Party of One: A Memoir in 21 Songs - Dave Holmes Page 0,1

way a nonmusician could make his own album, the way a kid too scared to speak his mind could get his point across.

It’s still my favorite thing to do, and you better believe I tried to sell my publisher on getting this into the marketplace as an Apple Music playlist, but these book types insist that you use words. So here they are: stories of the blessed and stupid life of a kid on the margins, and the music that moved it forward, in book form, which I figured I should hurry up and do before we start passing down our histories via emojis and GIFs of Rue McClanahan. I put it together like an album, with a few interludes in between, like how hip-hop albums used to have skits. (But maybe they’ll, you know, age better.)

I hope you like it. I hope I bring back some memories or help you understand a beautiful time in recent history that is absolutely gone forever. And if you are in the middle of your own desperate tap dance right now, I hope that you can learn from my mistakes.

Just stay with me, and we’ll have it made.

I played for the St. Gerard’s first-grade boys’ soccer team because participation was compulsory, sports were a thing a boy was expected to take to, and I liked being where the boys were besides. They’d put me at goalie, which was a smart tactical move because I wasn’t very good at the running or the kicking or the remembering which way to go when I had the ball. I wasn’t into it. All the bewildering action was happening a world away in midfield, and I’d already done the thing where I tangled myself up in the net and pretended I was a Spider-Man villain; my work on the field felt done. And there was an audience right there: a bleacher full of parents and siblings, some from St. G’s, some from the opposing parish, Mary Queen of Peace—a crowd, I imagined, as starved for entertainment as I was. I knew where I was needed.

I walked over to the bleachers and shook some hands. “Good to see you, Mr. and Mrs. Gunn. Is that a new blouse, Mrs. Edwards? Lovely.” I could hear Coach O’Connor calling me back to my post, but I had put myself where I knew I could do the most good. “Can that be Angela, Mrs. DiNunzio? No. She’s growing up too fast.” My parents tried to get my attention and point me toward the field. “Let’s do a cheer,” I told my public. “How about ‘This Team Is Red Hot’—Do we all know that one? I’ll start.” The parents from Mary Queen of Peace got louder and louder, until they broke out into full applause and stood—which felt premature, given that I hadn’t even gotten into my impressions yet—but the ovation was not for me. I turned around just in time to see that one of their kids had sent the ball right into my untended goal. I clapped and whooped along with them. Scoring is good no matter who does it, I figured. It’s why we’re here in the first place. A few of the parents began to laugh, and I was too young to know it was at me. I just knew I was getting a reaction, and a reaction felt good. I’d never felt like I had much to offer out on the field, but this, this, was something I could do.

Coach O’Connor was a patient man, but he had his limits. “Hey, Holmes?” he called out to me, “Isn’t there somewhere you should be?”

Of course there was. I turned back to the bleachers: “Is anybody celebrating an anniversary?”

My family’s game was well in progress by the time I made it to the field—my parents had my brothers, Dan and Steve, a year and a half apart, and then exactly eight years later, me—so entertaining from the sidelines has always been my default position. Those who can neither do nor teach have a tendency to observe and make jokes.

Like any good St. Louis family, my family loves sports. They aren’t obsessed—they don’t wear jerseys or paint their torsos or perform strange rituals beyond some enthusiastic marching in place to the Notre Dame fight song—but they’re into it. We had season tickets to the football Cardinals in the years before the owner moved them to wherever they are now—boy, was that the talk of the town that I sort of