“Yeah. Maybe. And no, it’s not.” I wasn’t sure how to put it. The song I wrote about her was nice, and it wasn’t. Just like my feelings for her. “It’s a lot of things.”
My dad seemed to be digesting that, thoughtfully.
Years ago, I knew he would’ve been more upset about this. Today, though, he appeared to be taking it pretty well.
We hadn’t talked about my mom in a long time. Not since shortly after she died. But maybe time had finally healed some of those wounds.
“Well, I trust you know what you’re doing, Johnny,” he said.
“Yeah.” I rubbed my forehead. “I also wrote a song to the man in the car.”
I didn’t say his name. We both knew his name.
But to me, he’d always be the man in the car. The man whose life I took, without meaning to. The man who took so much from me. In that horrendous moment, he wasn’t a whole person. Not to me. He was fragments. He was hard, cold metal. He was blood on the glass. He was a terrible mistake.
He was a horrifying set of actions, taken for reasons I’d never understand, that ended in his own death.
I’d forgiven the person who took those actions, for my own sake.
But the actions themselves would probably haunt me for the rest of my life.
“This song,” I went on, when my dad didn’t seem able to say anything, “has been in me for a long time. Deep in me. In this place I’ve gone to hide over the years. Rory calls it a fortress.”
My dad nodded slowly, taking that in. “Fortress,” he repeated. I knew he was giving weight to the idea, because he thought highly of Rory, and of the work he’d done with me, how much he’d helped me, even when he didn’t always understand Rory’s unorthodox methods.
“The fortress is… this wall I built in my mind.” I didn’t bother telling my dad what Rory had said about him helping me build it. I didn’t want him to feel like I was putting any blame on him. “It was a place that kept me safe, when I was young. But I’m on the outside of it now. And the songs are coming with me.”
“Johnny… You know, whatever you need to do to… to feel better about what happened… then that’s what you need to do. Especially if it’s not hurting anyone.”
“Well, this is what I need to do. I couldn’t stay trapped in that place forever. The songs couldn’t stay trapped in there forever. It was making me crazy.”
“You were never crazy. We don’t use that word.”
“I was going crazy, Dad. I was torturing myself by shutting down. I couldn’t feel anything. Unless I drank too much, or fucked too much, or when I was up onstage… That hit of dopamine. Acceptance. Approval. From the fans. From the critics. Fromyou. And from women… I’ve been so fucked up with women for so long. And that’s not my mom’s fault. Or yours or Miranda’s. It’s not the fault of any women I’ve dated. It’s my fault. I know that. But I can’t keep torturing myself. I can’t keep silent anymore. So, I had to write these songs. They’re not literal stories. No one’s going to know exactly what happened when they hear them. But I know you’ll know, so I wanted to prepare you. These songs are very visceral. Emotional. I’m… I’m going to sing them, too.”
I could see what that did to my dad. His eyes glistened with tears. He sounded choked up when he said, “You’re going to sing them?”
“Yeah.”
“Onstage?”
“Yes. That’s the goal.”
“But, do you think you can do that—?”
“Don’t ask me that. Of course I can.”
I could see my dad digesting that. A sort of wonder softened the wounded lines of his face as he stared at me. He blinked back the unshed tears. “Of course you can.”
“I want you to be proud of me, no matter what I sing.”
“I am.”
“Even if it’s about pussy.”
Dad choked out a laugh. He got up and came over, his arms out, and gave me a hug. “I am proud of you, Johnny. Your mother would be, too.”
I closed my eyes and hugged my dad for a long minute.
