Part of A Larger Instance Collection, Currently Untitled
Ashley writes:
I remember driving to my aunt Karen's house thirty miles north and my dad popping in his Eric Clapton cassette tape. I remember when "Layla" came on, a song that I'd heard millions of times before thanks to him, but it suddenly meant something. Something about that guitar, that piano, those lyrics: "You got me on my knees, Layla, beggin' darlin' please, Layla." He sang along, my dad did, and you could tell he really felt it, really fucking felt it, when he was singing along, because it didn't even feel like he was driving, we were just coasting and floating and for some reason I understood that there was a terrible and beautiful and powerful and intense adult world that I knew nothing about. The fact was that that was the first time I ever realized that there was a world outside of my Beach Boys tapes.
And my parents had always had problems, you know, I always knew it. And I knew that my father had something so complicated about him that didn't allow him to love people right.
Over lunch two years ago, a good friend and I were talking about it. "Yeah," she said, "The woman he wrote that about was this chick Pattie Boyd, she was married to George Harrison. So, Eric Clapton met her when they were still married and fell in love with her and wrote it for her." "Wow," I remember saying, "That's amazing. I wish someone would write a song like that for me." She laughed a little and said, "Well, don't get too excited about it, because Eric Clapton and Pattie Boyd ended up getting married and then he got so fucked up on drugs and shit, and he had an affair, and left her."
And don't get me wrong, as far as I know my dad never had an affair, but something about that resonated with me.
I remember my dad looking over at me and saying that one day, "Now that's a real song, you know? A real fuckin' song. Don't make songs like that anymore." And then he took a drag off his cigarette and looked off into the distance ahead of us, in his own world. I remember him raising a hand to my mother, I remember him raising both of his hands to me.
I remember the amount of toys on Christmas multiplying exponentially based on how many bruises I had.
I remember the flowers he left for my mother after he called her a cunt and she stopped talking to him.
And I remember that one year, after he finally left, when I discovered his old box of cassette tapes in the attic and I put on "Layla" and I decided never to become that, never to become Layla.
