It never ceased to amaze me, the way she seemed to perceive what I was feeling when I was feeling it. I’ve always been skilled at hiding my emotions, but October runs on intuition and empathy like cars run on gasoline. And when she addressed me in that voice of hers, full of love and compassion and other sanguine motivations few people possess with that kind of authenticity, I wavered between wanting to throw her off the Golden Gate Bridge and fuck her brains out. Not that I had the balls to do either.
Anyway, if you want to know what my big dream was, I can sum it up in one word: guitar.
I started playing when I was twelve, and by the time I was sixteen I was as good as a kid could be. And this wasn’t according to me; it was according to just about everyone who saw me perform, including the guy who played guitar for Journey, who had been a child prodigy himself back in the 1970s and lived in my hometown of Mill Valley, a small, woody enclave north of San Francisco, across the Golden Gate Bridge, at the base of Mount Tamalpais, Marin County’s highest peak. The Journey guy saw me and Cal perform at an open mic night in town; afterward he came over, shook my hand, and told me I was a genius.
Cal was my best friend all through high school, and to this day the best friend I’ve ever had. The summer we met he could already sing, play guitar and drums, and within days of our meeting, he informed me that as soon as we graduated we were going to move to Brooklyn, start a band, and become legends. We even cut the tips of our thumbs and sealed the deal with our blood so there could be no turning back. We were going to call the band Blood Brothers in honor of our commitment.
“Brooklyn or bust,” Cal used to say.
And this was before every budding musician in the country was moving to Brooklyn to start a band. This was back in the mid-’90s, when people were still heading to Seattle for their musical fortunes and fame. But that pretty much sums Cal up in a nutshell. He was always ahead of the curve. He didn’t follow trends, he set them.
Cal used to say, “Dreams aren’t just ideas, Harp. They’re maps.”
If you want to know the truth, sometimes it feels stupid trying to put into words how important music was to me back then. But when I was a kid, music was all I had. It was my voice, my only real mode of communication. And until Cal Callahan came into my life, it was my only friend.
And what did I give music in return?
Nothing.
I betrayed it.
Like I betrayed Cal.
Like I betrayed October.
Here’s the thing: I knew that reading the e-mail from the Thomas Fraser Gallery announcing October’s upcoming Living Exhibit would get me to thinking. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say it got me to feeling.
Four times out of five, I deleted e-mails that had anything to do with October or the gallery, but for some reason I didn’t delete this one.
Consequently, I knew about Sorrow.
I knew I could see her. I could talk to her. I could explain why I left that night, why I disappeared without saying goodbye, and she wouldn’t be able to talk back, order me to leave, call me a coward, or tell me how badly I hurt her.
Or I could do what I’d spent my life doing: nothing.
I was at a crossroads. And while finding myself at a crossroads was not new to me, I’d gone the wrong way at almost every turn.
The road less traveled? That had never been the road on which I’d walked. And if it’s true that fortune favors the brave, my life, up until that point, was a testament to the fact that the opposite is true as well.
Misfortune favors the spineless.
You know what October said to me once when I was feeling down on myself? We’d just hiked to Stinson Beach and were sitting on a piece of driftwood, eating vanilla soft-serve cones, and out of nowhere the feeling hit me—it’s a feeling that overcomes me sometimes, a voice that tells me I’m not good enough, that I’ll never be good enough—and as October’s fingers played connect-the-dots with the freckles on my forearm, her perspicacity kicked in and she said, “You know, it’s never too late to be the person you really are, Joe.”
I didn’t say anything, but what I thought was: Yeah, well, who the fuck is that?
As I zipped up my backpack and stumbled toward the library’s exit, I thanked Patty for her patience. She said, “You’re not going to drive, are you?”
I shook my head and promised her that I intended to sit in my truck and think for a while.
“I really need to think,” I assured her.
But it was more specific than that. What I needed to do was decide whether I was going to go back to California.
October was the only reason I would ever go back.
She was the reason I left, and she was the only reason I would ever return.
TWO.
Almost three years and twelve hundred miles between us, and there was still a pit in my stomach every time I thought about her. And I thought about her a lot. Though rarely in the present tense. What I mean is, I didn’t often find myself wondering where October was or what she was doing. In my mind she existed almost exclusively in the past, in the memories I had of her, in the short time we had spent together.
For a while after I left, I chose to believe we were doomed from the start. That even if I’d stayed, everything would have eventually busted apart. I chose to believe I was doing us both a favor by taking off. I don’t believe that anymore. Not deep down, anyway. The stomach pit wouldn’t be there if I did.
Nevertheless, from day one there were obstacles, the most obvious one being that October Danko is a world-renowned artist. Granted, she’s only renowned to people in the world that know art. It’s not like she’s a household name or a celebrity. Still, she was accomplished enough when we met that, in comparison, I felt lacking.
That being said, I had never heard of her until I called about the job. The post I’d seen was elusive anyway:
Artist/Studio Assistant WANTED for film/art project(s)—beautiful redwood retreat setting (Mill Valley, CA)—salaried position w/potential to live on property—construction experience a must—call for details.
The location and the live/work situation caught my eye. I was still living in Berkeley and had been yearning to move back to Mill Valley, though I hadn’t pursued that desire in earnest for a couple of reasons. First, I didn’t want to deal with the emotional ramifications of living anywhere near my father. However, he had recently sold his company and retired to Vail, so I could check that excuse off my list.
Bob Harper’s departure aside, I couldn’t afford to live in Mill Valley on my own and probably would have taken the job at October’s even if it had required me to shovel shit for eight hours a day, if for no other reason than it might allow me to live among the redwoods again.