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Regular Angels
My brother is a pissed off, broken angel, all contour and shade under the lights, with an angular jaw and a mop of hair that lingers perpetually between haircuts. He shines from his altar, sweat glistening against his brown skin like diamond dust and waves of fourteen-year old girls break against the stage, reaching and crying for a handful of him. He spills over with pain, seeding it with guttural groans and sibilant screams, and they receive it and in them it blooms and changes and becomes beautiful.
As kids we take rockstar lessons from Rob Phaler, a local guitar hero who's prospects for fame outside of Boise, Idaho have long been buried under years of the prostitution of cover songs. He makes a living instructing over-privileged white kids whose parents pay him weekly stipends to reassure them that their progeny are prodigy. He smells of twenty years playing bars, and of the strong black coffee that softens the blow of morningafter upon morningafter. Out of the earshot of our parents, he calls us names, and when we haven't practised he rails at length against the injustice of two no-talents like us having beautiful new Fenders to play. My brother, he says, is hopeless. No ear and an ego the size of the Capital building. There is true wrath carved on my brother's soft child face as he crams his sheet music into his backpack and storms out of the studio, swearing in a color he's learned from our truck driver uncle. I, the peacemaker and ever so aware of the expense of our indenturement to Rob, mumble apologies and pack the guitars carefully, laying the straps across them in the cases like roses in caskets.
"Do any of you believe in love? Because I don't," The girls scream and the boys howl and my brother wails a high, splintered note. The microphone cord twines around his body, an electric serpent, as he dances wild, bouncing on the balls of his feet and whipping his six-foot frame back and forth.
The girl next door is actually the girl across the street in our PTA neighborhood two blocks from the high school. From our house, it appears that the distant spire of the Mormon temple rises directly from her roof. My brother rides his bike back and forth in front of her house bathed in the chilly slanted light of October.