Here's Where The Story Ends

Court and I stayed for a few more days in Tennessee after everyone else went home, to help Janine cope and to "be there" for Landon.

I didn't really know what "being there" would entail, but it turns out that literally just being there was good. I have no idea how a six-year-old processes that his grandmother is gone, especially when she'd essentially disappeared from his life six months earlier, which is forever at that age. But apparently having a favorite aunt and uncle around helped. After we'd said goodbye to everyone who'd come to the funeral, we moved out of the hotel and into Janine's house for half a week.

Speaking of goodbyes, I should tell you about the goodbye hug I had with Colin, because I know you'll appreciate it.

I remember the hug, I just don't remember exactly when it happened. It was at one of the stops on the Claire Farewell Tour, probably the reception at the hotel. A good, long hug from Colin made all kinds of things loosen up in my brain and my chest.

He asked when I was coming home. And it struck me, oh, yeah, what's next? Where's next? Almost a year earlier, Ziggy and I had put off making any long term plans about where–and how–we were going to live. There'd been the couple of months where we were in Boston trying to get healthy in body and mind–cut short by the whole Claire affair, but which would have been over by now even if we'd stayed.

It had been a good couple of months for us in Boston, even if there had been some angst. You know: my head feeling done in by the explosion of Nirvana, Ziggy feeling like grunge signaled the death of glam, us not listening to each other... That all seemed like small potatoes compared to the big stuff that had happened. The so-called big picture. Like us learning to trust each other, and losing our moms, and... holy shit, ending the lawsuits and resurrecting our band...?

Remember when I said I wanted to shoot the moon? I woke up the morning after Ziggy's confession about what he did to Digger, exhausted, wrung out, but I felt... good.

I should have felt like there were gaping holes in my chest, but I patted myself like I'd woken up from a dream expecting to find bullet wounds and instead, everything was whole.

I lay there in the dark, only a crack of daylight making it around the far edge of the blackout curtain, thinking about shooting the moon and realizing we'd done it. Ziggy had done it.

All the pieces that had been floating around the board, all of the moves made by all the people in our lives–Barrett, Patty, Carynne, Jordan (god rest his soul), our lawyers, even Janessa and Jonathan–all lined up like the tumblers and pins in a lock. And Ziggy had the key in his back pocket.

The door was open now and it was up to us to step through it.

Funny thing about that door. When I was young and unsigned and desperate to make it, getting a foot in the door was the most important thing. You hammer on that door, try to beat it down, but all you can see is that door is there to keep you out. Once it cracks open, of course you rush through it, eager to leap right into the mosh pit at the party you've been trying to get into all your life.

Now I knew that the door was also there to keep you in. The big lesson I'd learned thanks to the water tank: you can't just do it for the sake of doing it. Well, maybe some people could, but I couldn't. If I loved myself, I had to love what I was doing, and if I didn't love myself, I was going to end up dead. I'd also learned that to love someone else, I had to love myself first, or my heart wasn't strong enough to take it.

I'd seen my mother through to the end and it hadn't destroyed me. In fact, maybe my heart was stronger than ever? Battered, bruised, exhausted, but... beating steady. Conquering the pain in my fingers would be trivial by comparison. Returning to reasonable playing form seemed nearer, more attainable, than it had even a week before.

Ziggy cracked open an eye from the pillow next to mine, saw me looking at my hand, and without saying a word pulled that hand by the wrist under the covers and didn't let go until he'd left a sticky mess in my palm. (And then he went back to sleep.)

One more sendoff to tell you about. Remo caught me and Ziggy at the breakfast buffet at the hotel before he left to catch his plane. I brushed crumbs off my jeans as I stood up to give him a hug.

"I'm off to LA," he said. "Mel and Ford are there now."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah. I told Landon he could come and visit my little boy someday soon. Since I became 'Uncle Remo,' Lanny's decided that means Ford's his cousin."

"If you are telling me you're going to need my help wrangling my sister–"

"I'm not saying anything of the kind. Just telling you that, you know, some Christmasses down the road there might be a lot less sex and drugs and drinking and a lot more... whatever normal families do."

That made me laugh. Like this past Christmas hadn't been "normal?" I mean, other than Claire dying. Neither of us had any idea what "normal families" did. And it was also funny to think about how Remo's various attempts at getting "family" together for holidays had been the scenes of both his own surprise engagement (and wedding) and Digger's ejection from his house. And I thought about just how much red wine Claire could drink. So maybe–and by maybe I mean certainly–the excessive drinking wasn't exclusive of the "family" holiday.

"Where to next for you?" he asked, totally reasonably.

"Janine's," I said. Ziggy and I had talked about where to be next but we hadn't actually decided our next long term move. The one thing I'd insisted was that we not go right back to New York and try to start recording an album, like, next week or something. The good thing was, we wouldn't have to. Now that Digger had folded his hand, it'd take some time for the lawsuits to tie up, and we'd could wait to start work on a new Moondog Three album after that. Patty had told Zig at the funeral that she'd had an engineer already do a remix of "Into the Night" using DATs Jordan had left behind. Apparently the tapes included me playing four different solos for it. I wondered which one they picked, but I wasn't in a hurry to hear. The single was ready to drop as soon as the publicity campaign peaked. My job in that process was just stay out of trouble and stay out of the public eye, which suited me just fine, actually. "We might take over Bart's beachhouse at the Cape for the whole rest of the summer."

Remo chuckled. "It's funny. Usually when we say goodbye it's all about where and when we'll be hitting the road next. But we're both going home."

"Yeah." Even my anxiety about Japan was gone: Ziggy's solo tour plans had evaporated once the prospect of a full Moondog Three tour had been floated. And that I'd gladly do, once I was back in shape. I flexed my hands. Getting there.

"You still want to come out and do a little acoustic album together?" Remo wanted to know.

Yes, yes I did. But not right that minute. "Soon as I put my heart back together," I promised.

He looked past me to where Ziggy was nibbling on a croissant and pretending to read the newspaper. "I have a feeling that'll happen sooner than later. Give me a hand with my bags?"

"Sure." I picked up his hardshell guitar case and a small travel satchel. He took his suitcase and garment bag and led the way to his rental car.

"You know," I said, as we went out the sliding glass doors, into the summer heat, "it wasn't that long ago you were warning me he was going to rip me apart, not put me together."

Remo gave me one of those exaggerated skeptical looks. "It wasn't that long ago you were warning me the same thing about him."

"Yeah, it was." I felt like I took the first proper deep breath I'd taken in a year, maybe longer. "That was a million years ago."

Remo had a little smile on his face. "I was really worried about you when I didn't see him at the church."

"So was I." If we hadn't been through all that we'd been through, past-Ziggy might have skipped out just to even the score for me not going to Jordan's memorial with him. But that wasn't how things were with us now. Even thinking about it, that possibility felt small and petty and distant. Speaking of small, petty, and distant, Digger had reportedly left town before the memorial service was even over. We hadn't filled Remo in yet on where Ziggy had been. I kept it simple. "He went to deal with Digger and keep him away."

"Oh, really?" He popped the trunk and put the suitcase in. "I thought I'd be the designated Digger-wrangler."

I handed him the guitar. "Ziggy had unfinished business with him."

Remo strapped the case into the back seat so it wouldn't rattle around and then looked at me over the roof of the car. "Should I ask how that went?"

I decided less was more. "It's finished."

Remo nodded. "Good." He came around to give me one more hug, and then looked me up and down. I looked him up and down right back. He was pretty much the same old Remo, except now he had a wedding ring on.

So did I, though. I had some inkling of what he was seeing when he looked at me. I wasn't any taller than I'd been when he ran into me that night in Providence in 1986, but I wasn't a scrawny, closeted, flat-broke teenager anymore. Now my hair was halfway down my back, I'd put on muscle, and the tattoo of the rocket that Ziggy had designed stood out on my skin. To me it looked like the rocket was pointing right into the future, like a dolphin that just leapt out of the water, weightless for a moment before it dives back down.

I'd dive back into work and the industry and rehearsals and tour plans and composing and publicity schemes soon enough. Right then I let myself just say so long to my oldest friend, and then I went back inside to share a croissant with my soulmate.

And as I walked across the parking lot, I got an idea for a song. 

********************************************

Liner Note

Thus ends book 13 of Daron's Guitar Chronicles!

Please read on in the next post for more exciting details