I remember the smell of her clothes, her perfume, her skin. The tilt of her chin when she was offended and the way her mouth pulled in at the corners when she was wary of your motives. I remember the way the tip of her tongue peeked out and touched her top lip when she was having an orgasm. And the way she’d hold the first sip of wine in her mouth for what seemed like a full minute before swallowing it. The way she closed her eyes and moaned when she swallowed…the wine. And me. I remember how she wouldn’t take shit from me or anyone else. She didn’t care what you thought about her, she cared what she thought about you. She wouldn’t let you in just like that. You had to prove it. I remember the open bags of Cheetos, all lined up in her pantry. The first time I saw them all lined up like that I’d pulled a couple rubber bands off my wrist and started closing them so they wouldn’t go stale.
“What are you doing?” she’d said, when she caught me tying one up.
“Someone left them open,” I’d said. “They’ll go stale.”
“That’s the point.” She’d taken the bag from me and pulled off the rubber band, handing it back to me.
“Stale Cheetos are my favorite.” She’d pushed it between her lips, wagging her eyebrows at me.
And then as she was walking away, she’d said, “Are you going to write a song about it?”
I remember the way she’d always say: Are you going to write a song about it?
And I’ll never forget that I did write a song about it. All of it. And those songs. I wrote one song, I wrote two songs, I wrote three songs, I wrote four songs. Yara gave me one gift: endless inspiration. One song, two songs, three songs, four songs go platinum. We make money, we acquire fame, we travel all over the world and live the very dreams we dreamed.
But I’m poor.
I have nothing but money.
And her sweater, I still have one of her sweaters. Her smell has long since faded out of it, but if you look closely at the cuff of the sleeve, you can see tiny flecks of orange trapped in the wool. Cheeto dust.
I lift it to my nose before every show, trying to find her somewhere. It comes with me when we’re on tour. I keep it in a box that looks like a coffin. The guys give me shit about it, but I don’t care. There was one time I forgot the box in a dressing room in Albuquerque;I only realized it by the time we reached Reno and we were getting ready to play a show.
“I’m not playing,” I told them. “Everything will go to shit without the sweater.”
Sometimes a man gets carried away, but what does it matter? That’s a man’s business. They convinced me to go on anyway; hard slaps on the back and looks that made me feel like I was overreacting. The sound went out during the first song. It had worked fine during rehearsal, but I didn’t sniff her sweater, so it stopped working. Then during the middle of the show, the stage manager started violently throwing up. She was rushed to the hospital in the middle of our set after passing out and was later diagnosed with the norovirus and severe exhaustion. Again, the sweater. Then Ferdinand broke three guitar strings, and I forgot the lyrics to “My Wife’s Wife.” By the time we left the stage and were back in the tour bus, all the guys were convinced about the sweater.
“No more shows without Dave’s sweater,” Brick said.
He stank of beer and sweat and I didn’t want him anywhere near Yara’s sweater.
“Do we need to sniff it too?” Ferdinand asked.
Ferdinand somewhat understood my grief over Yara—having watched the whole relationship unravel, he never questioned it.
“No one sniffs the fucking sweater but me,” I said.
So the sweater became a sort of Ark of the Covenant for us, with me as its handler and the guys as firm believers in its magic. We didn’t go on tour without it, and it’s on the cover of our second album. Sometimes we tell the story at our shows and the crowd roars. They want to see the sweater. But Yara’s worn grey sweater is only for me. I wonder if she’s ever seen our album cover and recognized it—I wonder that too often actually. The most twisted thing about being an artist comes when you understand you’re creating for one specific person. The painful part is realizing who that person is, and the devastating part is knowing the compulsion will never go away. And they mostly stem from a death: emotional, physical—it doesn’t matter. They die to you and their things become sacred. She doesn’t deserve it; she’s a coward. But trying to control who controls you is like dictating what the weather should do every day.
We moved from Seattle to LA to pursue the music. Ferdinand, Brick, and our newest member, who we call Keyboard Carl. Carl came last but I like him most. He has greasy hair hanging around his face that reminds me of Kurt Cobain’s, and he wears 90’s boy band T-shirts. He gives Lazarus Come Forth a nice solid rock & roll vibe.
The guys found the transition to LA easier than I did. I was leaving behind memories; they were wanting to make new ones. In truth, they’ve always loved the idea of fame harder than I do. I just love the music.
We signed with a small indie label: a husband and a wife named Rita and Benny. They are so passionate about music they do little but eat, sleep, and talk music. They make me feel inferior but well taken care of. Everyone has a nickname in our circle, so we call them The Musics. We stayed in their house when we visited and by the end of the long weekend, they believed in us and we believed in them. I guess the rest is history.
Ferdinand buys his mother a lake house in Chelan, and Brick buys his girlfriend new tits the size of cantaloupes. Keyboard Carl says he’s saving his to buy an island. I think that’s an excellent idea, but there’s no one I’d want to take to the island with me, so I deposit my checks and try to forget that the money is in there. Some guys would use it to ease the pain, I guess, same way as some people use drugs. I want the pain to stay where it is, hard and heavy. It makes me feel close to her. I am inspired, but I am empty. The month after the tour ends, Ferdinand comes to my condo, which I had purchased from my aunt.
“You have a beard now,” he says, scratching his head. “How do you eat pussy with a beard?”
I laugh and we hug in the way men do with a few firm hits onto the back. I’ve always thought it funny that even in hugging, men show aggression. Ferdinand stays with me for the week and before he leaves, he tells me I need to find Yara.
He’s nervous when he tells me. I’ve seen him play to crowds of eighty thousand not even breaking a sweat or vomiting like Brick did before a big show. He sits now on the arm of my sofa, his legs spread. His body is bent so that his elbows are resting on his knees, his hands dangling between them. He looks me in the eye, but he’s having trouble doing so.
“Look,” he says. “I have a friend in London. He came to one of our shows once…”
“Which one?” I ask.
“Red Rocks. He came to Red Rocks and I asked him to keep an eye out for Yara.”
“How does one keep an eye out for someone they’ve never met, in a city with millions of people?”
“I showed him her picture. He writes restaurant reviews for a blog, so I figured if he was frequenting London’s bar scene he was liable to run into her.”
“And did he?”
“No.”
I can’t hide the disappointment from my face. “So why are you telling me this?”
“Because I don’t really give a fuck who you fuck. But, you changed after she left, and fucking all those girls didn’t help you. Neither did the album’s success, man, which I suspect was mostly written about her.”
I pause to think about “Atheists Who Kneel and Pray.” The night I had fallen drunk on a stranger’s lawn somewhere in North Bend, on my way back from a bar. The snow was falling around me, shocking my face and hand with little pinpricks as it landed. I’d stared up at the sky and thought about how I didn’t believe anymore—not in God or his creation. Definitely not in love. She’d come as a thief in the night and taken it all away. How could a person do that? How could they have so much power? And as I lay there, in a drunken state of heartbreak, I’d written the song that had put us on the map.
“You need to find her,” Ferdinand says. “You need closure, man. Or something else. Find her and tell her it was all for her. Whatever you need to do.”
Ferdinand’s mother was a shrink. I take it that he gleaned all his wisdom from her.
I rub my hand across my face. “Okay, man,” I say. “Okay.”