“That’s you, isn’t it? Leading my daughter astray in the musical wilds?”
“What?” I said, again.
“I’d like to think my purposes are less nefarious,” Lacey said, past me, to him. “And my taste in music significantly more impressive.”
My father grinned. “If you can call it music.” And just like that, they were off, Lacey leaping to the defense of her god, my father throwing out phrases like new wave, post-punk pop avant-garde, the two of them batting names back and forth I’d never heard, Ian Curtis and Debbie Harry and Robert Smith.
“Joey Ramone couldn’t lick Kurt Cobain’s shoes.”
“You wouldn’t say that if you’d seen him live.”
Her eyes popped. “You saw the Ramones live?”
“What?” I said again, and fought the sudden urge to climb onto my father’s lap, wheeze whiskey breath in his face, force him to see me.
“Saw them?” He gave Lacey a patented Jimmy Dexter smile. “I opened for them.”
“You were in a band?” I said. No one was listening. No one was offering me a gallant hand, either, so I pulled myself upright, and tried not to puke.
“You opened for the Ramones?” That was Lacey’s Kurt voice; that was awe.
“Well . . . not technically.” Another smile, an aw shucks shrug. “We played in the parking lot before the Ravers, and they opened for the Ramones. It got us into the after-party, though. Did a shot with Johnny.”
“Lacey was in a band,” I said. Lacey had told me all about it, the Pussycats, like the cartoon, all girls, guitar straps slung over their shoulders, Lacey tonguing the mic, sweaty hair matted to her face, crowd-surfing on a wave of love. Never again, she’d told me, never here in Battle Creek, never anywhere. “The fact that we’ve even heard of grunge all the way out here in the middle of nowhere?” Lacey had said. “It’s like those stars, the ones that explode so far away that by the time you get the news, they’ve been dead for a million years. We’re too late. We missed it. Only the truly pathetic pretend to be artists by making something that’s already made. And I do not intend to be pathetic.”
I was jealous of Lacey’s band, of those girls who’d been her Pussycats, but glad, too, because I couldn’t be in any band, obviously, and if she’d started a new one it would have carried her away from me.
“Tell him about your band, Lacey.”
But she didn’t want tell him, or didn’t hear me. “What was he like?” she said. Breathed the name. “Johnny Ramone.”
“Drunk. And he smelled like dog shit, but man, he gave me one of his guitar picks and I thought I’d build a shrine to that thing.”
“Can I see it?” Lacey asked.
My father reddened, slightly. “Lost it on the way home.”
I cleared my throat. “When were you in a band? And how did I not know this?”
He shrugged. “Long time ago, kid. Different life.”
My mother listened to music only in the car, and then only to Rod Stewart, Michael Bolton, and, if she was feeling frisky, the Eagles. My father, when he drove, alternated between sports radio and silence. We had a stereo no one ever used and a box of records in the basement so warped with damp they’d been deemed unfit for the previous year’s yard sale. For the Dexter family, music was a nonissue. Except that now my father was talking about it the way Lacey did, like music was his religion, and it turned him into a stranger.
“How did a guy like you spawn someone so musically illiterate?” she asked.
“I ask myself that every day,” he said.
“No, I don’t buy it. You see what this means, Dex? It’s in you somewhere. You just needed me to help you get it out.”
It was a generous assessment. Everyone knew I took after my mother: the beige and blotchy coloring, the stick up the ass. But if Lacey saw him in me, there must have been something to see.
“Dex? That supposed to be you, kid?” My father examined me, looking for evidence of her.
“No offense, Mr. Dexter, but Hannah’s a shit name,” Lacey said.
“Call me Jimmy. And no offense taken. It was her mother’s idea. I always thought it sounded like a little old lady.”
Lacey laughed. “Exactly.”
That my father never liked my name: This was another thing I hadn’t known. I’d thought he called me kid because he wanted to claim a piece of me no one else could.
“But Dex? Yeah, I like that,” he said.
Dex was supposed to be our secret, a code name for the thing that was growing between us and the person she was shaping me to be. But if Lacey was ready to introduce her to the world, I thought, she must have her reasons.
“That’s right,” I said. “Dex. Spread the word.”
“Your mother’s going to love this,” he murmured, and it was clear the thought of it pleased him as much as the name itself.
“So, Jimmy, maybe you’d like to hear some real music,” Lacey said. “Dex has a copy of Bleach around here somewhere. At least she’d better.”