Into the Woods

2 Into the Woods

2

INTO THE WOODS

Teddy

It was possible that the reality of the North Woods was going to be different from my idea of the North Woods.

To begin with, it was ninety-two degrees when I got out of the van at the Wild Arts retreat that was to be my home for the summer. I knew because the driver, a gray-haired woman who looked like Paul Newman’s fraternal twin sister, announced as much as we drove through a giant wooden archway with a sign that read, “Nature Is the Art of God”: “Ninety-two at eight forty-five at night—uff da.”

She sounded like she was straight off the set of Fargo . But she was right about the heat. It was hotter than the subway platform at 77th Street during a July heat wave. It was hotter than a stage in the literal desert at Coachella. It was hotter than the rage boiling in my jet-black soul.

I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately.

Not exactly, but it was a nice idea. In my case it was more that I had come to the woods because I wanted to finish my fucking album.

No, I had come to the woods because I wanted to start my fucking album.

There was also the part where I had nowhere else to go.

Well, that wasn’t true. My decade-plus in the band I’d just burned to the ground had made me plenty of money. I could hole up wherever I wanted to work on the revenge album. But like Thoreau, I was in search of the peace and solitude I hoped nature would provide. When the offer landed in my inbox last week, it had occurred to me that I hadn’t been in actual nature for years. I hadn’t even really been outside that much, except onstage at outdoor shows, on hotel balconies, or getting into and out of cars, for a year.

So it was likely that I was romanticizing the whole experience. I’d forgotten, or maybe I’d never known, that when you were in the woods, you were not alone. You were, it turned out, accompanied by approximately a million tiny mosquitoes and, in this case, one life-size mosquito wearing a T-shirt that read “I Minnesota.”

I had a feeling that despite the cheery shirt, the Mosquito was almost as grumpy as I was.

Except that wasn’t true. She’d been sweet as all get-out to our driver, chatting with her the whole drive from the airport to camp. And when she hopped out of the van, she closed her eyes, sighed, took a deep breath in—she didn’t seem to notice or care that the air was as thick as in any mosh pit—and said, “I’m so happy to be here.”

It seemed to just be me the Mosquito didn’t like. Which… fair enough. I was no picnic at the best of times, and this was not the best of times.

She gathered her hair into a ponytail and fanned the back of her neck. I sympathized. I had long hair, too, and it was a sweaty mess in this heat. Maybe instead of the Mosquito, I should call her Cotton Candy, because that was what color her hair was. Come to think of it, her eyes, too. Her pale-blond hair had pastel-pink tips, and her big eyes were light blue. She was an entire carnival, and that was just from the neck up.

“Hello and welcome! My late additions to Wild Arts! I’m so glad you’re here!” A tall older woman with long white braids strode toward us. I slapped a mosquito as it sank a tiny, poison-tipped ice pick into my neck.

“This is the worst time of night for insects, just as darkness falls.” The woman reached into a fold of the… garment she was wearing and produced a bottle of bug repellant and handed it to me. “You must be Teddy. We’re delighted to have you with us. I’m Marion Kuhn.”

I was probably supposed to know who she was, but honestly, when I’d skimmed the proposal from Wild Arts a week ago, all I’d retained was the fact that it came with a cabin on a lake for the summer in exchange for some “artist in residence” duties I fully intended to phone in. It had been the right opportunity at the right time—a life raft when I was drowning—and I’d signed on without even talking to my manager.

If he was even my manager anymore. I hadn’t spoken to Brady since the last week of the tour. If Concrete Temple was no more, if it had splintered into individual shards, did those individual shards still have a management contract?

Forget management contracts. What I needed was a record contract. Because I intended to write a shitload of songs here in Mosquitoland.

“And you’re Gretchen Miller!” Marion exclaimed, turning to the cotton candy mosquito. Oh, wait, I had the perfect name for her: the Sugarplum Fairy. It encompassed her sickly sweetness and her annoying buzzing. If cotton candy and a mosquito had a baby, it would be the Sugarplum Fairy, would it not?

“Thank you for stepping in,” Marion enthused. “You’re really saving my bacon.”

“Thanks for having me,” Gretchen said. “It was good timing. I’m in need of a break from real life.”

Hear, hear, Sugarplum.

“I just hope I can live up to the…” Gretchen side-eyed me. “Talent pool you have in place here.”

“I assume you two have met?” Marion said.

“Sort of,” Gretchen said. “I introduced myself at the airport.”

I had not responded in kind. That was what I meant about not being a picnic right now. In my defense, I’d thought she was a fan when she approached me at a Starbucks in the Minneapolis airport. I’d been wearing dark glasses and a hat with my hair pushed up into it, so I’d been extra undercover. Which had led me to believe she was a super fan. The worst kind to encounter in the wild. In general, but particularly when one’s nuking of one’s career had recently been on display for all to see in the pages of Us Weekly . So when she’d flown at me all abuzz—that was where she’d earned her initial Mosquito nickname—I’d shut that shit right down, answering her questions in one-word grunts.

It was only when we were both being greeted by Paul Newman in baggage claim that I realized my error. It was almost funny. Here I’d thought I was being fangirled, and really she’d just wanted to talk to me because we were both going to the same place to bequeath our artistic sensibilities to the masses or some shit.

I told myself to stop being such a dick. Gretchen was my colleague here.

I slapped my forearm, hitting an especially engorged mosquito so hard it left a bloody spot.

Gretchen Miller. I had eclectic taste, and I knew a lot of people across a lot of genres, but I was coming up blank on that name. Of course, this place probably drew from more of a regional talent pool.

Maybe she worked behind the scenes. If this camp was meant to teach people the music business, they’d be smart to staff it with producers and engineers and such. That kind of career was a more realistic goal for most people than, you know, that of an actual rock star.

Said the actual rock star.

But was I anymore? Could you be a rock star without a band? Could you be a rock star if you were just one self-contained shard?

Did I even want to be a rock star anymore?

So many existential questions. At least I knew the answer to that last one. No, I did not want to be a rock star. I never had. It just sort of happened. And really, I wasn’t a star. That had been Scott Collier, our handsome, charismatic front man and rhythm guitarist. Runner-up on the star front had probably been our lead guitarist, Jet. I mean, when your name is Jet Lexington—Jet Lex—and you have a penchant for standing on the very edge of the stage doing your over-the-top shredding, you kind of have to be a star, right?

I’d been happy to stand in the back with my reputation as a cranky-ass and play my bass and sing backup along with Luis Costa, our drummer. I considered myself a songwriter first. The only thing I cared about was that Scott and I shared writing credit equally, à la Lennon and McCartney. I cared that we made each other better. I cared about the music.

I’d thought he did, too.

“And of course I know who you are,” Gretchen Miller said, drawing me from my thoughts and reminding me that we still had an introduction in progress. “Tennyson Knight.”

Her use of my formal first name startled me. No one called me that except my mother, the woman who had cursed me with it in the first place.

“It’s Teddy,” I said.

“OK.” She shrugged.

It was a dismissive shrug.

It wasn’t as if I cared if people were starstruck by me. People generally weren’t—that was the not-a-star thing—and usually I liked it that way. I was the Mike Mills to Scott’s Michael Stipe. The Michael Anthony to his David Lee Roth. Not even. I was the Duff McKagan to Scott’s Axl Rose and Jet’s Slash. Rock people knew me, but in the real world I could generally walk around unbothered. It was a sweet spot I appreciated. The hat and dark glasses at the airport had just been extra insurance given the upheaval—and resultant tabloid attention—of the past week.

But somehow, irrationally, this shrug, this disregard , from a fellow musician got my back up.

Even though I had no leg to stand on here, given what a jerk I’d been to her at the airport.

Man, I was all over the place with this woman.

“I hadn’t heard much Concrete Temple before this summer,” she was saying as another especially vicious mosquito landed on my cheek. “It’s very…” Her nose scrunched as she searched for the word she wanted. “Emphatic.”

Well, fuck you very much, Gretchen Miller.

Gretchen turned to Marion and opened a planner, which I’d noticed she’d been consulting on the drive from the airport. Maybe Gretchen Miller was an A there was a rhythmic background humming of some sort. Crickets? Cicadas? I didn’t know nature stuff, but it was a pleasing sound.

I headed for the bed, but as I walked, I moved the phone light around the rest of the cabin. There was an old but comfortable-looking love seat near a small bookshelf and… holy shit .

A keyboard.

I detoured over to it like a moth drawn to the light that is ultimately going to be its demise. The keyboard and a lamp next to it were plugged into the wall. So hey, no shower, but at least there was electricity—come to think of it, why the hell had I been using my flashlight in here when we’d seen a light on in one of the other cabins? Idiot.

I switched on the light to reveal a full-size Yamaha. This must be what Lena meant when she’d said five and six were “music cabins.” Gretchen must have a keyboard, too.

What was Gretchen going to do with a keyboard? She was—

I interrupted this train of thought—what the hell did I care if Gretchen had an extraneous keyboard?—and stepped closer.

Concrete Temple had been all guitars—lots and lots of guitars, which was probably what Gretchen meant when she’d called our sound “emphatic.” We were the grandchildren of Phil Spector. I had a baby grand piano in my apartment in New York, but I hadn’t been home much over the past year. And honestly, I never tried to write anything on it. It was for show, for grandstanding at parties, where I was known for being able to play pretty much anything anyone requested.

I hadn’t written on a piano in any meaningful way since my teen years. We’d had a shitty, perpetually out-of-tune upright in Greenpoint. Mom had inherited it from a guy in the building who’d overdosed. I had found a needle and a spoon in the bench seat.

A memory rose, seemingly from nowhere, a snake rising to the sounds of its charmer: Mom and Auden and I, singing in the dark while I played that piano, candles all around us. “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” “For What It’s Worth.” “Both Sides, Now.” Mom had been obsessed with the folk songs of her parents’ era. I’d absorbed it all, replicating what I heard on the scratchy records she was always playing. There had never been money for formal lessons—I only learned to read music as an adult—but I taught myself to play both piano and guitar from that stack of Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, and Joni Mitchell records. My grandparents’ records, I supposed, though I’d never met them. Peter, Paul and Mary had been a favorite of Mom’s because our little family of three could do the trio’s harmonies. “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” “500 Miles.”

“Lemon Tree.” We’d even had a potted lemon tree in the apartment in homage to Mom’s folk heroes.

That fucking lemon tree. I’d have thought it was long forgotten, but nope. Apparently it had been lying dormant under the soil that was my psyche all these years, sour as ever.

The night I was remembering had been dark. The electricity had been cut by the landlord, which in retrospect was not an unreasonable thing for a landlord to do when faced with a building full of hippies and artists who didn’t much care for paying rent. We had often gone without things most people would consider necessities—power, running water. Food.

But we’d sit in the dark and sing by the candlelight. We’d had no power, but we’d had the piano.

I wasn’t romanticizing those days. I wouldn’t go back for anything. Lemons could grow on trees in pots, even in semiconverted warehouses in Brooklyn, but a kid couldn’t live on lemons.

A kid couldn’t live on love, either, though Mom had sure preached that gospel. It had taken Auden and me years to deprogram ourselves. To understand that Mom’s version of love had been more about rallies and songs and whatever her agenda du jour had been than about actually caring for her kids.

“‘Don’t put your faith in love, my boy,’ my father said to me. ‘I fear you’ll find that love is like the lovely lemon tree.’”

It was funny how, like the memory of the tree, the song was still there, hiding out in the folds of my brain. I hadn’t thought of it or heard it for literal decades, but it had risen to the surface of my mind like the rubber balls Auden and I used to play with in the McCarren Park pool. We’d sit on them, hold them under water, and laugh when we lost our balance and they shot to the surface.

We’d go to the pool when the water was turned off at home. We’d swim, shower and shampoo in the locker rooms, and emerge clean and cool into the early evening. That had been a good feeling. A respite.

I looked over my shoulder, out the window into the blackness. I didn’t have a shower, but I had a whole damn lake outside my front door.

Turning back to the keyboard, I hit the power button, my throat tightening as a green light came on. The first note of “Lemon Tree” was a G. My finger hovered over the key for a few seconds as I swallowed a hard lump of emotion. The anger from before, from the past week—from the past year —had alchemized into something heavier and slower. Something more like sadness. It was thick and metallic in my throat.

I pressed the key. It was weighted, so it was both soft and heavy under the pressure of my finger, both familiar and strange to my guitar-calloused hands. I let the note ring out into the night and waited until the reverberations had fully faded before walking out the door and into the lake.