BedTyme Stories
About the time my daughter gets engaged, Tim’s father dies. Tim calls and asks me to visit him at his new studio. He says he could use some encouragement. Hearing a hesitation birthed in my growing isolation, he adds: Dude, the studio is right next to a porn store.
How could I say No to the guy who makes me can’t-catch-my breath laugh? Just like with his music, Tim riffs on stories, like the one where he accidentally sees his grandfather’s scrotum as a 4-year-old. It was drooping all the way to the floor. Dude, can you imagine what seeing that does to a kid?
I decide I could use a good laugh. I’ll be right over, I tell him.
In the parking lot next to BedTyme Stories and High Standards Smoke Shop, I knock on the door of a building the studio shares with Fantastic Hair. It takes Tim a minute to unlock chains and codes to let me in. When he gives me one of his take-no-prisoner big-bear hugs, with the little breath left me, I manage to say:
Location, location, location.
A lone security light illuminates the porn store’s mural of the Blue Ridge Mountains with hope and promise:
Where Adult Dreams Come True.
Barking a laugh, Tim releases me, spreads his arms like a Goofy Giant Royal, and jokes:
Porn, vapes, and music all in the same block. Dude, it’s like heaven.
After a rapid-fire dialogue on varying types of dildos, Tim and I sit down in his new digs and share a Vape. I apologize for not calling about his father, and thank him for the invite. I tell him: You are one of a few people I trust to see me living with depression.
Tim needs some encouragement as well. He has faced more than his share of hard knocks – sued, betrayed, maybe embezzled, bounced from his old studio, forced into risks he never imagined, and then, the loss of his father.
Tim tells me he wrote a song about his dad a few years ago, but can’t find the courage to sing it since his death. From the stool in front of his mixer, he pulls a wrinkled scribbled yellowed paper and I see the title:
18-Wheeler
When I encourage him, he begins to sing the story of his father, who abandoned the family when Tim was 2 for a lifelong wanderlust -- driving 18-wheelers, riding cross-country with Harley Davidson gangs, running high speed from himself.
You left one son in Georgia
And one in San Antonio
You left your wife in Tulsa
To run off with the road
Tim stops to remind me – his dad’s leaving opened the door to a diabolical tide of abuse from a series of stepfathers.
Through strikethroughs, he shares 18-Wheeler’s final verse:
After all these years of riding
You finally made it home
After all these years of driving
Don’t you feel alone?
After praying together, Tim asks if I would video the song while he records.
I only have an iPhone with me, I tell him.
That’s enough, he reassures.
Before recording, we share a few hits off the vape under the porn store’s sign.
Neon colors spasm in a gray fog creeping slowly along a dilapidated stretch of Asheville Highway. A light drizzle saturates a lingering sense of melancholy; abandoned storefronts haunted by rust on rust, black molds, and streaks of crimson tail lights.
Not much a neighborhood, Tim says.
Soon, I find myself in that familiar posture, doubled over in laughter. As soon as I catch my breath, I say: It’s the perfect metaphor.
In recording 18-Wheeler, we decide on minimal – one guitar, one iPhone, one tilted table lamp, and one raw dog story.
For the next eight minutes, Tim pours out his heart: grief, longing, heartache, forgiveness, hope, and a shitload of grace.
In the midst of a sadness I couldn’t seem to shake, and a song Tim couldn’t seem to sing, in a studio next to a porn store, we encourage one another to worship together — speaking courage to become the people of God’s design.