Thoughts of Ionesco frontman Sean Madigan Hoen has written his first book, Songs Only You Know: A Memoir for Soho Press.
Songs Only You Know: A Memoir plunges the reader into Detroit’s hardcore punk scene with eighteen-year-old Sean and spans a dark decade during which his father succumbs to crack addiction, his younger sister spirals into a fatal depression, and his sense of home crumbles. Sean’s salvation is music, and the many eccentrics and outsiders he befriends as frontman of Thoughts of Ionesco, a band referred to by Spin as “an art-core mindfuck.”
Sean’s prose whips from mordantly funny to searingly honest while offering an unflinching look at a family in crisis, low-rent music subculture, and the hard-earned identity of its author. A story of young manhood that deserves a place alongside Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life and Nick Flynn’s Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Songs Only You Know is a beautiful, devastating exploration of family, friends, and one young man’s musical dream. It marks the arrival of a fiercely original literary voice.
And we’ve got an excerpt for you! Check it out after the jump!
A July night, right around 2:00 a.m., I exited the Lager House with a shot of last-call whiskey I’d poured into a can of Pabst. The Lager was a hipster hovel on the Detroit end of Michigan Avenue, into which I’d ventured after a local gig that had gone especially well. People singing the words, shaking their bottles at us during the good parts—the better the band played, the more I believed I deserved a heavy bout of drinking. Our best shows, like tonight’s, made me feel immune to consequences or convinced me that my life’s recent accretion of consequences were what inspired me to perform well in the first place.
I’d closed out the bar, waited for the lights to snap on, the bartender blowing a whistle once the stereo clapped off. Always a sad instant.
A gang had assembled in the Lager House parking lot. Musicians and music types lighting bottle rockets as radios blared from cars, a change of station as you passed each ride. Tiger Stadium’s abandoned shell rose to the west, the upper deck a dark slab stamped into the ozone. The spirits were really just beginning.
“After-party,” said a guy named Jimmy Bang-Bang: Keith Richards–on–punk, shirtless, two-foot exclamation point tattooed over his spine. “You.” He jabbed a finger my way. “You’re coming with us.” But I waved him off with my drink and boarded my station wagon, a blue, four-door grocery-getter I’d financed with money my dad had left behind. The bar’s exterior lights snapped off as I nudged through the crowd, pumping the brakes. People howled, slapped their hands against the hood.
I recognized every face and tattooed limb. I saluted a voice that rose above the rest to shout, “Adios, motherfucker.”Then a hard right onto Michigan Ave.
Which at that hour was a strip enchanted by the truest night creatures, those for whom the sunrise, if they saw it, meant only that they’d yet to succeed in obliterating their souls. A haunted place. The car seemed to descend into it as I headed west over Fisher Freeway: chewed-up storefronts and parades of hookers in sequined miniskirts, many of them so crack atrophied and gnarled you couldn’t imagine a letch on earth taking his chances. One of their hubs was an abandoned Mobil station, a mile or so from the Dearborn city limits. Another flock congregated at a self-serve car wash to use the cement wash bays like showrooms for the miracles they were selling.
Michigan Avenue from Braden to Schaefer, 2:15 a.m.
Nights like this, I’d undertaken a personal business with the territory. Once I was driving alone, I couldn’t solve the terror I felt about returning to my bedroom, knowing I’d awake the next morning to crap blood and shiver until the coffee was ready. My only alternative seemed to be the outer-limits, people and places whose sadness might demolish my own. More than once, I’d given a woman twenty bucks to drive around with me, thinking she’d be relieved to sit and talk, taking it personally when she seemed annoyed by my misuse of her speeding minutes. “You done now?” they’d say. “I ain’t gonna drive around all night. I’ve got money to make.” I’d come on too fast, asking where they came from, thinking I’d convince them there were decent men left on the planet. They’d say, “You wanna party or not?” They’d say, “Where you been? What you on?” And I’d say, “Drinking,” and they’d say, “That’s all? You sure that’s all?”
What I’d wanted from them I will never fully understand. There were traces of someone in their eyes, of people who’d been smoked out, until canceling themselves became the only means to get what they so awfully needed. Twitching, frenzied zombies hungry for one thing. They seemed absolute. Nothing in them could be reduced any further; the next change would be death. Sitting beside a woman like that, I’d know it could have been me, any of us, had the scripts been switched, had we been born there, in a hood where wild dogs had run off the postal service and the schools were patrolled by cops. Every one of those spirits was out hounding for crack—the coals beneath the night streets, the lifeblood of those moonlit hours.
A couple miles west of the Lager House, I turned down the stereo and pulled into the deserted Mobil station. The sign had been burned along with everything else, but you could still make out the name. Two women approached before I’d come fully to a stop. They always waved and peered through the windows, taking a good look at every visible surface before they got in. They smiled, giddy. I looked like a softy compared with most of what they saw.
“You gonna pay twice,” the heftier and older of the women said.
And I said, “Yeah, all right,” as they swung open the doors and squirmed into the car. I’d driven my equipment to and from the show. The back of the station wagon was packed with guitars and amplifiers. Instrument cables were strewn across the seats.
“The fuck is this?” said the skinny one, who’d claimed the backseat.
She held up the knotted end of a twenty-inch power cord as the jowled, magenta-lipped woman beside me said, “Yeah, fuck’s that shit?” They were black women, dressed in shimmering plasticlike costumes with feathery scarves and rattling necklaces.
“It’s for music,” I said. “You plug them into instruments.” All those psychos, who beat and strangled these women—I wasn’t thinking about the grave hazards of their trade. The car was headed east for no reason at all.
“You wanna hear my band?” I said.
I slid our CD into the stereo and let it play, feeling an unfamiliar shame as the woman beside me mocked our white grooves, saying, “Lord, we got us a Beatle here.”
There might have been a girl at the show who’d have let me sleep it off in her bed, someone petite and confused, tattooed with skulls and vines. There’d have been breakfast in the morning, her roommate sulking bedheaded into the kitchen for a glass of tap water. Then I’d have to face her again, the undesirable closeness of having known each other’s lonely bodies, all the while worrying that Angela might somehow find out. I wanted no part of it, even if I did.
“We gonna party?” said the woman, turning to face me.
Flesh sagged mottled and coral-like from her cheeks. Stripes of blue makeup were drawn over her eyes. She looked like she’d been working that rodeo for years and didn’t have much time left before she’d have to come up with something else. She was truly excited.
“Party or what?” she said.
I knew I was rounding a corner when I said, “Yeah.” I had fifty, sixty bucks in my pocket. Said I was looking for cocaine, like I couldn’t have found that elsewhere.
“He wants powder,” the fat one said, instructing me to turn here and there, until we pulled up to a house, the front window of which cast the only light on the block.
“You got money, blondie?” she said, and I forked over what I had.
I was hoping she’d rip me off or that some unforeseeable coercion would extinguish the night, because I wasn’t about to turn back. I didn’t know what I was after but could feel myself drawing near.
She strutted up the porch. The girl in the back spent the minutes glancing around my car at the road cases and instruments. I’d yet to really see her face, only the glint of her eyes in the rearview, staring out from that dark space. I was afraid of her. She could have reached from behind and cut my throat if she’d wanted.
“You know this place?” I said.
And she said, “Yeah, I know it,” like the refrain of some old song.
When the older, fat one returned to the car, she began speaking to her backseat accomplice, using a tongue I’d never heard—rapid, rat-a-tat syllables. The only bit I made out was the girl in back saying, “Don’t you go gettin’ me in trouble, girl,” her tone gleefully announcing that we were already there: trouble.
They sensed my fear, knew every inch of this transgression.
“Drive, baby,” the fat one told me, exposing a miniature Baggie of teeth-sized crack rocks. “They ain’t got no powder,” she said, “but this’ll do, this’ll do.” She quickly packed a rock into a stem, acting with the instinctive certainty of a squirrel working the seed from an acorn, lighting up, passing the cylindrical pipe to her friend, who said, “Aw, girl.” She held a deep inhalation that kept her silent for what seemed minutes before she barked out a sound part laughter and part wheeze. “Mmmmm, fuck.”
I drove up and down vacated side streets as they traded hits, sighing upon exhale. None of us cared where we were going. We all knew they were playing me, that this was the easiest cruise they’d taken in years. At a stop sign, deep into a shredded neighborhood, the woman beside me said, “You want some a this?” She took the flame to the glass nozzle, breathed in a long hit, and pulled my face to her lips, exhaling what was left into my mouth, which I breathed in, all the way, as far inside as it would carry.
Nothing miraculous—that first hit. Just a rush to my head while I asked myself, Is this it? How it feels? I was tired of everything, too drunk to ascend, to think of my father, how many early mornings he’d lived right here, where I was. It was the smell, mostly. A chemical stench filling up the car. We took the backstreets, doing the same thing awhile longer, until we’d run out.
They all crossed my mind during those late-night drives, the people who’d have wept at the sight of me cruising, dead to myself, steering with my knee. There wasn’t usually a street girl beside me.
Mostly, I drove alone. Pulling to the Dearborn limits, turning around, swooping back for another glimpse until the sun became an undeniable fact, urging me home as the real world emerged: School buses and fresh-faced citizens in cars, the sweet lard aroma of doughnut shops. The morning’s paper stacked in metal boxes. All of it seeming to exist for the uncertain purpose of some allegory that was happening inside me.
That’s when I’d wonder if Caitlin and my dad were witnessing me from another plane, where everything had already happened. I’d talk to them, imagine them out there, but never at the same time. I’d speak to one and then the other, as though they hovered at two different places in the sky, each of them looking down alone, which said everything about my inability to piece this all together.
But I thought they knew my fate, every moment about to unfold. They knew you could leave this world in a black cloud and that sooner or later everyone you knew would follow, and then it would be over. But that’s not what they saw for me, not what they wanted. Returning home, I’d creep through the side door, cranking on the box fans and sliding onto my parents’ old bed—one thing I’d salvaged and kept for myself.
When I told the women I was out of money, they directed me to another house where the slender one in the backseat went inside to see a man. She was in there a little while, long enough for me to know what was going on.
“I want to drive this car straight through that place,” I said. “This sick place.”
Rage was passing through in jolts, quick revulsions that felt superhuman.
“Now what are you talking?” said the woman beside me, sitting shotgun—Angela’s seat, Will’s seat. She slapped my shoulder, “Don’t be fuckin’ around here.”
“I’ll drive this thing straight to hell,” I said.
My head swelled, congesting with heat. There were jaws inside it, clamping down. I didn’t feel good, but I wanted more of whatever I’d had. I’d been experiencing it without comprehending it: the brain swirl and my tingling windpipe, a mind speed that smashed each thought violently into the next. Was this my father’s abyss? I understood it only to the extent that I ached for another breath of smoke.
Not much later, the other woman came out in a rush and injected herself into the backseat.
“Aw, what you get?” the old one said as her bony friend presented a new, minuscule sack of drugs. She took it. “We gotta smoke this now,” she said, “this boy here’s gettin’ all suicide on me.”
The rage had passed; I felt nothing.
The woman in back said, “You always getting me in trouble,” as the one next to me packed the next hit, saying, “You first, baby. You earned it.”
When that ran out, they asked to be dropped off at the busted corner where I’d found them. But I couldn’t fathom them leaving me alone, just like that, to carry on with my life.
“We’ll go cash a check,” I said.
“Shit,” one of them said. “Motherfucker wants to cash his check.”
I crossed the Dearborn line and pulled up to a twenty-four-hour grocery store I’d been coming to since I was a child. Caitlin and I had picked cereal boxes off its shelves, bought plastic trinkets from quarter machines at the entrance.
The older woman took my arm in hers as the three of us crossed the parking lot. I was protecting them, now, vouching for their souls as we entered the grocer’s neon jaw. The bright light of the store made apples gleam while revealing the scanty dreadfulness of my companions’ costumes, the bruises on the dark skin of their exposed legs and the grime on their clacking heels. We weren’t dangerous. I knew what we were—the most pitiful beings breathing in that particular time and place.
“Get whatever you want,” I said.
The ladies went on a spree, throwing liters of cola and potato chips and lipstick tubes and sanitary napkins into a shopping cart. The woman who’d sat in the backseat never looked me in the face, never smiled. Twenty-five, thirty-five—she had such power of experience it was impossible to guess her age. Her scorn was valid. She was onto me, knew I was a tourist in their world. The older one squealed and danced toward each item, saying, “Oh, I like this,” before tearing it from the shelf.
When they’d finished, there were enough provisions in the cart to feed my band for weeks. I wrote a check as the fat one rubbed up on my thigh, sickening me in every way, but I wasn’t about to offend her now that we’d come so far. The cashier, whom I’d seen so many nights working the graveyard shift, didn’t look at me. She never had and never would. If only she’d seen me earlier that night, playing for my life—the music, the music, the music—I’d have made perfect sense.
I got a twenty-spot for writing over the check, and we drove downtown for the last bit of crack. We’d yet to finish sucking clean the small rock when an eerie narcotic undertow made me instantly suspicious of a plan to kill me.
Told me I had to act fast, go mental.
White devil. Pale white crazy devil boy.
“Out of the car!” I yelled it. Slammed the brakes hard enough that both of them had to collect their minds before anything else happened. When they didn’t open the doors, I jabbed my knuckles between my teeth and bit. I’d chewed up my tongue in a drug fit, could feel it wagging like a sponge. My neck felt wrenched in a vise, and my chest banged. I’d never wanted a beer more than I did then, though I knew it would do no good. The velocity of crack, the Technicolor glow of the grocery store—it had spun me into a void, of which I’d suddenly located the center. An instantaneous sobriety. I’d known that to happen: a brutal clarity shining forth like a planet at the end of a binge. Suddenly all the liquor in the world could no longer alter the mean truth of the here and now.
“Hold it, honey,” the older one said. “That shit’ll creep on you. It’s creeping on you.”
The possibility of this moment lasting a breath longer sent me into a clenched-fist panic. “Get outta here,” I said. “You’d kill me for nothing, both of you.” And I knew—they knew—that I was putting them on.
“We cool,” the old one said. “We cool.”
They scattered to the street, laughing, lugging their plastic sacks. It was a mile walk through the trenches to the burned-out Mobil station. And I yelled through the closed windows, from inside that stove of gray smoke, “I hope you got what you wanted,” which was the thing I’d feel the worst about, years later, once that night seemed to have finally ended.
All the while the CD of my band’s music had been spinning. It was only after they’d gone that I realized it. The melodies, the sound of my warbling voice, echoes from some life that awaited me whenever I next awoke. Maybe they weren’t much, our songs, but they carried me home through Dearborn’s unsuspecting morning. Through the side door of the house and up into bed.
