By this point Kate and her husband wisely fled. Eddie bought me two beers. I honestly don’t know why I stayed. Eventually, during his bragging about myriad shady economic dealings and conquests, I extricated myself, claiming I had to pack up gear that had already been packed. I shrugged into my blue leather jacket, and Eddie made a crack about my being late for a motocross rally in the Liberty Tree Mall parking lot. I bumped into his arm, oil-spilling his drink onto his blazer and tie. He claimed I did it on purpose. I didn’t disagree. I thanked him for the beers and tossed bar napkins at him. I left him grumbling and his Neolithic associates breathing through their mouths and unsure when the violence might finally start. I told Meg (the bar owner) I was leaving my stuff in the back room and would get it tomorrow, which was not unusual. Too buzzed to drive, too pissed to care to ask anyone for a ride, I walked the two miles home.

I wonder if that applies to why you stayed at your old house.

Before leaving, though, in a low moment, I keyed deep scratches into the driver’s-side door of Eddie’s car. It was a low moment because I guessed the BMW SUV was his. Oops.

* * *

Through sheer determination and persistence, the Pallbearers Club had semi-regular gigs at Mercy Tavern (I’m not making the name up, I swear) in neighboring Salem and the Copper Dog in Beverly. What set me apart from your typical nostalgia act of auto-tuned, drum-machine-accompanied, acoustic renderings of flower-power standards and soft rock “classics” (not that I’m judging) or shitty contemporary pop country (I am judging), was that I played electric and awash in distortion. The band was me, my electric guitar, and a mic. Well, I brought a PA, a mixer, an amp, a distortion pedal, and an iPad on a music stand with the lyrics and guitar tabs of about eighty songs I knew how to play, but no prerecorded loops, drums, voice modulation, or other bullshit like that. I’m not saying I wasn’t a nostalgia act, just a different kind. (Nostalgia is like the “Monkey’s Paw” story; we want the long-gone thing from our previous lives back until we do and see what it has become, what it always had been.) I played for the subset of Generation Xers who yearned for the pre-fab, contrived edginess of ’90s alternative rock while they drank wine and microbrewed IPAs. To further facilitate the feel, I performed a practiced and winking disdain-for-the-audience schtick between songs. Yeah, we Gen-Xers hated ourselves almost as much as we loved ourselves.