There’s the time before a show in San Francisco, where we both wanted tacos and got caught up in that secondhand shop across town. Funk Police went on at 6. Spin Cycle at 7:30. Plenty of time for us to explore the city hand in hand, feeling the electricity of a new connection. It’s June. The air’s clear. It’s 65 degrees and sunny. I’m in jean shorts and sandals. Brett’s wearing bermuda shorts and a ripped shirt. He’s saving his Booger shirt for later. We’re trying to let loose and end up looking like a cute couple.

When it’s that easy, you tend to not think about these things. About him wiping the trolley seats clean before I sat down. About us holding hands effortlessly while passing a man in corduroy playing Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion” on a corner patio. About us standing bare-footed in cold ocean water overlooking the golden gate bridge while Brett asked me questions about my life up until that point, and about what was next after high school, and the tour, implying so sweetly that I was welcome for the rest of the ride. He was 29. I was 18.

That day we set out for the town and tacos. The tacos were at a food truck in a gas station parking lot. Recommendation from a guy Deacon knew. Fifty cents a taco and authentic. Double tortillas. Meat. Onions. Cilantro. Side of pickled jalapenos and carrots. Verde and red sauce. Greasy fingers and full bellies. We ate at a picnic table in the shade. Three Hispanic men ate at the same table. They wore jeans and long sleeve shirts covered in cement. Brett asked them for local recommendations to pass the afternoon. One of them joked he could help them pour a concrete driveway. They’re a man short and short on time. 

To his credit, he gave me a check-in look like, “What do you think?” But his mind was made up. Once his mind’s made up, good luck changing it. I was a tomboy growing up. Always in the dirt and fishing with my dad and uncles.

We end up riding in the back of their pick-up truck two miles to a residential community. The cement truck is already parked outside the house, giant drum spinning. Brett flips into brick mason mode. You know the story about your grandfathers. You come from a long line of brick masons, Fender. It could’ve stopped at your dad, but your uncle took the torch while Brett burned his at both ends on the concert circuit. It’s a surprise you didn’t take the mantle. You used to build the hell out of LEGO sets. I’m telling you stuff you already know. 

But you weren’t there that day before the show in San Francisco. The masons only had one extra pair of rubber boots, which Brett gave to me. I was on hose duty, washing out wheelbarrows and metal posts and shovels. He offered to screed the cement with the two by four, but they had him on wheelbarrow duty. One after another, pumped three quarters full of wet concrete and dumped at the far end of the driveway against the garage. His arms bulged, his face reddened, and he was so damn happy. There’s a world where he doesn’t become a global rock superstar. There’s no press and no platinum records and no navigating streaming rights. There’s no flameout and breakups and hearts broken over money and music. Hearts will always be broken, Fender. That’s the damn shame of it all. To live is to feel pain. To truly live is to learn the wisdom of what to do with that pain, and how to grow from it. Soul searching, going up and down highways, all over foreign lands, to find someone like you, ultimately makes it all worthwhile. I promise you, it’ll happen when the time is right. 

In that world, your father’s back hurts more. He walks with that hunched over limp your Grandpa Carradine has. But he’s happy running a business where he can drive around town and point to houses, to chimneys, to fireplaces, and say, “I made that.” Of course he can say that with his music, which came from love. But building a basement isn’t the same as writing a song, although sometimes they take as damn long.

Ha! We’re still over here finishing each other’s sentences.

We left the glistening driveway with clothes drenched from sweat and hose water. His face was speckled with cement spray. His shirt was covered in it. Rather than do the sensible thing and head to the hotel to shower and rest before the show, we took their recommendation to visit a local thrift shop three blocks away. We walked, laughing with the exhilaration of “That just happened!” The song “Gloria” played in my head, I recall, and I told him and we got sidetracked compiling an exhaustive list of songs that spelled out someone’s name. At the end of it, I put two fingers over his heart and said he could hold onto my love for the day. And then I kissed him. It was something my grandpa used to say to my grandma before tapping her blouse above her heart and kissing her on the forehead. 

The thrift shop was called Earnest Ernest. Blue awning and a working barber shop pole with the rotating red, white, and blue stripes. A separate sign above the pole read, “We don’t cut hair, but we do sell scissors.” You’ll see for yourself. We explored the shop, admiring a set of fine dishes my grandmother collected. I bought her a butter dish and a gravy boat, both impossible to find, especially during that time. Nowadays you can search for five minutes online and have it to your house in under a week, and sooner if you’re willing to pay.

Brett lost his mind over an autographed copy of Catcher in the Rye. The shop owner, still Earnest then – a gaunt Native American gentleman in a tweed jacket with elbow pads; he looked like a professor of antiquities – said you could trust its authenticity based solely on it being the only autographed copy he had ever come across. He found it at Shakespeare Book Company across from the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and had held onto it for fifteen years waiting for the right buyer. His price? $300. 

I had no idea how much money Spin Cycle made, but $300 was $300. Brett asked Earnest if he liked music. Earnest did. He asked him if he liked pseudo punk rock music.

“Never much cared for it, but my son says it’s a new way of thinking about the same ideas. What are you? Some sort of musician?”

“Something like that. I don’t have $300, but I do have something of similar or higher value.”

And thus Earnest and his son joined us backstage before the show. The encounter and exchange and cab ride back to the venue took long enough that Brett was late for the first and only time to soundcheck. The looks Deacon and Paul gave me when they saw the state of his outfit. 

There was no time to clean up. Brett went on stage in his shorts and ripped shirt. Fingers still caked with dry cement. Heather was taking photos of the band. She was good at sex, but better at photography. She runs a studio back in Michigan these days. Has three kids. Does weddings, senior pictures, a few scenery shots. She has a music section in her studio that includes the photo of Brett in his shorts with one leg kicking towards the audience, mic stand held to his left side, hair a whirl, two fingers held over his heart, his eyes looking to the side, to me. The number of times I’ve watched him sign that photo. Goodness. 

The rest of the tour was adventure after adventure, exploring street art and food in Austin, catching a day game for the Rangers in Dallas-Fort Worth, the band trying to eat Wintzell’s out of oysters in Mobile, leaving Fort Lauderdale looking like lobsters with seafood smiles, convincing the men of Spin Cycle that Les Miserables is art, too, in Charlotte, and on a rare night off when pipes burst at the venue in Roanoke, we took mushrooms and did a ghost tour that led to Larry curled up in his hotel bathtub, cold water from the shower beating down on him until he snapped out of it. What else?

…

Oh, yes, yes. Petty came to Jacksonville in July that year. He was everywhere, but Jacksonville on the 11th. Spin Cycle did a noon set on Saturday at the Rambler’s Fest, an event put on by what was his name? The guy who founded Bonnaroo. An early foray into the festival scene. Spin Cycle. Green Day. Nirvana. Bad Company. Cheap Trick. A who’s who I hadn’t seen before, but neither had the band. Your dad was used to meeting rock stars by then. Hell, he was one, too. That first festival scene you should’ve seen his face. So many nerves! He was okay meeting the up and comers like him. Billie Jo. Kurt. Dave Grohl. All kids learning to fly. Rick Nielsen put him on edge. Not because Rick was over the top or intimidating – at least I didn’t think – just that he was Rick Nielsen. He grew up in Rockford, Illinois, another midwestern boy like Brett. Talking about home helped calm Brett down. So did holding a guitar in his hands. Once the music started, the rest washed away. 

Then came the meet up Petty and the Heartbreakers. 

For a budding superstar, he sure got antsy waiting backstage to meet Petty. Have you ever seen your dad nervous, Fender? Most people haven’t. He’s a cool customer on the outside. Most things don’t rattle him. Meeting Tom Petty had him bouncing between feet like he was walking on lava. It was a week after Into the Great Wide Open was released. The band was listening to it on repeat. “Learning to Fly”. The title track. My favorite, “You and I Will Meet Again”. We already knew that album start to finish. 

Deacon did Deacon stuff to get us back there. He knew Jeff Lynne from studio work on the Xanadu soundtrack. He was six degrees of Kevin Bacon before Kevin Bacon. And there’s Brett Carradine, blushing and sweating and chewing his fingernails. Stan Lynch and Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench and Howie Epstein. You know the names. I don’t have to tell you. And Jeff. And then Tom. 

Paul was always too cool for school, carrying his ego around like a trophy he viewed as much bigger than it actually was. He assumed he was as good if not better than most musicians, so at worst he was equal with them, at best they were lucky he found the time to meet them. Larry’s secret was he never wanted to be a musician in the first place. He would’ve been just as happy lecturing a class on space time physics or running a restaurant. He loved music and appreciated all opportunities to hang out with the cool people creating it. Petty and the Heartbreakers lived up to the billing. 

“Spin Cycle as I live and breathe!” Tom hollered when they came off stage

“Helluva show,” Brett said, shaking their hands like a nervous nelly. Have you ever got so embarrassed by how nervous someone was acting? Like, they try to shake the person’s hand and mess up the handshake, trying to be too formal or too cool and end up doing a weird in between and the energy’s all off? That’s Brett Carradine meeting Tom Petty and his merry group of musicians.

You notice he hasn’t interrupted me. You reach a point in your life where all the stuff you did when you were younger is what it is and there’s nothing you can change about it other than appreciate that it happened. 

He did calm down. They connected about football and music videos, and a hotel hang ensued. Tom’s the reason they filmed the “Hatching Zombies” video in Gainesville. He knew someone at the University of Florida who got them access to the laboratories on campus. 

Millions of puppets

Hatched on the daily.

Public zombies

Forever forward failing.

I could sing that for days. I still do. It’s hard not to hum songs in the shower. Next time you’re on a date, Fender – and there will be dates, I promise, even though you think your world is over and your heart will never heal, there will be dates, with pretty girls who are interesting and hard-working and have the capacity to care so much for you that you’ll forget what the big deal was with your friend Laramie. Next time you’re on a date, ask her what music she likes and listen to it with all your heart. If love worked in a linear fashion, living would be a far less interesting place. 

Hatching zombies for a cause

Hatching zombies for us all

Hatching zombies galore

Run amok in every store. 

And there were more tours, and you joined for the not always kid-friendly fun. And when the music stopped for the band, our music stopped soon after. Minus that unreleased album they made that everyone talks about. Maybe you’ll find it on your trip. Not because we couldn’t exist without it, but because we were all living together for the last time without knowing it would be the last time. 

We were right for each other when the time was right. Until the time wasn’t right. He had a hard time understanding that. Maybe I did, too. What needs to happen is what needs to happen. I know this sounds vague and cliche, but if you’re lucky to live long enough, sleep in depressed holes and bask in sunshine on top of mountains, then you know it’s all true.

There are many interviews with your father showing up online these days. He gave a hell of an interview. Honest. Funny. Always too slow for most hosts but perfectly timed for audience reactions. On one with Letterman, which happened in 2003, after he released Solo for the Time Being, Dave asks him what happened in ‘95. Brett doesn’t sugar coat anything. But he does pause before speaking despite having been asked this question by many interviewers. This time, maybe because it was Dave being conversational and eliciting honesty, or because Brett was sick of recycling the same, “We were all ready for something new” or “Creative differences” answers, he said instead, “I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.”

Mike Schur had to have been watching that night. Or someone from his team. And that’s the story of your father. Always making an impact when he didn’t realize it. 

Of course, if you keep watching, after the audience goes awwwwww, and Dave taps his stack of papers on the desk, Brett says, “And you know what, Dave? I still miss her.” 

And Dave laughs and makes that teeth grinding pose, and says, “And by her, Brett, you of course mean the music?” 

And Brett shrugs and taps his heart with two fingers. 

I was watching that night because I never stopped watching. Live long enough to gain perspective, Fender. Only way to see if a bird returns if you let it fly away.

Sometimes the birds fly away and live happy lives with other birds. And sometimes, like in our case, you were characters in the same book all along. It just took years to realize other chapters had to be written before you could be reunited. Someone once told me, ‘You can’t make new old friends.’ And I disagree. Every now and then you meet a person you instantly feel like you’ve known your whole life.

The package I sent you includes a letter from your dad. The envelope is the same one he used for his suicide note three years ago. That’s when things started to fade on him. He knew just enough to know his mind was going. He panicked one night and ate pills and penned a letter to me and you. I saved him and took him to the hospital, but burned the letter. That was his lowest. Even the old can get scared. But he bounced back and wouldn’t stop talk about you. It’s never so bad that your life isn’t worth living. 

Thanks for listening, Fender. My voice is sore, but it was worth it. Enjoy the rest of your visits. There are many stories about your father, as there are many stories from your life already. Consider yours and don’t let the emotions overwhelm you. We’re all on the path we’re meant to be. Safe travels. Love from us both.