Dreamland(3)

By that point, Paige was working with a local artist who specialized in stained glass. She’d worked at the shop part-time while she was in high school, but by graduation she was already crafting her own Tiffany-inspired lamps. Unlike me, Paige got pretty good grades all along, but she had no desire to go to college. Instead, she worked on building her business and eventually met a guy and fell in love. She left the farm, moved out of state, and got married. I hardly heard from her during those years after she left; even after she had a baby, I only glimpsed her on the rare FaceTime call, looking tired and holding her crying kid. For the first time in my life, it felt as though no one was really watching out for me.

Add all that up—my overworked aunt and uncle, my lack of interest in school, my sister moving away, and chores I had come to hate—and it’s not surprising that I began to rebel. As soon as I started high school, I fell in with a group of guys with the same tendencies, and we egged one another on. At first, it was little things—throwing rocks through the windows of abandoned houses, prank phone calls in the middle of the night, stealing the occasional candy bar from a convenience store—but within a few months, one of those friends stole a bottle of gin from his dad’s liquor cabinet. We met by the river and passed the bottle back and forth. I had way too much and threw up for the rest of the night, and since I’m honest, I’ll admit I didn’t learn the appropriate lesson. Instead of waving off the bottle whenever it came my way, I spent countless weekends with my brain blurry at the edges. My grades remained in the tank, and I began to skip certain chores. I’m not proud of who I was back then, but I also know it’s impossible to change the past.

Right after my sophomore year began, however, my life took another turn. I’d drifted away from my loser friends by then, and I heard through the grapevine that a local band needed a new guitarist. Why not? I figured. I was only fifteen, and when I showed up to audition, I saw the band members—all in their twenties—smothering their laughter. I ignored them, plugged in my electric guitar, and played Eddie Van Halen’s “Eruption” solo. Ask anyone in the know, and they’ll tell you it’s not easy. Long story short, I ended up playing my first gig with them the following weekend, after hearing the entire set for the first time in the single rehearsal we had beforehand. Compared to them—with their piercings and tattoos and either long or spiked bleached hair—I resembled a choirboy, so they kept me stationed in the back near the drummer, even during my solos.

If music wasn’t all-consuming before, it quickly became that way. I stopped cutting my hair, got illegal tattoos, and eventually the band let me start performing out front. At the farm, I pretty much quit doing any chores whatsoever. My aunt and uncle were at a loss, so they chose to ignore me, which kept our conflicts to a minimum. We even stopped eating together. I devoted more time to music, fantasizing about playing to massive crowds in sold-out venues.

In retrospect, I probably should have known it would never work out, since the band wasn’t all that good. All of our songs were in the screamy, post-punk vein, and while some people enjoyed the music, I’m pretty sure most of the audiences we played to in our part of eastern North Carolina weren’t dazzled. Nonetheless, we managed to find a tiny niche, and until almost the end of my senior year in high school, we played twenty or twenty-five weekends a year in dives as far away as Charlotte.

But there was friction in the band, and it grew worse over time. The lead singer insisted we play only the songs he’d written, and while it might not sound like a big deal, ego has killed more bands than just about anything. Adding insult to injury, the rest of us knew that most of his songs were mediocre. Eventually he announced that he was moving to Los Angeles to make it on his own, since none of us appreciated his genius. As soon as he stomped off, the drummer—at twenty-seven, he was the oldest among us—announced that he was quitting, as well, which wasn’t a surprise, either, since his girlfriend had been pushing him to settle down for a while. As he put away his kit and loaded it in the car, the other three of us nodded at one another, knowing it was over, and packed up. After that night, I never spoke to any of them again.

Strangely, I was less depressed than simply lost. As much as I’d enjoyed performing, there was too much drama and too little momentum that might lead the band anywhere. At the same time, I had no idea what to do with my life, so I just went through the motions. I graduated high school—probably because the teachers didn’t want to have to deal with me for another year—and spent a lot of time in my room, writing music and recording songs I posted to Spotify and Instagram and YouTube. No one seemed to care. Little by little, I began pitching in at the farm again, though it was apparent that my aunt and uncle had long since given up on me. More important, I started to take stock of my life, especially as I spent more time on the property. As self-absorbed as I’d been, even I could see that my aunt and uncle were getting older and that the farm was struggling. When I’d first arrived as a child, the farm grew corn, cotton, blueberries, tobacco, and we raised thousands of chickens for processing. All that had changed in the past few years. Bad crops and bad business decisions and bad prices and bad loans meant that a good portion of the original land had been either sold or leased to our neighbors. I wondered how I could have missed the changes as they’d been happening, even though I knew the answer.

Then, on a warm August morning, my uncle had a massive heart attack while walking toward the tractor. His left anterior descending artery was blocked at the origin; as the folks at the hospital explained, this kind of heart attack is often referred to as a widow-maker, because the odds of survival are incredibly slim. Maybe it was all the buttered bread he ate at dinners, but he died even before the ambulance arrived. My aunt was the one who found him, and I’ve never heard anyone scream and wail the way she did that morning.