But now I understand that I had it all wrong. The issue isn’t, Am I good enough? No. The issue is, Do I not have any other choice? Will and desire don’t matter. Ability doesn’t matter. Need is the only thing that matters. I need to do this.
Enough, Ada darling. I’m way off subject and I don’t seem to have managed my task very well. You will say, You haven’t explained, why didn’t you do something if you knew? And you are right, I did know. And you are wrong, I shouldn’t and couldn’t have stopped anything. I will try to make you see that. I will try again after I sort things out. And Ada, despite my rambling and middling self-recriminations, don’t—please don’t—pity me. Or Nik. As Gloria Steinem once said, “Pity is simply hate without the respect.”
Yours always,
Ma
Denise stuck the letter back in the envelope glued to the page under the taped-in, cut-out typed heading July 1, 2004. This was not a letter from Denise to her daughter, Ada. It was a sham, a hoax, a put-on. This document was from Nik’s Chronicles. Denise found it there, as she was meant to. This was a letter, written by her brother, in her style—or his conjured style of her—for his Chronicles. He did a rather fascinating and painful facsimile of Denise, a witty, brutal parody of her. For her, actually, because Denise was pretty much the main audience for the Chronicles (besides Nik himself, of course). He exaggerated her pretensions, her diction, her grating trebly qualities. He made fun of her memory skills. (Denise took supplements to aid memory. She did brain exercises. She convinced herself that her ability to remember was speedily evaporating.) She pressed her hand against the open binder. She smoothed the page and could feel the weight and chunked thickness of all the pasted-in entries. The sun had come up, she could see a faint glow at the seams of the garage door and in the small row of windowpanes. She should call someone. What would she say? She tucked the open binder under her arm and climbed up the ladder through the trapdoor to Nik’s apartment. She made a cup of coffee with Nik’s plug-in percolator. She pulled back the black curtain on one of the east-facing windows. The pink edges of the dawn made the scrubby desert oaks look carved in light. It was very quiet. No coyotes or cars. She sat down at his desk with her cup of coffee and pulled the volume of the Chronicles toward her. She took the faux letter out and read it again.
He didn’t really exaggerate her digressive tendencies, she couldn’t argue with that. All that ridiculous acting stuff. She had taken one acting class and she wasn’t that bad. She was commonplace bad. She was much more commonplace in all respects than this Denise-on-steroids that Nik created for the Chronicles, which she knew was never meant to be about the facts or actual life out in the world.
As for the fake quotes, she got a kick out of those. That was Nik’s signature affectation for her, his marker of anything rendered in her voice. The made-up quotes were her attributes, like Saint Lucy always appearing with her eyes on a plate, but the reference was only understood by Denise, only really understood in the context of the entire Chronicles, and so, finally, a profoundly elaborated private joke between them.
What was he getting at with some of this? Nik threw little pebbles and they pinged against the glass; his versions of the two of them kept very close in their own weird-logic way. There was no question that she would have to call Ada next. She would have to account for her actions—or lack thereof—to Ada. She must delineate, with some exactitude—as he ironically put it in his fake letter—the truth of their sadness and troubles.
It was also accurate to say that Nik reveled in his solitude and Denise did not. She figured that was the first thing that separated them—that and when she began to become his audience. It wasn’t just that Nik got a guitar from their father. Nik took it, grabbed hard at it, and never let it go. They diverged early, and after that there was no changing or stopping him.
From where she sat at his worktable, Denise could see his original guitar perched on a stand in the corner. An Orlando with a rosewood body “just like a Martin.” Nik had taken good care of it. She knew he felt there was some destiny to the day he received it: the Beatles, the guitar, the last time they would see their father. She knew because Nik felt there was destiny in everything. The story was part of his legend: he hadn’t even wanted a guitar—it never occurred to him, he would claim with a laugh. And yet it changed his life. Which was true, it did change him. It took him over like a disease. From that very evening he would not quit with that Orlando.
He used to sit by his record player and listen over and over to the same song until he figured out how to play a particular lead. He didn’t read music or learn music theory. But Nik had a capacity for dogged devotion. He was doglike, really, the way a dog will chase a car it can never catch or will never tire of retrieving a ball you throw. He would come home from school or a party or a date, and he would automatically pick up his guitar, in just the same kind of habitual and nearly compulsive way Ada would run to her computer. Many times Denise remembered trying to tell Nik something and he would still be playing his guitar, working something out with fingers and string. It irritated her, the way he would sit there, then say, Yeah? And nod as she spoke, but still stealing glances downward, his left hand depressing strings, his right hand clutching a pick, just touching the pick to strings without strumming. He was showing Denise this great amount of attention and respect by not actually strumming. She said, one time when she really wanted him to listen, “Could you just put your guitar down?” and he looked at her as if she’d asked him to put his arm down.
As it turned out, he was not the world’s most brilliant guitar player. He was good, good enough for songwriting and singing, which were the things he really cared for. He worked at learning the guitar and achieved a high level of competence. Nik taught himself everything about playing, even taught himself the fact that he was not ever going to be a virtuoso.
The actual demise of Nik as possible guitar hero came in 1973. Nik had just begun to play out with his new band, the Demonics. Previously there had been some jam sessions with school friends, but the Demonics were his first band to venture past the garage. He had a bass player, Sam Stone, and a drummer, Mike Summer. (Or maybe it was Dave Winton first and Mike later?) They had scored a regular gig opening for bands at this shitty club called the Well. They played early in the evening when no one was really there, kind of a fill-in thing. But it was a great opportunity—they were just beginners. They still had these long shags and they were a little pimply and peeled. Nik was always pretty good-looking, but he hadn’t found his look quite yet—he was still in the developmental stages. He was on the verge of good-looking. Denise went to all of the gigs even though she was sixteen and well under the legal age. She just slipped in as part of the group. She found a perch near the stage and folded her legs and arms until she felt nearly invisible. The Demonics played the same ten songs over and over. Although Nik had already written hundreds of songs by this point, the only ones they had rehearsed and could even play at all were these ten fairly simple songs. After a few weeks of their boring set, Nik tried to introduce new songs. But something wasn’t working. They would just fade on the stage, already sick of themselves. Then they would get some minuscule amount of money and mope around the edge of the performance area. They’d stay for the next band if they could, but the club knew the Demonics were all underage and they weren’t supposed to hang out after the gig. One night, though, they did manage to stay for the next band, the Cherries. There were four of them—drums, bass, and two guitars. They all had short hair (for that time) and wore collared, short-sleeved tennis shirts buttoned all the way up and tucked in to their beltless, tight, flat-front khaki pants. Nobody looked like that yet.
“Speed preps,” Nik whispered, staring at them. The singer hardly touched his guitar and spent most of his time closed-eyed at the mic, hurling words into the dark. He would hold a chord and then wave his right hand at the strings at crucial moments, giving an underfill to their sound. The other guitar player, the taller, sweatier one, played the leads and sometimes sang harmony—his singing