36
Wyatt
Wyatt flew with his mom back to New York immediately after his high school graduation. It was too early for the Holloways to be there, as Sam would still be in school. He stayed one night before getting in his dad’s old truck and driving across the country. As he made his way west, sleeping in the bed of the truck and occasionally splurging on a motel, he tried to think of anything but Sam. It was painful to know how easy it should have been to pick up the phone and bridge this huge gap he’d put between them. But he didn’t have any words that didn’t come out angry.
For three thousand miles, he thought about the time bomb that was his family and how Bill had sped things along. His anger was a huge, ever-growing pain that filled every part of his body. He tried to remember feeling as happy as he had last summer, and the loss of that feeling just made him angrier. He had to protect Sam from the ugliness inside of him. So he didn’t call.
He had two thousand dollars saved up from summer jobs that would buy him a little time to find work. His plan was to bartend at a music venue while he found a way to break into the business. He had a catalog of exactly three finished songs that he wanted to record.
Looking back, it was madness. It was the specific kind of dreaming that belongs to a person who doesn’t know any better. Like a ten-year-old who’s sure he’ll play in the NBA someday. All he had was a duffel bag and Dr. Nick’s guitar, on his way to becoming a rock star. Even if someone had reasoned with him, he wouldn’t have changed course. He knew that his future was in music the way he knew the sun was coming up tomorrow. But then again, he had thought his future was Sam too.
He found an apartment on Market Street in Venice Beach on Craigslist for four hundred dollars per month. It turned out it was just a studio apartment, one large room with his roommate’s bed and a kitchenette in the corner. What passed for his bedroom was the walk-in closet, which had its own window and enough space for a twin mattress.
The building was on an alley that led to the busiest drug-trafficking street in Los Angeles. On either end of this alley were spectacular ficus trees with intricate trunks and root systems that tore up the sidewalks. Wyatt came to see Los Angeles in this light: beautiful and invasive, natural and violent.
His dream of bartending his way to success was an instant failure. There were no jobs in music venues for bartenders. There were no jobs anywhere for bartenders. He eventually took a job at a Shell station two blocks from his apartment and made minimum wage pumping gas, and more for minor car repairs. As he walked to work each day, he felt the flow of his life: playing guitar and fixing cars. Nearly all he’d ever wanted. Except Sam.
He liked to drive up to Malibu to surf at Point Dume and hear the music roll off the beach. The warm air, the gulls, and the cold water brought him back to Long Island. He thought about Sam and how he’d destroyed that last good thing in his life. It was as if everyone around him had let him down, so he figured he’d just finish the job. Wyatt stayed out on the water as long as he could, because there he couldn’t help but be honest with himself. And when he was honest with himself, the songs came.