I lean back on my bike seat, listening, the bag from Wendy in my hand. Every night I’ve stopped at the same cross street, the same stop sign with the dented pole, and listened to the sound of Riley’s guitar drifting down the street. I know that later, when he opens the door for me, I’ll find the four-deck on the floor with a loose-leaf notebook open, Riley’s messy, scrawled notes all over the pages, an ashtray mounded with crushed butts. On some nights, it’s just the tender, warm sound of the Gibson Hummingbird hanging in the close air; Riley doesn’t sing all the time. Once, at the library, I looked up Long Home on the computer. Tiger Dean still maintained the band’s website. I clicked on songs like “Stitcher” and “Charity Case,” Riley’s big solo number. It was Tiger’s voice that was initially captivating, a powerful blend of personality and tone, but it was the lyrics that kept everything together, that kept me listening closer, instinctively seeking out certain phrases and words. There was one other song that Riley sang solo, a ballad called “Cannon,” about a man so heartbroken his heart tears from his chest and rolls away and he follows it (And my heart burst from me / like a cannon / And it rolled to the bottom of the canyon / And here I will stay / Emptied in these empty days / Until you come back / And marry me, baby), and I think it worked precisely because he wasn’t a natural singer. It made the song all the more sad that his voice broke in some parts, wavered in others, and disappeared altogether at the end.
On Riley’s street, people sit on porches, beer or wine in hand, listening to him, too, their faces open to the sound of him. When he gets it right, when there aren’t any mistakes, when he can sail through a song completely from start to finish, it’s thrilling, it pierces right through me. The faces of his neighbors light up. When he’s done, they mime applause, because nobody wants him to know they’re listening, nobody wants him to stop playing. Everyone is careful around him, like he’s an egg they have to cradle.
But he does stop playing when he hears me clatter up onto the porch. He settles the Gibson on the couch, rustles his papers, takes a long drink of his beer, lights a new cigarette, takes the bag from me, and disappears into the bathroom.
When we’re in his house, together, with all the signs of Riley-ness, his well-thumbed old books in the sturdy bookshelf, his records alphabetized on shelves all around the room, the comfortable, elegant, and crumpled velvet couch, the carelessly full ashtrays, I think it’s somewhere I could stay: inside a life already lived and firmly in place.
