Every other weekend I stayed with Bob on his houseboat in Sausalito. Bob didn’t like commotion, so I wasn’t allowed to bring my guitar. Never mind that he lived at the end of the dock where there were no trees and nothing to do except look at the water. Most of the time Bob did let me bring Cal, though, and for a while I thought this was a symbol that Bob cared about my happiness and was being a considerate father. Then Cal and I overheard Bob tell Debbie, the woman Bob was dating at the time, that he liked it when Cal tagged along because it meant he didn’t have to babysit me.

“It’s not called babysitting if you’re the dad,” Cal huffed to me, as if he were an expert on the subject. “It’s called parenting.”

Bob’s take on music was even more appalling to Cal. As far as Bob was concerned, music was part of the background noise of the world, not an art form that deserved to play a major role in a person’s life.

“Never trust a man who isn’t moved by song,” Cal reasoned. “It means he’s dead inside.”

One particular weekend, Cal talked Bob into taking us to the big Tower Records in the city on Friday night because Bob was having a party and we didn’t want to have to sit around listening to his guests get drunk and babble about how much they’d spent on their houses. Bob had agreed, but he punctuated his consent by saying, “There’s something wrong with two teenage boys who have nothing better to do on a Friday night than go to a record store.”

“We don’t think there’s anything better to do,” Cal replied on both our behalves, as he was wont to do.

“What are you, his lawyer?” Bob barked. “You know what I was doing on Friday nights at your age? Chasing girls.”

“Harp and I don’t have to chase girls. Girls chase us.”

That was only marginally true. Girls chased Cal, he picked his favorites, and then he made sure whoever he was dating had a cute friend for me.

Back then, Cal wasn’t what most people would call handsome. His face was too birdlike, all of his features too small to be considered traditionally attractive, and he was built like an I beam. But his confidence and charisma overshadowed all that. He was a player. And more often than not, he had the coolest girls in the room swooning.

On more than one occasion, Bob made it a point to tell me I was empirically better looking than Cal, as if this were something I should value or exploit. But I was one of the smallest kids in class, and I was shy and self-conscious around normal people, so you can imagine what I was like when I was in the vicinity of a girl I liked.

As the car pulled in to the Tower Records parking lot that night, Bob said, “You two better start putting as much energy into getting into college as you put into getting albums.”