He told me that he was a really great musician, except that he couldn’t afford a good synthesizer to compose on, while those damn Skoags could just puff out their skins and make every sound anybody had ever heard. He leaned real close and told me that the real danger was that the Skoags would make up all the good music before he even got a chance to try. Which I knew was dumb. While Skoags can play anything they’ve ever heard, perfectly, no one had ever heard them play anything original. No one had ever heard them play Skoag music, only ours. I started to tell him that but he passed out on the floor by my sofa. Everyone ignored him. They were into the food and the beer and the music. All my mom’s parties were like that.

I’d usually curl up on one end of the sofa, face to the cushions and try to sleep, sometimes with a couple necking at the other end of the sofa and two or three musicians in the kitchen, endlessly rehearsing the same few bars of a song I’d never heard before and would never hear again. That’s what Mom was really into, struggling musicians who were performing their own stuff in the little “play for tips” places. She’d latch on to some guy and keep him with her aid check. She’d watch over him like he was gold, go with him every day, sit by him on the sidewalk while he played if he were a street musician, or take a table near the band if he was working cafés and clubs. They’d come home late and sleep late, and then get up and go out again. Sometimes I’d come in from school and find them sitting at the kitchen table, talking. It’s funny. The men always looked the same, eyes like starved dogs, and it seems like my mom would always be saying the same thing. “Don’t give up. You’ve got a real talent. Someday you’ll make it, and you’ll look back at them and laugh. You’ve really got it, Lennie (or Bobby or Pete or Lance). I know it. I can feel it, I can hear it. You’re gonna be big one day.”