by Lewis Shiner
“Janey?”
“His daughter’s name, supposedly. He hailed a cab and was following them when his wife went through a red light and a truck hit them broadside.”
She couldn’t seem to find solid ground, and it was making her panicky. “You’re not making sense, Gabe. Are you jealous of Skip? Did I miss something?”
Gabe opened the envelope and took out a stack of photocopies. He paged through them and handed one to her. It was part of a page from the LA Times dated October 10, 1972, copied from microfiche: “Singer Faces Manslaughter Charge.” Skip Shaw, who’d had a hit a few years earlier with “Tender Hours,” had been involved in a fatal accident the previous evening. His daughter Jenine, age 3, was pronounced dead at the scene. Arresting officers claimed that Shaw, 23, was “highly intoxicated and belligerent, possibly under the influence of narcotics, certainly in no condition to have been driving.” After treatment for minor injuries, Shaw was charged with manslaughter as well as driving under the influence and criminal negligence. Shaw’s wife Carol, in New York at the time, could not be reached for comment.
“What are the rest?” she asked.
One was a xerox from a 1979 issue of Billboard with the headline, “Former Folk-rock Frontman Fails to Fork Over Five Figures.” Sources at Warner Brothers records were quoted as saying they had no plans to take Skip Shaw to court to recover the $30,000 advance he’d been given to record an album for them. The money was gone, Shaw was destitute, they only hoped that one day he’d make good on his contract. “We’d still love to have a Skip Shaw album,” the source said. “We just don’t know if such a thing is possible anymore.”
“I take it this isn’t how he tells it?”
“In one version, he told me a vice-president at Warner tracked him down to a motel in Mexico and set fire to his room. In another, he actually delivered an album—a brilliant album, of course—and Warner was ‘afraid’ of it and destroyed the master. Look, Laurie, don’t get the idea I like doing this. I hate this more than you can imagine.”
“Do you? I find it disturbing, to say the least, that you’re keeping this little secret file of evidence on somebody you claim is your friend. You’re a regular one-man CIA, aren’t you?”
“You don’t know what it’s like yet. Being around Skip can make you doubt everything you ever knew. It’s dizzying. It’s hard to remember which way is up.”
“Does Jim know about this?”
“Jim helped me put it together.”
“Dennis?”
Gabe nodded.
“Have you ever showed this to Skip, given him a chance to explain?”
“I tried. Either the papers got the stories wrong, or he was trying to protect somebody else, or I wasn’t remembering what he’d really said, or somebody was lying to get even with him.”
Suddenly it was all simply too hard to think about. She didn’t want to do it any longer. “I think you should go.”
He got up. “I’m sorry, Laurie.”
“Just go.”
He stopped again at the door. “I know how you’re feeling. I really do. And if you want—”
“Get the fuck out, okay?”
She locked and chained the door after him and curled up on the couch with a blanket, hugging herself until she stopped shivering, watching TV until she drifted into an uneasy sleep where she was trying to solve a sort of three-dimensional crossword puzzle, fitting letters into words and words into meaningless phrases like “the ashtray was full of dimes.”
It was dark when the phone woke her. A tentative voice said, “It’s Skip.”
“Hi,” she said fuzzily.
“I just…I wondered—”
“Don’t wonder,” she told him. “Don’t explain. Just come over. Come over now.”
Aubade
She woke late, smelling coffee and cigarette smoke, at first startled at the slap of bare footsteps in the living room, then relieved, amazed, flattered, to realize they were Skip’s, that he hadn’t pulled his boots on and escaped in the night. Only then did terror flood her heart.
She pulled the covers over her head and curled fetally around a pillow, her eyes squeezed shut. They had not even, for God’s sake, used a condom, though at the moment she was less afraid of disease than she was of facing Skip in the light of day.
When she tried to see herself through Skip’s eyes, she found only her high school self-image: awkward, naive, poorly formed, tongue-tied, childish. Why hadn’t he run away?
By far the worst was her sure and certain knowledge that she had destroyed the band. It could not possibly survive the contempt for her that Skip was surely feeling now. She pictured each step on the path ahead: the awkward silences at practice, the knowing looks passing from face to face, then Skip finally disappearing somewhere into the bowels of LA.
As he surely would. The man was a liar, a drunk, a bitter has-been, as Gabe had tried so hard to tell her.
She found her sweatshirt tangled up in the bedclothes and put it on. Even that small gesture of independence gave her strength. She got out of bed, pulled the sweatshirt down to her knees, walked into the living room, and screamed.
He looked up from the spiral notebook he’d been reading. His jeans and belt were on and fastened, but his shirt was unbuttoned to the waist. He exhaled cigarette smoke through a bemused smile and said, “Good morning to you, too.”
“What are you doing? That’s mine!”
“Some of this stuff is pretty good. The one with the foolscap and the dunce—”
She lunged for the notebook and tore it out of his unresisting hands. He was still smiling. “This is not funny, you asshole!” she yelled, wrapping the book against her stomach with both arms. “This is private. You’ve got no right—”
“Hey,” he said, hands halfway up in tentative surrender. “I’m sorry, okay? I just wanted to see the rest of your songs—”
“If you want something that’s not yours, you ask for it. Understand?” She took the notebook to her bedroom, pitched it into a drawer, and slammed the drawer shut again. If there’d been a lock on the drawer she would have turned it and swallowed the key. No, she thought, lock and key were not enough. Obviously she would have to burn it, so that when he mocked her, there would be no evidence to support him and she could deny everything.
She jumped when she felt his hand on her arm. “Don’t touch me,” she said.
“It was just laying there,” he said. “I promise I won’t ever look again unless you tell me.”
“You’re goddamned right you won’t.”
“I said I was sorry and I am.”
She turned around and looked at his bare feet. He hadn’t put his socks on, let alone his boots. “Okay?” he said.
“I guess. I woke up feeling awkward, and then I saw you going through my stuff…”
“Me too.”
She looked up at him, which was probably a mistake. His eyes were soft and dark and full of hurt. “What?” she said.
“Awkward. Me too. I was laying there in bed next to you, and I felt this chill of pure remorse, like I’d screwed something up.”
“You’re sorry we made love?”
“Darlin’, that would be like a comet being sorry it fell into the sun. It wasn’t like I could keep away from you. If this hurts the band, if it hurts your chances, I don’t know how I could live with myself.”
“It’s your chances too.”
“I used up my chances a long time ago. Besides, you’re Laurie Moss, and I’m—”
“I know. You’re just a tree.” Without quite meaning to, she found her cheek pressed against his tanned, hairless chest. His skin smelled like a lawn on a late summer afternoon. And then somehow they were in bed again.
Later he brought her coffee and said, “Can we at least talk about the song?”
“What song?”
“The foolscap song.”
“That. That was my Elvis Costello period. Too clever for my own good.”
“Is there a tune?”
<
br /> When she got up for the notebook, she knew she’d somehow lost a contest she’d never meant to enter. Paging through the half-baked ideas, clichés, and shopworn revelations made her cringe. “This song,” she said, “is exactly the kind of thing I didn’t want you reading.” The lyrics were full of forced puns and odd rhyme schemes:
Leaves of empty foolscap
Left me feeling like a dunce
I’ve gone so wrong
Every time I try to write
The phone has wrung me uptight
With a long
Wrong number
More than once
“Yeah,” Skip said, “but is there a tune?”
She brought her father’s guitar back to bed with her and sat naked, one leg crossed over the other, working through the chords, the melody returning to her in fits and starts.
“Have you considered playing the Duck like this?” Skip said. He was propped up on a mound of pillows, his hands behind his head, long strands of brown hair fallen across his weathered face. “You’d really pack ’em in.”
She sang through one verse, ignoring him. Skip had her do it again, then said, “Go up a step to the C for two bars, then to the E-flat.” She played and he sang, “ ‘The phone rings around the roses/You sent to deliver me/Everything stems from this…’ or something like that.”
“It needs to go to A minor instead of E-flat,” she said, and for the next hour she didn’t think about the consequences of what they’d done, only about watching the song open like a flower in time-lapse photography. Before Skip touched it, the song had been words and nothing more. After, it meant something; it glistened with subliminal sadness.
“How do you do that?” she said. Beneath her sense of wonder lay the conviction that she was doomed to a life of waitressing, that greatness was simply not in her.
“Practice, my dear.” Skip got out of bed, his back to her, and pulled on his pants.
“You’re leaving me,” she said. “I’ll never see you again.” She’d meant it to be a joke, had let it escape before thinking how it would sound, how nakedly the words would hang in the air.
Skip put on his watch and said, “You’ll see me in six hours.” He put on his shirt and his boots while she sat on the bed, hunched over her guitar, and then, as he stood looking for an exit line she climbed over the bed to him and wrapped him up in a kiss. When she let him go he smiled and said, “You got to stop that, now.”
Panic
The apartment was a hundred times emptier when Skip left than it had been before he came, as if he were a particularly insidious thief. Overnight she’d lost all comfort in silence. Dressed again in sweatshirt and jeans, she huddled on the couch, knotting her fingers until the knuckles crunched. She didn’t even have Skip’s phone number. Probably for the best. She’d missed her interview in Pasadena entirely. Gabe would know what had happened the minute she showed up at practice, and that thought made her cringe. Looking ahead, she could always start planning for her eviction, which couldn’t be far off.
More than anything, she hated the idea of sinking without a trace when she had been so close. If she could just finish the master tape, she thought, she could endure the humiliation. She could hold the CD in her fingerless gloves as she lay starving in her cardboard box on Venice Beach. Worse come to worst, she could make do with a cassette that Jim dubbed off for her.
Then that’s it, she thought.
We’ll finish the tape.
Of the Same Name (1)
That night they learned “Fool’s Cap” and two more originals: “Linda,” which went back to college and a friend of Laurie’s who’d cut off all her hair and tried to kill her boyfriend, and “Midnight Train,” which wasn’t about much of anything beyond its own “na na na na” chorus. Laurie had spent the entire afternoon frantically reworking them both, going through the notebook that Skip had violated and folding down the corner of every page that held a scrap of poetry capable of being hammered into a bridge or an extra verse.
After practice, sitting at the kitchen table, Jim added them to the song list and said, “You know…” He stopped and counted the songs again and then scratched his orange beard with the butt of the pen. “You know, there’s enough songs here for an album.”
“Really?” Laurie said. “No kidding.” She should have been grateful that Jim had raised the subject first, but instead she was full of the sudden and rare terror of getting what she’d asked for. What if I get what I want and it still doesn’t make me happy? she thought. There were so many ways to be wrong, so few ways to get things right. How was it ever possible to know?
“I make it ten originals,” he said, “your pal Summer’s song, your dad’s song, and ‘Don’t Make Promises. ’ ”
She and Skip were both shaking their heads. She said, “Skip already told you—” at the same time that Skip said, “I can’t sing lead on—”
They stopped and looked at each other across the table. “We’ll discuss it,” Jim said. “But I’m telling you right now, that arrangement is killer. It’s a great piece of material, it was born to be a duet, and I can’t believe nobody ever thought of it before.”
She looked at Gabe, but Gabe was still neither talking nor meeting her eyes. She and Skip hadn’t deceived anyone—when she presented “Fool’s Cap” and Skip kept suggesting lines they’d thrown away that morning, she could barely maintain a straight face—but they’d all pretended nothing was happening. Everyone except Gabe.
“I think we should go ahead and start it,” she said.
“What,” Dennis said, “you mean tonight?”
“We could start tomorrow. Work on the set for a couple of hours every night, then spend a couple of hours recording.”
“It’s your band,” Skip said. “Only what’s your hurry?”
She held onto her coffee cup with both hands, needing heat. “I’m broke,” she said. “I can’t find a job. I’m scared. I want to feel like something in my life is for keeps.” Her gaze caught on Gabe as she said that, and she wished she could close her eyes, but he stared right into her until she finally turned her head away.
“We can talk about it,” Jim said.
“Let’s,” she said. “I want to talk about what it would sound like. Here’s what I think. I think you should be able to hear the space between all the instruments. I think it should sound like everybody’s playing really hard, but you can hear everybody, all the time. Everything should have texture and rough edges that catch in your brain. Weird instruments—toy pianos and plastic trash cans and tonettes, tucked away for people to discover.”
Jim’s eyes lit up. He had a glockenspiel, he said, that would fit on “Brighter Day” and a cheesy 12-tone electronic doodad that had exactly the right sound for “Fool’s Cap.”
He went to Sam’s room to find it and in the silence Dennis said, “So, what are you going to call the record?”
“Laurie Moss,” Skip said. “What else?”
Dennis leaned forward, hands clasped on the green Formica tabletop, blond hair falling in his eyes, an intent expression on his face. “You know what I always thought would be a good title for a record? Of the Same Name.”
Jim, on his way back with the doodad, stopped in the kitchen doorway to listen.
“That way,” Dennis said, “when they announce it on the radio? They could say, ‘That was Laurie Moss, from her album Of the Same Name. ’ ”
Jim, standing behind him, looked stricken. “My God,” he said. “Dennis made a joke.”
“You guys think I’m stupid—”
“Yes,” Jim said, “we do.”
“—but I’m just keeping my lice under a bushel basket.”
For a second Jim didn’t seem to believe what he’d heard, then he sank to his knees and started to roll around on the floor. Gabe bent over in his chair and Skip shook his head in silent laughter.
“What?” Dennis said. “What’d I say?”
“Nothing,” Laurie told him. “I think it’s perfect. It�
�s exactly right. We’ll call it Of the Same Name.”
When the silence wore off Gabe said, “And then what? Do we shop it to the majors or what?”
“Of course,” Laurie said. “Columbia and Warner first.”
“Well,” Jim said.
He’d left a black hole in the conversation. He sat down again and put the doodad in front of him. It was a six-inch miniature keyboard with an octave and a half of little round buttons instead of keys. He played a three-note version of the “Neither Are We” riff.
“You could get really hurt in the majors, even if we did get a deal. They pretty much want a gold record first time out anymore. And if you don’t hit with the first single, they won’t even take your phone calls.”
Laurie’s hopes began to melt and run. Her father had done this to her in grade school, and her mother stepped into the role when he left. If she wanted a new dress, he told her she’d just grow out of it. A puppy would be endless work. The lines were too long at Disney World.
“Let’s not do this now,” she said. “No pissing on the album until it’s done, okay?”
“Fair enough,” Jim said. “Let’s see what we end up with. Anything could happen.”
“You got that right,” Gabe said, a bit ominously, she thought.
She stood up. “Tomorrow?” Everybody agreed, and Skip got up, too. She felt her heart pick up speed.
She leaned down for her guitar case and Gabe said, “Hang on,” in her father’s voice.
It had gone so well. Skip fully present and playful, rehearsal productive, the album now consensual. She might have convinced herself she was going to get away with it if not for Gabe’s relentless guilt-inducing stare. “It’s late,” she said, the way she would have said it to her father in sixth grade. “Can’t we—”
“No,” Gabe said.
She looked at Skip, who crinkled his eyes in a way she believed no one else could see. She realized she would have to settle for that. “See ya,” she said. He nodded and walked out.
She looked at Gabe. “What did you want to talk about?”