You’re alone on the edge of the pool, where the shallow and deep ends meet. It’s golden hour. I watch you dive in. Plaid boxer shorts billow out from the waistband of your swim trunks. We don’t say much to each other. We just swim around until the pool closes, careless and curious, like nine year olds are. From then on, I begin cutting the netting out of my swimsuits so I can wear boxers too.

Twelve years later, my mom presses the home phone to her chest. Her eyes are wide. I’m in the courtyard of her new home, crunching on a piece of toast, home for spring break. The winter’s white-grey sheath has begun to glow green. Dozens of mirror-like droplets dot the plants in her garden. That’s where I’m looking when she tells me you died.

Even though you and I haven’t seen each other since high school, I think my mom’s worried that your death will break me — the proverbial straw. Over the past month, my girlfriend and I broke up, I was fired from my bartending job, and, soon, I’ll be graduating college with no job prospects. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t anxious. Anxious and hungover.

But I continue to fixate on the flowers in the garden. Pinks and yellows lit like fire against the wet stone walls. Silent, I walk down into the grass, noticing how each green blade moves against the arches of my bare feet. I feel high, tuned in. It isn’t joy, but it feels oddly good. I’m present, a bud about to burst.

The sensation disturbs me.

A heap of band Ts and khaki pants, plastic nerf guns with orange foam ammunition, a bulky helmet for your dirt bike (that I never saw you ride), checkered button-downs, several mismatched sneakers, a large white cage for your guinea pig Foo, wooden drumsticks, a bunk bed with full-sized mattresses, two windows and a giant stack of CDs. This is your bedroom in fourth grade.

My eyes bulge, I can’t see the floorboards. It doesn’t match the rest of your parents’ house, which is tidy and bright, like a seaside cottage.

“We gotta clean this,” I say, standing still in the doorway. I surprise myself. My mom is always on me for not cleaning my room, but this isn’t a few misplaced shirts, it’s full-on disorder.

And, for whatever reason, you agree.

For two hours we hover over your personal belongings, sorting side-by-side. What do we talk about? Maybe the fact that you have a television in your room (so cool!). Also the season of South Park you own on DVD, which I pretend I’m allowed to watch. I’m sure Blink-182 comes up, too, since it’s the CD that catches my eye: The Mark, Tom, and Travis Show. A drive-in movie themed cover with cartoon versions of each band member, complete with tattoos, piercings and a blonde babe with a signature Sharpied across her boobs.

As you slide open your closet door, I hold the CD case up to the light like a crisp one-hundred-dollar-bill and admire the “Parental Advisory Explicit Content” sticker stuck to the bottom left corner.

“This is unedited?” I ask.

“Yeah, it’s pretty crazy,” you say, smiling. “They say ‘fuck’ a lot.” We both crack up. Then you snatch the CD from my hands. “You gotta hear this.”

The top of your boombox springs open and you place the disc inside. It’s a lavender color with the three band members’ chuckling cartoon heads displayed on top. Skip to Track 8. Airy cries from the crowd, a redundant guitar strum and Tom DeLong’s whiny vocals: It would be nice to have a blow job / It would be nice to have a blow job…

On and on as I sit on your bottom bunk, folding shirts, giddy with excitement. I’ve never heard anything like it.

The song ends and I can’t help but ask. “So…what exactly is a blow job?”

“I think it’s like when a girl...blows on your, well, you know.”

You point to your crotch and it’s clear that you’re not entirely sure, either.

“Like when something’s too hot?”

“Ya, probably.”

I nod and turn my attention to the last heap of clothes, where I find an item even more valuable. An airsoft gun. I’ve never held one before. It feels so real, a pistol, heavy, all black with a pointed orange tip, the only clue that this is a toy. I think you can tell I’m obsessed with it.

“We can go shoot it if you want,” you say, shrugging.

I look around the room: the clothes are folded and placed in drawers, the CDs all have their appropriate sleeves, the beds are made and the floor is visible.

“Sure,” I say, nodding, as casually as I can. “Sounds good to me.”

You grab a plastic jar filled with tiny neon-green balls and slip something else into your pocket. Before I can ask you what it is, we’re rushing downstairs and out the front door.

Like my neighborhood, about a mile away, your street backs up to a wooded area with a pond and a few walking trails. Suburban-woodsy. A ring of post-colonial houses and streets coated in pine needles. Safe spaces for children to get into trouble.

Facing the pond, you pull the pistol from your waistband and cock back the top. It makes a satisfying clicking noise and looks similar to what I’ve seen on Law & Order reruns after school. When you pull the trigger there’s a reverberating Ping! and a neon fleck flies out into the water. I can’t wait to get my hands on the gun. You shoot it again, this time at a squirrel running along the branch of a tree. The animal scampers away unscathed and we’re both relieved.

You hand me the pistol and I cock it like Axel Foley in Beverly Hills Cop, ducking behind a small bush as if it were a burned out car being fired on by assassins. Distracted, I don’t see you pull the firecracker out of your pocket, light it, wind up and chuck it in the air. It goes off above my head with an impossibly loud bang and we both scream then sprint back to your house. We hide in the darkness of your garage, like wanted felons.

Years after you die, Radiohead’s “Jigsaw Falling Into Place” plays through my headphones as I drift off in bed and dream about your funeral.

Everything’s preserved. The church we used to attend. The grassy hill. The red stone wall along the main street. The outdated gymnasium with yellow floors and brown trim. And the hulking youth group bus that would break down on long rides, puffing smoke into our eyes through overhead AC units. Even the ushers look the same, standing at the double doors our families walked through every Sunday for the late service. Our fathers look crisp in pressed ties, cheeks bright pink from a close shave. The steps where we were confirmed are covered in the same ugly green carpeting.

I’m looking at everything from above, pressed to the ceiling, tucked up behind the slow-spinning ceiling fans. There’s an open casket sitting on stage with your body wrapped tightly in its womb. I watch our youth minister, our friends and families, as they rapidly age.

Your mom, with greying hair, collapses on stage like a pierced gladiator, buckling and slashing underneath the overflowing congregation. I fall from my perch and wake up sweating, surprised you’re still on my mind.

In sixth grade, you sit down at the lunch table wearing a baggy black hoodie dotted in small circular pins, all red, black and grey. When I comment on how cool I think it is, you seem almost embarrassed, unsure of how the sweatshirt suits you.

“I saw Green Day last night,” you say, quietly. Maybe you know I’ll be jealous. I am, of course, but I also know that to see Green Day, my favorite band, is so far outside the realm of possibility that I barely let my envy register.

At 12 years old, my parents would never consider letting me go to a real concert, not for a band whose newest CD features a bleeding heart grenade on the cover.

Spiked hair, studs, thrashing guitar, and angsty anti-authority lyrics has been my M.O. ever since Good Charlotte came out with their career defining album, The Young and The Hopeless in 2002. But while I want so badly to imitate these tattooed pop-punk pioneers, I’m well aware that I can’t actually look like them. I’m not allowed.

The closest I get to self expression is a T-shirt my great aunt from Canada sends me of a skateboarding monkey sliding down a rail on his crotch with the phrase, “Don’t Forget Your Cup” written out across the chest. The other shirt she sends me — of Harry Potter smoking a skinny joint (“Harry Potter and the Sorcerer is Stoned”) — is kept captive somewhere in my parents’ closet.

The year I turn 30, I dream about you for the fifth or sixth time.

We’re in a dark room with red and blue spotlights hitting a small stage-slash-bandshell; the nightclub somehow resembles where we graduated high school.

The place is packed. You’re playing your own funeral, sitting on a chair and strumming a guitar, looping yourself with a pedalboard at your feet. I stand in the back trying to focus on the music but I can’t hear you well enough. I can’t feel your presence as much as I want to. You just sit there, hunched over the guitar, plucking chords until a soundscape emerges and engulfs you, all red and blue. You don’t speak between songs. You take on a holographic state.

When the concert is over you evaporate. I fling open the door to the street. It’s sunny and bright. We’re on a sidewalk, the two of us, talking but not really saying anything; you’re speaking a language I’ve never heard before. Your mom pulls up in her blue Dodge Durango, the same car she had when we were kids, and you climb in.

Before I wake up, I’m standing in the street watching the car drive away.

The bitter, minty smell of Listerine is pungent as we wriggle out of our shorts, revealing boxers spotted in hockey sticks or baseball mitts or little beagles playing cards.

There are glass spheres standing between each sink. They’re filled with black plastic combs wading in pints of Barbicide. When I was younger, I cupped the blue liquid into my blonde hair as if it were dye (an earnest attempt at appearing like my punk-rock idols) but it ran into my eyes and made me scream. My mom had to rush me home and wash my eyes out in the bathtub, fearing I’d go blind.

But now we are 13 and know better.

We know which peoples’ lockers are open, which ones have books of matches we can use to light stuff on fire in the woods, and, more importantly, which ones have the big bottles of Head & Shoulders hidden inside — a thicker, smoother alternative to the pink body wash loaded into the hanging shower dispensers.

The shower stalls don’t have doors but you don’t care. You ditch your boxers and plop down on the tile floor. Water runs down your legs toward the communal drain. You don’t warm up. You just start jerking off, no mercy.

“Here!” you say, sliding the bottle of shampoo across the slick turquoise floor. I snatch it up and face the wall, squeezing a healthy amount of gel into my right hand.

I’m embarrassed by your showmanship. I choose to stand under the shower head and slip my hand below my wet shorts, working in private. But I’m also desperately curious. I hear myself yell, “Is it working?” over the sound of running water. You let out a howl and I can’t help but spin around to see that grin of yours, you are beaming. I guess what they said in health class was true.

“Are you awake? Colin, wake up.”

My eyes force open. Sitting on the edge of my twin bed is my mom. She wears the same stone-cold expression as a TV detective interrogating a disgruntled suspect. I’m disoriented, having already fallen asleep. I cringe and turn slowly to my alarm clock. It glows red—2:22 AM.

“Colin, look at me.” My mom shakes my shoulder. “What is wrong with you?”

“Whaddya mean…?” My voice is a low rasp.

A pair of chunky Skullcandy headphones press tightly against my neck. I struggle to remove them, but eventually pry them loose and toss them to the floor. The lime-green cord descends like an escape ladder at a house fire.

“What do you mean?” I choke. “I’m fine.”

“You are not fine.” She glares down at her 14-year-old son, her spidey senses tingling. Although my mom pursued a career in interior design, she majored in criminal science at college and always dreamed of being a private eye. Tonight, I learn that she’s equipped for either profession.

“The second we got in the door, you threw open the cupboard and grabbed a box of Cheez-Its and a box of Pop Tarts and ran down to the basement. What was that?”

“I was just hungry,” I say, my eyes mere slivers. The headphones, which are still connected to my iPod, broadcast the ghostly din of Thom Yorke’s vocals from somewhere on my floor: Just as you dance, dance, dance…

“Colin, I’m serious. I smelled something in the car when I picked you guys up tonight. Don’t lie to me.”

She keeps questioning and I keep denying until there’s a long uncomfortable pause. A breaking point. I know I’ve got to give her something.

“Okay okay,” I say, inching my body upright against the wall behind me. “We may have smoked a littttle weed.” The words feel impossible in my mouth, like chewing glass. I can’t believe it’s come to this. “I’m sorry.”

“Colin,” she says, staring me down. “It smelled like booze.”

Fuck.

The next day, after school, you and I change into shorts and lace up our muddy sneakers in the parking lot, preparing for a few hours of hell: cross country practice — a team we’ll both be kicked off of senior year due to our tendency to skip races and smoke joints in the woods. Gravel crunches beneath our feet as we fall back behind the pack of skinny boys. I fill you in on my confession.

“Dude, you’re such an idiot! Why did you say that?!”

“She caught me off guard, man, what was I supposed to do? You’re lucky I convinced her not to call your mom.”

You shrug, panting. “I guess that’s true. I can’t even imagine what my mom would have said, not that it would have mattered.” For a moment, we run down the mile-long path in silence. “Hey, we had a good time, though. Amanda was so fucking cool, I think I’m gonna ask her out.”

“Well have fun at homecoming, cuz there’s no way my parents are going to let me go.”

“Ha! Sucks, bro. But at least both your eyebrows are still there.”

“Shut up. That pipe of yours is dangerous, dude. I thought I singed my face off when I took a hit.”

“Wait,” you say, suddenly serious. “Do you think your mom hates me?”

I laugh at how much you suddenly care.

“No. But you’re definitely not her favorite right now.”

You slow down. You look crushed.

Sophomore year of college.

I’m in the library past midnight deleting the same paragraph over and over, trying to write a short story for my intro to fiction class. About to give up and return to my cramped dorm room, I remember something: the deal you cooked up with one of the lifeguards at the country club pool. Your mom’s oxycodone for weed.

As I begin to type, I remember that lifeguard. He was in his early twenties and spoke like he didn’t give a fuck. Sure. Whatever. His chest was shaved, his swollen muscles a fitting canvas for the two rottweilers with bloodied fangs tattooed on his back, like Edward Norton in American History X. He was eventually fired for a DUI, his second in the span of a year.

The dog tats freaked me out, but I could tell you were impressed. You saw something in the lifeguard that mattered to you.

Perhaps the day you and he made your first trade, in the back of the men’s bathroom, where as kids we’d spent time before swim meets, swapping swim trunks for jammers, was also the day I could feel something begin to split.

I watched you follow the dog fangs into the bathroom and reemerge smelling of skunk, the older guard still shirtless, donning thick black shades and a whistle, which he twirled around his finger as he traipsed down the gauzy steps to the white plastic chair hanging high over the deep end.

“He crushed up the pills and snorted them right off the counter,” you said, in awe. I felt like I was trapped in a real-life D.A.R.E module. Not only were you pedaling opioids, but you had stolen them from your mom’s medicine cabinet.

As a kid, there are great forces at work. The inability to travel freely. A lack of funds. The deep-seated fear of disappointment. And parental guidance, in whatever form it takes. But as teenagers, the firewalls to adulthood begin to melt away.

In the story I am writing, the protagonist is part jacked lifeguard, part you, and part me. On a sunny day when the pool is packed with people, he climbs the slick ladder to the high-dive, walks to the end of the board and jumps, launching himself into a perfect swan dive. While airborne, the drugs hit, and there he goes, down into the depths of his trip.

Later that semester, my story is published in the college literary journal. At the journal release party I stand behind a boxy podium and read my words for a small crowd of professors and English majors. I don’t expect anyone to laugh; this is serious stuff. But people are in hysterics. I force myself to laugh along, happy to entertain. Happy to separate myself from the reality of that sketchy lifeguard, the alarms in my head, and you on that off-kilter day.

Not long after that strange day at the pool, I feel compelled to confide in an adult. So, like a dweeb, one day after school I go to see our youth minister, The Rev. We meet at a crowded coffee shop down the street from the church.

A year out from smoking weed for the first time (with you), I probably think the stuff’s more deviant than I should. But I’m staring down the barrel of a new era. High school starts in the fall and I’m doing what I can to convince myself that you and I won’t start to drift once the summer ends.

As The Rev tries to offer some advice, I try and listen. But there’s a song playing over the coffeehouse speakers with an eerie acoustic guitar strum. The vocals are haunting and the drums are metronomic, with quick, perfectly timed fills. I’m mesmerized. I pull my phone out under the table and open Shazam.

Later that day, I check the app and see “Jigsaw Falling Into Place,” by Radiohead. I listen to the song on repeat in my room.

After I graduate college, over a year since you’d passed, I come back to visit my mom and set up another meeting with The Rev. I haven’t attended church since high school and I no longer identify as a religious person, but it’s comforting to reconnect with someone who not only knew you but also led your funeral service.

From behind his cluttered desk The Rev, now with graying hair, shakes his head and says, “I keep thinking back to that chat we had when you guys were in middle school; it didn’t seem like a huge deal at the time, just a little weed and whatnot—adolescent experimentation. But I might have been wrong.”

I don’t know what to say. Aside from a couple of rumors I’d heard about a laced drug you’d bought online, there’s nothing definitive in your obit; I still don’t know exactly how you died.

I’m rummaging through the albums in my apartment, looking for something to play while lounging on the couch. In a pile on the floor, I stumble upon my roommate’s copy of In Rainbows and start with the B-side, placing the needle down gently in the groove of the fourth track: “Jigsaw Falling Into Place.”

It still sounds as good as it did during my meeting with The Rev. It sounds as ominous as it did during my mom’s interrogation, and as elucidating as it did in my bed as I drifted off into an imagining of your funeral, which, in real life, I never attended.

I slide out the liner notes and read the lyrics as the song plays out.

Just as they play your favourite song
As your bad day disappears
No longer wound up like a spring
Before you’ve had too much
Come back in focus again…

Before you comatose
Before you run away from me
Before you’re lost between the notes.

You got the light you can feel it on your back
Your jigsaw falling into place

Thinking of you, the words almost seem too on the nose. I wonder if you ever heard this song when you were alive. Did you even like Radiohead?

Moments after I finish reading my story in college, and step down from the podium, I decide to bury you forever, whether I know it or not. In fiction.

But, as it goes, when you die, I’m forced to dig you up.

That’s why I’m dialed in, blissing out in my mom’s yard. For the first time in months, I’m not stuck obsessing about my future as an unemployed English major, or contemplating my probable OCD, or running through endless versions of who I might become in “the real world.” For a drawn-out moment, I forget my own debilitating fictions and dive back into the past, with you:

I remember the first burn of liquor down the back of my throat. Raspberry Smirnoff. You pull the bottle casually from the back of the snack kart, a four-wheeled off-white machine stocked with booze, and I’m surprised to see it parked out here on the 7th tee, unmanned, its small black tires resting on a carpet of brilliant green.

And each row of bottles is stuck with silver pour spouts, shimmering pink and orange under a creamsicle sky.

“Let’s just take one swig each,” you say, using the tips of your fingers to pry off the spout.

And after a few seconds, there’s a pop as the spout’s black rubber base squeezes out of the bottle and falls to the ground. You raise the circle of glass to your lips and tilt the comically large vessel toward a row of swaying pines, their dark tips just blocking the setting sun.

And as the clear liquid hits your tongue, your eyes become slivers, your whole face a scrunched mess, like the cartoon guy on Warheads wrappers. But sucking sour candy looks different; this new act involves swallowing air through your teeth, like something’s burning or you just stubbed your toe. Eventually, you hand me the bottle, mustering enough of a breath to smile. “Not bad,” you choke.

And I’m at Camp Jewell with our fifth grade class, playing bystander to your first kiss. You and Meg on the rounded dock at dusk. I’m descending the wooden steps as another couple guides you two toward the water. The hierarchy has never been clearer; these preteen ushers have been dating longer and are to be trusted as experts. The excitement on your grinning face is tangible. I want it for myself. We want the same things.

And, it’s two years later, I’m listening to Brittany describe your “real” first kiss, which went down in the stairwell of a University of Tennessee dorm. She laughs and says you were awkward, that you bear-hugged her. The next day, I’ll wrap my arms around Kate in the middle of the massive university pool, noticing the goosebumps on her bare skin as you make us blush with ceaseless commentary — Dang, look at you two!

And it’s there, in Tennessee, on a summer church trip, in the sticky southern heat, where I witness someone so comfortable in their own skin. Each afternoon, you walk around our shared room butt-naked, eating Peach-O’s from the plastic bag, yammering on about Brittany and whether she actually likes you or not.

Because of this, we are late to every “God-Is-Great” activity. All week, we pace back and forth in front of elevator doors, arguing whether or not bashing the down arrow will make a steel box plummet faster.

The news of your death travels fast. My phone erupts with texts and voicemails from people we knew when we were kids. I’m not sure how to tell them about us. How time poured between us like wet cement. The thought makes me dizzy. Days later, I flake out on your funeral and head back to school.

It’s becoming clear to me now that your death gradually shifted the way I think about memory. Nowadays, I see the act of remembering as a natural resource. Like focusing on the breath during a panic attack. For me, in moments of severe change, you remain a beacon, something I can grasp for.

It’s simple, really; remembering you helps me remember myself.

It’s one year after your funeral when I decide I need to see your parents.

Your mom’s hair is just as straight and white-blonde as it always was. Your dad is just as comforting and kind.

Inside your house, I give them both big hugs and they lead me into the renovated kitchen. The new island is huge—white marble. It looks different and I’m relieved. We sit on three wooden stools and your dad hands me a Corona with a lime wedged in the top. I think about the bottles of cheap liquor you and I used to sneak into the basement and smile.

“He was so close to graduating,” your mom says, flipping through a photo album someone made of you. The pages are brightly colored. She’s grinning, your mom, looking down at a picture of you posing on a sand dune, a wall of spiky grasses behind you. “He was majoring in Environmental Science.”

“That’s so cool,” I say, jarred by how little I know about your final years. I’d heard you transferred schools at some point but I couldn’t say where. Regardless, it feels good to see your face again. Your slanted smile framed by plump dimples, your squinty eyes and that wave of shaggy brown hair. In later pictures, a thin hemp necklace with a singular bead hugs your skin.

As we chat about the past, I can’t shake what The Rev mentioned earlier in our meeting. That you were home for spring break as well and passed away upstairs. That your mom found you cold in your childhood bed.

You had a bad heart, she tells me now. I don’t ask her to elaborate. Instead, I think about your American Idiot hoodie for the first time since sixth grade. Specifically that heart-shaped grenade and the firecracker you once launched into the air above my head.

After I say goodbye, I decide to drive the long way around your block, spotting a bench in the same place we once fired that pistol years ago. It’s rooted on the edge of the pond, overlooking an island of water lilies. The metal bench reflects the afternoon sunlight in sharp unmoving bursts. I stop the car and get out. There’s an inscription dedicated to you, it’s carved into a sign hanging on a tree branch: “Buddy’s Bench. To all of those who find joy in nature.”

Days before we start high school, my family invites you to stay with us at a rental cottage on the Connecticut shore. The cottage is over a century old, a house of wooden beams, creaking floors, and countless ghost stories. You arrive at night.

As your mom backs out of the driveway, I motion for you to drop your bag and follow me down the hall.

In the screen porch on the back of the house I unhinge a painted clasp between two warped windows and push them open. A cool breeze hits our faces as smells of salt and beachgrass seize the room.

You look out. It’s all water, but you don’t see it yet. An endless black ocean. Your eyes are still adjusting. A glowing strip of foam rises and falls, a small wave breaks on the shore, and I watch the whites of your eyes expand. In a soft voice, you say, “Woah.”

I’m in my thirties now and I’m still dreaming of you. It happened again the other night.

This time, we’re at a community college in Santa Monica. It’s my first time in California. As I pass the campus on the way to the beach, I notice someone in a Quicksilver hoodie walking between classes. It looks just like you. I know you’ve been dead for a decade, but I spend the rest of my vacation following the student around. Tracking him like a private eye.

My suspicions are correct! It’s you. You’ve been out here this whole time. Alive.

Feeling deceived, I confront you. You explain that you had no other choice. A life-changing opportunity arose, your mom sent you to California and covered everything up back home after you left town. This was for the best.

You’re an adult now, but your eyes contain the same spirit of your old kid self. I believe you.

Boarding my flight back to New York I feel a genuine comfort in knowing that I can come back and see you whenever I want.

When I wake up, I know that much is true.

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Our old stereo now lives in a 70s-style wet bar.

As I drag the chairs in from off the balcony and slam the screen door, my dad slides a remastered version of Led Zeppelin from its crisp new sleeve, placing it gently on the turntable.

I watch his hands as they remember the mechanics of the task, a past ritual.

It’s the summer of 2014 and Zeppelin’s septuagenarian guitar god Jimmy Page is in the process of remastering the band’s entire catalog from the original analog tapes.

Over the next few years, Page, who believed Zeppelin MP3s sounded “ridiculous,” will reissue new mixes on vinyl with original cover art and sleeve designs, as well as deluxe editions featuring live concert recordings from back in the day.

Like holographic Pokemon cards, these vinyl releases will all be marked with a small silver sticker depicting the mythological angel Icarus writhing in pain after he flew too close to the sun. It’s a symbol the band enacted in 1974 for their own record label, Swan Song Records.

By sending these refurbished recordings out into the world, Page is rehashing a vintage pastime. He’s stoking excitement in the aging hearts of OG fans (including his own), while also trying to bond with a new generation.

And, in a way, my dad’s doing the same.

In the 1970s, my grandfather donated my dad’s record collection to the Salvation Army when he was away at college. Sometimes I dream of those albums drifting around out there in record stores and on other people’s shelves, maybe even on mine.

But now, for the first time in over 30 years, my dad is rebuilding his collection. This decision draws a direct link between the two of us, and essentially becomes a lifeline during a dark time.

I’m already a few years into collecting records, Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy being my first.

Throughout the second half of high school I’d amassed a short stack of vinyl — old and new — which I lugged up to college in a transparent purple IKEA cubby covered in skate stickers and played for curious homesick freshman like myself.

By the time I was done with finals and prepping to move back home for the summer, I noticed that my collection had magically expanded. Random stops at local flea markets and thrift stores resulted in a row of multicolored spines running along the top of my dresser, bookended by the foot of my bed and my roommate’s microwave.

But while I was away at school, accumulating records, my parents were seven hours south finalizing their divorce, dividing up their belongings, and shedding nonessential possessions for open-houses and an imminent move.

Being back in my hometown without my home is strange.

My mom rented a room for us in a hotel across town where I live out of a suitcase and sleep on a pull-out couch. You could say I have a newfound appreciation for my old house, but unlike the “Overview Effect” that orbiting astronauts experience when viewing Earth from thousands of miles away, my emotions manifest in a desperate nostalgia that will ebb and flow for years.

If my dad is trying to lure me to his one-bedroom apartment with the new turntable he picked up from Best Buy, it’s working. And thank god. The most grounded I’ll feel all summer may be in front of this stereo, the two of us sharing a pizza from Harry, spinning records.

When the needle drops on Led Zeppelin, the speakers let out a warm nostalgic fuzz. My dad and I sink into our seats.

The patio chairs, which for years lived in my family’s backyard, are a crisscross of plastic strips that imprint Xs on our backs and thighs. Our bare feet sweat into the new wall-to-wall carpeting.

“Why don’t you go grab us a coupla beers?” he says, looking over at me.

I can’t tell if I hear correctly.

“Beers?”

“Yeah, there’s a case of Sam Summer in the fridge.”

I try to act cool, but this is a first for us. I’m still a few years from 21 and we’ve yet to crack the cap off the formative-father-son-drinking-together-experience.

“Sure thing, dawg.” (Sometimes we call each other dawg.)

As I make my way toward the kitchen, two power chords ring out through the brightly lit apartment. John Bonham’s drums build as Robert Plant’s banshee vocals emerge, high-pitched and defiant, ricocheting off the bare walls.

My father sings along from his chair.

In the dayyyys of my youth
I was told what it was to be a man

His voice is soft, low, and in tune, just like it was when I was a child. He used to sit on the edge of my bed and croon “I’ve Been Working On the Railroad” until I fell asleep.

Now I’ve reached the age
I’ve tried to do all those things the best I cannnnn…

Good times, bad times
You know I had my share
When my woman left home with a brown-eyed man…

The apartment still smells like the last tenant, an octogenarian smoker whose death made way for oatmeal-colored carpeting, fresh paint and the lingering scent of a well-used ashtray. I wonder if the people who moved into our house can smell us too.

To get to the kitchen, I have to pass the long oak table my parents and I used to sit at every night for dinner. My dad also has the game chest Mom picked up on a family trip, and the two cream-colored club chairs with olive stripes that used to face the television.

A framed portrait of my grandfather as a younger man leans up against the wall.

I stare at it. His pale-pink face is clean-shaven, his dark hair combed neatly and parted down the side. Clear, focused eyes. A mirror image of my dad when I was young. Some mornings before school, before the sun was up, I’d catch a glimpse of him in the hallway, glistening and professional and ready for work.

Dad stops singing, yells over the music. “Yo! Ya get lost?”

“One sec!”

The kitchen is a large empty room wrapped in metallic gift-wrap wallpaper, as if duct tape has been pulled taught and applied in perfect diagonals. The fridge purrs. I open the door and the amber bottles inside shimmer in the empty white light.

Aside from a case of beer, there’s nothing but condiments. A tube of French’s yellow mustard, Heinz ketchup, and a little thing of Tabasco with a red crust lining the crease in the cap.

When I was a kid and something was lost, my dad would tell me the same thing: Think back to when you last had it. Retrace your steps.

We would do it together, marching up and down the house in search of sunglasses and keys, CDs and action figures. And after a while, there it’d be, the missing object flattened beneath couch cushions or wedged deep within a jacket pocket, somehow still intact and back in my palm.

But this practical act of search-and-rescue no longer seems to work. I’m not interested in finding a lost object. I’m searching for a moment in time. A whole era that has tragically disappeared.

Until I left for college, it was my job to set the sonic tone for dinner. I’d sift through our family’s CD collection, located in a cabinet underneath the TV, and load a spontaneous assortment into the disc changer: Rom-com soundtracks, classic rock anthems, Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Greatest Hits, Haddaway’s “What Is Love” — the mix would drift out while we ate and chatted about our days.

Now I can’t remember when we’d divided up the hundreds of CDs. Packing up the house was a dizzy gray-blue blur. My stack now lives in the backseat of my car, I know that, and my dad’s assortment is displayed above the turntable in a neat row, drawing, for the first time, a clear distinction between what has always been his and what hasn’t.

Unfortunately, in my quest to reclaim a life that is melting away, a time when our belongings — the CDs, the speakers, the furniture — are all together under one roof, I’d found something that only beckons more questions.

Cracking the cap off our first father-son brewski, I can’t tell if I should bring it up. My discovery: two wads of cash. Crisp pale-green paper asphyxiated by thin rubber bands, stuffed into my dad’s sock drawer.

A historically predictable engineer, my dad has grown mysterious, forfeiting his 9pm bedtime for a nightlife I’ve imagined from the mattress set up against his living-room wall. One night, when nothing convincing materialized, I became squirrely and started opening drawers.

The bills felt like lead weights, hundreds lining the outside of each roll. Theories multiplied. Dad’s double lives.

But I still can’t figure out how to ask about the money and won’t for years to come. At this point, it all feels too exhausting. I want to know the truth, but I’m not ready to try.

So the two of us raise our bottles and cheers. To a new ritual. A temporary way of life.

Seated in front of the record player, drinking slowly, we sing the final verse of “Good Times, Bad Times” in our heads (Sure do wish I was at home…) and fixate on the album cover — a doomed German blimp bursting into flames.

For the next 42 minutes, my dad and I enjoy ourselves, listening to the songs we already know.

Listen to “Good Times, Bad Times” here:)

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All Aboard

Decades before Ozzy Osbourne became the Prince of Darkness, my grandfather was drunk in a warm living room shouting Alllllll ABOARRRRD while his daughters, tucked into bed upstairs, tried to sleep.

“It was always a late night thing, the cocktails were big-time and he would get those train sounds going at full volume,” my mom tells me over the phone. “It sounded like the house was coming down.”

During the parties her parents would throw in the 1960s, this was my grandfather’s shtick. A devoted train enthusiast, Sturman (or “Sturm” to his friends) would drift toward the turntable with a gin martini and a vinyl record, ready to crank the volume for his unsuspecting guests.

“He’d pretend that you were really there, on the railroad,” my aunt says. “I think it drove Mom crazy.”

At the time, my aunt Robin thought it was bizarre that her father’s record collection was filled with chuggachuggas and choochoos, while her friends’ dads were spinning Dean Martin and Louis Armstrong.

Now, five years older than her father ever was, Robin finds herself searching YouTube for train sounds late at night. Videos that loop for hours so she can relax and finally get some sleep.

Introductions

I’ve never met my grandfather. He died in 1991, three years before I was born.

But I do remember wearing his pin-striped train cap around our house as a kid. The rigid canvas scratched my scalp, and a long floppy brim blocked my eye line as I slid down our basement stairs in clean white socks.

I remember the stark black-and-white-ness of that hat; I thought it looked punk-rock, loosely resembling the bleak color palette of posters pinned up to my bedroom wall — Green Day, Avril Lavigne, pages ripped from TransWorld skate mags.

Sturm wouldn’t know any of these references. However, he was up there, too, or at least his art was.

Even though they weren’t my style, two train cars he’d painted hung above my childhood bed for years. I think my mom wanted to introduce him to me somehow, sneaking in a sign that her father and I were linked despite the circumstances.

“He would have loved you,” she used to say. “He always treated me like the boy he never had.”

Now, living in an apartment in a different city, Sturm’s paintings are back up above my bed. Two idyllic midday landscapes marked by alternate versions of his signature, as if at the time of painting, he was still trying to hash out his identity.

Sharing the wall is another one of his.

A photograph we uncovered after my grandma died in 2020. A blown out black-and-white image of an unidentified hulking soot-coated steam engine beaming its headlight through a dark foggy night.

For the past five years, I’ve imagined my grandfather taking this photo. Standing on the wet cement platform, alone, the cool metal of his camera pressed to his cheek, the mechanized heartbeat of the resting metal beast humming through the soles of his shoes.

Legacy

Almost everything I grew up learning about my grandfather was shrouded in a similar darkness. His legacy was spotted by unfortunate facts passed down by the people who loved him most.

Failing the physical for the WWII draft; dreams of becoming an artist squandered by a life in corporate sales; money problems; driving around with a trunk full of empty gin bottles; jaundice and liver failure; and the unfiltered Camel cigarettes — four packs a day for 40 years — that eventually killed him at 65.

My grandmother, Lydia, who I could talk to about anything, was an expert at avoiding questions regarding her late husband. I never pushed it.

But all these years later, Sturm’s love of trains — by far the most enthusiastic sign of his existence — has expanded into something more.

Oddly enough, it began when I mentioned SNL-graduate Fred Armisen’s new record, 100 Sound Effects — a quirky nod to the rich history of broadcast sound-making — to my dad.

“You know your grandfather used to play train sounds on vinyl, right?”

The question prompted me to call my aunt and my mom. They’re not sure what specific records he had. Perhaps Rail Dynamics (1952), or Whistling Thru Dixie (1961), Steam On The Horseshoe Curve (1961), or even Interurban Memories (1961).

But the idea that he collected them and played them leads me to believe Sturm might have been happier as a train conductor than a salesman.

In The Field

These kinds of records were meant to immerse the listener not only in the sonic atmosphere of a rail yard or train car, but in an actual historic moment. While sound effects vinyls were born from 1930s radio via superficial sound design — like shooting blanks off by a microphone to signify a murder during a live story broadcast — others were true field recordings.

Each track on the Interurban Memories album, for example, contains sounds from an actual train trip, whether it’s January 4th, 1959, riding along California’s “Whistle Alley” with the “wild harmonics” of blimps flying up above; or the sound of “wigwag bells” and “auto horns” from a classic 1920s train car cruising down Hollywood Boulevard on November 1st, 1959 at 1:15PM.

Instead of creating fictional worlds, these records showcased the real world at a precise time. These moments would forever be lost without someone’s effort to preserve them on wax.

Daily Entries

This idea, that you could play back the sounds of an everyday moment on vinyl eventually pushed me to research my grandfather’s life by immersing myself in another kind of record.

Three of Sturm’s journals have been sitting on my shelf for years, but I’d never felt the need to go through them until now.

I started in 1976. When Robin was at Russell Sage College in Troy, NY and my mom was a senior in high school, driving around town in the family’s broken-down Ford LTD. I can picture the house from being there as a kid, but I’m forced to reassess it in a different era, through another man’s perspective: Returning from the office at noon for lunch, then again around 5:15pm for cocktails and supper, grateful to be in the warmth of his home with his family, already dreading the next day of work.

On the page, Sturm cried when the family cat, Archie, died. He called his sister’s husband Glenn for $1,000 so he could keep his daughter Robin in school. He drove down to the local train station for updated Amtrak timetables before a big trip.

Train Dreams

Reading my grandfather’s journals reminded me of Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, a mesmerizing novella documenting the lonesome, tragic and curious life of a day laborer named Robert Grainier in the depths of early 20th century Idaho.

After a disturbing scene in which a gang of railroad workers attacks a Chinese immigrant on the Idaho panhandle, the book follows Grainier’s trip through time. Eventually, what’s real becomes blurred by what haunts him, with forgotten memories sparking up from the fire of his uncertain past.

“Now he slept soundly through the nights, and often he dreamed of trains, and often of one particular train: He was on it; he could smell the coal smoke; a world went by.

And then he was standing in that world as the sound of the train died away. A frail familiarity in these scenes hinted to him that they came from his childhood. Sometimes he woke to hear the Spokane International fading up the valley and realized he’d been hearing the locomotive as he dreamed.”

In the story, trains resemble Westward expansion and the settling of “Frontier America,” but more so, they embody the steady, unstoppable motion of time.

Following Grainier’s observations, his molasses grit and undying routine, felt like following my grandpa through the yellowing pages of his black leather-bound journals.

Daily entries give way to an atmosphere made up of palpable repetition: Breakfast, drive to work, drive home for lunch, drive back to work, drive home for cocktails, supper, Johnny Carson, writing, sleep. The image of a grown man in another time reflecting on his day-to-day grind. “What a day—Shit!”

Like Grainier, I think Sturman aimed to keep his labor and his identity separate. He cherished being home, describing every meal as delicious — “most delightful steak dinner”; “(Spaghetti extremely good)” — and naming the love he had for his family, as well as his sadness when they were gone — “I’m really going to miss Wendy this weekend.”

And like Grainier, who blamed himself for not saving his family from a forest fire, Sturm plainly states his blunders, his exhaustion, his fears, his leisure, his inability to manifest solutions to some of life’s worst challenges.

Through that daily exercise, though, his voice — a voice I’ve never actually heard — begins to shine.

No one in my family had ever mentioned Sturm’s urge to write everything down. This act alone presents a fresh lens through which to view him and his decision to record personal, mundane events.

Related

Well-recorded mundanity is what I’ve always strived for in my own journal.

For the past 10 years I’ve been recording what I see every day, as well. Without any knowledge that maybe Sturm passed this urge along.

I do wonder if our urge is the same. My entries have no real page limits like his, and I get into my feelings, insufferably at times — he did not. But I’d guess our urge to record the day is more about a means to slow the unstoppable motion of life for just long enough to feel grateful and move on. To be able to start the next day without the last one weighing us down. I guess one might call it a coping mechanism.

In Your Image

Another reason I was inclined to finally pick up Sturm’s journals was because of the photos my mom’s been sending me. See for yourself:

Her father as a boy in 1938.

Posing in 1942 on the day of his junior high graduation.

Or posing that same year, in a bush.

Or a few years later in the local newspaper, alongside fellow actor Barbara E. Morris for the high school play.

Or with my mom and Lydia (looking totally fed up) while holding Archie the cat and a cigarette.

Or Sturm and Lydia posing in middle age (and color) — my grandmother in a pink checkered dress, Sturm in a navy blazer, his thick eyebrows raised an inch from his smiling face, his sister’s painting of a waterfall above the model train set lined up on the fireplace mantel.

That painting also lives in my room now, resting on two little nails, unframed.

My favorite photo though is of my grandfather lying back on the beach, in pressed slacks, his shirt off, shades on, smiling, propping a to-go martini against his bare stomach.

When I showed my friends this photo they said they saw me in it. Which made me buzz, because I saw myself in it too. The same hairline, sure, but also a personal essence, a part of who I am.

That said, I’m plagued by a fear of following Sturm’s path. I have been since I was young. Failing to realize I’ve forfeited my essence before it’s too late, shadowed by shame, drinking too much, drowning.

But now I can see that his is a cautionary tale written in full. A warning, a screeching train whistle. And for that I’m thankful.

An End

So far, my favorite line in his journals ends an entry on Wednesday, January 21st, 1976:

“Had a drink and then a delightful ‘Roast Lamb’ dinner. The snow coming down hard as I write.”

It’s the only time I’m truly able to picture him alone, writing.

I wish I had found some of Sturm’s old railroad records in my grandmother’s attic. I would have played them at parties, too, in Ridgewood, Queens. Shouting Alllll ABOOARDDD to an unsuspecting crowd and the twenty-somethings who live downstairs.

Instead, I break out the records passed down from my aunt and mom, stuff from when they were still teens — Saturday Night Fever, Earth Wind & Fire (probably more party-appropriate).

I’m sure Sturm heard these albums through the floorboards, too, booming from his daughters’ shared bedroom while he sat on the living room couch, by the fireplace or picture window, legs crossed, sipping a drink, fanning through the Hartford Courant, listening and knowing he’ll write it all down later.

I can see it so clearly.

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