Chapter 12
Through her kindness, I discovered Monday evening that I wasn’t yet cut off financially from my mother’s account.
Dreux was nice enough to take me to the nearest hardware store after we were done helping at both the barbershop and hair salon.
It was at the hardware store that I bought a few gallons of pure black paint.
Dreux said nothing as I made my purchase; he simply offered to carry the jugs for me to the car, and when I said no, he did it anyway.
My mind was still buzzing about our talk at Marty’s. I saw Dreux in a new light. He was still very much a golden boy to me, even if he’d momentarily slipped and lost his way.
What I reflected on most was my unresolved issues with Scott.
When I got in that night, I moved all my furniture to the center of my room and placed down the protective lining along the walls before starting to paint.
I put on some music and got lost as I painted my walls black.
Somewhere in the background I vaguely recalled Scott stopping by and noticing me at work.
He merely told me dinner was down in the kitchen when I was ready before leaving me be.
There was nothing else said, even though there was a lot to be said.
I painted my room black to make it match what I felt inside.
When my body was aching and tired, I showered and slept in our guest room, skipping dinner altogether.
I waited another day or so before confronting Scott, who was off from work Wednesday afternoon. He was in his work room, tinkering around with something, and when I poked my head inside, I found that it was a guitar he was working on.
Scott’s work room was more his music room. He had an array of bass guitars, a piano, and tons of photos of famous musicians. Jimi Hendrix, Freddie Mercury, Prince, Keith Richards, Jimmy Page, and of course Pink Floyd.
Scott was lost in his own mind as he seemed to be fixing a guitar string.
For a while, I watched him, at total peace with the universe.
Maybe we were more alike than I even knew.
When I was feeling lost, angry, or hurt, I turned to music and I was almost certain the look on Scott’s face was the same one I often wore.
In another moment, Scott lifted his head and spotted me. His mouth drew into a flatline. I could see on his face that our civil war was draining him as well.
In the beginning, I wouldn’t have given a shit about his anguish, but now, I was tired too.
I walked around the room, all the while noting that Scott’s eyes lingered on me. At one of his vinyl bookcases, my eyes fell upon a small tin box on top.
“Saylor,” Scott began to speak up from behind me.
I ignored his remark as I took it upon myself to curiously open the tin box.
To my surprise, inside was a good supply of what smelled like some killer weed.
No way.
I faced my father. “You gotta be shittin’ me.”
His cheeks tinted a little pink as he awkwardly scratched at the nape of his neck.
He was such a hypocrite.
Of course, I should’ve known better. He was a musician, and most artists had a vice.
As ticked off as I was, I let it go, feeling vulnerable in my true mission.
“I come in peace,” I clarified.
Scott arched a brow. “What does that mean?”
I shrugged, finding my way over to the piano and running my finger along the keys. “I want to talk. I have questions.”
Scott released a sigh, sitting up and setting his guitar aside. “I assume you’ve had some for a while.”
I bobbed my head, refusing to look at him. It was hard to articulate the jumbled mess that was my mind. All that I could think to ask was, “Why?”
Scott’s silence drew my attention to him. He had his head down, collecting his thoughts, thinking over each of his words carefully. I admired this, as he wasn’t one to just speak without meaning.
“You’re going to want the beginning,” he told me. “Because in a nutshell: I fucked up. I was just a kid, and I let someone tell me I wasn’t good enough, and I bailed on a situation that’s haunted me for a long time.”
I sat at the piano, fully facing him. “Tell me.”
“I left home at twenty, destined to make it, to be…” He gestured toward his wall of photos. “…among the greats, but as I told you, that didn’t work out too well.”
“Before LA, what was home like?” I wanted to know. On my mother’s side, my mom wasn’t too close with her parents. We used to see them on special occasions where my grandfather would turn his nose up at me.
I always thought he saw me as some sort of bastard.
Even at a young age you know what it’s like to be looked at differently.
My grandmother had been nice, loving even, but my grandfather had always come off detached and cold.
My mother swore for a time it was all in my head and that they both loved me.
She just wanted to protect me. It wasn’t long before we stopped seeing them altogether.
Scott ran a hand through his hair and leaned over a bit to get more comfortable.
“Home was pretty ordinary. I grew up here, and at times it was great, and at others, it was dragging me down. I couldn’t sit still here.
My leg was always bouncing to go. Pop, he was always against my dream to make it big out there, but my mom, she was supportive as best as she could be.
You see, my sister, Irene, she was the good one, straight As in school, captain of the debate team—the whole works.
My mom tried her best to understand me, while Pop often threatened to ship me off to military school. ”
It was hard to believe at a time my father had been…like me. “You were trouble.”
Scott didn’t disagree. “I was a punk. All I cared about was music and getting high with my friends. I think my mom thought me going to LA would change me, so to speak, since it was the ‘real world.’ ” His gaze drew to the floor. “I guess in a way it did.”
“And then you left,” I said, urging him to keep going.
“Yeah, I worked my ass off during my senior year to start saving money, and then finally at twenty, I bought a bus ticket, packed a bag, my guitar, and I took off for LA.”
“You worked as a busboy?” I tried to recall.
Scott nodded. “I worked at the country club during the day and played in my band some nights. I met your mother at the club. She was a regular with your grandparents, the noble Barringtons. Madeline, she was only seventeen at the time, had just graduated high school, but very bright and years beyond her peers.”
One thing about my mother, she wasn’t judgmental. She always tried to get me instead of simply throwing me in therapy and drugging me up to make me fall in line like some parents did at my old school.
“Yeah, Mom’s different.” At least, she was before she got rid of me.
“Unlike everyone else, she treated me like a person and actually talked to me that summer. I guess you can say I fell for her fast and hard.” Scott seemed helpless as he furnished a smile.
“Some guys on staff told me to leave her alone, that it wasn’t worth the risk of my job, but I couldn’t back down.
I invited her out one night when my band was having a show, and it shocked the hell out of me when she actually came.
Maddie was from an aristocratic world, and yet she was in this really grimy bar just to see me.
Sorta like a white rose in a field of weeds. ”
His words resonated with me. Back home, to some, Scott too had been a dandelion, and not even just in LA; here in Meadow Grove, too.
In that moment, I didn’t feel so different from him. For most of my life I felt defected or disconnected from my peers. Truth was I carried pieces of Scott with me as well. He’d been an outsider too.
“So you two hit it off?” I was surprised to find out their age difference and that my own mother had snuck into a club to see my father play a show.
“Oh yeah, it was instant. She stayed until our set was done and we grabbed a table and talked all night. One thing about her, she kept me on my toes, and I’d never felt that before. Her mind, her humor, her beauty—I was in love for the first time in my life.”
I was conceived in love. The thought was sobering.
It wasn’t until Scott admitted it that I realized that I needed to know this detail.
“What went wrong?” I prompted him to tell me.
Gone was all the stars in Scott’s eyes as guilt and shame took over.
“Your grandfather caught wind of what was going on. He tried to get me fired from the club for it. He said I was harassing Maddie, but she stood up to him about that. Maybe in some ways, it was doomed from the start. We were from two different worlds, and sometimes love isn’t enough, Saylor.
“When Maddie found out she was pregnant, she was happy and scared. Your grandparents wanted her to go to school in the fall and do something impressive with her life, and getting knocked up by some busboy in a band wasn’t exactly groundbreaking.”
“But it happened.”
“Yes, it did. We laid in bed and planned a life together. Call me crazy, but I wanted to marry her, not because you were on the way, but because I loved her and I just knew she was the one,” Scott insisted.
“Why didn’t you?”
Scott held a hand up, as if to settle me down before he continued.
“Mr. Barrington never liked me for your mom. When he found out about the pregnancy, he wasn’t excited at all.
He ‘grounded’ her, kept her from leaving the house and seeing me.
Maddie called me crying about it, and I got in a cab and stormed over and met him at the door. ”
I watched his face go from shame to anger as he spoke of my grandfather.