Say Goodbye

by Lewis Shiner

  “Okay, okay.” He looked at Melinda. “Call me tomorrow, we’ll work something out.” Then he turned to Laurie and held out his hand. “I believe we have a deal. You’re a very impressive young lady. And quite a talent.”

  Laurie told herself he didn’t mean to condescend. She took his hand and smiled bravely. “Thanks.”

  Then Claybeck was gone, with a magisterial wave, and Laurie said, “Three weeks?”

  Melinda nodded. “Start packing.”

  Patrice

  Laurie signed the General Records contract on August 16th, two days later, in Melinda’s office in Venice. Dennis voiced concern because it was the anniversary of Elvis’s death, but cooler heads prevailed. Gabe and Jim were also there; Skip and Ross Claybeck were not. Skip’s signature, however, was already on the contract. Ardrey was there and Melinda took pictures of him with the band and the contract in the fond hope of getting one into Billboard.

  With Ardrey was a Frenchman named Patrice who spoke almost no English. He was about fifty, with long gray hair combed behind his ears, blue doubleknit pants, and a leather jacket. After the signing, the photo op, and the requisite champagne, Ardrey introduced him around. General had hired Patrice, Ardrey said, to direct their first video.

  “Everybody’s agreed to ‘Angel Dust,’ like you wanted, for the single,” Ardrey said. Laurie had an involuntary pang of delight at the word “single.” “Though I still like ‘Don’t Make Promises.’ ”

  “But we settled that, correct?” Laurie said. “Because it doesn’t really represent the album? Being kind of old and folky and countryish and not written by Laurie Moss and having Skip singing on it?”

  “Except for one thing. Chemistry. That song has chemistry to burn, as Werner Von Braun used to say. But that’s okay. Poor old washed up Mark Ardrey doesn’t get to pick the singles anymore.”

  “Spare me,” Laurie said. “Patrice is going to shoot ‘Angel Dust.’ ”

  Ardrey opened a catalog from a Guggenheim exhibit of Patrice’s black-and-white photos. They were mostly of street kids in early adolescence, grainy and full of desperation. Ardrey said, “We thought we’d turn him loose in Hollywood, let him shoot the kids here.”

  “You’d be doing their parents a favor,” Laurie said. She plunged on past Ardrey’s puzzled look to ask, “Didn’t Soul Asylum already do this in ‘Runaway Train?’ ”

  “This is different,” Ardrey said. “We’re going to hire some of the kids, put them in the audience with you at a club, give it more of a story.”

  Jim was still looking at the pictures. “I like this,” he said, pointing to a photo of a boy of thirteen or so crouched on a surfboard on a brick street in a French resort town. The boy, in baggy shorts and no shirt, had bent his legs as if riding a wave, the board upside-down with the fins sticking up. Laurie could see the ocean behind him, and she could see the rich kid that he and his friends had taken the surfboard from, standing off to one side looking frightened and angry at the same time. The friends were laughing and clowning, and the kid had a cigarette burning in one corner of his mouth. The defining detail, however, was the expression on the face of the girl, also maybe thirteen, who had turned away and was now walking toward the camera, hurt and disgusted and lost, clearly sick of the kid and all his smart-ass friends.

  “There’s a whole movie here,” Jim said.

  Laurie looked at Patrice and pointed to the picture. “I like this too. It has a lot of heart.”

  Patrice tapped his right fist twice on his chest. “Thank you. I think the same about your song. I make you a video with a lot of heart, okay?”

  “Okay,” Laurie said.

  Ardrey and Patrice left, and Gabe said, “Hey, babeee. I make you the feeelthy vee-joe.”

  “Don’t complain,” Laurie said. “I just got you into pictures and you didn’t even have to sleep with me.”

  Immediately she wished she hadn’t said it. Gabe, Jim, and Dennis all looked embarrassed in declining order of intensity. Laurie sighed audibly. “Okay, now that I’ve so tactfully conjured the absent Skip, has anybody told him we’re touring?”

  “He’s been informed,” Melinda said.

  “Do we know if he’s coming?”

  Melinda shrugged. “If we knew which side of the deck he was going to end up on, he wouldn’t be a loose cannon, now would he?”

  Laurie sighed again, more quietly. “I’ll handle it.”

  Jim said, “Maybe I should…”

  “Nope,” Laurie said. “Not this time.”

  Celebrity bowling

  She got to Skip’s apartment before eight. The sun was still up, the air cool and sweet, the way it was in Texas once a summer, the way it was in Hollywood almost every night. It finally hit her that she was about to leave LA. She sat on the curb and watched palm trees turn to silhouettes as the sun went down behind them.

  Saturday would be her 14-month anniversary. It seemed like no time it all when she tried to conjure it as a single entity. When she thought about the moments, though, there seemed to be more of them than in the rest of her life put together. The way she’d always thought true love would be.

  She heard the whisk of one denimed leg against another, and then Skip was sitting next to her. “You said eight o’clock,” he said.

  She nodded. “Here I am.”

  Skip was barefoot, in jeans and a white T-shirt. His hair was in his face and he hadn’t shaved in a while. He combed through his hair with his fingers and lit a cigarette, and the two of them sat and watched the deep, lacquered blue of the coming night.

  “I’m going to miss this place,” Laurie said.

  “Everybody wonders why it’s so crowded out here. Then they come out themselves and they don’t want to leave either.”

  She let the peaceful moment stretch as long as she was able, and then she said, “You’re not going to tour with us, are you?”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I’ve been waiting for you to let me down ever since this whole thing started.”

  “Just don’t forget who was the first to tell you I would do it.” He took a deep drag and blew the smoke out his nose. “Melinda called me this afternoon.”

  He seemed to be waiting for a response. “Yes?” she said.

  “Ardrey had just called her. Very apologetic. He’d fought and argued and done everything he could do.”

  “About what?”

  “My share of the advance. Your pal Clay Dick’s got a long memory and loves a grudge. He got the lawyers to dig up some fine print in my old Warner contract that lets them keep anything I make off this record until that old advance is paid back. With interest.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Kidding? I don’t think so.”

  “Can’t you fight them?”

  “Sure. I could pay thousands of dollars I don’t have to some shyster of my own to take on the entire legal department of Time-slash-Warner. What do you think my chances are?”

  “I can’t believe they’d do that.”

  “Believe it. This is still fairy-tale time for you. What you haven’t seen yet is that the fairy Godmother and the wicked witch are one and the same.”

  The temperature seemed to have dropped ten degrees with the sunset. Skip didn’t seem to notice, though Laurie had to cross her arms to keep from shivering.

  “So,” Skip said. “Who told them I was in the band?”

  “What do you mean ‘told them’? Ardrey’s been following us for months. How could he not know?”

  “There’s a difference between being a sideman and getting a full cut as part of the band. Who put it in the contract that I was part of the band?”

  “All I did was set it up so we’d all get an equal share. Now wait a minute. Are you blaming me for—”

  “Back when this whole thing started, I made you promise me something. I made you promise that anything I did beyond playing—like having my name on the record, I specifically remember mentioning—had to be in my own
way and in my own time. Remember?”

  She did remember, and it was a cold, hard lump in her stomach. “Are you telling me you wanted me to cut you out of the money?”

  “I told you not to get me involved in any legal bullshit without asking me first. That seems pretty clear to me. As for the money, I’d have to ask you: what money? I’m sure as hell not going to see any of it now.”

  Despite her chill, Laurie could feel the sweat start under her arms. “This is ridiculous. You’re just looking for somebody else to blame because you pissed away your own career. You’re the one who took that advance and didn’t deliver. You dug this grave with your own two hands.”

  Skip shrugged, stood up, dusted off the seat of his jeans, and started back toward the apartment building. He was halfway there when Laurie finally called after him. “Skip?”

  He turned around without speaking. She stood up and tried to find something to do with her hands. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I felt so goddamned noble, writing the contract that way. I didn’t think…”

  He nodded once, very slightly.

  “I have to know,” she said. “If you’re not coming on the tour, I have to find somebody else.”

  He let her twist for a few seconds and then he said, “Here’s the deal. Take it or leave it.” He started counting off with his left little finger. “First, if I come, I’m not sleeping on somebody’s floor. I’m not going to have some fool kid’s parents come home and throw me out in the middle of the night. Either we do Motel 6 or we get a bus we can sleep on. Two. I bring my own car. I’m too old to have to ask somebody for the keys to the van if I want to go drive around by myself. Three. As long as I make the sound checks and the gigs, the rest of my time is my own. I don’t have to do interviews or radio jingles or celebrity bowling.”

  Three seemed to be it. She hadn’t heard anything she couldn’t live with. “Does this mean you’ll do it?”

  “I got no choice,” he said. “I need the per deim.”

  Guilt tortured her all the way home. She felt unclean and went straight to the shower, scrubbing herself to a bright red glow. By the time she got out, she’d calmed down enough to call Melinda at home. “When Skip signed the contract, did he say anything? Like wanting to be left out of it or anything?”

  “No. He just asked what I thought his share might come to. Why?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Just Skip.”

  The relief was only temporary. She lay awake half the night hearing “Don’t Make Promises” over and over again in her head.

  Struggling

  Even before Laurie’s signing I’d tried to pitch an interview to the usual editors. I’d done an Internet search on her name that turned up nothing beyond outdated club listings and I wanted to know more.

  “What’s your angle?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I haven’t talked to her yet.”

  “What do you know about her?”

  “She made a great record. You should hear it.”

  “The cutout bins are full of great records. Call me when you’ve got a story.”

  Such is the sensitive world of rock journalism. In the end I decided they might be right: I’d built an obsession out of a few songs, a photograph, and the sudden hole in my life that came from Tom being in day care.

  Day care was Tom’s decision, not mine. It constantly amazed me how he’d come with parts of his personality fully formed. He’d been fascinated by animals, for instance, since his eyes had first learned to focus. I used to take him to the park in his plastic carrier when he was only a few months old, and as he sat beside me on the park bench, he would reach out to dogs and squirrels with a kind of desperate yearning that he never showed toward humans. By the time he was three, it was easy for his friends to lure him into preschool and away from his old man with siren songs of stuffed toys and the teacher’s pet kitty.

  It left my mornings free to write again, though the writing itself wasn’t going well. I’d spent most of a month working on a piece on comics for Spin that, by the time two different editors were finished with it, had lost its focus and was twice its assigned length. They’d put it out of its misery and I’d had to settle for a kill fee instead of publication and the money I’d contracted for.

  Then there was the book proposal I’d had going around for a couple of years. It was called Struggling, and it was about musicians who’d had minor hits over the years without ever getting beyond cult status, people like Gary Myrick and Dwight Twilley and Marti Jones, who’d been from label to label doing brilliant, deeply personal work, and were still playing the same clubs they’d always played, when they could afford to tour at all.

  I tried to explain to one editor how the second half of most rock books was deadly dull. “It’s like Tolstoy said in Anna Karenina—all successful bands are the same. The drugs, the writer’s blocks, the concert riders for no brown M&Ms, the inevitable breakup.”

  “Tolstoy said that?”

  “This, on the other hand, is just the good parts. The first guitar, the first gig, the first single on the radio.”

  “You’re not getting it,” he told me. “The bigger the act, the more books you sell. These people, they got no coattails your book can ride on.”

  I was a few months away from my fortieth birthday, a bad time to have to ask one of the all-time hard questions: What’s your second choice for what you want to do with your life?

  Shoot

  The band was shooting the “Angel Dust” video the day after Billboard came out. To Laurie’s amazement, Skip drove up as they were carrying the equipment into the Whiskey at seven in the morning. “I never did a video before,” he said, and that was nearly the last thing he said all day.

  The shoot introduced her to a level of tedium she could never have imagined. They went into makeup at 8:00 and at 10:00 Patrice started shooting master footage. They played along with the CD eight or ten times under blinding lights, then Patrice said, “I want some pictures of the guitar player singing?” Though Laurie tried to explain that Skip didn’t sing on “Angel Dust,” in the end it was easier to play “Don’t Make Promises” a couple of times to shut him up. After that came three hours of close-ups, no more than a few seconds of the song at a time, until Laurie prayed the single would tank so that she would never have to sing it again.

  At 4:00 Patrice brought the kids in, and the band began playing the song all over again. At one point a carefully-rehearsed moment happened in the audience that brought hand-held cameras swarming in on it. Patrice’s attempts to explain were incomprehensible and Laurie was too tired to care. Finally, at 6:00, it was time for the Whiskey to start sound checks for the night’s real bands. Patrice and his crew disappeared down Sunset on the trail of the extras, leaving the band to load out by themselves.

  As they sat on the sidewalk afterward, too exhausted to move, Gabe said, “This would be a good time to talk about getting a roadie for the tour.”

  “Okay,” Laurie said.

  “We know somebody,” Jim said. “His name’s Chuck Ford.”

  “I’ve done tours with him before,” Gabe said. “He can run sound and lights and he can do guitar tech stuff. And he’s very calm. He’ll work for an equal share.”

  “Okay.”

  “We need him,” Jim said.

  “Okay,” Laurie said. “But I have to meet him.”

  Gabe said, “He doesn’t have Big Hair, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  Laurie closed her eyes and leaned her head against the outside wall of the Whiskey. “This could be a long tour.”

  Last week

  On Wednesday Patrice decided he had to film a rehearsal. He’d come up with some ideas, Ardrey said, and needed a little more footage. To no one’s surprise it took the entire evening.

  Thursday night another photographer came to Jim’s for pub shots. She was tall, about forty, with fluorescent red hair. Skip, to no one’s surprise, failed to show. The rest of them posed with and without instruments, indiv
idually and in all their possible permutations and combinations. Laurie was relieved at not having to take her clothes off. “But then that’s only because we’re not shooting a cover for Rolling Stone,” the photographer said.

  Skip also failed to show for a round of interviews on Friday. His absence, Laurie was fairly sure, had cost them getting “Angel Dust” on CMJ New Music Monthly’s CD, since their interviewer had brought a copy of One More Lie to get it autographed.

  Chuck Ford came to rehearsal on Sunday. He was six feet tall, forty years old, with graying hair and beard. He had glasses and an easy smile and the voice of a late-night DJ. He shook Laurie’s hand and said, “I love your record.”

  “Great opening line,” Laurie said, and listened with amazement as he fiddled with the mixing console and in the space of five minutes cleaned up and sweetened the band’s sound. When he was done, he sat on the battered sofa with a stillness that Laurie envied. At the end of the set she turned to Gabe. “If he can lift an amp,” she said, “hire him.”

  Monday the 28th began her last full week in LA. She’d given notice at work and left word on Summer’s answering machine. She’d told her mother, who, for the first time in Laurie’s memory, accused her of being stupid. “You finally get a real job and you don’t even try to keep it. I don’t know what’s going to become of you.”

  On the other hand, her landlady had seemed pleased. “You’ll lose your deposit, of course, but I won’t file a bad credit report. This place was more than you could afford, that’s all. And now I can rent it to some out-of-town screenwriter for an extra two or three hundred a month and not feel guilty about it.” She sighed. “On tour. The very words sound exciting, don’t they?”

  “I don’t know,” Laurie said. “Ask me again in six months.”

  She had only one thing left to do, and that was to say goodbye to the LBD. Even with the small fortune it had cost her in repairs, the mornings it had refused to start, the stale dusty smell it had developed, the shimmy that started at exactly 52 miles an hour, it was harder than she ever would have imagined to let it go. It had taken her away from Jack and brought her to her first band practice. She’d watched fireworks drip from the Disneyland skies inside it, listened to the band’s first demo in its cassette deck, and slept on its cracked vinyl seats more than once. It had given her freedom in a world of struggle and uncertainty, and she would be inexpressibly diminished without it.