by Lewis Shiner
Laurie couldn’t shake the feeling that the man was a flake. He dressed badly, he was in bad odor with his own record company, and he was simply too free with his sincerity. “Then you should sign us,” she said, standing up.
Ardrey shook a mock-reproving finger. “Now, now. Doesn’t do to get pushy. When are you playing again?”
“Who knows?” she said. She was suddenly so tired that she wondered if she could make it to the LBD, wondered if she had will power enough to force it up the steep slope of the Hollywood Hills and down again to her apartment. She managed a costly smile. “G’night, everybody. Y’all were great.”
She stopped for her guitar and amp, and on the way out the door she saw a slender redhead slide into the chair next to Jim and lean over to hug him. The woman looked to be in her mid-thirties, pretty, expensively dressed in a black blazer and half-unbuttoned silk blouse.
I don’t want to know, Laurie thought. I’ve had enough for one night. She walked out of the club unrecognized and unmolested, breathing cool, clear air, still hearing the low throb of the bass guitar through the wall behind her.
The last days of Summer
She showered the smoke and fumes off and sat up for an hour or so letting her hair dry, watching ancient sitcoms on Nickelodeon and drinking water to wash the last residues of excitement and despair out of her aching muscles. Even then she had to fight for sleep, only to wake up at seven forty-five to a snarling alarm clock and go through the motions of getting dressed, eyes squinting against the sunlight, groggy consciousness tiptoeing around the hard questions waiting to be asked.
As soon as she got to work she called Jim, who said, “You should have hung out another five minutes.”
“So I could meet your girlfriend?”
“That’s okay, Molly will only kill me if you say that in front of her. Yes, I wanted you to meet Melinda. She manages bands. I’ve known her for years, and she wants to take us on. In fact…”
“What?”
“Well, she had something for Saturday night, only I know you’ve got your thing with Summer, so I told her we couldn’t make it.”
“What kind of a thing?”
“A benefit, medical care for the homeless type deal. No money, good karma, good press after.”
“I can’t do it, Jim. I told you from the start—”
“I know. I know. I was trying to find something that could be construed as good news to lead off with.”
“Oh God, what now?”
“It’s not the end of the world, but…both Matador and SubPop passed on the tape. Both very nice letters. Both mailed on Tuesday.”
“They probably decided together, while they were making plans to ditch our show and go see Random Axe.”
“Both of them said it’s a very professional, very commercial demo and it ought to be on a major label.”
“Anybody’s label but theirs?”
“Maybe they’re right. Maybe we should be on a major. That guy Ardrey last night said—”
“Dan was telling me about him. Nobody expects him to be at General next week.”
“I’ve heard the rumors too, but he’s there today, and he did like us. It’s a start. Look how far we’ve come since January. We’ve got a master tape almost done. We’ve debuted at a major club on the Strip. We’ve got a potential manager who thinks she can get us work and we’ve got, as they say, ‘major label interest.’ ”
Laurie said, “We’ve got a guitar player who can’t decide if he wants to play with us, an audience who’d rather hear him than me, and a handful of rejection letters. My landlady could change her mind and evict me any day, and if I’d actually been free to play this benefit thing, I wouldn’t have a proper amp to play through. You said yourself that if we don’t get noticed when we first come out of the gate, it’s going to take years. On top of all that I’m fighting to finish an album that nobody wants.”
“I take it you won’t be over tonight to work on the vocal tracks?”
She sighed. “I don’t think I can face it right now. I’m sorry. When we’re actually playing, everything is great. Especially last night, when we had a real audience to play to. It’s the best feeling I’ve ever had. It’s just…everything else. The real world. I can’t stand the inside of my own head anymore.”
Jim was quiet for a long time. “So do we go with Melinda?”
“Go with Melinda,” Laurie said. “Tell her any night other than Saturday.”
She went straight home after work. Summer’s VW Rabbit was parked on the street across from the apartment, and Laurie’s first thought was, please, not tonight. She contemplated driving on past, but no, Summer was on the porch, was standing up to wave at her, the breeze pulling at her brown flannel shirt.
Laurie pulled into the driveway and parked. As soon as she got close enough to see the creases around Summer’s eyes and the flat, forced smile that kept dropping away and returning to her mouth, Laurie knew that whatever this was, it was not going to be easy.
“You okay?” Laurie said.
“Sure,” Summer said, then quickly, awkwardly, reached out to hug her. Laurie, already turning toward the door, recovered as best she could and patted her keys against Summer’s back.
“Come on in,” Laurie said, unlocking the door, turning on lights, throwing her purse on the table by the door. “You want something to drink?”
“No. No, thanks. You go ahead. I mean, if you want to.”
Laurie stopped halfway to the kitchen and turned to face her. “Summer, what in the world is wrong with you?”
Summer sat on the couch, sank into the cushions, then scooted forward, forearms on her knees. “It was very sweet what you said about me last night.”
“Last night?”
“When you introduced ‘Tried and True.’ ”
Laurie couldn’t remember what she’d said. Something about Summer being one of her favorite songwriters, she imagined. “How did…oh. I get it. You were there.”
“I left at the end of the set. I couldn’t face you last night. I’m not sure I can face you now.”
“Why not? Will you tell me what’s wrong?”
“Knowing you were playing with them wasn’t the same as seeing it. It was like actually running into Fernando with his wife or something. I guess you knew that, which is why you didn’t invite me and I had to read the ad in the Weekly like everybody else.”
“I thought you didn’t want to hear about—”
“It doesn’t matter. Really, it doesn’t matter. What I saw last night…” Her eyes had turned red and puffy.
“What exactly did you see last night?”
“I saw your future.” She looked straight at Laurie for the first time since she’d come inside, and the tears were now overflowing and running down her face. “I’m not in it.”
Laurie sat on the couch and took one of Summer’s hands in both of her own. “Summer, that’s not true. The rest of the band knows that our Saturdays are strictly off-limits—”
“That’s ridiculous.” Summer wiped her eyes on her shirt sleeve and seemed suddenly in complete control. “You can’t be in a working band and not be able to play Saturday nights. How many gigs have you already given up because of me?”
“None,” Laurie said, but it sounded like a lie even to her own ears.
“Even if that’s true, and I don’t believe you, and it wouldn’t stay true for long in any case, what about me? Am I just supposed to sit around and wait for you to get tired of me holding you down?”
“You’re not—”
Summer started crying again. “We should split up now.” Then, barely a second later, she was back in control. “The longer we put it off, the uglier it’s going to be. I already talked to Brad. He wants two weeks’ notice, tomorrow night and next week, so he can push the farewell concert angle. He’s not happy, but he understands.”
“Understands what? Because I don’t understand this at all.”
“That I’m going to be playing the Duck and places l
ike it for the rest of my life. And that he’s going to be booking people like me as long as he’s there. And that he’s only going to get talent like you on your way up.”
“Or on my way back down?”
“It’s way too early to think about that.”
“I can’t believe you talked to Brad before you talked to me.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. This isn’t about you anymore. It’s about me protecting myself.”
“How did we end up where we have to protect ourselves from each other?”
Summer, to Laurie’s relief, didn’t answer. Instead she got up and went to the door. “I love you, you know,” Summer said.
“I love you too,” Laurie said. “I don’t want you to go.”
“I know that,” Summer said, and went.
And so, two nights later, they played their next-to-last duet together. Summer talked too much between songs, about Laurie’s new band, about the songs themselves, about, for God’s sake, the weather, and the audience loved her for her lack of self-control. It made Laurie seem sullen by contrast, even to herself, though she was sure she hadn’t started out that way.
Sunday she went to Whittier to work on the album. “I knew you’d come around,” Jim said. “What is it you guys say in Texas? Get back on the one that threw you?”
“ ‘Throwed,’ ” Laurie said. “The word is ‘throwed.’ ”
When she hadn’t heard from Summer by Thursday night she called and got her answering machine. The same on Friday. Saturday night Summer was sitting on the edge of the stage when Laurie walked in the Duck. “Hey,” Laurie said. “I tried to call you.”
“I know,” Summer said. Laurie couldn’t yet tell if her smile was more than superficial.
When Laurie left Jack, it was over. She never had to see him again, let alone to do something as intimate as this: to get up together on a stage in front of two hundred people, to blend one voice into the other, to move in rhythm, to let all defenses down. “Are you sure you’re up for this?” she asked.
“I’m a professional,” Summer said. “So are you.”
“Professional. A perfumed word to cover a myriad of ills.”
“That’s just your guilt talking,” Summer said. “If you have to, remind yourself that this was all my idea, first to last. Let’s both try to live through it.”
In the end it was anticlimax. There was a whiff of the perfunctory about it, more wistfulness than true regret, more professionalism than epiphany. When it was over, Summer collected her guitar and her two hundred dollars, kissed Laurie, promised to call, and melted into the crowd.
A hypothetical question
After Laurie’s father moved out, she’d spent months remembering every time he’d ever been disappointed in her. Her mother had sensed it and used her own disappointment as a weapon throughout what was left of Laurie’s childhood.
She sat up late Saturday night imagining she had Aladdin’s magic lamp on the table in front of her. On this hand, a record contract with General Records. On the other, the ability to go through the rest of her life without ever disappointing anyone again.
Which do you choose?
Of the Same Name (2)
It was three months and one week from the time Laurie decided in a February panic that she had to have a finished master tape to the afternoon in mid-May when she recorded the last of the vocals. After that final session, Jim took Laurie to her first major league baseball game, then they worked on the mix until five Saturday morning. Laurie crashed in the guest room until ten and then they started again.
It was like mixing on her Tascam four-track, except for the size of everything involved. It took both of them to work the faders on Jim’s mixing console, sometimes colliding as their hands moved from one channel to another. It seemed to Laurie that for every song there was a single true and correct mix. She knew exactly how each instrument should sound at any given point in the song—how loud, how much reverb, how much treble and bass, where exactly it should sit between the listener’s ears.
Saturday afternoon, as they took a breather, Jim said, “Estrogen seemed to move a lot of CDs at Club Lingerie.”
It sounded like a tentative step toward something Laurie herself had been considering. She answered carefully, not wanting to frighten him off. “Dan said they made back their investment in a couple of weeks.”
Jim nodded. They rehearsed their moves for “Linda” and then Jim said, “I guess they put, what, about fifteen hundred in it initially?”
“I made a couple of calls. It’s around that. For a thousand CDs and five hundred cassettes.”
Jim nodded and they tried a take using the master, dubbing it down to its own individual Digital Audio Tape cassette. When she listened to the DAT Laurie shook her head. “The bass should be going pooom, pooom, like this monstrous explosion halfway across town.”
They tried again and listened again. Jim said, “If you’ve been making calls, you’ve been thinking about this.”
“About what?”
“About us doing the record ourselves.”
Laurie shrugged. “I wake up at five AM sometimes. It’s that or relive childhood embarrassments.”
“So what were your thoughts?”
“That we wouldn’t have to listen to a lot of asinine opinions if we did it ourselves. We’d only have to listen to five.”
“You’re leaving Molly out?”
“No, I was leaving Dennis out. Drummers aren’t legally allowed to vote, are they?”
They made two more tries on “Linda” and then still one more, the fifth, where they caught it perfectly, volume up, swaying unselfconsciously, hands crawling like independent robots over the alien landscape of faders and knobs.
They took the finished song from DAT to standard cassette and then took the cassette to the kitchen, where they played it through Jim’s jam box. “Fifteen hundred dollars is a lot of money,” Jim said.
“Nobody’s looking at you on this one. You’ve already paid all the recording expenses so far, not to mention feeding me.”
“Who else is there to look at?”
“I don’t know that yet. But I don’t know that I’m ready to pursue this yet, either. I mean, I’m not Bob Dylan, with basement tapes and trunks of unpublished songs lying around. This record is five years worth of work for me, and I’m not sure I’m ready to throw it on the self-published scrap heap.”
“The one doesn’t necessarily mean the other. I mean, if we should happen to consider this seriously at some point. Industry people don’t like to listen to tapes anymore. A CD, with nice art, would actually get listened to. And if we did get a label deal, we could include a re-release of this record in the contract.”
“If we did happen,” Laurie said, “to talk seriously about this. And if fifteen hundred dollars should happen to land in one of our laps.”
But the idea had seized her. A CD now, with her name on it, and a record deal later. An hour or two later she asked, “Who do you know that’s an artist?”
“Believe it or not,” Jim said, “Dennis is pretty good.” He got a CD down from the shelf behind them. “He did the cover.” It was a mixture of collage, pencil, colored pens, and type, striking and confident. “Figures, really. Visual arts and coherent speech are usually mutually exclusive.”
They finished at twenty minutes after midnight Saturday night. Jim put together a cassette copy of the finished album and Laurie sat at the kitchen table for ten minutes, just looking at it.
“Are you okay to drive?” Jim asked.
“Yes.”
“Then go home. Sleep.”
She drove back to Studio City with the tape in her left hand. The album was complete in her head and it never occurred to her to put the tape into her deck. When she got home she lay down in her clothes and slept for twelve hours.
The finished tape was still unplayed on Sunday night when, after a long bath, with clean sheets on the bed and the apartment at least tidy, she made her weekly calls
home.
Her mother first, for conversation that was perfunctory at the same time that it was reassuringly familiar: Corky still out of work, the San Antonio heat already in the 90s, when was she coming home?
Then Grandpa Bill and a chance to brag about the album. “Will you send me a copy of the tape?” he asked.
“Of course, but…I don’t know if you’ll like it.”
“That strikes me as a particularly foolish thing to say. I’d love it for no other reason than that your voice is on it. Add to that the fact that you wrote the songs—”
“Most of them.”
“Even if it was only one. How could I not love it?”
He seemed to expect an answer. “I don’t know, Grandpa. I guess, being who you are, you’d just have to love it.”
“Much better. Now, you said something about putting it out yourself. What would that cost? “
“Grandpa, no. That’s not why I told you about it.”
“It’s a simple question. Surely you can answer a simple question.”
“Well, I said I’d looked into it…”
“So you must already know the figures.”
“It’d take about fifteen hundred dollars.”
“And you’d have to sell how many to pay me back?”
“A hundred or so.”
“From everything you’ve said it sounds like a perfectly reasonable investment to me. Why don’t I send you a check?”
Part of her had hoped for just such an offer, but now that it lay in front of her she felt deceitful, manipulative, and hideously guilty. “Wait, wait. Let me talk it over with the guys. If I can feel okay with this, and you still want to do it, I’ll get a firm quote, okay?”
With the help of a woman named Janice, the art director at Sav-N-Comp, Laurie picked up enough Photoshop and Quark to lay out the CD and cassette labels and inserts. She brought Dennis in one weekend in early June, and they tweaked the album art until they were both happy with it, then added the titles: LAURIE MOSS and OF THE SAME NAME. That Monday they FedExed a DAT master and a zip disk of the art to EvaTone in Florida.