Chapter Three
Marshall
On Wednesday morning, Sean and I went fishing.
I was pouring myself some coffee into a thermos when I heard a knock on the front door. Sean was standing there wearing his fishing gear: a rod slung over his shoulder. Behind him, the city was just waking, and a pale grayish mist rose over the street in front of my house.
“Sean, it’s too early in the morning for this,” I said groggily. “What do you want?”
“Only a few hours of your time. When I got into work this morning, Gramps encouraged me to take the day off—”
“Those were his exact words?”
“Well, no, it was more like, ‘Please keep your ass at home today and stop bothering me.’ But I took it as a day off, and I’ve decided to head on over to the lake if you want to come with me. I’ve got a cooler full of beer and Pibb sitting in the back of my car, and it’s not going to drink itself. I know you’re not doing anything for the rest of the day.”
“I could be doing something.”
“Are you?”
I was silent.
On our way to the lake, I asked him if he had resolved his existential crisis. He put on an old Elvis Costello album and sat there in silence for a few moments tapping his fingers in time to the beat and looking thoughtful.
When he didn’t respond, I added, “I just remember the other day, you were saying—”
“Yeah, I remember the conversation,” he said shortly. “I wouldn’t call it an existential crisis. More like a quarter-life crisis if we’re being honest. I just don’t know what I’m going to do with the rest of my life. What do you do when you’ve spent your whole life preparing yourself for a career in music, and it’s not working out?”
“Well, you do have a law degree,” I pointed out. “You could be making bank if you just applied yourself.”
“That’s assuming I want to apply myself. Let me ask you this: if you were me, what would you do? Would you double down on your music, or would you find a nice girl and start a family?”
“I’d—probably find myself a nice girl.”
Sean winced as though he had been expecting a different answer. “I don’t know, Marsh. I know there are some amazing tunes inside me just waiting to be brought out. I can’t explain how I know; I just know. I remember hearing somewhere that gifted men always have a sense of their own greatness, and I can feel it burning inside me. I know I won’t be single forever, and these might be my last years to discover my destiny before family intrudes and fame becomes nothing more than a dream.”
Sean had an odd habit of waxing philosophical like this whenever we were alone together. It was a side of himself that he hid from most other people, but it always seemed to come out around me. I felt privileged, in a way, that he let me see it. Maybe because from the beginning I had seen more to him than just a shallow frat boy with a penchant for pranks.
Sean turned off the music. “And before you tell me I’m insane for believing in myself,” he said with a shake of his finger, “let me tell you a story about a young man named Bruce Springsteen. In early 1974, he was coming off the relative failure of his first two albums, which had underperformed. His record label was thinking about cutting him loose. He knew he had one last chance to break into the mainstream, or he was done. He’d be driving busses in Jersey for the rest of his life.
“So what did he do? He shut himself in with his band and spent a year crafting the album that would become Born to Run. He devoted six months to recording and rerecording the title track, and later when they asked him why he spent six months working on that damned song, he said, ‘Because I wanted it to sound like what I heard in my head.’”
“So, what’s the moral of the story?” I asked.
“The moral of the story,” said Sean slowly, “is that you never give up. Never, ever give up, even when your friends and family are telling you to throw in the towel, hang up the guitar, and go home.”
“Well, that might be true for someone like Bruce Springsteen: he was talented and driven, and one way or another, he was always going to make it. But not all of us can craft songs or make art at that level. For the rest of us, sometimes there’s wisdom in hanging up the guitar and settling down with a girl who makes you happy. Sometimes that’s the best you can expect out of life.”
By now, we had reached Lake Marion. A slight mist was rising up over the water, and in the distance, I could see a man oaring a rowboat to the far shore. Sean brought the car to a halt about fifty yards from the edge of the water. “Let me ask you just one thing: what do you want out of life?”
I shrugged; it wasn’t something I thought about often. “I guess I want to get married and start a family.”
“Is that all you want out of life?”
“You make it sound like it would be a tragedy if I ended up happily married,” I pointed out. “For some of us, that’s the best we can hope for.”
“I just want so much more.” Sean leaned his head on the steering wheel as though wanting to take a nap. “God, there are so many dreams lurking in this breast. We were made to do more than just reproduce. We were made for greatness!”
“But being in love is a type of greatness. Being able to take care of a family takes a special kind of talent, and unfortunately, not everyone has it.”
Sean sat up in his seat. “I guess I never thought of it that way. It’s just—all my life I’ve wanted to be the best at something. The greatest. And now I’m getting into my late twenties, and I’m realizing I’m not particularly good at anything. I wish you were born knowing the thing that you would be great at so that you could devote your youth to that thing and not spend years flailing around trying to figure out what to do with your life.”
I pulled off my cap and threw it into the floorboard. “Boy, if only it were that easy!”
***
We spent a few hours fishing on the shore of the lake and then drove to Montreux. I hadn’t eaten since the night before, so I was feeling starved by the time we sat down. Sean ordered the smoked chicken tacos served with jalapeno mayo and onion straws while I ordered Belgian-cut French fries and chicken schnitzel, a breaded chicken cutlet paired with a burgundy mushroom sauce, served over rice and asparagus. It was almost embarrassing how rapidly I devoured it.
On the other side of the table, though, Sean was still slogging his way through his quarter-life crisis.
“You know what I think it is?” he said in a shaky voice. “I think sometimes genius just comes with practice. When Bruce was composing Born to Run, he used to shut himself in the studio for twelve hours a day just scribbling down lyrics, sifting through the best ones, and practicing his guitar. Maybe that’s what I need to do. I’ll tell Gramps I can’t help him out in the lumberyard anymore. I’ll rent a garage or something, or I’ll borrow yours, and I’ll spend the whole day working on my music.”
I suddenly had a horrifying vision of Sean playing guitar in my garage at all hours of the night while I struggled to fall asleep. “Sean, this is some kind of mania,” I said. “You’re obsessed with Bruce Springsteen and wanting to become a musical genius. Lately, it’s all you talk about.”
“Listen,” said Sean, his eyes bright with conviction. “On October 27, 1975, Bruce landed on the cover of both Time and Newsweek. No musician had ever graced both covers in the same week. He was twenty-four. I’ll be turning twenty-nine next month. And what do I have to show for it? What have I done with my life?”
“You can start by finishing your tacos,” I replied.
In all the years I had known Sean, I had never seen him like this, and I was at a loss for how to handle it. When he spoke of his own greatness, he had the same half-crazed look in his eyes that my aunt Ruth had gotten when she thought UFOs were trying to contact her from the far side of Saturn. I remembered my parents talking in whispers, saying she had to be committed for her own good. Worried, I began casting around for something that would take his mind off of Bruce and his own lack of talent.
There were some guys sitting around a table playing poker toward the back of the room. Near the center of the table sat an older gentleman with a full salt-and-pepper beard who held a mug of ale in one hand. The others addressed him as “Tom.”
I motioned to their table. “We ought to go join those guys over there. It’ll be good practice for the festival tournament next week.” Not that I was particularly worried about the festival; the last couple of years, the guys I’d competed against had just been looking for an excuse to get away from their wives. I had beaten them easily.
Sean dragged himself out of his despair long enough to glance over in their direction. “They look sort of intimidating,” he said boozily, “like they could break us over their knees. Just the sort of guys we ought to be testing ourselves against. With the Las Vegas invitational coming up in a few months, we need all the practice we can get.”
“Finish your meal, and we’ll go over there,” I said.
After we’d paid for our meal, I went over and asked Tom if we could join them.
“Sure, go right ahead.” He motioned to a couple of empty seats on the other side of the table. “But I can’t promise you’re gonna like this.”
“Oh, I’ve been beaten before,” I said as I took my seat. “But not always.”
Tom nodded and began shuffling a new deck. “How long you been playing?”
“About eight years. I got started in college, the two of us and some other guys playing in the lounge when we should have been studying trig. God, sometimes I still have nightmares that I’m gonna fail a test because I forgot to do any of the reading. But once we figured out how the game worked, we started making bank off it, and that’s how I was able to pay for college.”
The other guys raised their brows looking impressed, which confirmed what I had suspected: that they hadn’t been playing nearly as long as I had. Tom had a foreboding manner, and he could probably run the table with these other guys, but in terms of experience, I already had him beat.
What worried me more was the guy seated to my right. River was younger than the others, in his mid-thirties, wearing a gray sleeveless t-shirt that showed off his improbably large arms. He had shaved every hair on his head—including his eyebrows—which gave his face an eerie, alien appearance. Early in the second round, he made a reference to having once beaten up some “illegals” who had cheated him out of several hundred dollars in Reno—the rest of the gang laughed uncomfortably—and I couldn’t tell whether or not he meant it, but I didn’t particularly feel like finding out.
This put me in a dilemma, as I wanted to win money, but I didn’t want to win too much of it. I won the first round, but made a point of losing the second. I won the third and planned on losing the fourth, but at that point, there was so much money at stake—about 900 dollars—that I couldn’t refuse. I wanted it, Sean wanted it; we had to have it.
I laid out my hand, took the money, and thanked them all for playing. “Sean and I have to get going,” I said, already edging my way toward the door. “Sorry we couldn’t stay longer; it was a pleasure to meet you, a real pleasure.”
River rose out of his chair, flexing his muscles ominously. I was so transfixed by the motion of his arms and his weird, hairless face that I almost didn’t see Tom creeping up behind me.
“MARSH, LOOK OUT!” shouted Sean.
I turned around just in time to see a fist soaring through the air toward me. I ducked out of the way, throwing myself against the table. Tom, momentarily knocked off balance, staggered and fell backward.
With River on one side of us and Tom on the other, it seemed like there was no escape. Being young and in good health, I had never until that moment thought about how it would feel to be injured or dead (In the latter case, would I even feel anything?). As the gang encircled us, I experienced a moment of existential panic. Twenty-five years old, and I hadn’t done any of the things I had wanted to do in my life.
My thoughts were interrupted by the sound of wood splintering. A kindly observer from a neighboring table had broken a chair over River’s head. He stumbled a few paces forward and fell face-first onto the cold floor.
While the rest of the gang swarmed our chair-throwing companion, Sean and I decided to make a break for it. We turned and ran. We didn’t stop running until we had reached his Nissan.
“I’ll admit that was more intense than I cared for,” I said as I climbed in. “I prefer games that don’t come with a risk of being put in a coma.”
But Sean didn’t respond. Instead, he knelt down in the parking lot next to the car and expelled his lunch into a fresh puddle of rain. It was some minutes before he managed to recover himself and crawl back into the car.
“You want me to drive?” I asked.
“If you would, please.” He handed me the keys.
We were mostly quiet as we drove home through the rain-dogged afternoon. The gray sky above us and the marshes on either side of us seemed bathed in an uncommon light. Once we paused at an intersection adjacent to a small park, through the rearview mirror, I saw a dog sunning himself in front of an old, rusted swing set.