Alice Unbound

by Colleen Anderson

  The Wonderband Battle of the Bands, sponsored by the hottest indie label this side of the rabbit hole, first prize a sweet cash advance and contract for a debut album plus limited tour. Every rocker in town would give a left foot to sign with Underland Records. This is the second Wonderband Battle ever held. Last year the win would’ve gone to us, if I hadn’t pulled one of my more royal mess-capades and monumentally screwed the best band in town out of making the gig. As it was, Underland declined to name a winner and nobody got signed. But here they are again, a year later, back for round two.

  Thought of a second chance sends a zip of electricity up my tail.

  I preen a bit now, smoothing along the side of my head, still trying to play it cooler than I feel. I never liked Deuce. He and I go way back. Got a history. None of it good. “Yeah,” I say, knowing I shouldn’t, hating the smug look on Deuce’s flat pasty face. “We were thinking about signing up to play. We thought competition might be kinda stiff, but if you guys are setting the bar…”

  I’m expecting Eagle to laugh. He’s a good wingman in all sorts of social situations, and plays hella decent second guitar. But he’s goggling at me wide-eyed and wary. Our band isn’t exactly together anymore, and by together I mean on speaking terms. Even before last summer we’d been struggling, fighting, missing gigs and burning bridges, pissing off all the wrong people. Artistic disagreements, we told everybody. That’s what everybody tells everybody when their band falls apart. My shitwaddity under the myriad influence didn’t help. One thing about losing your job, losing your band, and alienating almost all your friends: it sure does free up time for what you might call honest self-reassessment.

  So Eagle doesn’t laugh. But the Hearts do. They’re slouching off smirking and snickering, though a year ago they’d have been lucky to be slotted our warmup band even though their mom, Queenie, owns Queenie’s Place, the best live club in town. It hurts like a sucker punch to the ribs to have those peckweeds so sure we’re not a threat, musicwise. Makes me want to get the lead out, crank up my apologies and mend some fences like I’ve been intending to all summer but somehow never got around to. Makes me want to scrape the gang together, show those cover-hack wannabees what a real band looks like, show everybody what a real band can do. Suddenly makes me want it really, really bad.

  “Come on, Eags,” I say. “We’ve got social calls to make.”

  Eagle and I are both currently in what you might call the wheelless state, so it takes us an hour to slog the whole way to Dodo’s westside ’hood. Nice houses, trimmed lawns. No peeling paint I can see, and not a single car up on blocks choked with parched weeds and drowned plastic bags. Of us all, Dodo’s the only one with what my sister would call a real job. Works for the city, takes home some sweet pay. Not stuck up about it though, and like all good bassists, he’s got the perfect garage for band practice.

  He’s in there now with the door rolled up, wearing frayed cut-offs. His threadbare flannel is ripped at the shoulders to give him room to play, make the most of those stumpy little arms of his. And he’s playing, man. He’s playing. He’s riffing up, riffing down, not tight-kneed like inferior bass players but loose, man. Loose and leaning into that lowdown sound of his, crouching low like the thump reeling outta his spiffy amp, crouching so low his knees practically bend backward and his wumbles wiggle.

  He looks up at last, sees me and Eagle shading the perimeter of his driveway, peering in like we’re mimes at an invisible wall.

  Dodo’s so cool, man. The absolute coolest. He studies me without surprise. Nothing in his expression to make you think we haven’t stood in the same room or breathed the same air for a year after all those years living practically in each other’s laps, touring and playing and gigging, the whole band eating and sleeping together in a big pile like a litter of gigantic puppies. Gigantic boozing, hard-rocking, occasionally stoned-to-the-tails puppies.

  “Whassup?” he says, no emotion in it, the way he does.

  Man, did I miss this guy.

  So me and Dodo and Eags are cruising down the freeway. Dodo’s ride is wicked sweet, a vintage finned motherflipper with an ass-end like a rocketship and tail lights like full moons. I’d barely even had time to finish my pitch before Dodo was nodding, putting away his equipment, grabbing his keys. Eagle backs me up the whole time, squawks with fresh outrage when I relate our morning run-in with the Hearts, puffs up his chest, beady eyes full of that rage he gets.

  The car may be vintage, but the sound system isn’t. Dodo loads in an old demo we made back when the gang was together and still in love with each other, in love with our sound. Makes me nostalgic as all get-out, makes me tear up a little. Eagle smirks at me and I gotta tell him some ash flew into my eye, blowback from the ciggies Dodo’s laying on us like candy while the freeway’s yellow ribbons flutter by below.

  We draw up to the curb in front of the place I know so well I can practically taste the air in its kitchen, though I haven’t stepped inside for a year. The flowerbeds are new. Pansies and marigolds spill over edges of little pebble walls someone’s stacked to mark borders. But the house is the same, ivy licking its front, screen door propped open to sunshine. Screen door is decorated with a scrolling iron flamingo silhouette, painted an in-your-face, lick-me-please, creamed-strawberries colour few hard rockers I know would even think about thinking about.

  The guys hang back, leaving me to stumble up the winding pebble path on my lonesome. I step onto the shaded porch, pretending my brain doesn’t swim with a hundred memories, a hundred moments, a hundred kisses. Cool air drifts out of the dark living room, blinds drawn against the day’s heat. I smell cookies. Cookies and generosity and more chances wasted than I ever deserved.

  I knock on the wooden doorjamb and she calls from the back: “Coming!”

  And there she is, rounding the corner from her kitchen. So beautiful, so vivid. My little lorikeet. My little Lory. Except not mine, anymore.

  “Hey, Lory,” I say. “It’s good to see you. Really good. Really, really good.”

  Her smile is better than sunshine and warm cookies and a dozen record deals all rolled into one. A hundred record deals. A thousand.

  “Hi, Duckie. It’s good to see you too.”

  Now we’ve really got the music cranked. Our music. The best music. I’m in the back seat with Eagle, thinking exactly this as he shouts to me over the whomping fugue of Dodo’s runaway bass, “Hells-yeah! I forgot how bleeding good we were!”

  Lory twists back to smile at us from the passenger seat, all-over ruffled by wind whipping in the open window as Dodo’s vintage beast eats up the highway. Her voice isn’t super loud but I hear it anyway, each syllable a silky cord winding around my heart as she says, “We’re still that good.”

  The song hiccups, a perfect intentional pause, the sort of thing that makes every difference there is between a nothing bunch of posers like the Hearts and a bona fide rock-n-roll band like us. Pause like that swallows your heartbeat for a moment, one-two-three, then serves it right back to you for an appetizer, bon appetite. It’s as if no time at all has passed between the day we mixed this and now. In the car, our four heads bob the beats one-two-three-four…and Lory’s drum solo crashes down, an aural tsunami.

  Girl drummers are rare even in a music town like this one. And Lory’s the best I ever heard. The best there ever was. The best. I’m so happy right now I could explode in a puff of eiderdown. It’s a monument to my general pre-dried-out depths that I let things go so long before looking up my old bandmates. Eagle’s like me: kind of an odd duck, slow to make friends, quick to alienate people when he feels threatened or insecure. But Dodo and Lory have tons of friends, lots of fans no matter where they go, even without the rest of us.

  I scrub at the corners of my eyes again, trying to get rid of the wetness before Eagle notices. Can’t blame ashes this time; Lory doesn’t like it when we smoke around her, so we never do. She hates smoking almost as much as the Gryphon does.

  The Gryphon.

&nb
sp; My testes tighten, everything shrinking along with my happiness bubble. Good as I’m feeling, good as things are going here, getting the old crew back together, getting everybody to agree to thrash it out this weekend at Queenie’s for the Wonderband title, I’ve been avoiding thinking much ahead. Dodo, Lory, Eagle and I are birds of a feather, but the Gryphon’s not like the rest of us. It’s possible he won’t let me past his front door, seeing as how I’m the main reason our band fell apart. Not the only reason – I’m not diva enough to claim that – but being the main reason for the end of our collective musical hopes and dreams is bad enough, isn’t it?

  The Gryphon has moved since I saw him last. It’s a stellar pad, rundown in all the right ways, cool in all the right ways, a prime street in a prime part of town, hip-wise. Makes sense. There’s nobody hipper than the Gryphon.

  We all trundle out this time. I resist the urge to nudge Lory to go first up the flagstone walk between crumbled curb and impressive front door with big iron knocker. She’d do it, I know. And our chances at getting in the front door might be better if I let her. But everybody’s waiting for me, pretending they’re not. It’s me who’s got to grovel if we’re going to get the Gryphon to agree to put the band back together, even for a single gig. His vocals were always our glue, our saving grace. Our secret weapon.

  Without remembering having taken any steps between the curb and here I find myself on the porch. Lory’s behind my right shoulder. I can smell her, like jungle flowers kissing dark chocolate. Behind my left shoulder stand Dodo and Eagle. In front of me at eyeball level sits the massive iron ring of the knocker, nestling smug in the hammered groove of its plate. I should just reach for it. I’m going to reach for it. Everybody’s waiting for me to reach for it. I take a deep breath and reach for it and the door swings inward.

  Off balance, I trip onto the threshold, flail a bit. The Gryphon’s shirtless chest is a wide wall of muscle and sinew, feathery as the rest of us but a million times more solid. That’s the only word I have for the Gryphon right now: solid. Other than fighting the sudden urge to pee, I’m blank beyond that.

  “Been expecting you guys,” he says, his voice that deep unforgettable lather of woodsmoke and coffee beans and melting ice cream. “Come in.”

  He turns and disappears back into his house, leaving me to shoot a what-the-fuck googly-eyebrows look over my shoulder at Dodo and Eagle. Far as I know, none of us have spoken to the Gryphon since last summer, not even Eagle who is some kinda way-distant cousin. Dodo murmurs, “I didn’t call him,” at the same time Lory gives a don’t-ask-me sorta shrug. A soft involuntary squawk escapes Eagle, who looks as in need of a urinal as I do. The Gryphon has that effect on people.

  Inside, his décor is same as it ever was: mid-century guru meets high-style loft. White painted brick and rough wooden beams, and fancy imported carpets scattered everywhere that may have cost a mint or been salvaged off the curb, one or the other. The Gryphon settles cross-legged on the highest mound of carpets, yogi-style, and watches the rest of us straggle into the room to perch awkwardly or, in Lory’s case, prettily, on various tufted poufs and pillows. And he’s just looking at me, man, with those inscrutable half-lidded liony eagle eyes. And he’s just waiting, man, waiting for me to start.

  I begin with an apology – a whole tangled string-ball of apologies – for all the gigs I flubbed, the calls I blew off, the money I stole from the band’s kitty to get my next hit. But I’m barely into round one when he waves one of those massive front talons at me, all benediction of forgiveness and shit, and smooth-rumbles in a voice pure cinnamon and whipped honey, “Tell me about this morning.”

  There’s the Gryphon all over: knows everything before you tell it, practically before you know it yourself.

  Without too much tongue fumbling I tell about me and Eagle, minding our own business, set on by those flatwad Hearts. How they bragged about winning the Wonderband title this weekend. Tell him how it sent a thousand diamond and spade points piercing my guts to think a dead-end craptastic outfit like those flatties could sign the Underland deal my a-holery caused us to miss out on last year. Work myself into a lather, telling it like I’m telling it, sweating it like I’m sweating it, till I finally get to the end of everything I have to say other than the ten billion more apologies that could never make up anyway for letting down my band. I owed these guys everything. Still do. Owe them everything that counts for anything.

  And now I’m here. The clincher, the crux of the matter, the seal of the deal unsealed. “So I really hope,” I tell the Gryphon, pausing for the first breath in what seems like a year, injecting it into a silence so intense I know the rest of the crew is holding their collective breath too, “we all hope you’ll let us put Gryphon and the Birds on the sign-up sheet. With you, we could rock this town like it’s never been rocked, blow the feathers off that Underland rep and finally record that album we were made for. But without the Gryphon, that is to say, without you…”

  Lory brushes my shoulder. She and Eagle and Dodo have come to stand near me during my monologue, a tight flock of four, same as in the good old days.

  “…without you, we’re only birds.”

  Practice that week is brutal. Brutal in everything but the music.

  It’s me and Eagle, Dodo and Lory, and at first it’s awkward as all get-out. But Dodo’s working his second-favourite bass like it’s thinking of breaking up with him and he can’t stand the thought – wooing that chunk of lacquered wood with every stroke and lick and slap he can wring out to get it to make beautiful music with him. Eagle’s okay; he and I have been riffing in secret for a couple months now in my sister’s basement, me on my broke-down thrift store rig and him on his dad’s latest guilt gift. Lory pounds those drums like she’s pounding biscuits for rising, and there, here, in Dodo’s garage, things start to come back together. We, we start to come back together.

  I know I can’t get Dodo’s favourite bass back from the shop where I pawned it, even if it was still there, even if I did have the cash. But every day that week I take the bus an hour each way, coming early to practice and staying late, digging through Dodo’s dusty milk crates of old equipment, bundles and tangles of stuff he’s given up on, moved on from. Mikes and amps and pedals and cords his full-time job doesn’t leave room for repairing, for rewiring and re-soldering and cleaning and coiling. By the end of day one I’ve dug up an old effects pedal whose reappearance he treats like a return of the prodigal. Day two and we’ve got enough mikes for full practice. Day three earns me Dodo’s first genuine smile and I feel things knitting inside, bones and other body parts I didn’t notice were broke.

  Making good with Lory’s way easier and much, much harder. No amends to be had for the tears she shed over me – enough tears to wash us all off on a river of sorrow. So no; there’s no way to atone for the tears and the years, and no promises I can make to make up for the promises I broke. But that’s the easy part, figuring all that out, knowing it in my heart, accepting it for truth. The hard part is that she totally forgives me.

  I bring Lory flours each day, a tiny apology for the injuries I caused – massive in scope if not scale, whatever relationship we had dead by a thousand papercuts long before it got incinerated by the missed Wonderband gig. But I bring her those flours, buckwheat and millet and sorghum and rye. I smile and watch her from the corner of my beady eye, knowing she’s got things good now, glad for her. It’s accepting this that’s the hard part: Lory has nothing in her heart for me but love, but she’ll never love me again.

  It’s the Gryphon I can’t get back to. Dead lines and dead silence and no answer no matter how often I call from my sister’s place. No matter how often I hike to his ’hood, stare at that big iron knocker taunting me from its grooved iron bed. I lift and drop it, CLAAHNK CLAAHNK CLAAHNK, but it never summons the only lead singer the best band in town would ever want.

  He doesn’t answer Dodo’s or Eagle’s calls either. Doesn’t even answer Lory’s, and it’s all because of me.
But we keep practicing and it gets less brutal, and I keep telling everybody the Gryphon won’t let us down. I remind them I’m a bit of an expert in the letting down department, and the Gryphon’s not me. I do that all week, and all week we practice like there’s no question we’re playing. No question we’re rocking it, thrashing it out. No question we’ll win, and make Gryphon and the Birds the next Underland Wonderband.

  Queenie’s Place is jumping. It’s the go-to joint for local rock most weekends, but I’ve never seen it like this. Never seen it stuffed so far past the point of fire-regulation-safety no return.

  We get there in the middle of the Tweedles’ set. As a duo they’re okay, but Dee’s voice doesn’t hold a candle to Lory’s, not that she sings much. She should. Note to self: if I survive the plunge-gut cotton-mouth jiggle-brain sensations turning my whole body to suet, I’ll write her more songs for the band to play. Maybe duets with the Gryphon, her spun sugar bouncing off his deep mahogany spice…if he ever sings with us again.

  Because here’s the thing: the Gryphon never did agree to sing with us here tonight.

  But here’s the other thing: he didn’t not agree, either.

  The rest of us are ready to rock as we’ve ever been. Without ever actually agreeing, we’ve all agreed to push the pause button on every single thing in our brains that isn’t rock and roll. Even Lory, who has people in her life. Even Dodo, with his good job. All week we slept rock. We ate rock. We dreamed and breathed and shit rock. We’re all sweating rock and roll right now from every pore of our brain-busted no-sleep bodies. But who needs brains to play when you’ve replaced all your molecules with music? So the Birds are ready. The Birds are good, but with the Gryphon, man…with the Gryphon, we’re golden.

  Eagle and I are unloading the van in the alley when Deuce and his brother shuffle up. If the Gryphon were with us those Hearts would’ve made themselves scarcer than roosters at a rotisserie.