This Song Will Save Your Life

“Screw you, too.

No, I don’t want you back.

With your sneers and your jeers

And your worthless attacks.”

The barista came over to us again. “Hey,” he said, “could you guys turn that off? This is a public place, and it’s a

“Sorry,” we said in unison.

“Did you like it, though?” Harry asked me after the barista walked away.

“I can’t wait to listen to the whole thing.”

Harry flushed. “You’re, like, obligated to say that, though.”

“I still mean it,” I said. “You guys are really good.”

“Way too good for this place,” Vicky agreed, slamming shut her book. “Let’s get out of here and go a

It was good to have Vicky.

And then, of course, there was Char.

Char and I fell into a pattern, too. Every Thursday night, I would walk over to Start as soon as my family was asleep. Char would say hi to me like we were just friends, nothing more, and I would plug my laptop into his mixer like we were just friends, nothing more. We never greeted each other with a hug or a kiss; nothing. I would start each Thursday night convinced that whatever Char and I had between us was over now, and I would be walking home at a relatively reasonable hour.

And by the end of each Thursday night, Char and I were making out in the DJ booth like our lives depended on it, my hands in his back pockets, his hands in my hair, our tongues exploring each other’s mouths, coming up for air only when it was time to transition into a new song.

It wasn’t because we got drunk as the night went on. I didn’t drink at all, and Char didn’t drink much because, as he pointed out, “This is my job. You can’t get wasted at your job.”

It wasn’t an effect of alcohol. It was more like we got drunk on the night.

Invariably, even if I was done with my half-hour set by one a.m., I would hang around until Start ended, at two. Then Char and I would load the equipment into his car, and he would drive us to his apartment, where we would fall into bed and continue what we had started in the bar, only with far, far fewer clothes. We would keep that up until one or both of us fell asleep.

At five thirty, my phone alarm would go off.

“Jesus Christ,” Char groaned into his pillow. “It’s the middle of the goddamn night.”

Then I would make Char drive me home immediately, before my mom woke up and noticed that I wasn’t there.

This was easier the first night, when I walked over to Char’s from my dad’s. My dad was late to bed and late to rise, especially on weekends. So when I jolted awake at eight a.m. on that first Saturday to the feeling of Char kissing my neck, it was easy to scramble out of bed, into Char’s car, and home before Dad had even gotten out of bed to collect the morning paper.

Getting back to my mom’s house before she woke up, however, presented a different sort of challenge. This was a woman who operated on about six hours of sleep every night. “There’s just too much to do in a day,” she often said, as if this were a bad thing, though you didn’t have to know her well to know that she loved doing too much in a day.

Thus, Char and I woke up at five thirty a.m.

“Remind me why I’m doing this?” Char asked on the second Friday morning that we did this, as we sat in his cold car, the streetlights still on overhead.

“Duh, because you love me,” I joked. But Char was practically asleep in the driver’s seat, and he didn’t laugh.

And that was the last I would hear from Char until the next Thursday night. No text messages. No Saturday night dates. Nothing. Just a friendly greeting when I showed up at Start six days later, followed by a thousand kisses.

I knew Char wasn’t my boyfriend. But was he anything to me? And was I anything to him? I wanted to ask him to explain this to me, but I couldn’t, because I suspected that I was supposed to understand already. I suspected that our relationship, if I could even call it that, was just one more thing covered in the Handbook for Being a Real Person, which somehow I had never received.

“How do you know so much music?” Char asked me late on the following Thursday night as we lay in his bed together, my head resting on his chest. At Start earlier, I had played a set of late sixties soul. Char hadn’t recognized any of it, and I could tell he didn’t like this, because he told me it was his turn again well before my half hour was up, while the crowd was still enthusiastically dancing. I wanted to keep playing, but I didn’t. After all, it was his night.

I had discovered that Char knew a lot of facts about music. He knew the names of drummers from famous bands, and then what other bands they had later gone out to start. He knew the names of dozens or possibly hundreds of music labels, and who had produced Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, and which members of the Beach Boys were brothers and which were cousins.

I didn’t know any of that stuff. Music wasn’t history class; I didn’t need to memorize a thousand dates and names. I just cared a lot about music.

You’d think this might make me cool, since music is supposedly cool, but it doesn’t work like that. It turns out that caring a lot about anything is, by definition, uncool, and it doesn’t matter if that thing is music or Star Wars or oil refineries.

“My dad introduced me to a lot of music when I was very little,” I told Char, then added, because we were in bed together and this seemed like an intimate thing to reveal, “He’s in a band.”

Char propped himself up on his elbow. “You have a cool dad. What band?”

“The Dukes.”

“I don’t know them,” Char said.

“Yes, you do.” I sang the chorus of the Dukes’ big hit: “Take my hand, baby, and run away with me. Take my hand, and I’ll be your man.”

“That’s your dad?” Even in the darkness, I could see how wide Char’s eyes had grown.

“Well, he’s the bassist,” I said.

“But didn’t the Dukes break up ages ago?”

“No way. The Dukes have been together for decades. They play cruises, casinos, seventies revues. You know. The big time. The four of them all grew up together in Philadelphia. They started the Dukes for a middle-school talent show. And then they just stayed together. Forever. My dad says that the band has been the most long-lasting relationship of his entire life.”

“Is that, like, his full-time job?” Char ran his hand through my hair, twisting it around his fingers.

“Being a Duke would not be much of a living. The drummer is a lawyer now, the guitarist and the singer started an accounting firm, and my dad works at a music store. They just do Duke shows occasionally. Like when Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons are unavailable.”

That last bit was intended to make Char laugh, but he didn’t. “I can’t believe you never told me this before,” he said, as if he and I were constantly having long, meaningful conversations about our personal lives and I had for some reason kept this particular piece of information a secret.

I shrugged. “I don’t know what your parents do.”

“Yeah, but they’re not in a famous band.”

He didn’t, I noticed, tell me what his parents did.

“My dad’s band isn’t famous,” I said. “They had one song that was a huge radio hit, and then two LPs of songs that no one has ever heard. Honestly, it’s kind of sad.”

“Sad?” Char echoed.

“Yeah, like, every couple months these middle-aged guys put on fringed leather jackets as if they’re thirty-five years younger and sing about ‘dancing to the radio,’ or whatever. Like the best part of their lives happened when they were our age. They play an afternoon show for a sparse crowd of equally middle-aged people who only know one of their songs, and they do it all so they can make a couple thousand bucks that they can use to fix the plumbing in their houses and send their kids to summer enrichment programs.”