Bluestown — Gregory Becker

In the first chapter of Bluestown - which as a short story appeared in the 1995 Drue Heinz Prize-winning collection Dangerous Men - Geoffrey Becker emerges as a writer of unusual imagination and talent. Spencer Markus at fifteen wants to believe in his dad, Spider, a local musician whose life and career seem to be going nowhere. So when his dad shows up and pulls Spencer from school one afternoon, inviting him on a road trip, he is eager to go along. But the trip turns out to be Spider's strange way of saying good-bye, rather than facing up to the lies he's told, both to his son and to himself. Seven years later, Spencer is living in Brooklyn with his girlfriend and a roommate, and working in Manhattan answering letters for Mutronics, a musical-effects company under siege from both its unhappy customers and a union that wants to organize it. In the midst of an imminent breakup with his girlfriend, and with the labor dispute growing uglier and more violent daily, Spencer suddenly hears from his father. As they try to reestablish some kind of relationship, Spencer must once again confront Spider's essentially unreliable nature, recognize that they may have more in common than he'd care to admit, and get on with his own life.