Songs Only You Know by Sean Madigan Hoen

Author:Sean Madigan Hoen [Hoen, Sean Madigan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-1-61695-337-9
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2014-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

6

The two-dollar fare to cross the Ambassador Bridge was a better option than the Windsor Tunnel, which plunged you beneath the water through a cylinder of diesel-blown tile. From the bridge’s arch you’d glimpse civilization, split in two by the Detroit River. The west bank: Detroit’s garden of rust and hollowed buildings, sunrays splintering through jagged glass. To the east was Windsor, Ontario’s polished chrome, the green turf of city parks, restored crosses rising from chapel steeples. Swiveling your neck left to right, it was like a before-and-after exhibit, one side imploded and the other upright and gleaming.

For the band, crossing into Canada meant pulling over to allow border patrolmen to dismantle our road cases and molest our equipment. Coming home, the U.S. guards silently waved us through with a lack of ceremony that made us feel we’d returned to an undesirable place. I’d been crossing the bridge since I’d turned nineteen, able to legally enter Canadian bars two years before the States would allow it. Windsor’s pubs were unthreatening rooms with cheap pitchers and good music. Canada was a place of luxury, a nearby reprieve. Their red maple leaf stamped everywhere, on paper sacks from McDonald’s drive-throughs and on the freshly painted receptacles into which those sacks were so diligently pitched. SMOKING KILLS warnings plastered to each pack of cigarettes; the Canadians’ rote politeness and clarity of speech. I didn’t hassle with strapping an antitheft bar across my steering column when I was there. Nothing was lurking in the corners.

There were also the Windsor casinos, which had never enticed me. By early September, though, Warden was on a monthlong winning streak, gambling the last of his record company’s account after he’d been fired from his job delivering Hungry Howie’s pizzas. Coming off a stay in his mom’s trailer, he was living near the Canadian border in a loft soon to be bulldozed for a new Tiger Stadium. Since Angela had returned to Kalamazoo for fall semester, I’d begun stopping by Warden’s cavernous new home, taking solace, imagining the glorious pad it might be if he bought a couch and arranged a stereo for communal listening. His only amenities were a mattress laid over milk crates and a formation of stuffed garbage bags containing most of what he owned. His bathtub was a trough of gray water.

I’d been there, half asleep on his floor, the morning Hungry Howie’s canned him.

“Don’t do this,” Warden said, into the phone. “Not now.”

Then he’d threatened to kill his boss’s newborn son.

The craziness he’d spew—you could have had him locked up, diagnosed him this or that. A sicko, mainly. Some people wouldn’t believe it, but Warden was, in his guts, a sweet man. He had no command over words; they came out of him like belches.

“You just don’t talk that way,” I said. “It ain’t cool.”

“That’s how it is, man.” And by this he meant I was right.

As for the bands and the scene, if they spoke of Warden at all, it was as the ass end of joke.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.