Bandmates

The Wars [Running Time 3:31]

Lumped together like the ice cubes tinkling in their tumblers, the men that lined the living room bumped shoulders. I slipped into the kitchen, where women waved knives around to punctuate their contributions to the conversation. Then, the slice of sky out the kitchen window faded into a haze, and my mom led that group out. “I give you one thing to do.” She pointed to the barbecue, which billowed smoke.
My dad’s best friend turned to him. “You’re off to fight flaming geysers of oil, and yet you can’t manage a little burger grease?”
While we ate, the guests debated how long the war would last and how long the fires would burn. “Only a few more months of combat,” said the loudest, “but it’ll take years to douse those flames.”
“Years?”
Everyone was looking at me except my parents, who were looking at the plates on their laps, which held only scraps.
Women paraded out desserts, each outdoing the one before, and then my dad was asked to give a speech. He put his hands on his hips, his broad shoulders straight, his strong back arched. He asked me to step forward, and he shook my hand as though I were the one leaving. “I’m proud of this little man.”
A few people gave my dad going-away presents: a horseshoe-shaped pillow for the airplane; dark sunglasses with leather sides to protect his eyes from airborne sand; and, from my mom, a framed picture of me. “You won’t forget your son.”
“Well,” said a woman. “Isn’t that sweet?”

Two and a Half Broken Homes [Running Time 2:33]

The summer my dad said he was going to Kuwait, Spaz’s dad drove off, and Junior’s dad built a shed. That shed had electricity and a telephone, a camp toilet, a desk, and a bed. Junior’s dad worked in it all day, every day. Then, each evening, he went into the house to eat dinner and to watch TV for an hour on the couch opposite Junior’s mom. Returning to the shed, he stopped only to recheck the mailbox for the letters he begged from men who had been to war. He called these letters primary sources; he had been writing a book for as long as we could remember. This daily routine was complicated only a couple of times each week when Junior’s dad lugged his shit box into the house to empty it, after which he showered, changed his clothes, and drove to campus to teach his military history class.
It drew Junior’s mouth into a pinch as tight as an asshole when Spaz and I made fun: we imagined that the professor was using that shed to bed students who wanted a better grade; we claimed to have seen young women stealing across the dying lawn.
Junior often enlisted one of us to help him with a personal comeback: a hook that might gut the other guy. I was useful to him because I had the details of Spaz’s dad’s departure; I had slept over there the night he didn’t come home, and Spaz’s mom had her sisters on the phone.
“You know,” she said to me, in the morning, over breakfast, “I was a happy person before I met him.”
Spaz asked, “How old were you then?”
She frowned. “I can be that way again.”
And she did seem happy, high on the balls of her feet, as she worked her husband’s magazines and records and shirts through his snow blower to confetti the lawn. When he arrived home and banged on the locked door, Spaz and I watched from the living room, where the windowpane reverberated in front of our faces. Then, giving up on getting inside, he heaved the blower up onto the bed of his truck, strapped it down, and stroked its chute.
“He’s jerking it,” Spaz said.
His mom tilted her head, as if on the phone again. “Language,” she said. “You’re in elementary school.”
“Not anymore.”

Puffer-Fish Punks (Aposematic Oi! Oi! Oi!) [Running Time 1:15]

That August, preparing for middle school, I asked my mom for advice: when to arrive, where to sit, what to wear.
“Since when do you worry?”
Even my toes had sprouted hair. I was turning into my dad, whom my mom no longer called Reg but rather “the ape that lived here.” How could he have left without teaching me to shave? And, now that he was gone, who could tell me why it wasn’t purely excitement I felt when I was hard with thoughts of college girls visiting me in a garden shed?
“Oh, Christ,” my mom said. “This is no reason to cry. Come home to me for lunch.”
“And?”
“Be nice to your classmates. If you do, they’ll be nice to you.”
I said, “You know that’s not true.”
Unsure of what to do, Spaz, Junior, and I buzzed our politely parted hair and dyed it bright blue, translucent blond, and fire‑storm red. We kept our Peter Pan runners only for gym, replacing them with big boots, skate shoes, and canvas Chucks. We also swapped simple sweatpants for jeans we washed hot and slashed with scissors. And we bought T-shirts from punk bands: Bad Religion, Black Flag, The Descendents.

Broken Bones (Part I) [Running Time 3:03]

That fall we bought instruments: Spaz struck pawnshop drums whose skins were rutted with pockmarks; Junior slapped a Fender bass whose scratchplate he buried in stickers; I raked a guitar whose low action allowed the strings to scuff the pickups; and we each chose a microphone, agreeing to wait and see who would be the lead singer and who would be only backup vocals.
At that same time, we bought skateboards. We dared one another to try railslides, always searching the city for steeper steps, and we ollied off retaining walls, sometimes snapping our boards on the landing. Then, in the winter, we bought snowboards. In the river valley, we packed gully walls to make jumps with hooked lips. For two consecutive Christmas portraits, in which my mom made me pose with her in red, green, and white outfits, I wore a cast on a wrist: first one hand and then the other.
And yet the spring after that, at an SNFU gig, I charged into the mosh pit. In that shit-bowl swirl of bodies, an elbow split my lip. I climbed the stage and dove into raised hands that didn’t catch me. I tried again and was dropped on my head.
My mom asked, “Who did this to you?”
She learned the answer to that question later, at our middle-school graduation, where we showed off our first tattoos and piercings. Spaz chose a nose ring, Junior put a pin through his eyebrow, and I punched my tongue.
At home she said, “When I found that fake ID, I let you keep it because you said you only wanted to go to concerts. Let me see it again.”
I tugged on my wallet chain.
“Not the—your piercing.”
I stuck out my tongue.
“That’s self-destructive,” she said. “It’s not fashion.”
“When you wax your legs, it sounds like a Riot-Grrrl band recording in our bathroom.”
“Okay,” she said. “Poke yourself full of holes.”

Spaz Don’t Surf (on a Commodore 64) [Running Time 1:51]

Awaiting the start of high school, we sat on our skateboards near the professor’s shed. It now had a padlock to protect what was, according to Junior, a top‑of-the-line computer. My mom and I didn’t even own one, and while Spaz’s mom had bought him a Commodore, the box on which he set the monitor had no jack for a phone, so we doubted what Junior told us about his dad’s IBM and the World Wide Web.
“Fuck you,” said Junior. “It’s true.”
With eyes closed, I saw the globe scored, as if by flight paths; cut like fire trenches, these connections carved up major cities. I no longer expected to come home from school to find my dad the way I used to: waving me into the garage, where he had parts spread over the concrete at our feet, and where all his thoughts of dinner had been pushed aside by the passion that had overtaken him with an idea, like rebuilding my childhood Pogo Stick, a metal rake, and the lawn mower into a two‑in-one-pass grass cutter and aerator. But I still wondered where he went after putting out the last of Kuwait’s oil wells, and I often imagined us together. “Will this Web really reach everyone?”
“Everyone,” Junior said again, “and everything.”
“We’re underage,” Spaz said. “There’s no way we’d be allowed to—”
“What?”
Spaz raised cupped hands to his chest. “See everything.”
“No,” I said, and Spaz nodded, as if I was agreeing with him. But I was starting to believe Junior, and I felt flooded by guilt, for wanting to see it all, and by gratitude, for wanting something else even more.
“Let’s try,” said Junior, who held up a key. “All three of us.”
Spaz said, “There’s already a band called the Circle Jerks.”
“We’ll take turns,” I said. “Alone.” And before Junior could take back the offer, I made us race, spread across a full lane of blacktop, to the hardware store. Spaz never rested his back foot on his board, my wheels screamed, and, when it honked, Junior gave a car the finger.
The clerk, a senior at our school, said, “Hello, Uni.”
Before Spaz called me Unibrow and everyone took it up, nicknames were one of the few remaining things that made me think only of my dad.
I nodded, and the clerk turned to Spaz. “Will longer wallet chains fool the girls?”
“Longer?” Spaz said. “Your mom seems satisfied.”
I said, “Seriously? Don’t ruin this.”
Spaz stroked my arm: a gesture invented years earlier to mock my enthusiasm for social studies, and deference to the teacher, when the current events unit was all about the Gulf War.
“No chain,” Junior said. “Copies,” and again he held up his key.
The clerk said, “Sharing a penthouse?”
“Funny you should say that,” said Spaz.

Broken Bones (Part II) [Running Time 2:44]

That weekend was high summer, and the afternoons had become too long for simply skating up the south-side strip and flipping through the stacks of records and racks of T‑shirts.
On Saturday, after a practice in which we succeeded in reaching an even higher speed and volume, and a lunch in which we failed to suppress our hunger despite emptying the cupboard of all carbohydrates and starches, from Kraft Dinner to instant potato flake, we walked toward the university, and we stole a pair of shopping carts. We powered over potholes and speed bumps, careened the cages into one another, and tipped. The lone rider, I slid along the asphalt; my leg was ground like meat.
On Sunday, after we practiced and ate, we pushed one another on our skateboards over downtown’s decommissioned train tracks, our trucks grinding on that rail. We then used our boards to bash into a shuttered warehouse. Dividing the room was a wall of brick, and its mortar moved with my finger. Spaz laughed. He picked up a floorboard that had fallen through a hole overhead, and he stabbed at the wall. It wobbled but steadied again after it dropped a brick to the floor. Spaz did this twice more. He handed one brick to Junior and another to me. Then he stepped away, spun, and threw his at the wall, which buckled but held. “Go,” he said.
Mine blew out a few more bricks, which we picked up.
“Go,” I said.
Spaz threw again. More of the second floor fell through the hole.
“Fuck you,” said Junior, who had mice shit in his hair.
“Go,” I said.
“No.”
“Seriously? Do your part.”
“Fuck you,” Junior said again.
I threw my brick and was pinned to the ground. My shopping-cart rash stopped stinging, or I stopped thinking of that leg anyway, as everything but the bright pain of a finger crush disappeared in dust.

Grinders [Running Time 0:45]

I kept the clock lit until it passed midnight, bringing me one day closer to my turn in the shed, which Spaz now called the “sperm shack” or “spank shack.” But what if Junior was waiting for me there, hand extended, to reclaim his key? It wasn’t unusual for Spaz or me to be irritated with his hesitating and to push him, but never before had I buried him in rubble. Sleepless, I went to the washroom sometime between dusk and dawn. My mom’s mirror, tilted to magnify the skin between my eyes, revealed scars and scabs like scorched earth. I poked at another ingrown hair with a dental pick.
And then, from the dim hall, my mom mumbled nonsense.
“You scared me,” I said.
During our first nights without my dad, she woke many times with an aching jaw to the sound of teeth on teeth. But within weeks, she got a mouth guard. She hadn’t been up late since, except on a recent birthday, when she woke sick from a box of wine. That night, she said it was hard, as an adult, to make friends; we couldn’t afford her hairdresser, but she went often just to talk to the woman.
From the hall came the slurp of her pulling out her mouth guard. “I asked if you stole that.”
I set the pick on the countertop, patted the sore skin between my brows, and then rubbed my eyes. “If dad came home, would you have him?”
“I don’t need anyone else,” she said, “but you.”
I snorted. “Don’t tell your dates.”
The furnace clicked on and off again.
“Things will get better.” My mom leaned into the light of the washroom. “You’re just at an awkward age.”
From her hand and mouth guard, a strand of drool stretched toward the floor.
“It looks like this stage lasts forever.”
“I said age.”
“Your jaw must be stiff from grinding,” I said, though the problem may have been my loud music and ringing ears.
“Okay, dig your brains out through your forehead.”
I reached for the dental pick.
“But what good could come from making a mess?”
“Maybe my nickname will change,” I said, “to Scarface.”
“Did Spaz show you that one?”
“Seriously?” With my finger wrapped in a metal splint, I pointed to the rash that ran the length of my leg and to the place where my skin was forming a hard scar over a knot of some kind: an asphalt pebble or glass shard. “You’re worried about me watching a movie?”
My mom said, “I don’t want anyone calling you Scarface.”
“Me neither.” During our first phone calls, my dad referred to me as C4, Stinger, Ventura: whatever had most recently helped him put out a fire.
My mom sighed. “If you asked them not to, and they’re still at it, don’t spend time with them. You’re in the same homeroom, but don’t mistake situation for—”
“Your hairdresser,” I said. “How is she?”
My mom’s face fell, and her shoulders slumped. Her ratty nightgown was suddenly too big; she was a girl caught in a game of dress-up.
She went back to bed, and I turned back to the mirror. My eyes were ringed with red, blood-smeared.

I Was a Teenage Navigator [Running Time 2:27]

Before allowing us to use the shed, Junior made up three rules. “You’ve got to agree.”
“You already gave me a key,” said Spaz.
I said, “I’ll do whatever you want.”
“First rule,” he said. “Keep the light off, or the door cracks will glow. Second rule. Stay within your time slot.” We had studied the TV Guide in which Junior had highlighted his mother’s picks: Melrose Place, Mad about You, Murphy Brown. “After my parents’ nightly show is over, my dad’s coming out to write.”
“No,” said Spaz. “To wank.”
“Fuck you,” said Junior.
I said, “What’s the third rule?”
“Pack it out. Don’t leave anything.”
“What is this,” Spaz asked, “camping?” Only he had said what he would bring: Kleenex, Trojans, Vaseline. While shame had stuck in my throat, where it worked like an acid drip to upset my stomach, Spaz had it coating his tongue like a wax he hoped to crack and spit.
“We need another rule,” I said. “We need to delete the history.”
“Don’t touch my dad’s book.”
“Shit, Junior, your dad’s only out here because your mom’s in there.”
Junior said, “Fuck you, Spaz.”
If ever I find my dad, I will ask him: Did he mean to leave my mom, me, or both?
I tried again: “When we’re done each night, we have to click on the history button and erase all the things we saw.”
Spaz twisted to face me. “What weird shit are you into?”
That week, Junior joined Jef’s Nude of the Month, and Spaz said to try the alt.sex newsgroup. I was interested but knew I wouldn’t have time enough for those sites. Also, entering the professor’s shed, I forgot their names. The ethanol smell of his camp toilet burned my nostrils, and the darkness pulled at my eyes. The floor was littered with books broken open, spines split, to show pages of pictures: dead boys on beaches, dead men in fields. The walls were papered with photographs, too. Were they milk-carton kids or obituaries? Each was paired with a letter and pinned to the plywood. Most were black‑and-white portraits of young soldiers on paper that had turned brown and yellow, as if bruised. The rest, of old men, were garish with color and a glossy sheen.
I squeezed the arms of the professor’s chair while the modem chimed like a telephone speed dial, hit high tones like the machine at the hearing test my mom made me take, and then hissed static like a TV with a cut cable. Into Navigator, I typed company names: Boots and Coots; Cudd Pressure Control; Kuwait Wild Well Killers.

Coconut [Running Time 0:44]

At practice I choose a metal pick, long and stiff, to keep my splint away from my guitar. “Let’s go.” Weaunched into a Ramones song, repeating those three chords, and, following Spaz’s lead, we increased the tempo again and again. And then Junior’s fingers dashed down his fret board and into a darker melody, which I quickly matched to relieve the dissonance. Not only that, I dropped my top string to a D, Junior began to strum so that his open strings hummed, and Spaz added his second kick drum. Wrapped in the noise of this new riff, we rushed one another for a turn making up lyrics. Were Junior and Spaz, full of desire or self-loathing, singing about women they had seen on the computer in the shed? I could decipher only the last word of most lines: wanted and then haunted, masturbation and then isolation.
When it was my turn, I surprised myself by reciting lines from my last phone calls with my dad, though they had stopped a year and a half earlier.

“Do you accept the charges?”
“Hello? Hello?”
“I can’t hear you. You’re breaking up. Hello?”
“How tall are you now?”
“I’m taller.”
“Is everything still burning?”
“What?”

I strangled the neck of my guitar, and, wincing, I raked my other hand, pick and splint, over the strings to be sure Spaz and Junior heard little of my lyrics.

“Are you using my tools? You’re welcome to them.”
“What would I do? What would you do? I don’t know what to—”
“I’ve been wondering if an old bowling-ball shiner might take the skin off a coconut.”
“What?”
“My birthday was last week.”

Runaway (Part 1) [Running Time 2:18]

I told my mom that, after another Saturday in the city, I would have supper with Spaz.
“Do you have to be gone all day?”
Waiting in my room was a duffel in which I had crammed enough clothes and cassettes to stay away a week. Deciding to leave it behind, I said, “I’ll be back tonight.”
“Do you want to watch a movie? I could cancel my date. I might cancel anyway. We want different things.”
“What does he want?”
“Someone to tell him it’s okay.”
“And you?”
“Someone who won’t ask anything of me. But if I cancel again, he’ll find some stupid young thing that will do anything to make him happy. There are hordes of them.”
“A menace.”
“Don’t tease. It’s bad enough you men are in cahoots on this.”
“We’re all rotten,” I said, “but we’re not together.”
I rode the city bus to the Greyhound station, where the woman in the wicket said, “What do you mean you hope so? You need to know your dad’s in Calgary, and I need a note from your mom.”
I set my fake ID on the counter.
That coach stopped in Ponoka, Innisfail, and Olds. In each town, the only other traveler stepped down, looked around, shook her head, and boarded the bus again. When we reached Calgary, I hired a taxi with the cash Junior gave me for my Operation Ivy LP.
The office was a single story with a flat face. Inside, behind a reception desk, three cubicles stood bleached by fluorescent light. In the first, a man squinted at a spreadsheet like it had insulted him. In the second, a man read a list into the phone: apples, bread, cornmeal. The third cubicle opened the other way.
The receptionist said, “I’ve no record of you.”
“I’m here for Reggie,” I said. “My dad.”
“Raheem?”
From that last cubicle came a man with a beard, which broke, split by an apologetic smile. My skin is the shade of snow, and his was sand.
The trip home was even slower than the trip down because the bus picked up people and packages in every town: Carstairs, Hobbema, Wetaskwin. I arrived late. My mom, in her nightgown, sat at our table. “I called,” she said. “His mom didn’t make you dinner.”
“Spaz and I went for pizza.”
“I don’t trust those two.”
“Who? Spaz and his mom?”
“Okay,” she said. “You’re spending some time here with me. No more Spaz and Junior. Forget them.”
“No Spaz, no Junior, no men ever again. Is that what you want?”
“Yeah, a world for women. A golden era.”
“It’ll be another dark age, only done up with lipstick.”
“What?”
“Future historians will call it the pink years.”
She tried to cover her smile, but the corners of her mouth curled beyond her hand. “You’re a clever kid.”
I said, “It’s not helping.”

Runaway (Part 2) [Running Time 2:07]

Using the professor’s computer, I joined a chat room for soldiers and civilians who had served and worked in the Middle East, and I asked the group a question.

Canadian Fireman: I put out the last of the burning wells in Kuwait. Where should I go now?
G.I. Joe: The courage we needed over there isn’t the kind we need here.
Soldier of Fortune: Crude under your fingernails? Oil in the blood? Try Fort McMurray!

I cleared my search history and closed Netscape Navigator, but a few more minutes remained in my hour. I opened it again and typed: “Oil, Fort McMurray, jobs.”
That Saturday morning, I pleaded for my release, and my mom relented. I told her that, after spending the day in the city, I would sleep over at Junior’s.
“If I call his place tonight, you’ll be there?”
“Seriously?”
She sighed. “Off you go.”
The same woman at the wicket said, “Your dad’s on the move.”
Next to the northern highway, matted brown grass had clumped, like drifts of sand, and each pocket of still water had a smooth surface, like an oil slick.
A passenger with boozy breath said, “Welcome to the moon.”
“No,” I said. “New Kuwait.”
At the plant I found the director of personnel in her office.
“You were injured at your last job?”
“It’s nothing,” I said, sitting down and slipping my hand, splint and all, into my pocket.
She said, “You sounded older on the phone.”
“I want more experience. I want to learn from my dad, who—”
“I’m sorry,” she said, “it’s just you look too young for your résumé.”
“The Iraq job only took nine months.”
At the outset the newspapers agreed with my mom and dad’s party guests: it would take years. But one team dismantled a tank and a jet plane and assembled a machine that shot water and wind. Another built a tractor that smothered ground fire. And a third reversed the flow of pipes laid to carry oil to tankers on the coast so that those pipes brought an ocean of water to the desert. All of those teams, I was sure, were led by my dad.
“That was several years ago. You would’ve been in school when the war—”
I had crossed one leg over the other to show my Screeching Weasel tattoo between my sock and cuff, but she was looking through me.
“I know what’s going on here,” she said. “Come on.”
Through corridors she led me to double doors marked “Theatre,” where we waited. When a woman emerged, the personnel director said, “Your class clown phoned ahead and set up a job interview.”
The woman snorted. “That’s two reasons he wouldn’t be welcome in our school.” She pushed past us, followed by a dozen girls with uniform crests on vests and skirts of royal blue.

Busted [Running Time 1:55]

Spaz and Junior were waiting for me on the professor’s driveway.
“It was your fucking rule,” said Junior.
“You,” Spaz said, “ruined it.”
“What?”
While they explained that the professor had noticed the record of my last Internet search, Spaz’s fingers curled over his thumbs into knots of knuckles, and Junior’s face reddened in two tight circles, as if a car’s cigarette lighter had been used to brand his cheeks.
I said, “Does this mean we’re no longer friends?”
Junior’s mouth pinched and then burst. “My dad says men don’t have friends, only comrades and colleagues.”
“That’s right,” Spaz said. “We were bandmates.”
At home my mom said, “A job in Fort McMurray? What about your diploma? What about me?”
“You?”
“You’re mine. I got custody. Your father got—”
“A picture,” I said, realizing, finally, that framed photograph was not a gift but a threat; she meant to put pressure under the feelings he had to bury.

Runaway (Part III) or Broken Homes (Reprise) [Running Time 3:27]

In the café across from the bus loop, I made a show of filling out an application for the owner, who stood behind her counter, never once looking away from me. Then, when the bus that Spaz and Junior had chosen drove off toward the city for a day of shopping and skateboarding, I stood and walked away from that woman’s business without further talk: a relief, I think, for us both.
On my route to Junior’s house, a few men mowed their lawns, but with the season’s rising heat, most had admitted defeat: cutting little trenches to sever the cared-for sections from the ones sacrificed to weeds, letting green grass burn to brown, and retreating from the sun to shade and shadows.
I carried my skateboard in my damaged hand; the other hand I had sunk in my pocket, where I dragged the pad of a finger, callused from the grating rub of guitar strings, along the ridges of my copied key. And then, like the college girls we had imagined, I stole across the professor’s yard and knocked at the door of his shed.
When he called for me to come in, I dropped my board, swung open the door, and started stammering the words my mom had made me rehearse: “I’m sorry I invaded your privacy and—”
With both daylight pouring in the open door behind me and the shed light on, I saw more than ever before of the books on the floor and the pictures on the walls. The professor, in his chair, swivelled slightly toward me, but a fold of his belly fat still sat on the keyboard tray. No young woman, however eager a student, would join him here. Even prostitutes would refuse him with the now–hardboiled-egg smell of his camp toilet. I said, “What are you doing?”
“Writing my book.”
“Will it ever be done?”
“I wouldn’t know what to do if I finished. And you? Do you really want to find your dad?”
I nodded.
The professor spun in his chair, his belly sliding off its shelf, and he tapped the wall next to one of the color photographs. In it an old man stood by a palm tree. His hair had gone thin and gray, and his skin hung loose below his cheeks and chin, and yet it was him: his shoulders were still broad; his back was still a bridge of muscle. He was grinning and reaching for a coconut offered him by a girl. Filipino? Thai?
“Has he been there since killing the oil fires?”
“I’m not convinced,” said the professor, “he ever went to Kuwait.”
I pushed into my eyes my undamaged hand, and, stuck without Junior and Spaz, I dug dirty nails into those thin lids. My hand came away wet: blood from a lid ripped, or blood from my strumming‑stripped cuticles, or the salty spill of tears. I didn’t look. Instead, I scanned the pictures around that shed and knew that my stomachache wasn’t going to get better: men are only boys with beer guts and battle scars, skins thick with scabs and eyes half-shut by scratches.
The professor said, “I’m sorry.”
He said it kindly, but in that moment I hated him. I felt too young to understand that unlike my father I wouldn’t run. Also, trying again and again, like Spaz’s dad, who had another wife and more children, would be beyond me. My future was in that shed. Studying its letter-and-picture–papered walls, I was looking ahead into this room, my basement bunker. Mine is smaller with egg cartons and Donnacona silencing all these songs.
Upstairs, my mother, wife, and daughters fight over the bathroom and the seats with the best view of the TV. I hate their talk about my retreat, in part because I’m a punch line, like the loser husbands and clownish fathers typical of the shows they choose, and in part because, despite those putdowns, it’s clear that they envy me. Down here, alone, I kick and flail behind the drums, pluck and slap at the bass, pick and strum guitars, and scream and moan into microphones, those metal-mesh globes. Computers, at least, have improved. With software easy to use, I overlay track after track until the instruments create a deafening echo, and my voice becomes a boys’ choir—until even I might be convinced that the knot of scar tissue still on my leg is a sign of privilege, and this key I forgot to hand back is a trophy commemorating the brotherly bond.