My Favorite Place

It was a December night in Chicago and I was a little drunk and more than a little miserable when the men started to play a song.  I let my hair fall over my eyes and peeked at them from between the strands as they plucked the chords of their guitars.  They were all warm eyes, dark hair, and smiles.  I was sitting backwards on a metal folding chair, trying to keep my drunken knees from knocking into the guitar that was being played to my right or the bass being played to my left. 

           

Earlier that day I had finished my last class as an undergraduate fiction writing student by reading aloud to my classmates a nonfiction story I had written about why I hadn’t been home in a very long time.  Now I was in the apartment of one of those classmates, listening to his band play while two other new friends I had made from class stood behind me. 

I liked my new friends.  I liked that they carried dark, heavy secrets like me.  I liked doing shots with them and dancing with them.  And I liked being there with them, experiencing the feeling of the music.

I liked it all much better than I liked the professor I was dating or the sex he was having with me or the other friends I was having too many martinis with, and certainly more than the now-gay ex-boyfriend that I had been dating for the past three years.

And then I loved it.

The men were only a couple lines into “Mr. Postman” when my drunken heart smiled and remembered my younger brother. They were like him and by being there with them I was like myself in a way I hadn’t been in years. 

My brother, like me, is deep, dark eyed, and a little out of place in the world.  When I was young and he was even younger and the summer days were devoid of everything but heat and music and secondhand smoke, I would play my favorite song – “Do You Believe in Magic” by the Lovin’ Spoonful – on our mother’s CD player and he and I would dance all afternoon.  As we got a little older we discovered rock’n’roll and punk rock and that the blond hair that we both grew too long was good for head-banging. 

When I think of being a happy child I am thinking of those times.  I am thinking of how my brother and I were wild and wishful children, playing tennis racket guitars and singing into wooden spoon microphones and dancing on our mother’s kitchen floor.  And then, when the day was done, returning to our separate bedrooms, each of us to write secret songs in our notebooks.

I grew up to be a writer.  He grew up to play songs.

In my classmate’s apartment, sitting between him and his bass-playing friend, holding a coffee cup of red wine in my lap, I thought of the last time I had seen my brother.  It had been a year and a half ago – before I had moved to England, before I had moved back to Chicago, and after I had already been living in Chicago for two years.  His band had won the local talent contest in our Wisconsin hometown and part of their prize had been to open for the headlining act at the town fair.  They performed on a small stage between the livestock tent and the tractor show tent.  I sat in the front row and I could not have been more proud.

The next night, the night before I left for England, my brother and I stayed up late, dancing and singing to all of our old favorite songs.  My then-boyfriend sat watching. He didn’t get it the way we did and my brother and I knew it. He didn’t feel like those songs alone could save him – or even like he had ever needed them to.

Sitting with my new friends, listening to my classmate’s band play, knowing what I knew of their secrets and seeing them smile at the songs, I wondered if they got it.

I looked over at the black leather, chains, and spikes figure of one of my new friends.  She was tossing her hair from side to side, a pretty pink smile brightening her whole face. She clasped her hands to her heart as if the men, the music, and the moment were touching something inside of her that she had lost touch with long ago.  She got it.

I was in a bad place in my life then – getting drunk and sleeping over at my professor-boyfriend’s apartment just so I didn’t have to sleep with myself and the memories of my now-gay-ex-boyfriend and, even worse, the reasons I never went home.  But at that moment, seated between the sounds of the song, with my new friends, I had a feeling that I was in the right place.  And for the moment I felt better.

Not wanting the moment or the feeling to end, I spent the next three days half drunk, half hungover, lost and found inside the songs, surrounded by new and newer friends, dancing like it was just me and my little brother on our mother’s kitchen floor.  I knew I needed to move forward and I would; I would move to France.  But at the moment I liked how time and I could move in place, twisting and turning each other in a sultry, cyclical dance of youth-without-consequences. 

A month and a half later I moved to France and I found myself happier than I had ever even thought it was possible to be.  I found more new, good-for-me friends.  I found myself enjoying my own company and the way I remained true to myself in the company of others.  I found myself jumping into a parade while confetti fell and stuck to my hair like neon colored stardust.  I found myself dancing the polka in Munich, dancing on the beach and in my bedroom, dancing with my friends and by myself.

I also found a new boyfriend.  Before our first date he asked me what my favorite song was.  I told him “New Slang” by The Shins.  On our date he told me he had listened to it but that he didn’t get it.  I told him I liked the song for the feeling and he told me he still didn’t get it.

Two months later I told him that I was worried about my younger brother.  My brother had written to me saying that he was worried that something was wrong with him because he didn’t feel as happy as everyone around him seemed.  He felt alone in crowds, inherently different and discontent.  And all he wanted was to be normal.  I had written him back saying that he just hadn’t found the right people or the right place yet.  I told my boyfriend how sad my brother’s sadness made me, how I wanted to be there to help him and to make him happy.  I told him how even though I had been almost everywhere I had ever dreamed of going, all I ever thought about was why I had left home and how I had left my brother behind.  My boyfriend didn’t say anything.  So I put my headphones on and listened to “New Slang.”  He didn’t get it.

A month later my plane from Paris landed in Chicago.  My mother picked me up at the airport and I went home to Wisconsin – home for the summer for the first time in four years.  I felt grown up and youthful, happy and hopeful.  I found my brother to be a bored, malcontent, misfit toy stuck on a metaphorical high school playground of football players and FFA members.  So since I couldn’t take him to France, I took him to the next best place.  On a whim of good-intentioned spontaneity I got in my brother’s car and together we drove to Chicago, to a place where I was sure that I could prove to him that I was right – that there was nothing wrong with him, that all he needed was to find the right place with the right people and then he too would feel right.

In Chicago, in my friend’s apartment, his band played and a party raged and my brother and I twisted and shouted to Beatles’ songs.  My friends greeted my brother as warmly and as enthusiastically as they greeted me.  And not only was I happy to see them again, but I was happy to be introducing my two favorite parts of my life to one another.  In the midst of the crowd my brother and I whispered secrets.  And when the songs blasting through the speakers were the same songs that he and I used to dance and sing along to when we were younger, I smiled at him and hoped I had proven my point.

There in my friend’s apartment, time and I resumed our old sultry, cyclical dance – both of us moving in place.  It was as if time itself had been waiting for me all those months I had been in France.  I had changed because I had needed to, but though the season had changed, the moment felt as good as ever and I felt better than ever.  And so the night hours bled rock’n’roll and blended into morning and the music played on and on – because it was good and fun and because we all knew what it was like to need a song like a Band-Aid.

I smiled as I looked around the room.  My friends, my brother and I were wild and wishful grown-up children dancing on the kitchen floor, singing along to our favorite songs.  And I was realizing that, of all the places I had been in the world, this was my favorite place to be.