Was looking for favorite jeans. Found something else. Was digging in a black hole masquerading as a closet, tossing things upside and downside, picking for the pair that have fit perfectly for three years, that have holes in knees and in pockets and don’t do their job: containment. Needed them because nothing else was clean, and on the days when nothing else is clean, it is best to aim high. They were not under dirty underwear and dirty Chuck Taylors and a wrinkled phone bill, someone must have paid it, or under the old messenger bag that will never be thrown away because it can still hold. They were not under a Tupperware container that contained something moldering, foodish in a past life, something not smelling because of the seal. There was no temptation to break it, as the story goes. Not under three-year-old issues of Rolling Stone, faces that don’t matter anymore. Not under a Slinky, tangled beyond use. Not under a cracked CD case, no telling who it housed in a past life when it was stil l married to its insert. Not anywhere.

He thought of remaining pantless, as the story also goes, because the person he was going to see wouldn’t have minded. He thought about it hard for at least two whole minutes. Lost confidence. Dove again.

Fingernails found the wrong thing. The sound of fingernails scraping across the little holes in the microphone part, a small landing pad, really, for fingernails. A wonder it happened at all. A wonder that a hand groping in the dark, looking for jeans, found things that were not jeans, but were better than jeans. And that is how the story goes and goes and goes because that is how stories start.

…

This is bad, I have concluded. This is bad because I have just been handed ample distraction for an entire day. I won’t keep looking for my jeans. I won’t even move from this spot until I press play and words flood out and I remember everything there is to remember about this thing. I will not leave the apartment. I will not do the things that need to be done, the things that I "forgot" to do yesterday and the day before, and the yesterday before yesterday, which was Thursday. I have decided that finding this, instead of the jeans, sucks.

It feels the same as it always did, lightweight for the power it wields, easily concealed in pockets, which was handy in restaurants, bathrooms, at awards ceremonies.

I was not one for journals. The other two were, and walked around all ink-stained and cramped in the knuckles and in the back from writing crunched over in the bunks in the bus. Self-torture was never my thing, is still not my thing, and frequently is the thing of my older brothers, presently and pastly. I preferred upright positions, freedom from ink, which is so played out, and I just wanted to talk. And talk. And talk. There is only one tape here. I distinctly remember, at the height of the obsession, that there were twelve. I want all of them. Right now. Or I don’t. Because having all twelve, I would obsess over playing them in order, because that’s the only way these things can be done.

There aren’t twelve. There is one. And I am so desperate to hear it that I yank the batteries out of the remote control, because the ones inside it are definitely dead. If they’re not, they should be and I feel bad for them.

Finger on button, over the triangle, so familiar under my thumb. Forward. Deep breath.

There’s nothing, then static, something hissing and crackling. Then silence. Then a bump. Then a voice.

"Uh… hi? Is this on? Duuuh… Of course it’s on. I just turned it on, didn’t I? So it’s on."

Me. Me when my voice was trying to figure out if it should change or not. Me creaking and cracking like a rodent, like something on Saturday morning cartoons. Me thinking I was very clever and funny. Well, I was, but still. Me, starting right from the beginning, so I wouldn’t forget the details. So many details in those days. And I gave my once upon a time…

"OK, let it be known that Tay never lets me talk…"

...

I am laying on my side, half inside the closet and half out, which is bad. I have been here for three hours. I have listened four times. Both sides. I am cold, because I am not wearing any pants. I am feeling like I should call Taylor or somebody. I don’t think he would remember. No, certainly not.

I can not stop the little blue flower pattern on the wallpaper from chasing itself. The list forms in my head, and I think that I need to be more like Ike and actually put it down on paper or in some electronic organizer/Palm/spare brain thing.

To Do After I Get There:

1. See eye doctor.
2. Figure out how to get to the new apartment
3. Figure out where there will be sources of food, sources that can be tapped over and over again so I don’t have to think about it ever again

To Do Before I Get There:

1. Look for the other eleven tapes
2. Ask Taylor where he thinks the other eleven tapes could be
3. Pack

I will die in that city. I will die and choke and all that will be left is a tape of me as a scary pre-pubescent brat who liked to name-drop and scream and… and… all sorts of other embarrassing badness that will not be my legacy, so help me God.

I decide to call Taylor. It goes something like this.

Taylor Hanson: Zac, like I have any frigging clue where your five-year-old mini cassettes are.

Zachary Hanson: You must know. You remembered where we put the MTV award.

Taylor Hanson: Well, yes, but that’s different.

Zachary Hanson: How so?

Taylor Hanson: Part of it was mine, for starters, so there was a personal investment element, and the garage is always a good first place to look. It’s all out there somewhere. Old t-shirts, unreleased demos by infamous unnamed producers that never saw the light of day, Hanson.net signup disks.

Zachary Hanson: Is Hanson.net still up?

Taylor Hanson: Not a clue.

Zachary Hanson: Do you think Ike would know where my tapes are?

Taylor Hanson: No. I don’t.

Zachary Hanson: Thanks for your help.

Taylor Hanson: Anytime.

I hate my brother. OK, I don’t hate my brother. But I hate my brother, you know? Thanks to a portable phone, I have not left the spot in the closet. Appendages are falling asleep. Hip is sore because it sits atop a Slinky, a bent Slinky, which renders it useless. It was in this state before my hip came to rest atop it. Don’t feel bad. I will find something to do with it someday. Me and Mack. We will find something.

No more. Time for new legacies. Time for bent Slinky to be thrown away. Time to find the pants, walk out of the house, breathe, in, out, do the work of getting ready to leave before it’s time to actually do so.

Taylor beats me to it. He’s scowling when he walks into the room and remembers to forget to knock. In three paces, he steps on nearly three quarters of the closet’s contents in some capacity, indirectly or full-contact, like a trash compactor.

"Why the hell do you call me when I’m just upstairs?"

"Because it’s quicker than e-mail, and I love how the human voice ads nuance to any conversation."

"Can I listen to the tape?"

"No." I am not giving in. Not not not.

"Why not? I was there for half of it."

"Sure. You were busy being Taylor Hanson Superstar and scribbling in your notebooks and styling your hair and stuff."

"Yes, but didn’t my hair look great, though? Just let me listen. One second."

I will not let him listen, and prove this by standing, albeit shakily on prickling extremities, and bodily shove him out of the room and into the hallway. He resists little. He has no choice. He is built like Cate Blanchet. Only I’d let her stay.

...

The idea of packing is foolish, so I refuse to do it. I am happy, I will be happy, with one pair of jeans, two t-shirts of contrasting varities, a box of granola bars, equipment for listening to music, a compact folder of meticulously chosen CDs, a notebook (I use the damned things occasionally in weak and unstable moments.), my Chucks, my newly discovered tape recorder, twenty-five dollars - enough for cab fare, McDonalds, the essentials - two packs of ever-so-hard-to-find-these-days Hubba Bubba, the DVDs of A Hard Day's Night, Citizen Kane, The Graduate, The Goonies and - please don't tell anyone - Mommy Dearest, my lucky luggage tag, an elastic for my hair and maybe a toothbrush. But only if there's room.

I am sitting on the couch reading The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe for the fourteenth time, and I am not thinking about packing. I am thinking about the way the fabric feels on my elbows and I am thinking of how I wish the light weren't so dim in here, and I am thinking about how I would like to stay here forever. Gated community for slightly famous persons. Lots of green grass. Enough rooms to stay lost forever.

The rest of the family is packing. Taylor is looking for the tapes. Isaac, who, thankfully for him, lives somewhere else in another gated community for slightly famous persons, which looks like this one, is here too. He is moving furniture, which makes me laugh. Others are yanking things out of my drawers and folding them, which I'm sure will be a terribly foreign and ultimately traumatic experience for things like my underwear. Taylor folds underwear. He does.

Additionally, I am thinking about the last breath of summer, which has turned everything molten, things like sidewalks and my brain. I am thinking that where I am going will never be like this, will never be like being roasted, but in a good way. I am trying to figure out whether this is good or not.

Lazy Laura takes the night off. La la la la la.

The way he tells it, it is one tumbling disaster after another. Loses pants. Finds tapes. Forgets to appropriately prepare himself for the biggest moment of his life. Typical, for the most part, but slanted by the fisheye of personal experience. In truth, he didn't lose the pants. They were misplaced. The tapes were another matter and as for preparation, that had to be done from the inside out. His family would pick up the rest of the pieces, the smaller ones that involved him not forgetting his toothbrush and clean socks.

He arrived on a Saturday after a bumpy flight that left him jittery in spirits and stomach. Easy for me to picture now, his tanned face looking greenish and Wicked With-y, his steps unsure as they tumbled out of the cab, up the steps, pausing, surprised when they encounter the doorman.

Never lived in a place with a doorman before, he said. Even after all these years of freaking filthy rich, no doorman. And who needed one? He could open it himself, carry his own stuff.

It was in the swank part of town that hadn't always been swank, a silver glass high rise that looked like something the Doozers built. A health club on the bottom floor. A "luxury" health club. A club for the real-life impaired, he said. A place where there were fake ferns and aerobics/yoga/spinning/stepping rooms that were glass on one side, so everyone passing on the street two stories below could have a magnificent view of your butt and your fashionable work-out work out gear doing leg lifts and knee bends and whatever healthy wealthy people did with their time in luxury gyms.

Never lived in a place with a doorman or where traffic rumbled below at all hours, where you had to buzz people in (up?) and where there were no super Shop-n-Saves to buy chips and Doritos, where it was chilly in the first week of September, where pushing, shoving, grunting and behavior as hard as the cracking sidewalks were considered preferable and even polite. Never lived alone. Never lived in a place where he could put things down, and they stayed there until he moved them. Where there were no yellow-headed littler ones clamoring into his lap and asking for stories.

The apartment was on the sixth floor and the doorman's name was Jim. He wore a suit coat and a tie. Zac was expecting something else, something like the braided, tassled, long-coated doormen in the European hotels. But no. Jim didn't have an accent or a last name and had worked at Infinity Towers since it opened two years before. Said good morning and good day and good to see ya, and not much else, but he was always there.

I am thinking it is not supposed to be like this. I am thinking that the pile of the carpet is supposed to be thin and/or nonexistent. I am think it's not supposed to be pink, and I am definitely thinking that fireplaces are not part of the average city college boy apartment décor. I am thinking that there are not supposed to be antiques, or sets of things that definitely look like they were created before the beginning of this century strewn about and set on glass-topped tables. A phone call ensues. Goes something like this.

Zachary Hanson: Mom! Please tell me this is not where I'm living.

Diana Hanson: How was your flight, hon?

Zachary Hanson: Fine. Lots of turbulence.

Diana Hanson: Oh, honey I'm sorry.

Zachary Hanson: Almost puked. Really. It's fine.

Diana Hanson: You don't sound fine.

Zachary Hanson: I'm not, but not because of the flight. OK, a little bit because of the flight, but mostly because of this apartment.

Diana Hanson: Did you forget to take the Dramamine? Oh God, it's clean, I hope?

Zachary Hanson: It's fine. Spotless. It's unhealthy.

Diana Hanson: Darling, help me understand here.

Zachary Hanson: Mom. It's a palace. With antiques, I think. I'm afraid to sneeze too hard.

Diana Hanson: Sounds lovely.

Zachary Hanson: Yes. Lovely. I can't live here.

Diana Hanson: We wanted you to be comfortable.

Zachary Hanson: So comfortable I’m afraid to touch anything?

Diana Hanson: Yes. You won't break anything that way.

Zachary Hanson: Mom…

Diana Hanson: Do you want us to find something else for you? We can.

Zachary Hanson: No… well… no.

Diana Hanson: We'll start looking tomorrow.

Zachary Hanson: No… no, don't.

Diana Hanson: Would you rather not be downtown? We figured, proximity to the school and all. Within walking distance. Looked very nice in the brochure.

Zachary Hanson: Mom, there's a doorman.

Diana Hanson: I hope you were polite to him, Zac.

Zachary Hanson: Of course I was polite to him. I didn't mention him because I was looking down on him or his job. I was commenting on the fact that I live in a place that requires a doorman for the obviously important sets of people who enter and exit the building on a daily-slash-hourly basis.

Diana Hanson: No need to get excited. And you are a very important person to us, Zac.

Zachary Hanson: Did Taylor find my tapes?

Diana Hanson: No.

Zachary Hanson: How do you know? Have you talked to him today, or do you know if he even looked at all?

Diana Hanson: Zachary, you sound very flustered, and if it all comes down to finding you a new place to live…

Zachary Hanson: Mom. Did he find the tapes?

Diana Hanson: I have no idea.

Zachary Hanson: You said he didn't find them.

Diana Hanson: Well he didn't mention that he found them.

Zachary Hanson: Him not saying that he found them and him not actually finding them are two entirely different things.

Diana Hanson: This is true.

Zachary Hanson: Do you know if he looked?

Diana Hanson: I'm assuming he looked. Your brother isn't one to say and not do. OK, that's not exactly true.

Zachary Hanson: Can I talk to him?

Diana Hanson: He's writing in his room, so you'll either have to e-mail him or call him on his cell. Was that a sigh? Don't sigh. That sounded like a sigh.

Zachary Hanson: Correct me if I'm wrong here. You're in the same house with him right at this very minute, probably even on the same floor, and I have to call him on his cell phone to talk to him?

Diana Hanson: Yes. You know how he is, darling.

Zachary Hanson: I do. Promise me you'll kick him out someday. Promise

Diana Hanson: We kicked him out two years ago, hon. He refuses to leave.

Zachary Hanson: You should call the cops.

Diana Hanson: We've thought of it.

After December 20, Laura started posting her writings on another, more private forum. She wants you to know that yes, she has been writing every day, and that she apologizes for any inconvenience. Wanna read? Drop her an e-mail, and she'll see what she can do to hook you up.