Jed Wolf

“How old are you?” the woman driving asked as I hopped in the back of her station wagon beside her two young daughters. “Seventeen,” I said, lying. “Well, you look twelve. Does your mother know you’re out here?”

The collect call from Cleveland echoed in my mind – my voice steady through the motel phone, promising to sleep outside from then on. “Stay in hotels for God sake,” my father had barked. “Use your travelers checks.” But I was determined not to spend his money, determined to shed each remnant of dependence like autumn leaves.

Her crew-cutted son stared out the window, and I found myself drifting between present and memory, between Gary, Indiana and London’s Carnaby Street, where dragged there by my grandparents, I’d worn striped bellbottoms and dreamed of eating cake in the rain. His peach-fuzzed neck caught the light, and suddenly I was pressed between “love’s hot, fevered iron like a striped pair of pants,” Richard Harris’s MacArthur Park threading through my consciousness.

“You need to comb your hair,” one of the girls said, the thick mat clinging to my neck like grief. “He’ll have to cut it out,” her sister added. “Don’t be rude,” their mother cautioned, her rear-view mirror never leaving my face.

“So, where y’all from,” I asked, wrapping myself in an accent borrowed from the flattening countryside. “Gary,” the girls breathed in unison, but when their precise older brother added “Marquette Park,” his words landed like stones into still water.

At boarding school, I’d learned to disappear into carefully crafted personas – the troubled artist, the nature boy bedding down in fields like a deer. I knew every dense cluster of sassafras, every hidden rock ledge and barberry thicket, my footprints mingling with the math teacher’s in fresh snow. He played Bach while I flipped through porn, and by June graduation, I trusted only dogs.

My violin case became both shield and bridge. “What’s that?” a sister asked, and within moments I had them singing BINGO, my nubby fingers dancing across strings, transforming the station wagon into a traveling stage. In boys’ school, I’d learned to deflect with non sequiturs – pointing at imaginary rats, feigning illness, running in opposite directions. But music offered endless variations on survival.

Our house had always been cluttered with my father’s compensatory collection – guitars, flutes, clarinets which like living room flotsam might wind up outside in the rain. I learned their voices by accident and instinct, understanding vibration and resonance the way other boys understood baseball cards. A wine glass could sing as easily as a cello, and airstreams found their way over mouthpieces like rivers to the sea.

The front-seated boy remained silent as I taught his sisters Irish rounds, their voices weaving together until the harmonies filled every corner of the car. Jocks might rule their athletic fields, hippies might claim their patches of grass, but when girls gathered to hear Joni Mitchell’s words flow from my fingers, I held a different kind of power.

Outside Gary, the station wagon slowed to a stop. The girls thanked me for songs their brother would never forget, though his silence spoke louder than their gratitude. Only April would have understood this moment perfectly – my childhood friend who knew why I refused lessons, who recognized rebellion in its purest form. Like me, she knew that some songs can only be played in your own wild way, even if few can hear.