by Lewis Shiner
“I’ll call you later,” Laurie said, unable to hear the rest from Melinda’s end because of the rushing sound in her ears. She put the phone down and took her journal off the night stand and did some figuring, carefully checking her work. Then she went outside to stand in the gray daylight and hold on to the railing with white knuckles.
The temperature was in the 60s and clouds were moving fast overhead, too many of them for the sun to break through. The air smelled of rain and gasoline and fresh-cut weeds by the roadside.
All she could think about was the previous night’s gig, their most pathetic in weeks, playing to two dozen people across the street from a cemetery in what had obviously once been a pair of double-wide trailers. They’d gotten forty dollars and a free meal, something with canned corn and tomato skins and big chunks of nearly raw onion in it. The owners were two old Southern hippies with shoulder-length white hair, and Laurie had felt so sorry for them that she’d eaten what she could and suffered with heartburn most of the night as a result.
Chuck was awake now, in jeans with no shoes or shirt. “Band meeting?” he asked gently.
Laurie nodded. From the corner of her eye she saw Chuck pad downstairs and some time later—a minute? fifteen minutes?—the others had all gathered back in the motel room.
She walked in, leaving the door open, and saw them sitting on the unmade beds or on the floor. She loved them fiercely. They didn’t want to look at her because, clearly, they knew what was coming. She said, “We’ve been cut.” She went over the conversation with Melinda, twice. Gabe, quietly, said, “Fuck.”
Mitch opened his mouth to say something inspirational, but Chuck saw it coming and put a hand on his arm. “Another time, Mitch.”
“Okay.”
“So,” Dennis said. “I take it this is not April Fool’s?”
“Indeed,” she said, “it is not. So here’s the deal. We’ve got a solid month of gigs booked, but no more tour support from General. In fact, they still owe us for the receipts we sent in for the last couple of months, and I wouldn’t count on us ever seeing that, either. The gigs won’t actually bring in enough to keep us on the road, but we’ve probably got enough in the bank to make up the difference, barring further disasters. We can cancel everything and split the money that’s left, or we can go ahead and take this thing as far as it will go.”
Now they were all looking at her.
“Drive it into the ground,” Dennis said.
“All the way,” Mitch said.
“Do it,” Gabe said.
“I’m in,” Chuck said.
“Okay,” she said. A gust of wind lifted her hair and dried the perspiration on the nape of her neck. “Thank you,” she said.
“I don’t know why you’re thanking us,” Chuck said.
Dennis said, “But you’re welcome.”
Later, as they were alone in the room, packing, Gabe said, “Tell me you’re not kidding yourself that some miracle is going to happen in the next month.”
“No,” Laurie said. “But I grew up believing that if you worked hard and did everything you were supposed to do, then eventually justice would prevail.”
“If you were black that thought would never have crossed your mind.”
“I know. But the point is, if I quit now somebody could say I didn’t try hard enough, that I could have gone on one more month and maybe that would have made the difference, that I gave up.”
“That’s it? That’s your motivation?”
Laurie nodded. “What about you?”
Gabe shrugged. “I guess I’m just not ready for it to be over yet.”
www.lauriemoss.com
I got the news first on Laurie’s Web site. Jim had put the site together shortly after he left the tour, perhaps as an obscure act of penance, and I’d offered him, via email, the raw transcript of my interview with Laurie.
When I saw that General had cut the band I knew, with complete fatality, that I was going to write a book about Laurie. In less than a second she walked into my book proposal for Struggling and threw everyone else out.
I also knew, with a sort of high-wire terror, that I might never sell the book, that it was going to take many hours on the phone, many days on the road, and many, many hours of transcription to do it right. And that both the writing of it and the not selling of it would make Barb unhappy, each in its own way. In short that it could be the most expensive book I’d ever written, in every possible sense of the word.
The last time
They did their last show on Tuesday, May 5 in Missoula, Montana. If Laurie had hoped for epiphany, what she got was anticlimax. They were second on the bill, with only 45 minutes on stage. The substandard PA was in the hands of a grizzled and apparently deaf sound man. Only 30 people showed up, already drunk when they arrived midway through the set.
The band did what they could. When Laurie looked around during “Don’t Make Promises” Mitch and Gabe were wearing huge green foam-rubber cowboy hats. Before “Carry On,” their traditional last song, Gabe got on his mike and said, “We’ve been on the road since September, and this is our last show for a while. We wanted to show Laurie how much we’ve appreciated crowding into a broken-down van and sleeping three to a room and hauling our own equipment in and out of gigs we barely got paid for. Since we’ve been living our lives in public we thought we’d share it with you folks here tonight.” Then they sprayed her with Silly String, and then they sprayed the audience, and then Dennis counted down the last song and before she knew it they were in the middle of it.
Remember this, she told herself, and tried to fix the feeling in the cells of her body: Know that there was a time when you were not alone, but were part of something bigger than yourself. Know that you made music that was both solid and full of beautiful detail, that you moved people physically and emotionally, that you lived this and it will always be inside you.
Loose ends
Though the band money was gone, she still had a little money of her own when she arrived in LA on May 7. Between the advance, publishing royalties, and her savings she had close to five thousand dollars, enough to buy a car to replace the LBD. She would need it if she stayed in LA and went back to work for Sav-N-Comp and tried to start again.
And she would need it even more if she packed up everything that was still at Jim’s and drove to Texas.
Jim insisted that she stay at his place while she made up her mind, and he took her car-shopping on Saturday the 9th. She found another Datsun, this one blue, only a year older than the one she’d originally driven to LA. She paid $4500 in cash, which left her without enough to make a deposit on an apartment. It was only then that she realized her subconscious had already made the decision for her. She would not be staying.
She was tapped out.
The next day, as she sat in the bathroom with the door open, putting on makeup, Molly knocked at the doorjamb. “Going to see Skip, are you?” she asked.
Laurie blushed. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
“What do you want to do that for?”
“I hate not knowing. Does he blame me for what happened? Is he okay?”
“Girl, look at yourself. Smell yourself. You’re wearing all that perfume and makeup and that slinky dress to make sure he’s got groceries?”
“Maybe I want him to know what he’s missing.”
“He knows what he’s missing. From the looks of you, he might not be missing it much longer.”
Laurie put her mascara down and looked at Molly in the mirror. “You don’t think I should go.”
“No, I don’t. But you’re going, that much is obvious. I’m just saying, Jim has tried to call him three or four times since they both, you know, came home and everything. Skip never called back. People have seen him out at that jingle factory, but he’s keeping to himself. I don’t think he wants to see any of us.”
“Is he still strung out?”
“Who knows? Who cares? He’s an asshole.”
“I know,” Laurie sa
id. “I know. But I feel responsible.”
When she pulled up in front of his apartment, she saw his Mustang and it made her legs unsteady as she got out of the car. As she walked up to the porch, she could see his open window and smell the cigarette smoke that drifted out, as if the eight months she’d been on the road had never happened.
She went into the front hall and hesitated, knowing that she could still turn around and walk away. While still considering the option, she saw her own right hand make itself into a fist and knock on Skip’s door. “Who is it?” Skip’s voice said, and she found that the air in her throat had coagulated and she couldn’t speak. A minute later the door opened. He wore old, faded jeans, an untucked white T-shirt, a lit cigarette in the corner of his mouth. Bare feet, bloodshot eyes, rumpled hair. Her eyes strayed involuntarily to the crooks of his elbows. No visible needle tracks.
“So,” he said. “It’s you.” He very slowly shifted his weight, opened the door the rest of the way, and stood to one side. “Come on in.”
She closed the door and leaned against it as he crossed the room and flopped on the couch, legs stretched straight out. “How’s the tour?” he said.
“It’s over. Ardrey got fired, we got dropped.”
Skip shrugged. “A blessing in disguise. You’ll get on a better label and they’ll break you properly. It’s only a matter of time.”
“I don’t think so,” Laurie said, “but that’s not why I came here.”
“Okay. Why did you come here?”
Now it was her turn to shrug, and to look at her feet. “I guess I wanted to know you were okay.”
“I’m here. I’m alive. Due in part to the publishing royalties I’ve gotten for songwriting credits I didn’t deserve. You shouldn’t have done that.”
“Is that Skip Shaw for ‘thank you?’ ”
“No, it’s me saying you really shouldn’t have. I’m a waste of perfectly good money.”
She looked around the room, at his paintings of suicide and betrayal and despair, at the ashes and the peeling paint and threadbare furniture, and realized what it was she’d come to see. The Skip Shaw that had twisted her up inside was there in front of her, but overlaid on that image like a double exposure was an old, bitter man who had nothing left to do but feel sorry for himself.
“You should call Jim sometime,” she said, straightening up, ready to leave. “He’s not going to yell at you. He misses you.”
Skip nodded, a non-binding promise to think it over. Then he said, “Are you guys going to be playing in town for a while?”
Her hand was still on the knob. She turned it and let the door come ajar behind her. “No, we’re done. I’m going back to San Antonio, the other guys will go back to whatever they were doing before.”
Skip tilted his head, as if she’d spoken in a foreign language.
“Don’t look so shocked,” she said. “It’s the way things are. You believe in justice because you happened to get what you deserved. You had talent, you got rich and famous. You screwed up, you lost it. It doesn’t work that way for everybody.”
“It should have worked for you.”
“I thought so too. I was wrong. But I can’t really complain.” She could, but she was damned if she would do it in front of Skip Shaw. “I got enough breaks that I actually got to make a run at it. How many people can say that?”
“Don’t go,” Skip said. “Come on inside and sit down for a while.”
“I don’t think so,” Laurie said. “You take care of yourself, you hear?”
Traffic was already bad by the time she got on the 10 for Whittier. She remembered the night the sky had rained fireworks on her and thought how much she was going to miss LA, traffic and cost of living and disposable culture notwithstanding.
I will not cry, she thought. She had her guitar and her beautiful amp, now with added character from its hard-earned scratches and dents. She had her Little Blue Datsun and the last hundred copies of the homemade edition of Of The Same Name. She had five hundred dollars, a place to stay once she got to San Antonio, and the skills she’d learned at Sav-N-Comp.
She rolled down her window and smelled, faint but undeniable, the perfume of orange blossoms.
Free
That night she packed everything in the LBD II for an early start in the morning: the amp in the bottom of the trunk, the guitar next to it, her clothes and CDs and books packed all around. Whatever didn’t fit in the trunk went into the back seat.
She went to bed early, feeling nothing beyond her own fatigue, slept nine hours, and got up at seven ready to drive.
The car was gone, stolen in the night.
THE REST
Mitch Gaines
Mitch, through Melinda, landed a deal with the specialty label Mayhem to do an album of heavy-metal instrumentals.
“I loved playing with Laurie,” he says, when I finally catch up to him at a signing party for the record in June of 1997. His hair is loose and long, and he’s wearing a mesh T-shirt and leather pants. “I learned a lot about restraint and taste from her. I’m definitely a better musician for the weeks I spent in her band. But this music, the music on my album, that’s where my real roots are.
“If she ever does another record, though, and wants some guitar on it? I’m there.”
Mark Ardrey
Mark Ardrey continues to politely refuse all interviews. Dominick Fetrillo in New York, who has never been particularly shy about talking to the press, told me Ardrey is now with an ad agency in Philadelphia, not far from Amish country. According to Fetrillo, “He says it’s a clean, honest day’s work compared to the record business.”
Jim Pearson
Though Jim is still working half-time at circuit design, the increased visibility he got from Of The Same Name has brought him enough paying production work that Molly was able to quit her Parks and Recreation job. When I stop by to see him, he’s at work on a new Estrogen album, which the band will again release themselves.
I’m startled to find how comforting it is to be in his kitchen again, having written so much about it over the long winter and spring. I can feel Laurie’s presence there.
“Listen,” Jim tells me, “the most amazing thing happened yesterday.” He takes me to the garage, where the members of Estrogen are tuning up, and shows me a guitar case. “Open it,” he says.
I do. Inside is a mid-sixties Strat, very clean, maple fingerboard and cream-colored body. “It’s Laurie’s guitar,” I say. “I thought…”
“It was,” Jim says. “After her car got stolen, I put Laurie on a plane for Texas and I talked to the cops myself. Laurie had given me the serial number of the guitar, and I passed it on to the cops and all the guitar stores that were interested. And sure enough, some guy showed up last week trying to sell it. The cops hauled him in but they couldn’t find any way to tie him to the robbery. The guy says some stranger sold it to him for fifty bucks, and stupid as that sounds, it could be true. Anyway, the cops called me yesterday and I went out to Pomona and got it.”
I touch the neck as gently as if it were flesh. “Does Laurie know?”
“Not yet. We’re trying to decide whether we want to call her and tell her or just ship it to her and let it be a surprise.”
“Let me take it to her.” The words are out before I know I’ve had the idea. “It makes sense,” I say, my rational brain trying desperately to cover the tracks of my subconscious. “I can stop off at some of the clubs where you guys played and get local color for the book.”
And the darkest part of my brain believes that if I show up with her guitar, she’ll have to be grateful me.
Catherine Connor
I drive by Laurie’s old place on my way to my motel on the far side of the San Fernando Valley. I knock on Catherine’s door and a young man answers: rimless glasses, a day’s growth of beard, khaki shorts and a long-sleeved white shirt. I introduce myself and explain that I’m looking for the woman who used to live there.
“Catherine?” he says.
“She was the one that got me into this place. I used to work at the same temp agency she did, and she turned me on to the apartment when she got married.”
“Married?” I say. “When?”
“I don’t know. I moved in at the beginning of June.”
“Do you know who she got married to?”
He looks wary. “I can give you the number of the agency. They might be able to get a message to her.”
“It’s okay,” I tell him. “It doesn’t matter.” I give him one of my cards. “Give her my best if you run into her.”
Summer Walsh
Following the lead of Ani DiFranco and others, Summer has started her own record label, Sly Duck Records, with financial backing from Brad Mueck. She’s released one album of her own and has a second one on the way; she’s also produced two other records by musicians from the Duck.
“The time is right,” Summer tells me over the phone. I’m in my motel room, trying to figure out how to tell Barb that I’m going to Texas. “The Lilith Fair is the hottest tour of the summer, and there’s a window now for women like us to get themselves heard.”
“If General hadn’t done Laurie’s album, would you?” I ask.
“Laurie doesn’t need Sly Duck Records. She’s a major label talent. She’s down now, but sooner or later she’ll be back up and she’ll go all the way.”
After I hang up I wonder where people get the peculiar confidence they have in others. Barb insists that one day I’ll make a fortune from my writing, maybe because it would reflect badly on her if I didn’t. Summer is sure that Laurie will be rich and famous, and that confidence lets her avert her eyes.
Laurie is seeing somebody, Jim told me. He doesn’t know any details, but he thought he should warn me.
Gabriel Wong