SETLIST: A MEMOIR by MICHAEL WATSON A thesis submitted to the Graduate School-Camden Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts Graduate Program in Creative Writing written under the direction of Lisa Zeidner and approved by _________________________________________________ Lisa Zeidner (Thesis Director) _________________________________________________ Lauren Grodstein (Program Director) Camden, New Jersey, May 2014 i SETLIST: A MEMOIR By MICHAEL WATSON Thesis Director: Lisa Zeidner Setlist: A Memoir follows me as a young musician in a fledgling rock band struggling for success while also struggling with a variety of family issues: my mother's worsening neurological disease, my strained relationship with my father, my sister's death from cancer and other deaths in the family, my own self-doubt. The hopes and promises of being in a rock band push me forward despite tragedy’s constant pull backwards. This is a memoir that shows a young man growing up, clinging to music as a way to hold steady as the turbulent new world of adulthood—one filled with loss and uncertainty—rushes around him. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. “The Fault”. 1 2. “Resolving” . 33 3. “Reinvent” . 60 4. “Help Wanted” . 80 5. “Just Breathe” . 103 6. “Remember” . 122 7. “Jams” . 188 iii 1 1. “The Fault” The year my mother got hurt at work and sick with nerve pain, the year my parents separated, I met Bryan on the school bus taking us to third grade. He wore black shorts, black t-shirts with WWF ironed-on wrestlers’ faces chipping off them. He wore black shoes with tall white socks. He had a crew cut and a muted smile. It was easy for us to become friends because we liked all the same stuff. The same anime television shows, the same card games. We both loved stories. He had hundreds of them which he claimed to be true— like how he climbed through the vents to steal an opponent's best card at a card tournament he entered; like how he watched dirty versions of the cartoons we watched where the characters had sex; like how his family had just moved back to Pennsylvania after years spent in Wyoming; like how his brother worshipped the devil and played in a death metal band and how he hadn’t been seen in a long while; like how Bryan was conceived backstage at a heavy metal show in the 80s. He told every story with conviction and made the mythology of the world he lived in come alive. I followed him, believed every single word he said, and he didn’t seem like a mystery to me at all. I felt like I had known him my whole short life. I didn’t get his phone number, but he told me where he lived. So one Saturday in the fall of 1997, a day after snow had blanketed the streets and sidewalks, Mom drove me to his house. I hoped he would be home. I knocked on his door and Bryan’s dad opened it. He had curly blond hair that dangled past his waist. He was probably smoking a 2 cigarette, was probably shirtless. I asked if Bryan was home and Bryan came to the door and let me in. He asked his parents if I could stay. They ordered pizza for us, and Bryan and I went to play outside in the new snow until the pizza came. Bryan suggested that we mess with the delivery guy. We covered the slab of numbers on his house with snow, in hopes that the he’d miss the place or take an extra few minutes to figure out where he was, where we were. I don’t remember if he was lost or late, but Bryan and I laughed and ate pizza and laughed about the story for years. Bryan showed me his bedroom—a bare bunked bed between a closet and a pair of narrow windows—and the spare room next to it where he housed all his action figures in a long wooden chest. Plastic Pokemon figures that you could get in Burger King kid’s meals on shelves lining the walls. Bryan and I made up games: spread his hoards of action figures out across the floor, had them crawl over pillow and blanket obstacles to fight each other as the sun came out, glared off the dirty windows in the late afternoon. Bryan’s house was so different than my own home. Things seemed to be in place there, stable, consistent The clumps of dust stayed latched to the edges of the hallway carpet, the curtains stayed still, the doors to Bryan’s parents’ and sister’s rooms were always closed. His house smelled stagnant, like smoke and wood and oil that spilled through the old radiators, and when I went home that night, I smelled too. It was rare that both Mom and Dad were home at the same time. Before they separated, Mom worked seven to seven overnight shifts as a nurse at Easton hospital, and sometimes worked the day too, then came home, napped, and went back to work. Dad did construction—he had started his own business, Watson’s Home Improvement—but after 3 a few solid years of business, jobs had become rare. The two of them took care of four kids, Melissa (14), me (8), my brother Andrew (7), and my little sister Jessica, only a year old. We all lived in a big house—three stories—full of furniture and mirrors and pictures blanketing the walls, baskets holding potted plants hanging from hooks in the ceilings. Floral wallpaper accented the burgundy walls. Velvety soft black and green couches, bay windows edged with billowing red wine curtains. The fridge, the pantry, the cabinets, the shelves leading down into the basement were always packed with snacks. On holidays, there were baskets of Easter candy and big meals and shimmering presents spiraling out from under the Christmas tree and into the living room. There was a big front porch that Mom and Dad painted blue, a terraced garden out front that wrapped around the house to the patio in the backyard. There was a pool and a deck that Dad built, a treehouse and swingset that Dad and my uncle pieced together one night—one of my earliest memories—a fence and two garages at the end of the yard that Dad put up. It must have been expensive to keep that home together for us. It must have been so much hard work to keep it all together for so long. They must have said yes to nearly everything we asked for. We lived in Whitehall, a suburb of Allentown, Pennsylvania, and part of the Lehigh Valley: three small cities in eastern Pennsylvania and their suburbs that spiralled out from the highways into quiet neighborhoods with clean sidewalks, new developments with huge, empty yards, family owned mini-markets and pizza shops. For Mom and Dad, there must have been something honest and attractive about the area that made them want to stay when they first moved there in the early 90s. Hardly any crime. Lots of kids Melissa’s age. Industry was fading and the ruins were everywhere—the abandoned 4 Martin Tower executive offices of Bethlehem Steel and decaying blast furnaces along the river; the defunct Dixie Cup Factory in Easton with its huge model cup sitting crooked on top—but the values of hard work and raising a family were passed down. We lived on East Union Street, a wide road with a few scattered homes, some of them tall like ours, most just one story with vinyl siding and orange brick, a small tree or a some hedges in their front yards. East Union intersected other streets like it in each direction until, half a mile east, there was the Lehigh River and then the Lehigh Valley International Airport. In clear weather, you could see the planes sinking through the sky below the sun, getting ready to land, or better yet, sweeping across the sky over the Lehigh Valley, then disappearing, the thundering wave of escape fading slowly with their trails of exhaust. I loved to swing in the backyard in the summer, and watch them all day, just wondering where they were going, wondering with excitement what it might feel like to be somewhere else. To the north there was West Catasauqua, where Bryan lived, and then Catasauqua. To the west of our home, our neighborhood of ranch homes wound around Jefferson Park, where we went to summer camp, around the Lehigh Valley and Whitehall Malls and ended at McArthur Road. MacArthur Road was a four-lane highway that bisected Whitehall and surged downhill into Center City Allentown. Strips of shops clung to either side of the highway and always seemed to be popping up and growing taller, and in one of those malls was Jacob’s Music, an old place with a glass front and a tiny neon sign. At school, my older sister, Melissa started playing the saxophone in the middle school band, and I told Mom that I wanted to play like Melissa. Since it was the first year the elementary school offered band, they only had a few instruments for rent. A few trombones, some flutes, a 5 tuba. Someone had already claimed the only saxophone, and when I told Mom, she called the school. She asked if there would be more instruments later in the year or if I could borrow one from the high school or middle school bands.