The Paradise Gig

by Laurence Shames

  Coincidence? Or was it that Sarge, either by intention or sheer dumb destiny, was somehow nudging Pete and Callie closer, moving both of them toward some middle ground between her former wildness and his habitual aloofness. It was Sarge who’d helped to cure her of her dead-end partying. It was Sarge who’d been pulling Pete out of his disengaged routines, who was making him care and help. Sarge was bringing them together; she wondered if he even realized he was doing it.

  She’d be curious to know sometime, if they could keep him safe long enough to ask the question.

  

  Bert put on his party clothes while it was still mid-afternoon, mainly because he wanted to test the outfit’s functionality. Specifically, he wanted to see how long it would take him to grab the snub-nosed .38 from its holster underneath the wide leg of his pants. So he rehearsed various moves in front of the full-length mirror that hung on the wall next to what used to be his wife’s side of the bed.

  The results were not encouraging. If he kept his feet flat on the floor and tried bending from the waist, it took him way too long to reach down to his ankle, plus, by the time he got there, the blood was rushing to his head, making him a little dizzy and his hands therefore unsteady. If he did a squat maneuver, the descent was somewhat quicker but then there was the dilemma of either trying to get up again, which would not have been easy, or just staying in a deep and humble squat like an Indian beggar, which was a bit undignified, plus a very awkward position to shoot from, should the need arise. Things went somewhat better if he put his foot up on a chair, though he still had all that denim to wrestle with before getting to the holster, and besides, what if there didn’t happen to be a chair around at the crucial moment?

  After twenty practice draws, Bert finally accepted with chagrin that he wasn’t going to carry the day with speed. If he had any hopes of getting the drop on someone, he would need strategy, a ruse, a diversionary tactic. So he went to the kitchen and grabbed a handful of rather soggy dog treats from an open bag. He hoped there was enough time to teach Nacho a new trick.

  27

  “N

  o dogs,” said the tall guy, as a valet took charge of Bert’s old Caddy and everyone clambered out of the car and clustered at the entrance gate of the estate.

  “Especially ones that howl at karaoke,” the short guy added.

  The two of them were dressed like Lennon and McCartney on the Sergeant Pepper album, in shiny pseudo-military suits from some other century. The tall guy’s, like Paul’s, was a metallic blue. The short guy’s, like John’s, was a painfully bright yellow. They both had epaulettes and lots of braid.

  Bert, feeling no need to be friendly at this stage of the game, said, “Youse guys look ridiculous.”

  The short guy looked at Bert in his gauzy cotton tunic. “And who are you supposed to be, the fucking Maharishi?”

  Sarge, carrying his guitar and wearing a tight black t-shirt that only a lean young guy could get away with, stepped between them before the unpleasantness could escalate. “Please,” he said. “These people are my guests. The dog stays.”

  He said it firmly but unaggressively. The thugs chose to take it as an affront to their authority, and they were happy to take it like that. They wanted a reason to be mad at Sarge. It made them feel more justified in what they had to do. Grudgingly, they waved the group through the gate and onto the sprawling property.

  It was about an hour before sunset, and very still. Long shadows stretched away from the palms and seemed stenciled on the grass. The crushed shells that paved the walkways held the heat of day and gleamed like opal. A hundred yards away, on the grand lawn next to the main house, a big white party tent had been set up. From the tent came slightly nervous laughs and sudden bursts of chatter—the sputtering sounds a party makes as it’s just starting to warm up. Sarge and Callie headed for the tent, the hem of her flowing flower-child dress tickling her insteps. Pete and Bert decided to have a stroll around the grounds, or, as Bert would have it, to case the joint.

  They wound through the cluster of guest cottages whose tin roofs glinted orange. They rounded a big swimming pool ringed with lounges and stacks of fluffy towels, as at a fine resort. One end of the pool was partitioned off with tile as a hot tub. There were speakers up on tripods here and there and neon sculptures just beginning to glow against the softening light.

  Beyond the pool, tucked behind a rank of oleanders in a privileged spot that overlooked the Gulf, was a small building that was nothing like the others. It was formal, classical. It had a bronze door, columns carved from limestone, and a grated window like a roadside shrine. Behind the window, topped by a vase full of yellow roses and softly lighted by the glow of a memorial oil lamp, was a marble casket on a pedestal. An unnatural hush enveloped the little building. The party sounds died before they reached the place. The foliage didn’t stir. Over the door there was a simple inscription:

  Nilda Mondesi

  1941-2019

  Speaking softly, as the setting demanded, Pete said, “Marco’s mother. Very devoted to each other. Callie told me he built this for her. A little bizarre, no?”

  “Token a respect,” said Bert, and, in a reflex that hadn’t gone away even through many decades of disuse, he crossed himself. “But yeah, a bit excessive maybe.”

  They took in the view—mangrove islets, wheeling gulls—then turned away from the somber spot and started walking toward the party tent, Nacho trailing at the end of his leash, sniffing at stones and shells. When they’d gone maybe a dozen steps, Bert suddenly stopped and said, “Holy shit.”

  “Holy shit what?”

  “Nilda.”

  “Nilda, right. Marco’s mom.”

  “The housekeeper.”

  “What housekeeper?”

  “The housekeeper at the Key Wester. In 1964. The one that cleaned The Beatles room.”

  “What the—?”

  “Don’tcha remember?” Bert went on. “It’s exactly like I tol’ ya. Paul and John, they’re gettin’ ready to leave, they can’t find the notebook wit’ all the songs in it. The manager’s in a panic. He double-checks the room. Nothin’. He sends for the housekeeper that cleaned it. She shows up, this little Spanish lady wit’ the blue smock and the hair net. She looks terrified, like she knows she’s in trouble but has no idea why, maybe doesn’t even know whose room she’s been cleanin’. Can’t speak English, remember? Or acts like she can’t. So a bellman comes to translate. They pow-wow and then the bellman says, ‘Nilda says…Nilda says this…Nilda says that…’ Nilda! So that’s who Nilda is! The housekeeper. Now she’s got a freakin’ monument.”

  Pete pawed the gravel and thought it over.

  “Christ, what an actress!” Bert went on. “I tip my cap. Give her an Oscar. Lookin’ so scared, lookin’ like she didn’t know what was goin’ on. Bullshit she didn’t know. She knew exactly what was happenin’ and exactly what she got her hands on. A future for her son, that’s what she got her hands on. So she glommed the notebook. Ain’t it clear? She glommed it, hid it away, gave it to Marco when the heat was off, and boom, fifty-somethin’ years later, now the songs are startin’ to leak out. Ain’t it obvious?”

  Just then, the DJ started up. Music billowed out from the big white tent and from the speakers arrayed all over the estate. Love, love me do, you know I love you…

  “Obvious?” said Pete, wiping Florida fog from his glasses and talking louder now against the music. “I don’t know if I’d exactly say it’s obvious. But it makes a kind of screwy sense.”

  “You bet it does,” said Bert. “And I’ll ya somethin’ else. I seen that notebook wit’ my own eyes, remember? Right there, poolside. It was a big fat fuckin’ notebook. There musta been dozens a songs in it. Maybe hundreds. I mean, a lotta fuckin’ songs that The Beatles never got to do and that people never got to hear.”

  “Maybe they recorded some of them,” Pete said hopefully.

  “Well, maybe they did. And maybe they didn’t. But you, me, and th
e resta the listenin’ public is never gonna know for sure, which just ain’t right. And why will we never know for sure? ‘Cause none of us have ever seen inside that notebook. ‘Cept maybe this scumbag Marco has. And meanwhile, he’s sittin’ onna songs, launderin’ ‘em one by one, and knockin’ off the nice young kids he sets up to record ‘em. Well, it can’t go on no more. Us, you and me, we can’t allow it. It’s just way too wrong. Which is why we gotta stop this shit and get that notebook back so everyone from here to Timbuktu can hear those songs, wherever the hell Timbuktu is.”

  “So you think he still has the notebook?”

  “Well, of course he does. Where else are these songs comin’ outa? He’s got ‘em all, which is so not right ‘cause they should belong to everybody. So we’re gonna get ‘em back. We’re gonna liberate ‘em.”

  “Fine,” said Pete. “Very right on. Very ‘60s. We liberate the songs. Then what do we do?”

  “Well,” said Bert. “Well…Well, I guess we give ‘em back to Paul McCartney. I mean they’re his, right? Half at least.”

  “Great. So we just call up Sir Paul—”

  “Look, we’ll burn that bridge when we get to it. For right now let’s get our asses to the party.”

  28

  I n the big tent, the champagne was flowing. Hors d’oeuvres were being passed among people dressed as Beach Boys, with lank blond wigs and surfboard patterns on their shirts, or Rolling Stones, in sooty jeans and practiced scowls. There was a Mama Cass in a triple XL muu-muu and a James Brown in a spangled tux and a breathtaking Diana Ross in a scarlet evening gown, though she might have shaved her chin a little closer. The DJ, raised up on a small stage with several turntables and a rank of giant speakers, was spinning a droll mix. “Light My Fire.” “Little Deuce Coupe.” “Georgie Girl.” “The Locomotion.”

  Pete and Bert found Sarge and Callie lingering on the edge of the crowd, drinking ginger ale and trying, but not too hard, to pretend they were having fun. A waiter came by with a tray of shrimp. Bert grabbed two and fed one to the dog. No one else took any. Bert said to Sarge, “Don’t like shrimp? Everyone likes shrimp.”

  “Too nervous to eat.”

  “I get it. But relax, look natural. This’ll all be over soon.”

  “Yeah, guess it will,” the young man said, and looked off gloomily at a corner where a few execs from Pandora and Spotify were mingling with some wannabe Elvises and Arethas. “The weird part is that I used to dream about a party like this. Like I’d want it to go on forever. It would be my moment. But it isn’t. It’s not about me. It’s not even about music. It’s just business. No one’s really listening anyhow. It’s just about who’s here, who made it past the velvet rope. That’s all.”

  He shrugged and sipped some ginger ale. The others all looked for something soothing to say. No one found the words. You couldn’t talk someone out of disillusion.

  A few minutes later, the DJ took a break from spinning vinyl and announced, in a tone that might possibly have been facetious, that the guests were in for a special treat. Then the tall guy and the short guy, preposterous in their Sergeant Pepper uniforms, took the stage, cued up the karaoke machine, and grabbed the microphones. They gave each other a glance and a nod, the tall guy hit the switch, and they launched right in. But they must have been on edge, because they missed the first note badly.

  “HELP!”

  They groped to find their pitch.

  “I need somebody. HELP!”

  A little closer that time.

  “Not just anybody. HELP!”

  Almost on it now.

  “Ya know I need someone’s HE-E-ELP!”

  They finally nailed it on the fourth try, and that was when Nacho started howling. A few heads turned, but it didn’t really matter, since not many people had been paying close attention anyway. Still, Bert picked up the dog and muzzled him. “No need t’antagonize ‘em any further,” he said.

  The song ended. A few people clapped. Most didn’t seem to notice it was over. “Boy, that bombed,” said Pete.

  “Well, good for them for trying,” Callie said. “And at least it really sounded like they meant it.”

  “Meant what?” Sarge asked.

  “Asking for help. Crying for help. Hard to imagine they’re really such bad guys.”

  Bert was unpersuaded. “Bad guys, hard luck guys, whatever. That flop is gonna put ‘em in a really lousy mood for later.”

  

  Dusk dimmed into night. The buffet was demolished. More booze was served. The smell of weed wafted in from corners of the tent.

  At a few minutes before nine, Marco broke away from a cluster of industry bigshots and came over to confer with Sarge. The producer was not in costume. It was his party and he was there to be amused, not to be amusing. He wore the same black pants and turtleneck he always wore. He greeted Callie but was basically ignoring Bert and Pete until Nacho started barking and snarling and flexing his scrawny haunches as though for a spring.

  Bert bluffed an apology and said, “Calm down, Nacho.” As he said it, he reached into a pants pocket for a dog treat, bent down without hurry, and fed it to the dog. Then he petted the little creature and gave it a secret wink.

  Marco said to Sarge, ““Good turnout. Right people. You ready?”

  The young man offered half a nod and half a shrug.

  “So here’s how it’s gonna be. I’ll introduce you. You’ll come out onstage. The music’ll start. The full recording. First verse, you don’t play or sing along. You just take it in like everybody else. But here’s the nice part. From the break on, I stripped out the vocal track. That’s when you give it to ‘em live. That’s when you show ‘em the sweet voice, the charisma. Got it?”

  The young man swallowed like he’d eaten a rock. His mother reached out and squeezed his hand. Pete and Bert wished him luck. He picked up his guitar and followed Marco around to the back of the stage.

  Spotlights came on. He stood there in the shadows and looked out past the wires and the mics and the speakers to the crowd now clustered in the dimness. Such a mix of faces. Some in costume, some merely themselves. Some excited, others bored, but all facing the same way, waiting for the same thing, united, if in nothing else, then in the expectancy of being entertained. And he, Sarge, alone, removed, was at the other pole of that expectancy. For a moment he knew what it was like to be a star. It was lonely.

  Marco stepped into the light, accepted some scattered applause, thanked the guests for coming, and began lying almost at once. He lied with quiet zest and utter confidence, telling how he’d been approached by an amazing singer/songwriter named Sarge LeRoi, who had brought him a song of such simple depth and polish that he could hardly believe it was the work of a newcomer. Clearly a gifted young man with a brilliant future ahead of him. He asked the crowd to welcome this great new talent, and they obeyed.

  The applause was tailing off as Sarge stepped into the glare of the lights. The audience in front of him became a smeared and grotesque blur, a leering gallery of sideshow snapshots. To spare his eyes and his sanity, he looked down and fiddled with the microphone.

  The song began. It purred through the speakers, the intro at first lean and pure with the joy and honesty of a few musicians together in a studio, then swelling with ersatz strings and phony horns that no human breath or fingers ever played, and finally Sarge heard his own perfected voice, though he barely recognized it as his own, singing words he hadn’t written and until that moment had never fully felt.

  Gone tomorrow. Gone to where?

  Daydreams, night dreams, love dreams, fright dreams.

  Gone tomorrow, present to past,

  Did I live it, dream it, believe it could last?

  Gone tomorrow. Gone to where?

  Hoping, yearning, loving, burning.

  Gone tomorrow, present to past,

  Did I live it or dream it? Gone so fast.

  The verse ended, the recorded voice paused. The pretended instruments paved the way t
o the break that Sarge was supposed to sing live. Except he didn’t.

  He just stood there at the microphone, his guitar slung across his shoulders, his eyes mostly shut. His lips moved slightly as if in prayer or farewell but no sound escaped them. To the audience it looked like classic, paralyzing stage fright but it wasn’t stage fright. It was a decision. He wouldn’t continue the charade. He couldn’t undo what was already done but at least he could drop out of the fraud. So he just stood there and let the voiceless song wash over him. The audience, confused, embarrassed, began to rustle and murmur. Marco’s glorious arrangement billowed and burgeoned around an empty middle.

  Sarge held his somber posture and determined silence until the last grand contrivance of a chord died out, and at last the premiere was over. After a confused pause there was a ragged wave of baffled and subdued applause.

  Then, belatedly, the singer found his voice. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you all for being part of this. I’m sorry I couldn’t sing the song for you, but I’d like to tell you why I couldn’t. I couldn’t sing it because it isn’t really mine. I didn’t write it. The Beatles wrote it. I just wanted you to know.”

  He took the guitar off his shoulder. There was a moment of stunned and excruciating quiet as the listeners tried to decide what to make of the bizarre, outlandish, impossible claim. Feet shuffled. There were nervous coughs and whispers. Then someone laughed. Then someone joined him. Then the laughing caught on and multiplied in a spasm of general relief. So that was it! It was a joke. Of course it was. What else could it be? Just a joke, and not a bad recovery from a green kid who’d been too scared to sing.

  The laughing went on, and in seconds Marco was back on stage, all smiles, congratulating Sarge for quick wits and a good save. Then he elbowed him out of the spotlight and back toward the shadows, where the tall guy and the short guy were waiting to pinion his arms, jab a needle in his side, and spirit him away.