by Lewis Shiner
She called the Times Monday afternoon and placed the ad. The following Saturday evening she sold it for 900 dollars cash to a 17-year-old boy and his father, and cried as she watched it drive away.
On Tuesday night, September 5th, she finished cleaning her apartment by nine o’clock. She carried two boxes out to the curb that held everything she intended to leave in Jim’s attic, and two suitcases that held everything she meant to bring in the van. She locked the door, put the key in the mailbox, and sat on the porch to wait for Jim to pick her up and take her to his house for the night.
The perks of success, she thought. Two weeks ago I signed a record contract with a major label and tonight I’m homeless. She was too excited to cry, too terrified to be happy, too amazed at what she’d done to consider hedging her bets.
She saw Jim’s headlights climbing the hill and went out to meet him.
L’Envoi
Wednesday morning, Dennis pulled into Jim’s driveway with an eight-foot former U-Haul trailer hitched to his bumper, now painted a peculiar shade of lavender through which Laurie could see jets and lettering touting the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. Chuck Ford was riding shotgun, and as soon as he’d said hello, he started loading equipment. For her part, Laurie had been up since seven, sitting in the death-camp atmosphere of Jim and Molly’s kitchen. Sam had gone off to day-care in tears and Jim and Molly had been sitting in despondent, red-eyed silence ever since.
As Chuck closed and padlocked the trailer, Skip pulled up to the curb with Gabe in the passenger seat. He sat idling while Dennis went out to the street to talk to him. Jim went into the house to say goodbye and came out with his glasses in his hand, wiping at his eyes with his shirt sleeve.
“We ready?” Dennis said, walking toward the van.
Gabe showed no inclination to offer up his seat, and so Laurie’s fantasy of a romantic ride through the desert with Skip, whom she hadn’t seen except at rehearsal since his blow-up about the contract, withered on the vine.
“Ready when you are,” she said. Jim’s pain was not her pain, she told herself, and neither was Skip’s. Nothing lay ahead of her but six months of hanging out with her friends and playing music. First stop Tempe, Arizona, for interviews and an in-store promotion during the day Thursday, followed by second slot on the bill Thursday night. She couldn’t repress a smile as she got in the back seat with Chuck, and she looked at her watch to fix the time: eleven oh eight a.m., Wednesday, September 6th. So it begins.
The road
Near Indio, by prior arrangement, Dennis pulled into a truck stop the size of a small city, complete with bunks, showers, restaurant, gift shop, pay phones with seats, pornographic video rental, and all the diesel you could pump. Skip waited for them under an awning, having sprinted away and left them within a mile of getting on the freeway in Whittier.
“You want to change vehicles?” Skip asked her as she stood in line to pay for her Coke and powdered sugar donuts.
In fact she did. Jim’s taste in music ran to Kansas and Alan Parsons; Dennis had Kiss, Judas Priest, and various guitar instrumentals from Dick Dale to Pell Mell; and Chuck, well, Chuck didn’t own any tapes. “To tell you the truth,” Chuck had apologized, “I don’t own much of anything at all.” That was the point where she realized just how little she knew about the people she was going to spend her next six months with, most of that time in a space smaller than a jail cell.
“Do you think people would talk?” she said.
“It’s their talk I’m trying to avoid. Gabe spent the whole drive out here telling me I ought to be nicer to you.”
“Did you agree?”
“Hell, you know I never listen to advice.” The road seemed to suit him. He was wearing a blue work shirt and black jeans, and his hair looked clean and windblown. The dry desert wind had brought out crinkles around his eyes and mouth, where a smile rested comfortably.
“Let’s risk it,” she said.
Once they were moving, the thunder of the V8 engine and the roar of the air conditioner made it easy enough not to talk. Twice Skip switched on the AM radio, twisted quickly through the dial, and turned it off again.
His guitar and amp took up the back seat. The longer Laurie looked at them, the more fragile seemed his connection to the rest of the band, until she finally said, “Skip? If your heart’s not in this, you don’t have to go through with it.”
He’d been quiet so long he had to clear his throat before he could speak. “Darlin’, when you say shit like that it just makes me feel old.”
“I’m serious.”
“Of course you are. Your heart’s in everything you do, and I don’t expect you could imagine a life where you didn’t feel that way.”
“Are you patronizing me?”
“No, I promise I’m not. And I promise, the instant I don’t want to do this anymore, I’ll let you know.”
That afternoon he didn’t seem world-weary and self-pitying as much as isolated and abandoned, the calf separated from the herd, blundering on, head down, in the wrong direction. She wondered if it would be possible to seduce him as they drove, convince him to pull over and take her out into the desert with a blanket and a canteen. Some sixth sense warned her not to try.
When they got to Tempe, Skip took one of the two room keys and shut himself up with his guitar and amp. Laurie stood in front of the closed door for nearly a minute, then walked three doors down to let herself into the second room and throw her suitcase at the bed.
“On tour for seven hours,” she said to the walls, “and already set to wreck my first motel room.” Then, as if the walls had actually heard, she said, “Just kidding. I promise I won’t wreck you.”
She stretched out on one of the beds to take her emotional temperature. She seemed a few degrees low: annoyed and hurt by Skip, tired from the drive, restless at the thought of another full day ahead of them before they got to play. She dozed off before she could work up a proper snit.
She woke to Dennis pounding on the door and yelling, “Let’s eat!” All six of them crowded into the van and spent an hour in futile search of the Ching Hai Vegetarian House, which Gabe remembered from a previous tour. They finally ended up at a hole-in-the-wall Mexican place where the food tasted like Patio TV dinners, then went to check out the club.
Whoever named it the Egypt Club had a vivid imagination that let them see beyond the cinder block cube on an orange dirt lot dotted with low-to-the-ground weeds. Chuck bent over one of the weeds to pluck an off-white, double-pronged thorn, which he showed to Laurie. “They call them bullheads,” he said, and in fact it did resemble a miniature cow skull. “Careful. There’s poison on the tips that makes them really sting.”
“How did you know that?”
“Pop was in the Air Force. We moved a lot. What I most remember about this area is that I could never ride my bike. I couldn’t make it down the block without one of these bad boys taking out a tire.”
At the door Jim attempted to explain to the manager that they were Laurie Moss.
“You’re tomorrow,” he said. He was thin, irritable, at least forty.
“We just wanted to look around,” Jim said.
“Cover’s three dollars.”
Laurie paid. The walls inside were black, the floor pale linoleum, the stage a small triangle in one corner. “Well,” Laurie said, “the stage is sort of shaped like a pyramid.”
“That must be it,” Gabe agreed.
They took over one of the two tables in the room. There were four other people present; Laurie didn’t know if they worked there or had paid to get in. It’s okay, she tried to tell herself. We start small and work our way up. The first band took the stage and started an odd, fast, country-tinged song in the tradition of local heroes the Meat Puppets. Skip quietly slid his chair back and went out the front door.
Gabe and Jim looked at her with alarm when she got up too. “I just want to see what’s going on,” she said.
Skip was just hanging up a pay phone under
a streetlight next to the highway. “Hey,” she said. “What’s the deal?”
“Calling a cab. Going back to the room.”
“Were you going to tell anybody?”
“I didn’t want a discussion. And I don’t answer to anybody, remember? As long as I make the sound checks and the gigs. Or have you forgotten that already?”
“What got into you all of a sudden?” Though, truth to tell, she didn’t remember him saying a word since they’d left the motel.
“I’m pissed at myself for not bringing my own car.”
“Why’d you come with us if you didn’t want to be here?”
“I thought I did. I thought it might be fun, all of us out together. It just turned out that I don’t have it in me tonight to listen to one more aspiring band.”
“Fine,” she said, suddenly tired of him. “Suit yourself.” As she walked away she listened for her name, for an apology, for an invitation to his motel room. All she heard was the groan of an 18-wheeler on the highway as it climbed painfully up through its gears.
Blue
The next morning at 11:00 she showed up at a local AM station with Gabe and Jim. The station, as it turned out, had a show devoted to new music that only ran on Fridays and Saturdays. Their interview would run for the first time while they were in Flagstaff and again while they were in Durango, Colorado.
At the record store they set up in the parking lot: no Skip, stripped-down drum kit, vocal mikes run through their amps. They played five songs, plugged the gig four times, sold two CDs to people in the audience, and a third to the store to put in inventory.
They’d barely loaded in the equipment at the Egypt Club when the trouble started.
“Just so we’re clear,” the manager said. “We charge three bucks at the door, first hundred goes to the sound guy, the rest gets split between the bands.”
Jim straightened up from where he’d been duct-taping his volume pedal to the floor. “We drove out here from LA to do this. We’ve got a guarantee of two hundred.”
“You got a contract?”
“Right there,” Jim said, pointing to the briefcase next to the bass drum.
The manager raised his eyebrows, as if to say, who knows what the future has in store? Gabe looked at Skip and said, very quietly, “Trouble.”
Skip nodded.
They’d never been cheated in LA, but Laurie suddenly realized that both Melinda and Sid the Shark were four hundred miles away. She could see from the stiff, ritualized way the men moved that hormones were pumping: Male Pattern Boldness, she’d called it once. “Maybe we should just pack up and go?” she asked.
“He didn’t say he wasn’t going to pay,” Jim said. “If we play, he’s legally obligated to do it.” He studied her face and said, “Don’t worry. It’s going to be okay.”
The opener was a predictable three-chord three-piece, crisp and well-rehearsed. When Laurie took the stage at eleven there were less than a dozen people in the club. She said goodbye to the idea that the place would miraculously fill up and obviate any problem about money.
“Hey there, Tempe,” she said. “I’m Laurie Moss and these are the Mossmen and this is a song called ‘Carry On.’ ” They’d changed the set list at dinner, losing the Motown and Marley and putting in everything loud and fast they could think of. “Carry On” was as loud and fast as they got, and when they finished, Laurie was sure she could hear crickets outside.
They soldiered on. Halfway through the set they lost the end of “Fool’s Cap” in the roar of motorcycles. Five large male bikers and one substantial female came in and stood by the bar while the band played “Angel Dust.” Afterward the biggest of them came up to Laurie and said, “Do you guys know ‘Born To Be Wild?’ ”
“Sorry,” she said. She was on the stage and he was on the floor and he was still taller than she was. “I don’t think—”
Jim said, “Laurie?”
“One second,” she said to the biker, and leaned over the keyboard.
“The rest of us know it,” Jim said quietly. “If you’ll just trust me on this, I suggest we play it.”
She turned back to the biker. “It would be our pleasure,” she told him.
Skip sang lead. Laurie managed harmony on the choruses and all in all it was credible for a first attempt. What Laurie was not prepared for was the sight of a single tear rolling unashamedly down the big biker’s cheek. Another lesson, she thought, about prejudices musical and otherwise.
After the set, when her guitar was in its case and Chuck was winding cords into tidy bundles, she looked up to see the big biker standing over her again. “You guys are real good,” he said. “Can I buy you a beer?”
“Make it a lemonade and it’s a deal,” she said.
The big guy’s name turned out to be Blue. She didn’t get any of the other names because the majority of her attention hung on Jim and Chuck at the bar.
“Sorry, fellas,” the manager was telling them, “but I can’t do it. You can see the turnout we got tonight. If you want to wait around till after we close maybe things’ll pick up and I can do something for you, but as it is I’ll be lucky to pay the sound guy. I can give you a few beers for your trouble.”
Jim slammed his briefcase on the bar and hauled out the contract, settling in for the long argument. Chuck walked to the stage and picked up Laurie’s mike. “I know y’all are looking forward to the next band,” he said, an easy smile just visible behind his beard, his voice calm and intimate. “And we’d like nothing better than to pack up and get on our way, if we didn’t have this slight problem. We had a contract to play here tonight, but the manager’s decided not to pay us. So we’ll just have to sit here until he either changes his mind or somebody calls the cops to sort the whole thing out.”
“Is that true?” Blue asked Laurie.
“Sadly, yes,” she said.
“You wait right here,” he said.
The manager put his right hand under the bar as Blue walked up. Laurie would have called out to stop him if her voice hadn’t failed her. Blue’s friends saw the hand move as well and they all stood up and fanned out around the room. Whatever Blue said, he said it very quietly, and after a few long seconds the manager’s right hand came up empty, opened the register, and began pulling out damp, crumpled bills. He held the money out and Jim took it, his hands shaking so badly he had to use both of them.
Blue said something to Jim and Jim nodded and tried to count the money. Finally Blue gently took it away from him, counted it, and handed it back. “It’s all there,” he said to his friends.
After the van was loaded, Laurie got a copy of the CD and wrote, “For Blue—Thanks for a night I’ll never forget,” on the booklet, and signed it with Xs and Os. Blue laughed when she gave it to him and said, “Maybe see you again some time.”
“Not in this dump you won’t,” she said, and he was still laughing when she walked away.
Outside she found the van gone and Skip standing next to his Mustang, Lucky Strike in hand, hair blowing in the diesel wind from the highway, grinning.
Now it was Laurie that shook, shivers not just in her hands but all over. Six more months of this? she thought. Playing to empty rooms and risking her life to get paid? She hugged herself and stared at Skip. “What’s so funny? Did you get a big charge out of that scene in there? Did it give you a thrill to see that asshole back down?”
“Nah. I wasn’t even thinking about that. I was thinking that tonight was the first time, in all the months we’ve been together, that nobody knew who the fuck I was. Or cared.” He took a final drag on the cigarette and flipped it away. “I was into it.”
The fishbowl
Flagstaff was better, fifty people in the audience and a young guy running the club who loved the band and wanted them back. Durango was rowdy on Saturday night, and Sunday they got to sleep in. Monday was Albuquerque’s Fabulous Dingo Bar, Tuesday was Santa Fe, Wednesday Roswell and all the UFO souvenirs they could possibly want. On Thursday they had a da
y off and went to Carlsbad Caverns.
After that first week on the road she knew each of them in ways she’d never known anyone except Jack, her mother, and her brother: bathroom habits and personal hygiene, secret abilities (Jim’s card tricks, Gabe’s yodeling) and sleep patterns (Dennis’s awe-inspiring ability to fall asleep literally anywhere, and stay asleep twelve to fourteen hours at a stretch, muttering quietly the entire time), vices (Laurie’s stuffed Tigger toy and her secret love of lemon cream pie) and virtues (Chuck’s absolute inability to take offense).
They were circumscribed by their private jokes and imaginary characters: Ken S. Masmacho and Alfred Lord Tennis-Anyone; Mama Cass Sanders, doomed to sing the truth when no one would listen and then choke to death on a piece of her uncle’s fried chicken; the ancient Chinese arts of Do Zing and Tu Ning; the Sirens of the Highway; Anno Dominos. They acquired nicknames: Dennis was “Sticks,” Jim was “Ivory Joe,” Skip was “Dingo” (which he clearly didn’t like), Gabe was “Snark,” Chuck was “Spud,” and Laurie was “Crunch,” a name she secretly liked so much she never wanted to be called anything else ever again.
They argued endlessly over each other’s top ten album and movie lists, debated the significance of first concerts attended and first albums bought, then got into the serious business of Most Embarrassing Moment and First Sexual Experience—in Jim’s case one and the same—finishing with the game that never grows old, Who Would You Kill With One Week to Live and Six Bullets?
En route to Durango, on the improbably-named Highway 666 between Gallup and Shiprock, a sandstorm suddenly darkened the afternoon sky, swelling the sun to a dim orange ball. Towers of rock faded to silhouettes on the horizon while tumbleweeds came hurtling at them out of the darkness. Jim put a moody album called Sunsets on the tape player and they all sat in awed silence while waves of sand washed up against the windows.