“Dad’s Music / My Music” by Jeffrey G. Moss
“Dad died,” my brother said. “In his sleep. Sheila just called. He’s gone.”
After the call, shocked and numb, I sat here at this same makeshift desk. Outside January storm gales surged; sleet ticked against the black window. Snow, rain, and ice ricocheted off the vinyl siding. The longer I sat the more I listened. As dawn crept in, the wind sounded like the sea, breaking, rolling, and retreating. Metronomic, meditative. The more I listened, the more I remembered.
“Da Doo Ron-Ron-Ron”
We are cruising along the tree-lined road in the white Chevy station wagon headed to the lake; the warm breeze through the rolled down windows is the promise of summer. It’s early July 1973. I am ten years old. Sheila, our stepmother, is belting out the lyrics and doing the hand gestures to The Crystals “Da Doo Ron Ron” coming through on the oldies radio station.
Richard, my middle brother, joins in, croaking out his own da doo ron ron’s from the way back of the car. He is eight. David, my youngest brother, five, is across from me on the back seat watching the trees as we sail by.
Dad’s lips mouth the words as he takes the curves, but he’s not singing. He never does. Soon he will spot the welts and bruises on David’s hamstrings. Then he will summon Richard and I out of the water. Up by the wagon, in the shaded lot, he will examine and then, in full on probation officer mode, interview us.
“When was the last time he hit you?”
“How often does he hit you?”
“Does he hurt you in other ways?”
But that’s as far as it goes, as it ever goes. The welts will recede. The queries will become tamped down memory.
Pop, our maternal grandfather, lives in the basement studio apartment. He and Gram invited us to occupy the main part of the house when Dad and Mom separated three years earlier. It was supposed to be a temporary situation. My grandparents should’ve gotten their Brooklyn row house and lives back. They didn’t. Gram left, but all that’s another story.
Pop works the lobster shift in a linotype shop Sunday to Thursday nights, which means he is around afternoons to look after us until Mom returns home. He makes sure homework is done, on rainy days he plays hide-and-seek, sometimes he takes us out for pizza, and he beats us. Regularly. With his skinny leather belt, the braided dog’s leash, with his powerful, machine operator hands.
Typically, after time away, an afternoon, a weekend, a holiday week, Dad and Sheila let us out curbside and wave as we ascend the cement stairs.
I often stand in the picture window. “Take us with you!” I want to yell as they drive away. “Take us. Please.”
“The Loco-Motion”
“And don’t call me unless the house is on fire!” Mom shouts. “Leave me have some peace!” She slams the heavy wooden door shut.
Pops moved to Florida, but another sort of monster reigns. Richard spreads his girth across the couch, turns the TV volume as loud as it can go, and crams Keebler Toll House cookies and half eaten bananas and apples under the cushions, the way ogres store their bounty. So no one else can have it.
He has a battery-powered, portable record player. Tonight it’s Grand Funk Railroad’s cover of “The Loco-Motion,” one of a half-dozen or so 45s he’s collected. The record player, too, is cranked up as high as it can go. He sings, meaning he shouts, along.
At thirteen I am ostensibly in charge, but that couldn’t be further from the reality. The beast quickly brings David, eight, to tears. The cacophony: the sitcom on TV, “The Locomotion,” his shouting/singing, the crying. Richard is the only person I’ve ever intentionally punched in the face. That will happen on a different night. I feel the crunch of that blow to his left cheek in my right hand even today.
I huddle in my room, lean against the door, the rotary phone from Mom’s nightstand in my lap. I don’t need any of the numbers hanging on the fridge. I have them all memorized.
Just as I am about to dial the bingo hall, the bowling alley, a friends’ house where she is playing mahjong or canasta, the phone rings.
“I can’t really hear you,” Dad says.
I stretch the receiver cord to its utmost; take it into the closet.
“What’s going on over there?” he asks.
I try to describe, explain how Mom is out, again, that the noise is deafening, that David is somewhere in the house crying, again, that Richard has set his turntable up outside the door to my room, that I am at wit’s end. Again.
I can barely hear the advice he is attempting to administer, or myself think.
“If you’re going to be involved, be involved all the way! Otherwise, stay out of it!” I holler, and slam down the receiver.
When the TV suddenly shuts off it’s like when your neighbor’s central air compressor stops right outside your open bedroom window.
“Boys,” Dad shouts, “what’s going on up there? Come down here.” Richard turns off the music and my ears ring, like, I imagine, they would after an explosion.
Dad collects us on the couch, the one with the food crammed under the cushions, and we sob. We cry until calm and quiet settle like a dirty quilt.
Dad didn’t take us with him that night either. Despite the continued violence and chaos, he never showed up like that again. The pattern of abandonment grew from there.
“Unchained Melody”
Yvonne and I are married in the fall of 1990. We are twenty-seven. The movie Ghost has recently come out. The Demi Moore/Patrick Swayze pottery wheel scene is steamy and sexy, so we elect to use “Unchained Melody” by The Righteous Brothers, the soundtrack to that scene, for our first dance song.
Just as the wedding band singer hits the plaintive notes about needing and hungering for love I catch Dad’s eye. He is a few feet behind the attendees gathered around the parquet floor. He is leaning on a catering hall chair. Sullen. Dour.
“I don’t want to come to the wedding, to New York,” he said.
“Really? You don’t. Why?”
He doesn’t reply.
Mom tells me that Dad hasn’t paid alimony in quite some time, that her lawyer threatened him to do the right thing or suffer the consequences. Mom agrees to not have Dad arrested. Not this trip, anyway. She says she’d never ruin our special day like that. I believe her; convince him it’s safe.
To our guests and Yvonne holding me near, it must appear that I have welled up with the emotions of the moment. I swipe at the tears with the cuff of the rented tux. When I look over, Dad’s left the room.
“Who Are You”
When our boys are in high and middle school, respectively, I take them to see The Who, a band I saw in the late Seventies. “Who Are You” is one musical highlight of the night. A few years later, our younger son, Derek, plays guitar in a band that performs “Who Are You” as part of their set.
Each and every time I hear the song, regardless of who is singing, one lyric in particular strikes a critical chord deep in my chest. It’s the one about a heart being like a broken cup and the narrator ending up on his knees.
Some years earlier, Dad calls on a weeknight. It’s dinnertime. He makes small talk with Yvonne and his grandsons, and then asks if we might speak privately.
“Can I call back after dinner?” I ask.
He insists it will be brief. I carry the cordless phone into the next room.
“Am I off speaker?”
“Yes,” I reply. “What’s up?”
“I can’t do this anymore,” he says.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I’ve been thinking about it. Us. And, well, this is what I’ve decided,” he says as if he’s prepared and rehearsed for this very moment.
“So, what? You don’t love me, Dad? Is that what you’re saying?”
Pause.
“Are you my father?” I ask. “Do you love me?”
Silence.
I ask one more time. “Do you love me? And if you don’t, who are you?”
“Yes, of course I do. I am your father, after all.”
That moment, like sitting in this very seat the night he died, feels like a decisive victory, and a defeat.
The landline crackles like a short-circuited amp.
“I’m going back to my family,” I say and hang up.
My sons and wife look at me as if I am a ghost.
I am shattered, but I never kneel before him again.
“My Father’s House”
I have attended seventy-six Bruce Springsteen concerts over the last forty-five years, at least fifteen of those with one or both of my sons.
Since Dad’s passing, I’ve been seeking some solace watching snippets of Springsteen on Broadway, sections where Bruce discusses how he’s managed depression and grief. The segment I revisit most often revolves around the song “My Father’s House,” a haunting number about a dream of unrealized reconciliation.
During a soft, strumming break Springsteen tells the audience that his dad was eventually diagnosed as bi-polar and, despite all the bitterness and lost years, the elder Springsteen, with treatment and time, tamed his demons. Father and son achieved some sort of resolution.
Each time I end up wiping the tears the same way I did with my rented wedding tux. The ache remains - relentless as the sleet and icy rain.
“Not Fade Away”
Eighteen months after Dad’s passing and fifty years since that summer afternoon when our stepmother sang and seat danced to “Da Doo Ron-Ron-Ron,” I go with some friends and Jason, my eldest son, a Phish fan, to see Dead and Company at Citifield. The band closes the second set with a version of the old Buddy Holly ditty “Not Fade Away.”
For days after the show, I listen to the original two-minute twenty-second release and alternate it with a live 16 minutes of noodling guitar and trippy jams original lineup Grateful Dead version from the Cornell ’77 show.
Regardless of the differences in length and style, at the core of “Not Fade Away” is the narrator’s proclamation of undying love. “Love for real, not fade away.” Of course, Buddy Holly means it like the narrator in “Unchained Melody” means it, as a statement of romantic yearning.
The refrain, set to the timeless Bo Diddley beat, is, for me, an assurance, a contract my father failed to fulfill. During the song I hug my son around the shoulders. He has no idea why.
“XO”
Today is Jason’s wedding day.
Yvonne and I set the simply-framed five by seven photos of Dad, Mom, Yvonne’s parents, and a few from Becca, the bride’s, side on the legacy table in the entrance hall, next to the seating cards. To paraphrase Springsteen, the dead are all here.
Outside a summer rain pours from the heavens. Yvonne and I hold it together, mostly, through the ceremony. When the DJ starts the newlywed’s first dance song, Beyonce’s “XO” performed by John Mayer, the couple enters and attendees gather to watch them swirl.
Jason doesn’t lift his gaze from Becca’s beautiful, beaming face. There is no reason for him to look for me; he knows that there’s no place on the planet I’d rather be. The moment is music for my full heart.
Jeffrey G. Moss
After 32 years guiding 13/14 year olds in crafting their worlds, he has finally started following some of his own writing advice. His creative non-fiction has appeared in Cagibi, Under the Gum Tree, Hippocampus, and elsewhere. Some of his CNF is forthcoming in Cleaver. Find him on IG @jeffgm. Find his published work here: https://linktr.ee/jeffgm
