a rock star. But it wasn’t as simple for me as it was for Cal.
First of all, Bob’s words got stuck in my brain. I believed him when he said I didn’t have what it took to make it in Brooklyn, and that gutted me. Second, and probably more significantly, for reasons I did not understand, Bob and I couldn’t seem to get along, and I desperately wanted to change that. I wanted his love and approval, and I thought that if I stayed behind and did what he told me to do, I would get it.
I stared at the red horse again and noticed that the jockey on the back of it resembled my favorite guitar player at the time, Johnny Greenwood. I was sure that was a message from Sam, a message I didn’t have the strength to heed.
“Joseph,” Bob said, “are we clear?”
It’s not that I knew all along I wasn’t going to go with Cal. It was more like the idea of moving to Brooklyn and chasing some crazy dream didn’t seem real to me. It’s easy to fantasize about doing something and to talk about doing something and even to make plans to do something. It’s a whole other thing to actually go and do it. It’s idea versus action. And the difference between the two is guts, I suppose.
When I look back on that time now, it’s clear that not going to Brooklyn was as much of a choice as going would have been. But it didn’t seem like it then. At the time I saw the fact that I stayed behind as not making any choice at all.
And when August rolled around, Cal moved to New York just like he said he was going to do, and I went off to Berkeley, numb and full of regret.
To Cal’s credit, he kept at me for a couple of years after he left, constantly begging me to drop out of school, move across the country, and be in his band.
“Nobody here plays like you, Harp. Blood Brothers, remember?”
I continually turned him down, and by my junior year at Berkeley, Cal and I had completely lost touch.
Though in the essence of truth telling, it’s more accurate to say I stopped returning Cal’s calls and e-mails. I purposely dropped off the face of his earth because whenever we talked, he would tell me stories about his life in New York—playing in dive bars, working as a dishwasher in a restaurant, sleeping in the restaurant’s pantry when he couldn’t afford rent—and I would hang up the phone feeling even worse about myself than I already did.
I followed Cal’s career from afar for a while. But the night Callahan appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman for the first time, I kicked the wall of my bedroom so hard I broke two toes.
After that I stopped paying attention to what Cal was doing. I stopped surfing the web for news of his life. I stopped listening to any radio station that might play his music. I never spoke of him again to anyone. In general, I tried to pretend Cal Callahan didn’t exist.
It wasn’t that I was jealous of Cal. I loved him, and I missed him. And I was prouder of him than I had ever been of anyone or anything. But it was impossible to feel that proud of everything Cal had accomplished without being reminded in the most painful way of all the things I would never do.
You know where I was the night Cal was making his national television debut on The Late Show? Before I went to the emergency room to have my toes X-rayed, that is? I was sitting in my shitty apartment in Berkeley, eating a shitty burrito from the shitty Mexican restaurant I lived above, wondering why I wasn’t standing on that stage, playing guitar beside my best friend.
EIGHT.
I didn’t know any nice places to eat in Mill Valley, so the night October and I went out to dinner for the first time, I let her pick the restaurant. She chose a tiny, farm-to-table spot off the main street in town and asked if we could go right when they opened, before it filled up, and for the first twenty minutes we had the place to ourselves.
The restaurant had an open kitchen, a wood-fired oven where they cooked everything in cast iron pans, and furry seat cushions that made the room feel cozy and romantic. There was a record