"sweet emotion"
aerosmith
10 of 20
Ryan Hawthorne. Born September 17th, 1963 or maybe 1964. Brown eyes, blonde hair buckling to silvery gray. What he knows about his father he can fit on a notecard. That sometimes he laughs not because something is funny but because he is amazed at another person's ignorance. He knows that he is prone to scratching his left ear with his right hand when he's caught in a lie. That he abstains from most sushi restaurants because in Tokyo he had some of the best there is. Joey knows too that he is fucking his twenty-three year old secretary. A bobblehead named Chloe who reads Mary Higgins Clark obsessively. Who is less than a footnote in his father's little black book and will likely never get that grad school assistance she was promised. Because Ryan Hawthorne does not do holiday commitments and the calendar reads December already. Chloe's expiration date is here and if she doesn't get it now she will by Christmas Eve.
Things he does not know about his father: his favorite color, his biggest fear, what he wanted to be when he was seven, how he feels about Madonna getting it in with Tupac. He's fifteen and though he wonders a lot about this man who is like him but not like him he doesn't pry a lot. Ryan doesn't offer. And Joey is too cool and too aloof for interrogations. But somewhere in the airport limbo between Denver and Orlando Uncle John let's something slip.
"You were in a band?"
"He tried to be in a band. Had a guitar and used to strategically rip his jeans. What'd you call yourselves again? SpitBricks? All one word, capital B?"
Defensively, "It was a play on words. And we weren't that bad."
"They were worse."
"Terrible," Aunt Mirela laughs. "They had one original song. 'Life On the Turn of a Dime'."
"And they only covered three other ones."
"But mainly that one that goes: 'Some sweet talkin' mama with a face like a gent said my get up and go must a got up and went.'"
"I think you should sing it, Uncle Ryan." He and Rou are far more attentive than the rest of the group. Joey's even stopped harassing Marko for his phone.
"Yeah, dad. Sing it. Rockstars don't get stage fright, now's your time to shine."
And it's beautiful really. In a mostly abandoned airport terminal, severely uptight Ryan Hawthorne loosens his tie (metaphorically and physically) to unveil his inner Steve Tyler. Uncle John's right, of course. Whatever brief successes SpitBricks had could only have been due to the man's natural charm because he really is terrible. Just as tone deaf as Joey himself with no seeming understanding of rhythm or melody. Still, they clap in the end. They praise him with playful shouts of encore and quickly shut him down when he vows to sing Gloria Estefan.
Things he knows about his father: he likes his coffee with one spoonful of sugar, sometimes he claims he's getting another call to cut conversations short, he can bait a hook. Once he wore acid washed jeans, teased his hair and thought he could be as big as Aerosmith.
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