Sinner

“Sorry I wrecked your lawn,” I said. “Tell the next band to put down a rug or some other shit.”

She clutched her hands together. “Should we call the cops? 911?”

Angie just stared at me. The microphone hung in her hand.

She said, “You ruined him.”

Then she dropped the mic and walked into the crowd.

It seemed obvious that this represented the end of the set, but the thought of taking all this stuff down and finding a way to put it back in the Mustang suddenly seemed like a huge amount of trouble. Finding the Mustang, period, seemed like an enormous quest. There is a wave that leads you to a gig, but after it’s crashed you onto the shore of the show, there’s no similar wave that takes you away, especially after your knees are buckling and you can feel every one of your teeth loose in your head. After you can see nothing but your dead drummer and every girl you ever slept with and hated yourself for in the morning.

Shayla was still going on about the cops, but I didn’t know what good they would do unless they were going to retrieve the car. I could hear my heartbeat in my forehead or maybe my temple.

Jeremy’s voice went on, smooth and easy, echoed by Leyla.

I should’ve thought of a way to wrap up this episode neatly, but I guessed they would probably edit that punch into something glorious.

T’s camera eyed me. I told it, “That’s a wrap.”

It was the best I could do. Hills and valleys. My mind curled up in the shadow of mountains I’d climbed and then plummeted from.

Jeremy took my arm. “Cole,” he said, “come on, man.” He looked at T. “You’ve got enough on there. Turn it off.”

Chapter Forty-One

· cole ·

Jeremy drove his old pickup truck while I sat in the passenger’s seat, leaning my head against the door. We didn’t speak. I was hoarse anyway.

He lived in a house out in the Hollywood Hills. Even though it was not far geographically from the city, it seemed like a different state. The narrow streets snaked up the steep hills, crowded with mailboxes, yucca plants, orange trees, dusty pickup trucks, and BMWs. The houses were mismatched shabby contemporaries from the twenties, one-hundred-year-old denizens of an older Los Angeles.

The streets kept getting narrower and steeper, the turns becoming more and more improbable, until finally we came to the place Jeremy shared with his girlfriend. The light green house was low-slung and lattice-covered. A eucalyptus tree grew beside it, appearing at one with the house, which seemed appropriate for Jeremy. A dusty and very busted Mustang from several decades before mine was parked half-in, half-out of a metal carport.

Jeremy parked on the street. “I think you should leave your work phone in here.”

I stared at him, not understanding. Then I said, “Isabel has it.”

Jeremy frowned. Mentally, he catalogued my online presence over the past several weeks.

“Yes,” he said simply. He pulled up the parking brake and put it in gear. “Well, leave anything else having to do with the show in the car, too.”

We climbed crooked concrete stairs, me slower than him.

Inside, the house was everything I would have expected from Jeremy: modest, airy, and very spare. He led me into a galley kitchen full of ugly, pristine ’70s appliances, and I leaned on the doorjamb and felt sorry for myself while he rummaged in drawers for a dish towel.

“Hold still,” he said. I rested my cheek on the counter while he dabbed at the side of my face. The towel came up covered with dirt and grime.

“Jesus Christ! Jeremy! Cole? St. Clair?”

This was how I found out that Jeremy’s girlfriend was the ukulele player for a band that had opened for us two years before. She stood in the doorway to the kitchen in a bra and shorts. Probably some girls would’ve been bothered by suddenly discovering guests while in this condition, but everything about her posture indicated she was not one of them. The last time I had seen her we had been in Portland doing a benefit concert for orphans.

“Hi, Star,” I mumbled.

Star looked at Jeremy. “Did you do that to him?”

Jeremy probed my forehead with his fingers. “Do you know if we have a first-aid kit?”

Star joined him and bent over me. She smelled like patchouli, sweet and dreamy. I could see her bare legs and Jeremy’s bare legs. The way they stood together was so comfortable, so unaffected, that I suddenly felt incredibly shitty about all of my life choices. I wanted — I wanted — I must’ve hit my head harder than I thought.

I wanted Isabel, but she was such an impossible thing to want.

Star touched my hair, very gingerly. “Maybe he should go to the hospital, Germ.”

I closed my eyes. I would have rather died on this counter.

“He needs to be someplace quiet,” Jeremy said. “We’ve had a bad day.”

They moved away from me, into the other room, and I heard their murmured voices. In my head, their voices were like this house, settled and modest and familiar. I heard them say he a lot, and knew they were talking about me, but I didn’t care.

People were always talking about me.

“I need a toilet,” I told Jeremy, and they both gestured around a corner.

In the bathroom I locked the door and turned on the light and the fan, and I leaned on the stand sink and rocked back and forth. There was no mirror, and so I kept seeing Angie’s face and Victor’s face and remembering every conversation Victor and I had ever conducted about drugs or wolves or suicide. I got a needle from one of my pants pockets and stripped and curled up beneath the sink and stabbed the point under my skin.

I was gone for five minutes. It wasn’t long enough to do anything but tamp down the worst of the jitters and maybe heal the bruise on my head a little. I hadn’t broken anything and the door was still locked and Jeremy wasn’t pounding on the other side of it so I couldn’t have been loud.

I got dressed and flushed the toilet as if I’d used it and then washed my hands.

I felt better. Or different. I’d been temporarily reset.

Outside, Jeremy stood pensively in the kitchen. He sighed when I walked in and then he said, “She’s going to get some Neosporin and some Korean barbecue. You still aren’t a vegetarian, right? Yeah, I didn’t think so.”

He gave me a glass of water, a clean dish towel with a bag of frozen edamame beans in it to hold to my head, and we wandered through his house, looking at his lack of furniture and material goods and plethora of bamboo mats and potted plants.