BANG OUT

First there was the music, which was knowing you could feel happy at any time without even trying, because it was simply a matter of picking it up and putting it to your fingers. No, I had no interest in teaching you or Sunny or Alice how to play, though Alice has it now and tries to play it when she thinks of it, which isn’t often, so it sits in its rippled black case, propped up against the coming together of the two walls one behind and one next to her bed. That guitar meant blood-in-veins back in the day when your mother and I had that college Jesus band and I wrote the songs and she sang and others played drums and sang too. It was evident to me at the time that the Holy Spirit was the music, that guitar, and it wasn’t simply because of the Christian words because I played the other stuff too—Young’s “Needle and the Damage Done” has the prettiest, most melancholic melody, and CS&N, you couldn’t beat their harmony and truth, and Dylan of course, and Jackson Brown, and Bruce Cockburn, and Manassas and the Byrds. Music was my one way into trying to understand the truth of existence, which even now makes little sense to me because your Uncle Mike shot himself in the head while his third wife looked on, right there in the bedroom, and he was the best trumpeter in Indiana; and my mother had taught herself piano and played it so much and so well that we all just wanted to shut her up instead of feeling obliged to go over and stand by her and sing the hymns over and over again because she’d scream at us to keep going, to keep the music alive in the family despite father’s complete 100% lack of musical ability, which irritated her to no end and always made me laugh. (You remember that cassette recording of him singing “Silent Night”? And was there even one note of resemblance there to the actual song?) I should have wanted to run away from music, but instead came to it as if it were an oasis. I see now that it was simply a matter of genes, of finding a part of the meaning of my biological existence, which meant brain chemicals finding and locking on to those musical configurings and finding some stability there, some eternal satisfaction for having fallen into the lock-and-key-ness, the perfection therein, of their destiny. I wrote songs, good songs. I wrote one for each of you. I recorded them and put them on cassettes for you. I wrote them out and framed them for you so you will never forget. But still you will. You’ll forget all about it and resent me for thinking that you will, for speaking the truth this way, as I see that you do now. As I see you trying to put all of me, every pure true part of me, comfortably away.

Those early times were incredible, when I thought I had it figured out, God and salvation and all that, but still huge doubts that could be recompensed then by conversation with the campus minister or in Bible studies or with the religious professor. To think that there were people out there who actually had the answers, and I could have access to them during my search for the answers! And I could express doubts to them, and return rejuvenated, though perhaps not wholly. And then bring it to God in prayer, and sing His praises with drum beats and guitars and tambourine—all the stuff our parents hated, but if they’d only listened to the words, seen that a lot of it was taken word-for-word from the Bible. Still, even then, even amidst the pockets of Spirit-filled joy (which I now believe to be disjointed streams of serotonin or whatever other neurotransmitter brings those feelings of elation and purpose), I would surrender to an awful despair—feelings of worthlessness and meaninglessness and aloneness—that no one seemed to want to answer to. What if it wasn’t all real—what we sang about? And why was God so quiet?

So the years went by and the three of you were born and we moved a lot but tried to always stay in a church, and even then, I could almost make it all work. I could love those Christian rockers, Larry Norman and Randy Stonehill, and be the only one in the church to listen to them rock out; could feel ok about that. Would even find, every once in a while, someone to share it with, and your mother liked having people over, and I could tolerate it then, so she’d make her amazing dinners and light the candles on the table, and afterwards I’d get out the guitar and, yes, play the old Christian stuff, but also the other stuff, the Neil Young and Bob Dylan and America and Eagles; maybe one or two of my own songs that were horribly simple in comparison. Still, that religious world, no matter what you are, is terribly small. And let me be clear that I loved the secular music just for being great music way before I started questioning the existence of God or at least His presence in our lives, and began seeing way too much variety in life to warrant our One Way-ness, and also began feeling sunk and more sunk, and completely overwhelmed and underwhelmed by the crazy world. And there are names for these ways of feeling, the psychiatrists say, but it didn’t help me then and it doesn’t help me now.

It was hard for me to find people I could work with, and the situation was never quite good enough, hence the moves and all those schools you and Sunny and Alice went to. And the three of you, along for the ride because you didn’t have a choice, and me aware underneath it all that I was truly a failure of a father, but hating myself for thinking that and hating you for putting me into that position. Why couldn’t the three of you have just been there? Why always demanding, wanting, needing? And Sunny so impossible and coming to need those meds? So there was always the music. I began putting the guitar away because the site of it came to make me sick, but there were all the records that later became hundreds of CDs, because I’ve never had anything against modernization. The three of you sure could dance! I taught you how to blow the dust off the needle before putting on the record, and if you danced too hard the record would bounce. I can still see two-year-old Sunny bouncing in one place and you and Alice shaking your bodies with young child abandon. And your mother and I could dance right in there with you. We were probably the only ones in church who let you listen to Whitney Houston’s first album and Fleetwood Mac and the Rolling Stones and Springsteen and the Beatles and the Zombies and Cream and Melissa Etheridge. And sometimes, yes I know, I played the music too loudly as you were trying to sleep, and it would be one of my many selfish acts that were only meant to save me.

At the end, I listened to it all. All the good ones—Jennifer Warnes’ “Bernadette,” and the Zombies “She’s Not There,” and Walker Jr.’s “Shotgun,” and Larry Norman’s “Hymn”—and the new ones—Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and anything by Dougie Maclean and, yes, even that kid Eminem, and the new stuff from Dylan and Steely Dan. I got real heavy into gospel music sung by those male groups. I listened to it on the earphones that completely encapsulated my ears and my brain and my body, and I drank my alcohol, and I tuned everything else out. And I ended that way, and I think, somewhere, there might be a certain kind of peace to it, for even now, in this living day (no, I don’t desire it), there is someone somewhere listening to a song I also once listened to.