry musicians trying to make it big. The actors (all male) had perhaps aged out of their roles by ten years or more.
In an interview, Essex says that “Rock On” is about “Americana” and how American culture shaped the early sounds of rock music in England where dance halls featured local bands trying to capture that sound. And the song does transmit a kind of telegraphed nostalgia for the 1950s and its music.
In very sparse lyrics, Essex references three songs: “Shout” (1959) by the Isley Brothers, “Summertime Blues” (1958) by Eddie Cochran , and “Blue Suede Shoes” (1956) by Carl Perkins. All of these songs, while standing on their own merits by the original songwriters, were covered by other artists to oftentimes greater success as far as sales and airplay. The Beatles had a hit with “Shout.” Elvis hit it hard with “Blue Suede Shoes.” Even “Summertime Blues,” a posthumous release for Cochran after his death in a car accident, became a country hit for Alan Jackson in the 1990s. All of these songs kept “rocking on.”
Essex calls on one cultural icon by name as if to conjure him from the grave. In fact, he uses two names: James Dean and, more informally, Jimmy Dean. At the time I must have wondered why he was singing about the sausage guy who grew up down the road from where I did. My grandmother’s second husband had his hair cut during the depression by Jimmy Dean’s mother down in Plainview, Texas. I mean, he sang “Big Bad John” and created a sausage empire and all, but he’s no James Dean.
Perhaps this 1950’s nostalgia can be broken up into two camps: (1) When James Dean was alive, and (2) After James Dean died. Paula Abdul’s “Rush, Rush” and its video homage to 1955’s Rebel Without a Cause, would come later in 1991, but it was still riding that wave of James Dean nostalgia. 1991 was also the year that REM released “Drive” which ponders David Essex’s “Where do we go from here?” However, Stipe and REM, with an admitted nod to Essex, adapt the nostalgia to fit the despair of the speaker and listeners and their moment.
“Rock On” Streetfight: 1973 vs. 1989
David Essex’s original works, in a way, because Essex can sing like he really doesn’t give a shit. On the same album as “Rock On,” Essex gives us “Streetfight,” which is grittier and tougher than “Rock On” but with a similar bassline beat and some horns breaking it all down in the middle. And when those horns come in on “Streetfight,” the shit gets real. The two songs pair together nicely. “Rock On” might be the song Essex’s streetfighter uses to wind with a couple of beers after a hard night kicking ass. (It’s worth watching this video of highlights from the 1979 film Warriors set to “Streetfight,” especially if you need to get in an ass-kicking mood.)
Years later, when Essex folds “Rock On” into his “jukebox musical” All the Fun of the Fair, we see the aging rocker in the role of a carnival barker, poking fun at himself, admitting that though he’s older he once “rock and rolled” with the best of them. The song grows with Essex into a humorous look at aging and youth.
But, I must say: I’m not too wild about the Essex version of the song either. It’s okay. Musically, it’s interesting. No chords. All bass, brass, and beats. It’s funky, that’s for sure. 1989’s ‘Rock On” lacks the funkiness of the original, a funkiness that original producer Jeff Wayne and bassist Herbie Flowers honored in the arrangement because, as Wayne noted, the strength of the song was in “the hollows, the absences and the mood in the lyrics.” Damian’s cover adds so much by way of instrumentation, the spare lyrics can’t breathe. The hollows disappear.
See Her Shake on the Silver Screen
If anything, the greatest offense of “Rock On” (1989) is its awkwardness, in how confusing both song and video are, and in 1989 people were still watching music videos. At least I was. I kept a VHS in the machine at the ready so I could record my favorite ones.
Damian’s cover aims for a hard edge and then undercuts it in the video. He even hams it up at the end when it becomes a sing-along with the stars of the movie, as if to say, “Look, I’m just kidding. I’m still me. This is fun. I’ll dance on stage with the Coreys.”
And, maybe he has a point: Isn’t rock and roll supposed to be fun?
The video wears the song’s confusion perhaps best of all. Damian is on stage. He is in an alley. He is in a room of black and white tiles. (What is it with these checkerboard rooms and why are there houseplants in this one?) He stands perhaps in a warehouse of some sort, a big box fan rotating ominously behind him. He wears black leather then kicks back all cozy in a turtleneck. He gets down to business in a suit then slips back into casual with a white shirt and wool vest. And, still, the video manages to capture scenes from the movie. All in three minutes and seventeen seconds. It’s a lot.
The video is bad because it’s awkward (again, that word), because it tries to go too many places all at once. It attempts and fails to dress itself up in toughness. It has a hell of a time picking out an outfit and sticking with it. The video itself is a costume. Like the song, it’s over-accessorized.
One has to wonder if “Rock On” was Damian’s attempt at a tougher image. Damian had spent the previous decade playing the rockstar Danny Romalotti on The Young and the Restless, a soap opera everyone in my family watched obsessively, even more obsessively than Dallas. And while Danny was a total rockstar who went on tour and everything and all the girls loved him, he played against rock-n-roll bad boy type by being the really good guy. Danny’s storyline would take him out of Genoa City on tour any time Michael Damian went on tour.
In an interview in People Magazine (July 10, 1989), Damian talks about the role of Danny Romalotti at the height of the song’s success on the charts, and it’s clear that the two often blur and understandably so:
For the most part, Damian says, it’s a kick “to be able to do the same things in real life that you’re doing in a character.” He strongly hopes, however, to avoid emulating his alter ego’s convoluted love life. “Danny married a girl because she tried to commit suicide,” says Damian. “She was pregnant. She ended up losing the baby, and we”—he is into his TV persona now—”split. My character has been in love with this girl named Cricket on the show. But she’s not into me. She was in love with her half brother.”
David Essex likewise experienced a kind of identity crisis when he played the rockstar in Stardust. When filming concert scenes, the audience had to be reminded to shout the character’s name and not Essex’s name. He found it very disconcerting.
Side Note: It’s no surprise to me that both Damian and Essex have had great success in the theatre. Essex, an aspiring jazz drummer, was discovered doing Godspell. Damian had a critically acclaimed run in Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat in the early 1990s. Both are clearly hardworking and love what they do, so it’s not easy for me to tear down a song that shaped both their careers.
In another interview, Damian admits that he didn’t initially intend for the song to be used for a movie, that he recorded it for his “own reasons.” His brother sent the tape of Damian’s cover without his knowledge to Mark Rocco who directed Dream a Little Dream. Rocco wanted that version for his film. I emailed Damian through his official fan club because I wondered why he originally recorded it. Why this song? I did not ask: What would the 1989 song have been for you if it had not been made the centerpiece of a really bad movie and a similarly bad music video?
I have yet to hear back from him.
Would it change the way I feel about the song?
Probably not: Michael Damian’s “Rock On” does not work for me because it is trying too hard to be all things 1980s as the decade was coming to a close. Perhaps, in that way, the song works as a tribute to a decade that sometimes dressed itself up in the 1950s. Two movies that express this nostalgic urge, ones that immediately come to mind, both involve time travel taking the characters away from the 1980s and to the 50s: Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) and Back to the Future (1985). There are many more movies and television shows that truck in this nostalgia, this mythologizing of the 1950s as a simpler time when it damn sure wasn’t.
“Rock On” attempts a harder edge in contrast to the softer and gentler 1950s (again, a dangerous myth) but ends up resembling the poppier attempt at toughness as shown by New Kids on the Block’s “Hangin’ Tough.” As an eleven year old who could get pregnant, I had to cultivate my own toughness. I learned to hit early and hit hard enough to almost break my hand when groped, to let my ability to fight back dictate my reputation in a very small town.
I was not going to be that “blue jean, baby queen” in the song. Maybe that’s why Toni Basil’s 1981 cover of “Rock On,” one among the many covers I heard for the first time just weeks ago, is the only one that works for me. It’s punchier. It just goes for it. I buy every single word she sings. Its badassery is believable. Its 80’s new wave ethos sounds fresh because it distills the beginning of a new decade’s urgency. It’s not tired of its tried and true tricks of sound and sense.
“Rock On” is a song that doesn’t quite know what it is. And maybe that’s the point. We don’t know where to go from here, and perhaps we didn’t know in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell, the year of Tiananmen Square, just all of us waiting there at the ass-end of the decade. The 1960s were waiting for us to get nostalgic over them, and we did with a Woodstock revival and Forrest Gump. But, in 1989, there was also me, sitting there at eleven years old, dressed up in a nostalgia I didn’t feel, the first one in my class to hit puberty and hit it hard. Maybe the awkwardness of “Rock On” was the next level awkwardness I was experiencing, and I didn’t like it reflected back at me.
Perhaps my generation (whatever you want to call it) was moving beyond the 1950’s nostalgia even as we were born into it. In 1978, the year I was born, Grease premiered (and it was later released on VHS in 1989). Happy Days, first aired in 1974, the year my mother graduated from high school, was going strong through the early eighties. As a child, I regularly watched it with my parents and grandparents well into syndication.
Elvis Presley died on my parents’ second wedding anniversary, August 16, 1977. My mother would have been three months pregnant with me, nervous about carrying a baby to term after two miscarriages in the past year. In 1978, we lived in an old farmhouse on land my dad worked. My mother never really got into disco, she said, because she was poor, rural, and busy with babies. She listened to old country-western radio and played Patsy Cline, BB King, Elvis, and The Commodores on the few eight-tracks she owned. These were the songs of my early childhood.
There’s a concept known as “the nostalgia pendulum” used to describe the frequency in which nostalgia runs, when old trends become popular again (and therefore manufactured, hence consumable). This is not a new theory. Some believe nostalgia runs on a roughly 30-year continuum. Adam Gopnik theorizes 40 years with some “epicycles” occurring within that run. What many of these theories sometimes neglect to mention is that “nostalgia” was originally used all the way back to the eighteenth century to describe homesickness in sailors. It was a sickness. It was a sickness. It was a longing for home. This can be the basis for great art, but can nostalgia be taken too far and make bad art? Can it be used for propaganda? It sure as shit can.
But, I’m getting away from myself. That’s beyond the scope of what I’m trying to do here, staring down middle age and writing about a song made almost thirty-one years ago when I was entering adolescence. I have no nostalgia for the late 1980s or the first half of the 1990s for that matter. Perhaps nostalgia is for people whose growth didn’t outpace their age, who felt of their age and not outside of it. Hell, maybe I’m not a fan of “Rock On” because I am not a very nostalgic person. Nostalgia relies on the account of good memories collecting more interest than the bad ones as the years pass. And in 1989, my best memories were still to come (and even now, ongoing), just waiting for me beyond that age of confusion, an age perhaps mirrored best in the mess that was 1989’s “Rock On.”
Lee Anne Gallaway-Mitchell in 1989, her fifth grade school photo. Lee Anne’s mother believes her daughter is the only person in the world who can pull off a mullet. Thanks, mom. Lee Anne’s essays and poems can be found in Bat City Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, 0-Dark-Thirty, and Terrain.org, among others. Her essay, “Debridement,” was chosen as a notable essay in Best American Essays 2019. She has a PhD in English from the University of Texas and is currently an MFA candidate in creative writing at the University of Arizona.
GEORGIA PEARLE & JOSHUA DEWAIN FOSTER ON “SAILING”
It was around this season last year that we first toured the property where we now live. Love built this place, the original owner had told us with her hands full of sterling rings, none of them a wedding band. A swoon to her voice as she said, This place was built to house love. Sing that to the same cadence as Fantasy, it gets the best of me. The Loft: six acres of parking lot and gardens edged in evergreens and lilacs, and two log cabin buildings—one that started as a restaurant, and a second that sprouted as a space to hold wedding receptions and parties anywhere other than a local Church hall. It was the first of its kind in Eastern Idaho.
In sailing terms, the sail loft is the room where sails get drafted, cut, and made into something that can catch the next wind. So it makes sense, this place being called The Loft. My job here, to help people cut the ceremonial sails that will carry them into new versions of their lives, forging new families. Or that’s how I see it on a good day. On a bad day, I think Foster and I are camping in the basement of other people’s hope, and those sails look like fantasies someone else crafted and stuck me to tend, a purgatory for our many prior matrimonial failures. We live with four divorces between us, at least seven diplomas on our shared walls, six of them verifiable, two dogs, a spoiled tuxedo cat, two garbage cats that came with the place, and my two teenagers at the dinner table each night.
The first month we were at The Loft, Foster found a baby bib in the garden and bestowed it to me. I threw it out. It keeps reappearing: last night, on my pillow. Before that, on the bathroom counter, in the bottom bathroom drawer. This morning I saw it draped on our headboard, which he claims was my doing. I don’t remember that.
Sailing Cutie, the bib proclaims in an insufferable white cursive. The bib is the soft but somehow bitter pink of the Walmart baby section, a cheap pink, like a Pepto bottle left too long to the elements. Machine embroidered on the bib, a sail boat with a dark pink bow stitched to the mast, dark pink stitching around one white sail, cerulean stitching around the other blue sail. The same blue for the anchor, and navy for the hull, and I think to myself, of course the supposedly masculine colors get to be the parts of the boat that are functional. Water-tight hull, anchor and sail, all blues. Meanwhile the pinks are merely decorative. Then I think, the bitterness of the pink is probably my own damn bitterness at being pink in spite of all my reaching toward anything else, queerness and solo-ness especially, at having gone through the whole supposedly fulfilling stretch of young motherhood mostly broke and alone, my children now in their teens and readying their wings, condescending to me over the homemade chicken soup I’ve made them when I have a literal PhD in the topic they’re teaching me about. But, my word, my children were beautiful. Bright blonde, sharp and so quippy that I kept regular notes on the gorgeous things they’d say. They’re still beautiful, in the way that teenagers are beautiful, constantly morphing and bursting, passing through the uncomfortable but necessary transom from postlarva youngling to grown human being. And of course I’m also proud of them, and comfortable in my assurance that they’ll go on being brilliant and beautiful and do something necessary for the world, that is if they can manage to keep their teeth and fingernails clean without my nagging. It’s just that the marathon of keeping them alive and focused in a direction for nearly a whole generation now has got me about worn out.
The bib has a brown stain along one full side of its pink, faded because I keep washing it. I keep throwing it in with the dish towels, in our laundry room full of wedding linens for the event center we both run, where we also live (in the basement). In my head, the stain has been there all along, mud from languishing in the rain after being dropped from the hand of some distracted auntie at one of the twenty-three weddings we hosted last summer. That’s probably not right, though. Foster is too attentive to misplaced objects and to the lawn care to have left it there in the mud for that long. I’m sure he picked it clean off the grass and brought it in to our shared bathroom counter, where it stayed, mocking me. The bib’s presence was there both times I drew my own blood for the at-home fertility test. Just to see where we are, what the options are or aren’t, because I am aging and Foster hasn’t yet had children, not that he knows he wants them. And oh holy hell, could I do it again? The first test failed. I over-bled on the blotter paper. I was sure I wasn’t giving enough with those little plastic lancets they’d sent, and so in my typical manner of overdoing everything, I took a straight razor to my fingertips. The company sent another kit. That time everything came out normal, fine enough for someone whose womb is geriatric.
Each time I throw the bib in the Speed Queen and waste another cycle on it, I ask myself why. I’ve thrown it away at least thrice. Every time, Foster pulls it out and finds another place where it can haunt me. I never would have put a bib like this on my child. A bib is just another thing to wash. Between diaper blowouts, spitups, and teething drool, infants have to be changed so often that it never seemed practical to me to Velcro yet another piece of fabric across their chests. Plenty of days, I gave up on fabric entirely and toted my babies around the house in only their diapers. As far as I’m concerned, this particular bib is no more or less useful than any bib. It’s a gesture, a symbol, with little real application. All summer, I told myself the same thing about all the weddings we hosted. The tradition, the fanfare, the same array of awful and awfully sentimental songs on repeat. Cut as many sails as you like. They’re nothing without the right wind.
But then, I ask myself, if it’s only some symbol, why did I find time to sob in our basement stairwell after every ceremony? Honestly. I’m poet enough that there’ve been plenty of times I’ve loved the symbol and the image more than the real, daily thing they were supposed to mean. I’m not supposed to love diamonds, those useless upcharged things with their industry’s ethical atrocities, but I loved my wedding jewelry all the way to the moment I pawned it off to pay the electric bill, both times, as marriage seemed important enough for me to try at least twice. And as I watched those princess cuts on my finger twist in the light, set in platinum, I loved, too, what they symbolized—the visage I carried, both times, of the fresh-faced young man who loved me enough to put two full months of work into something that served nothing more important than this reminder of his devotion. The fresh-faced young man who had fathered my child, and spent days lingering with me in the sand, beachside back in our coastal home county. It’s not far to never-neverland, sings Christopher Cross. Fantasy, it gets the best of me.
Those diamond rings had meant hope, and in my twenties I sold my hope for pennies on the dollar. How else was a girl supposed to keep her lights on after love had died? I pawned those rings and went back to my books with my children on my back.
After we’d taken our first tour of The Loft and its accompanying basement dwelling, Foster and I scheduled a trip to my home county in Alabama to talk to my lawyer, and the one of my two ex-husbands who’s still showing up for the kids. It was March 2019. We’d be graduating in May, two newly minted Doctors of the Literary, having pushed through the last few years together. What a way to spend our final Spring Break, dragging this love to tour all my failed sails.
The first day of our trip also happened to be my sister’s baby shower. Of course I only had an inappropriately black dress to wear, which looked strange against the pastel petit fours piped with icing pacifiers. I bought her a multipack of matching socks, hats, and yes, bibs, in an array of white and gray, and imagined them scattered and lost to the furniture in the blur of her firstborn’s first months. It was a warmer thought than it sounds. Some part of me truly misses those years I spent smelling like curdled milk, afraid to wear black because it would show so many smears, afraid to wear cotton because of how it’d reveal those letdown leaks. And maybe this is the point of sentimentality, at least when it comes to babies. Spend the time describing your days with an infant to anyone, and it’s mostly bodily fluids, laundry, blistered nipples, and the ever-banal-but-too-real-not-to-mention exhaustion. But there’s that other intangible: the moment when the child sighs, sleeping on your chest, and you see that you’ve broken off a piece of yourself and grown it into the future, a future you can only hope will expand into worlds you won’t live to see. And smacked on the back of that comes the hubris they’ll have when they do grow into people who know they’re rising to replace you, too foolish yet to realize how much they, too, will fail to perfect the world behind you, just as you know your own parents failed.
At the end of the baby shower, as I was sweeping the room for the last of the paper plates with their remnants of chips-and-dip and pastel buttermints, I got a text message from Foster: I’m bleeding. Anldso drunk. Nothing else in the message save a location pin. I showed it to my sister-in-law, she showed me her phone with its own garbled text flares from my step-twin, and we agreed it was time to go pick the boys up.
By the time we got to the ass-end of the suburban golf course where Foster and my brother were throwing discs over exposed sewer pipes and into the dense swamp woods, they had entirely forgotten they’d texted us. Pearle! It’s a miracle! How’d you find us?! Foster grinned and pointed to his calves, filthy and wet and vined with blood. I knew these woods well enough to know he’d got caught in a mess of brambles. I turned to my brother, HolyHell. How many hours I leave him with you, and this happens?
And of course my step-twin, lover of costume and revelry, participant in no less than one and no more than three Mardi Gras organizations, had already concocted another scheme. He had somehow collected a batch of sailor hats, and he wanted all of us together, in sailor hats, at the neighborhood yacht club for karaoke night, where we would sing together in those sailor hats.
It’s at least part my step-twin’s fault that I’m such a curmudgeon. He’s the sort of jokester who’ll get you nearly beat up any time you go anyplace together. Once, when we were twelve, I left for the bathroom at a homecoming game in Brewton, Alabama and came back to him telling a throng of cornfed Southern Baptist boys that I was known for my witchcraft skills. As soon as I’d heard the plan, I resolved I wouldn’t be singing. I probably wouldn’t be wearing those dumb hats, either.
I listen to a song like Sailing, and how can I not be irritated at the gauzy ease that seems to mark so much music from my parents’ generation? And this brother of mine, he loves it unquestioningly. I envy that about him, his ability to jump on whatever ship his joy has built and go with it. Meanwhile I can’t seem to trust most ships not to thrust me overboard or make me sick. When I was small, my father had his captain’s license, and would sometimes run charter boats for deep sea fishing trips. Once, before my step-twin’s father married my mother, I was out on one of those charter boats with my parents and their gaggle of friends, all in flipflops, tiny shorts or string bikinis on their slender-as-a-line-of-cocaine frames. I imagine it was about four years post-Sailing. There was the salt air, and the dolphins chattering boatside, their skin flecked with light as they sprang. I was young enough to imagine mermaids down there in the deep. And then I got sick enough to sully the hair of at least two or three mermaids, and someone carried me down to the cabin to moan to myself, alone, for the rest of the trip.
Christopher Cross makes an unsettling promise: that there’s a way to be taken away without danger. That peace really exists somewhere, that compromise won’t come on the back of the someone who’s already the most disadvantaged. You say boat shoes, I think sweat and blisters. What a damn inheritance.
*
This trip to Mobile Bay was the fourth time I’d visited Pearle country, and it’d never been this frazzled. I, for one, was scared shitless, understanding the synchronicity and alignment of all this. In January, Pearle and I had entered our last semester at the University of Houston, both with quality manuscripts and peak hope in a bleak job market situation. My agent, or, ex-agent, was shopping my novel then. I didn’t feel great about it, blamed Trump. GD Donald. That same month, Pearle and I video-conferenced in on a line with all thirty-two of my parents’ progeny. My parents had news to share. They opened the LDS official email once we were all ready: they had been called to serve, as Mission President and Companion to Mission President in some remote Pacific Islands—the Marshalls, Kiribati, Nauru—for three years. Little coral mushrooms growing out of the deep dark blue. My mother slid her glasses down her nose and chuckled and couldn’t get a word out, so surprised and shocked. She was really clucking. And my father, he sat back, stared off into the abyss. The story I’d always heard was that they had signed up for a six month mission to Southern Canada, where they could take their dog and pickup and food storage. I watched him running his commitments and career as a farmer and rancher through the ticker of his mind. He stared off, yawned big, opened his eyes. They had a June departure.
After the news, I didn’t sleep well for a few nights. Things had not been great between me and my parents. They were sick of me abandoning them and the family farm and our morals and standards in the sweaty pursuit of high art. I was critical of the Church, this governing organization and spiritual politick to which we all adhered, to varying degrees. I had lodged my complaints and withdrawn, stood my ground, ran my mouth, and because of this, hardly anyone could stand me anymore. The last time I’d seen my parents face-to-face had not been pretty. There was a yelling match with my mother in the parking lot of an orange gas station; I leveled truth upon my father in his big cowboy F-350 while we were eating tortas from the taco truck. I was so mad I only ate half.
And yet, I still felt inclined to call my father. He’d looked sucker-punched by the call. I knew how much responsibility there was to care for back in Idaho, because when I hadn’t been in sweaty pursuit of high art, I had worked every job on the family farm, from pulling weeds at the granaries to counting potatoes with the bankers. I deeply respected my parents, had worked in the dirt with my father since I could see over a dashboard, graduated into the office to be trained by my mother in the books and legalities. I had built their spreadsheets and and organized and backed-up their data and synced their phones and connected them. They loved me through my first divorce, completely shocked and scared, but my second wife and I left after a barley crop disaster, thinking I could never manage risk and crop failure like farmers had to, and that really fractured things. By my mid-thirties, I wanted that dependable, full-benefits, shared-moldy-office-institutional future. So I told my parents, before I left for the PHD, trailering my then-wife’s musical instruments and my books with my farm pickup, I told them I wouldn’t be coming back. The farm life was not for me. I was an artist, for shit’s sake. They were the leaders, caretakers, toilers. We’d tried it enough times to know better.
I left, knowing there was more sweet-bitter to come. My life changed a few more times in adult and complicated ways—that all-American story of eros and aftermath—and now here I was, fiercely with Pearle and her kids and our cats and her dog, our books in the same hallway. A new kind of family, at least for me, and one I wanted to continue post-doc, so I was staying up at night thinking about the obligation I had to my parents and this labor of love, and my history of missions, and theirs too, and how easy it is to lose everything, and the delay and heartache of rebuild and the hard-knock ticks of the mortal clock, and the truth of crashing dreams, of best ideas—creative and personal—capsizing, and my plodding and sunburned and volcanic genealogy, and all that my people had bled into their eons and stars and hills and hay and dust, and the lack of prof jobs or book deals, and thinking became dreaming, and maybe that became prayer, asking for direction on how this little crew of Pearle’s could ever fit into it, if they wanted to.
Then I talked to Pearle about everything that was weighing on me, and she heard me out, and she said, That sounds like something you and your father need to talk about.
So I called him. He almost always answers me, in part because I know when to call him, when he’s happy and clear-headed and undivided, which is usually sitting in his pickup in Idaho Falls eating fast-food and on bluetooth. In Houston, I sat out in my own car, in front the flat I shared with Pearle and the kids, with sunglasses and a beanie on.
This call was short. I told my father the truth: we were different because we had to be, and there was no use in allowing this wedge to settle and split us. I was sorry, and as he knew, loyal as a cowdog, and dependable, and indebted. And if there was a need for me in Idaho, and a way to include Pearle and the kids, then maybe there was a reason I’d finished the degree a year early—just in time to move back home.
My father was chewing something beefy, and focused on that, quiet in thought. He said he’d let me know if anything came to mind. We hung up. I told Pearle that was that, and we kept our gigs and dissertation schedules.
But then something strange and big happened—my mother had this old family cheese-and-kitsch store, a log cabin building they’d bought from the original owner a few years back, and now the neighbor wanted to sell the adjoining reception hall. My father called me, giddy but cool. He’d always wanted the whole corner property to eventually build something he’d never tell me. Top secret. The purchase would include the log cabin events center and its business operations, an industrial kitchen, nigh on three decades of rustic-romantic wedding decor, and the living quarters beneath the building, a three-bedroom, two-bath basement house with a west-facing set of concrete bunker stairs.
Pearle and the kids and I, we all hashed it out. In February, we flew to Idaho for a few days to talk more with my parents and meet with the former owner and maybe pop into School District 251, my alma mater, and also attend the funeral of the untimely death of one our our best family friends, a young man who was a hunting guide and fishing guru, son of my father’s best friend and hunting partner. Death abounded here; it felt heavy to be home, but necessary. And, in that way, the ideas and energy all started to pile up. Pearle and I stayed up talking to my parents. The former owner invited us to tour the premises and living quarters, and had a tray of fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies waiting. The basement house felt Nineties Nostalgic. I’d always been made to sleep in the cellar, and to have a whole downstairs, well, to me it felt like a comfortable beaver dam. What a dream. The kids were stoked to have separate bedrooms with functioning doors, and that the showerhead had neon settings. Pearle and I eyed up a two-person jetted tub in the master bathroom.
We started to imagine ourselves in new ways, Pearle and me. Could we? Should we? Even though it was a big boat, it was a small cabin, and lonely living. And but what about the kids?! Idk, idk. We didn’t say yes; we said we’d need to really look into some things. We all returned to Houston. By March, my father was joyfully negotiating with the neighbor, and Pearle and I were sweating pre-anxiously, and playing coy, not committing. Rejections came in on my novel, doors continued to close. The agent removed herself from the book, took a job internally. I thanked her, was sad, told her I was sorry that I could never make her any money.
Suffice it to say, when Pearle and I arrived in Mobile, we were feeling an urgent anxiety about locking something down. We got into Mobile and dropped the kids off with one of her ex-husbands, the one who’s still around, and went and crashed at her step-brother’s mom’s house. It all felt very family, and no one really knew what we were in town for. Babyshower gossip talk. I was very much looking forward to it all. I was going disc golfing with Pearle’s step-brother Daniel. A very family move. Knowing Daniel had a finely weird sense of humor and plenty of pop culture wisdom and great taste and stock of beer. He admitted to not being the most active Disc Golfer, but had gone enough to know his subdivision had a course in the heart of it. I had two bags of discs, and enough stress to chuck and drink all day if we had to to feel better about life.
The next morning, before the babyshower started, Daniel picked me up, and we wound around this massive wooded hilly runneled maze of houses and cul de sacs. LAKE FOREST, it was badly and generally named, and may have well been its own township, or kingdom. Daniel told me facts and fodder that sounded regionally accurate and fascinating. Daniel and his wife and their three cats and dog all just bought a house in Lake Forest, just around the wormy road from where he’d lived with Pearle as a kid, the one in which they stuffed a toilet in the basement full of potatoes, just to see how many he could fit in, no shit, and cost the family a lot of money with that prank, not to mention the loss of spuds. One of his high school friends owns that house now, has a homemade arcade in it.
It took a while to drive across, Lake Forest. Daniel was tan and swarthy and smiley, and had on sunglasses. Very boaty looking. I was wearing shorts in public, a rare look, for the sport of it, and running shoes and a bandana. The windows were down, and the spring air was hot, and the trees misty and the spanish moss greener than usual and wet, and the sun was out, and we could have been going to the pier where apparently the subdivision had a yacht club, which I couldn’t really visualize how close we were to Mobile Bay, just another hill over, down the road. And, that like any bay, there would be piers and accesses and businesses. It smelled coastal, and felt that way, when we parked and got out of the car in the lot smack dab in the middle of the course, and up and down which snaked Daphne Alabama City Parks Septic Crew, pumping sewage above-ground through huge flexible piping. The exposed sewer and weekend-parked dozers and tractors and flatbed trucks left by the department made for interesting obstacles.
I gave Daniel a bag of discs; he gave me a can of really good beer whose name I could care less about; and we started at box one, heading west, up and downhill, toward the water, drinking and throwing.
There’s always some comradery and chatter in the first nine holes. Daniel, who I could see now, had more a dock vibe in his new digs. He tried to explain H.O.A.s. We mostly talked and didn’t keep real score and felt good about throwing all these bogies. Daniel put on some music from his phone, a Google XL, just like I had, and streamed some of his new favorite music since moving to Lake Forest: Yacht Rock.
So far, I liked everything fine about the day but the soundtrack was really bumming me out. This softy salty meander. Is it all powdered drug metaphor? I could never tell. I tuned it out, drank, threw. Went through a few before the music got better. The beer kicked in and so did the habitat. My throws wobbled, then veered, then shanked. I didn’t care. I was vibing level Florabamaburger-in-Paradise, this music made perfect sense.
At some point, Daniel told me more about the yacht club, which sounded to me like a country club for ball golf, just add sails in a harbor. That was where Stacey and Daniel had been hanging out on various weekends, particularly, karaoke night.
And I must have been really drunk, because I said I’d sing some karaoke with Daniel, anytime, no problem, you bet, that’s what friends were for.
The tenth got gray and fuzzy. We’d walked up and down and back a hill, to the car, replenished the beer cooler, and tee-ed off down into a swamp full of sewage tractors, and I was probably sobbing on about how much I loved Pearle and her poems and politics and murmured all about it through my drive and launched my driver through a bramble wall into someone’s Lake Forest backyard. It took me a minute to pick my way through and dart in and grab the neon plastic, and by the time I came out and caught up with Daniel, my shirt was torn and I was bleeding down both shins. Felt great though, wasn’t thinking about anything but my salvage shot. A trio of bros with super cool backpacks came up on us playing really fast and so we found a bench and opened another one and let them play through. Daniel turned up the music. I was out of the window, too drunk, and again, yacht rock sucked, that was undeniable.
We were beyond the point of productive conversation. Daniel scrolled his phone, searching Miami Vice tunes, and I was squinting at those pros who jumped us. Each one threw three-hundred feet, and around trees and trucks and shit too. I was amazed at how good people could be at things, and ashamed I wasn’t better in every way. I wasn’t feeling great about anything. Why wasn’t I more careful? Classier? In less credit card debt? Even if this all worked out in Mobile, how would the kids really do in Idaho? How would Pearle? How would I? I grieved ex-family members from my past lives, the book, my own literary dreams. I was depressed and alone and bleeding in a foreign and hostile region.
I was about to puke, when Daniel was like, Will you look up there? His phone sang: The canvas can do miracles, believe me.
Down the hill strolled Stacey and Pearle in fanciful Sunday gowns. I learned this, when they got up close. I was stupefied, grateful, amazed.
How had Pearle come to find me, lost as I was, bloody in the water, torn up, paddleless, out of my latitude and longitude? Castaway miracles, only. And moreso, I was so glad she was here finally, but did she have a solution to my deep and abiding consumption of MERIT 57? And also could she pick me up and carry me to the car?
*
Before dawn on the day of our appointment with the lawyer, I couldn’t quit thinking of the wide Western sky. The summer before, Foster and I had driven all the way from Texas to Idaho to stay in an empty cinder-block ranch-style surrounded by fields and potato cellars, and on the way through Wyoming he started waxing on about the desert. I’d never seen so much open ground, marveled at the juniper and sagebrush. Imagine all this, thousands of years ago, all an ocean floor. I blinked into the dark and tried not to feel seasick. At one point in my life I’d overidentified with jellyfish, wanting what I thought must be an existence of clear calm in the dark. But all this talk I’d heard from Foster of water rights in the West had me nervous. What happens to a liquid creature in the desert dust? In a place where water’s scarce enough to draw and fight contracts over it? What if I dried up? And the kids? It’s not like either of us was particularly adept at making love stay. We had a pile of try between us and an even bigger pile of debt, much of it accrued in past lives, past attempts at making family. Finally, I reached across the bed in the dark and convinced Foster to get up with me and go to Waffle House. We sat in what had once been the smoking section, back when I was sixteen and dropped out of school and drawing a paycheck there, and talked through the conversation we’d be having with my lawyer later that day: how at risk would my custody of my youngest child be, given that we were living in sin and planning to move cross-country? And should I have my first husband’s paternity rights revoked, given that we hadn’t seen him or any sign of his care in how many years? What sort of contracts would I need?
After our plates were cleared, we set to walking the gator trail to burn off the nerves together. Except for when we fail, we do this most mornings. Walking. In Houston, we’d walk four or five miles around Buffalo Bayou, or the track at the downtown Y when it rained. In Idaho, we hiked. Lately, we go upstairs and pace circles around the dance floor before dawn, our rowdy collie puppy swiping our calves.
So we didn’t think much of setting out down the boardwalk trail along the interstate that runs across Mobile Bay, at least not until we’d got going. The early morning mist was out over the water, and maybe there was an alligator or two in the reeds, but mostly there was that unsettling echo of cars across the overpass overhead, thathunk thathunk. And I’d been saying it all week, but there’s no place I hate more on this earth than Daphne, Alabama. The place is mostly an interstate fast food strip and a sewer treatment plant that overspills into the bay and gums up the air. Daphne, where I’d been pulled over and searched by the cops what felt like at least once a month when I was a teenager, targeted for my manic panicked home haircuts, the piercings, my penchant for combat boots with ripped up dresses or old man slacks cut below the knee. They never did find a thing when they tossed my car. I’ve always been pretty square.
Another reason I hate Daphne: I could probably play Are You My Baby’s Father? on any given day in that miserable city. They’re both still there, in apartments a few miles apart. When I still lived local, years ago, sometimes they’d pick the kids up in the same damn truck, grinning together like some snaggle-toothed faux-wrestling tag team. For a while, I’d called them My Two Dads.
As we rounded the sidewalk coming off the boardwalk, I said to Foster, I’m sure this sounds ridiculous, but I can feel my firstborn’s father. Stumbling down the sidewalk in frayed wide-legged denim, grizzled, tie-dyed, something about the man’s energy made Foster put a hand on my lower back and shuffle closer. I walked faster, craned and squinted, trying to get a good look at the man’s eyebrows. Was it? Could it be? Nope. Not him.
And then the next one was him. Barely nine a.m. on a weekday, and my first ex-husband was walking from the Circle K in a pair of kitchen shoes and chef’s pants, black striped and ballooned, and a stained white undershirt. Seventeen years since the wedding photos. He’d lost a fair chunk of his teeth and not bothered to replace them. He had a rollie cigarette in his left hand, and a glass bottle in a brown paper bag in his right. Hey how y’all doin this morning, he said with a chin flick, no recognition until I tossed an, Alright, how ’bout you, over my shoulder. I wasn’t about to stop and try to reminisce, about what, all the birthdays and bank holidays he’d missed? Or the night he broke out my backdoor window to “use the phone,” or the time he’d cleared out my bank account to pay a dealer debt and left me and the baby with no power in December? That was H’s dad, I muttered to Foster, who did the double-take, incredulous, and then pivoted on his heel to walk backwards in this sort of ridiculous, sort of beautiful, puffed-up-and-protective stance.
Later, after sitting with Foster in my lawyer’s office, we’ll have dinner in a Thai restaurant with the other of My Two Dads. The plan was to let him know what was coming in the mail: the relocation letter, which my lawyer had perused already, which would inform him that we intended to abscond to the Idaho wilds with the kids after we’d finished in Houston, and include all the state mandated details of prospective visitation schedules, et cetera. And as we’re sitting there—Foster by my side and another version of my family, kids included, across the table—all of us pulling spring rolls from the same plate, for a moment things feel normal. Thanks to Foster’s easy charm, my ex seems to have forgotten to think all Mormons are kin to Warren Jeffs, and I somehow forget my litany of complaints against him, which are justified and many, and it all feels, for a moment, like family. I feel generous enough to pick up the check.
*
On the last big day of the trip, Pearle and I had a scheduled call with the neighbor, and then a follow-up call on that call with my father, whom we had recently learned sold his valley house and offered the neighbor all the cash proceeds for the reception center who would be very interested on the guarantee that Pearle and I were on board to manage. The neighbor wanted to say yes, but needed to be reassured we were for real.
On the first call, we assured her we were ready to leave our classrooms for the cult of small-business management as soon as we could. We all had a good scary relaxing laugh in my car on the bluetooth, then closed the deal. The neighbor was going to hang up and call my dad.
And then later, the call came from my father: “So are you two managers even ready for this? Do you have a pen and paper? Let’s make a list …”
Awkward, neither of us really spoke up. Pearle took notes, I asked clarifying questions. The new reality: there was a spot somewhere for us. Apple trees and space for kids and dogs. And work, work, endless work, tending to the investments and best bad ideas of others, taking the rickety helm while they set off on more hero narratives.
After a minute, my father’s voice fell drastically, Had something changed on our end? Were we totally both-feet-in, locked down, sure? And we were, made sure he knew it fully. In that case, he’d deliver a check of earnest money before the banks closed, and we’d work out the rest as it came at us, now that we were in business together, back in cahoots with the family. The laughs and praise of my father: rare, genuine. I was really coming home, this time with Pearle, and her crew. He could barely believe it, and really, neither could I, but we both were pretty damn happy about it. Pearle was just as stunned, smiling to herself in the co-pilot seat. She had confided to me how much she loved the mountains, the cows, the sagebrush, and who knew what kind of poems she could make in potato dirt.
It started raining again, getting cold and cloudy, dark. We belted up, hummed through the slow wet city of Mobile and onto the causeway, the sun setting in an orange line to our backs. We had a half-hour to kill before meeting for dinner, and suddenly I was feeling frigid and tired, and Bama was cold for the first time that week, but I also felt stoked that I had money coming in the future that was not student-loan, so I drove to the Daphne Dollar General, parked and left Pearle in the car, ran in and found a red flannel shirt made from the same fleece material as a lumberjack Snuggie. Never a piece of apparel that looked less Southern. Three dollars. Hell, I had that, cash. I bit off the tags and handed those to the cashier, told him to keep my pennies too. I put it on, buttoned it up, warmed me like a Large but thinned me because it was a Medium. That’s what happens, when things go your way. You start to feel like you had something to do with it, get a little high-headed, puffed up.
I strutted out to the car and Pearle took one look and started laughing. In that kind of mood, Pearle shaking her head at my faux bravado, we drove the speed limit down the main drag and then on a dark slender road to the parking lot of the Lake Forest Yacht Club, where most of Pearle’s Bama Family, minus her ex-men and children, for the last night, were waiting for us to eat dinner, and take in the local talent. In the white wooded archway of the entry, which looked suspiciously closed, stood Daniel and Stacey, and Pearle’s pregnant sister Katie with her husband Chris, and Pearle’s step-mom and long-term man, who was also the father to her daughter’s husband. This was the kind of family that made sense to me, a tangled and complicated but funny one, and once Pearle and I got up close, Daniel handed us two captain’s hats. Everyone else already had theres. I put mine on, lofty, spacious, tall, the brim, tiny, but visible. Pearle held onto hers, rolled her eyes, said Absolutely not.
Daniel led us up to steps to a dark outer ballroom and then through some closed doors that opened onto seventy, eighty seated and standing Hemingway-white People of the Gulf, mesh-back fishing shirts and cargo shorts and Roll Tide baseball caps, watching us saunter in with our captain’s hats, having never seen any of us before, all singing along to Steely Dan? Both sides were startled, and we all diverted our eyes, and our party hustled to a big undressed round-top table on the far side, facing the karaoke DJ.
Daniel stood up and took some menus from a rack on the wall, which was great, because we were all starved, and a customer, a woman a lot like us, just there for dinner and drinks and some entertainment, came over to our table and gathered up the menus and told us what there was: fried fish and shrimp, fries, po-boys, cheap beer. I think she was mad because her whole table looked viciously hangry and waiting on a food order. I didn’t like the treatment. All these good southern mannered folks had taken off their captains hats now that we were inside and seated, but I kept mine on, seeing that it bothered the other table. They forgot us when a silver-haired shorty took on Simon and Garfunkel, both parts.
In casual conversation, something came up that I’d heard before: both Daniel and Stacey and Katie and Chris had tied the knot that this very yacht club. But when I heard it this time, I heard it differently, since Pearle and I were partner in the love business, co-managers of beauty, innocence, freedom. We talked about their wedding and wedding decorations for a half-hour.
Pearle and I hadn’t smoked in months, but I went out and bummed one to celebrate, out on the wood deck, and got in some deep breaths. Daniel came from the bar with the last six good IPAs and we each took two. I heard more about their weddings, the in-fights, the highs and lows, the dancing at the end, always dancing, and remembered the pictures Pearle showed me on her Instagram more then once, in new context, and ain’t that all worth it, the sweetest part of love? The couples pics?
We look out to the black water of the gulf when the talking is done. And just like any cigarette, it’s the first one that gets me, and then the second one makes me reconsider my choices, but no it’s too late. I was a family man now, soon to be back in Mormon Country, I couldn’t be smoking coffin nails.
All the more reason to get them in now, I reasoned, and to celebrate.
We all finished one beer and went inside. Some new favorite was singing another bad song from an era that wasn’t mine. Who cared? I stood there and watched and saw that literally everyone else in the building did. A big boy sidled up to me then—he’d been sitting with the menu-woman, I recognized, looking up into his soft nostrils.
Hey, he said. What’s up with you and your friends?
I looked him up and up and down.
They’re my family, I said. We’re not from around here.
He looked over to his mother, and back to me, sort of.
He asked me: What’s up with the hat?
The nerve. Didn’t he know who I was? A soon-to-be Doctor of the High Arts, a cowboy captain, a man on a mission from God once again?
I said to him, flat out, staring up: It holds down my hair.
That clearly shut him up because he shut up. So I went and sat down, and told Pearle to put on her hat, which she did, for a couples pic with me, and then told everyone at the table what happened. They laughed. We watched three pretty okay performances. Then those that smoked went out for a smoke, and Pearle came this time and also joined. We always had a habit of being bad for each other. Wedding memories ensued, and so did my deepest fears and regrets. Oh, I’d made some mistakes. What number was this? On the docks, in a cold light yellow rain, we finished our last beer, all of us, and our last smoke, and entered again the gallery to cross the room and go out to the cars. I was ready to get on the road.
So we entered again the gallery, and immediately Daniel had his claws on me, walking me up the aisle to the DJ station, where the man in the sparkling jacket held up two wireless mics for us. Terror set in. We walked past the angry mother and son. I realized, that of course, Daniel had never forgotten what I had so drunkenly promised. I don’t know when he signed us up for a slot, but he had, during the beer runs.
Now, I am not a singer, and the stage has never called me, and I was dressed in confusing and anachronistic fashion and very much not enough drunk. My heart beat pounding beneath my ears, and I felt the beady eyes of the many mother-son couples in the room. Daniel, who had his back to me, was giggling. That ass; what a guy. Pearle had her phone out, recording. I’d been duped. I felt very queasy, and knee-weak.
Not the first time, not the last time, I thought. This was a hang-on and ride-it-out situation. So I took the mic and turned my back to the crowd and and tried to calm myself and leaned over to Daniel and asked him what the fuck where we singing.
Sailing, Daniel said, by Christopher Cross.
The title came onto the lyric screen.
I stared at it, hard. I had no idea.
Then the music started. The wavy instrumentals. And I thought, briefly, incorrectly: Oh, I know this. I’ve heard this. Right???
Some synthesized rhythms marked the true beginning, and baseline anxiety, of the song: reality escape by schooner. The further we got from the shore of the stringed instruments, and into the deep of beach-coke-80s America, I had serious doubts about turning around to face the crowd, and wanted to stop-drop-and-roll behind the DJ station, leave Daniel alone in his own mess.
But I didn’t. I grimaced, rotated, showed myself, put one hand in my pocket, struck the mildest pose. The words were appearing, ready to be sung. I shook my head no to Daniel, let him go first. As he mildly waded in, I tried to grasp any familiarity with this song, which everyone in the room immediately grooved to, as if Soft Nostrils had appeared behind us in a flowing buttoned fish shirt and neon sunglasses and a saxophone. Which, these first lines, they still give me shivers, make my blood run cold, for their softness, their nonsensical praise:
Well, it's not far down to paradise, at least it's not for me
And if the wind is right you can sail away and find tranquility
Oh, the canvas can do miracles, just you wait and see.
Believe me.
That made zero sense, and I had no idea what logically came next. So I would anticipate, and try, and fail. That happened for four minutes. Honestly, I don’t know how I made it through the entire set, other than the strange recess intervals found throughout in which I could close my eyes and pull my hat brim down and shuffle in place. Even when I did attempt to sing, mic down and six inches from my mouth, my eyes affixed to a swordfish on the back wall, my captain’s hat itching and weighing heavy, a-rhythmically moving my hips to a foreign flamingo sound, I put my arm around Daniel, that rat fink, and sang incorrectly:
Sailing—it takes me away!
That was my best line, and it got a few mother-son claps. Totally undeserved.
I knew then that “Sailing” by Christopher Cross was a bad song that made gullible people do irrational things. How many ship-heists because of this? And how many subsequent ship-wrecks?
Me, I held on for dear life, with Daniel, in our karoke life-raft until it was finally over. When I gave my mic back to the DJ, I looked him right in the chestnut moustache and said: Thank you, and I apologize for doing that. Never had this shirt, or singing in public, been a dumber, cozier idea. I walked straight out of the building then, planning to never return. Pearle was desperate to find something to eat and then go to Daniels and finally get to play VR-Ocean Floor. I agreed too, if there was something to drink that was fun.
We met Daniel and Stacey at the nearest Publix, and grouped up to get a cart. We had plans to buy fruits and crackers and good beer. Outside that stuffy yacht club, the night suddenly felt full of hope and options and fuel. We all put on our captain’s hats, my idea. I guess I’d never taken mine off, refused. On the entrance security camera we saw ourselves. I took a picture of the picture with my phone, which was really just a picture of me, of us, back then, but also still.
We took a little cart and wheeled into the mostly-empty store. There was an employee replenishing the citrus display. An old white man, not rattled by our rude hats. He stopped culling the grapefruits and straightened and watched us walk by. And he crossed his arms and sort of congratulated me and said: Hey, hey, hey look who’s ship came in.
I buttoned my fake flannel collar button, smoothed down my shirt, adjusted my hat, replied: We’re just fixing to set sail.
*
Both my step-siblings got married at that yacht club, thanks to my step-mom’s deep HOA discount, inclusive packaging, and the allure of the bayfront view. At the first wedding, I wore this strapless mid-thigh satin purple thing that I was convinced made me look like a suffocated tulip, my sister and my new sister-in-law’s sisters all in a bouquet to match. I’d burnt my forehead the week before trying to figure out how to operate a curling iron, and left the rehearsal dinner early to sob on my steering wheel the whole way home. I had just kicked out my second husband a second and final time, on the same day my temporary employment contract had ended, and me and the kids were headed back to the food stamp office. But the photos! Those lilac dresses against the fuchsias and corals in that sunset over the bay, my siblings radiant together, my children young and bright in the golden hour. The canvas can do miracles, just you wait and see.
I hate that yacht club nearly as much as I hate Daphne, but I love my step-twin’s unflappable effervescence, his enviable humor in the face of a disapproving crowd. The night we showed up with Foster, I was having none of the sailor hats, the warm lager, or the deep fried plates of deep fried. But when Foster got onstage in that dollar store plaid, mic in hand and arm around my step-twin, all nerves and try in the face of sockless, khaki’d hostility? It occurred to me how many other hostile bodies he’d braved alongside me, usually with far more humor and grace than I mustered myself. If I distrust Christopher Cross’s diaphanous, synthetic promises of being taken away, of dreams, innocence, of being free, someone pulsing “believe me” in my ear, what I know I can trust is the earnest and daily attempt to show up and look something like family. Foster asked me to put on the damn sailor’s cap, and I put on the cap to try this togetherness again. I’d rather be landlocked in our valley bowl of long-dried ocean, the aquifer far beneath me, trimming the lilacs and deadheading the petunias. We know by now how to stand against the wind. Whoever needed a mast, anyway.
Joshua Dewain Foster once again lives, works, and writes in Rigby, Idaho, his hometown. Since 2005, he's migrated from potato country to various creative enclaves for community and education, including the University of Houston, Stanford University, the University of Arizona, and BYU-Idaho, and has published in DIAGRAM, Tin House, Fugue, Sunstone, and others, as well as been awarded by the Idaho Commision of the Arts, with a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and two Donald Barthelme Prizes. The last time he entered into a March Xness competition was 2017's March Fadness tourney, in which he wrote about "Here Comes the Hotstepper" and driving rideshare during the Houston Super Bowl. You can read it and other short stories and essays at his website: joshuadewainfoster.com
Born and raised in the Gulf South, Georgia Pearle is an alumna of Smith College and holds an MFA in Poetry from Lesley University. Her poems have been published with Kenyon Review, Crab Orchard Review, Ninth Letter, and others. She recently finished a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Houston.