Say Goodbye

by Lewis Shiner

  Gabe is on tour with Dick O’Brien, playing a chain of clubs called Dick’s Last Resort. With Melinda’s help I track him down in Dallas and call him from the same Motel Six in Tempe where he had stayed when he was on tour with Laurie.

  “I saw her just last night,” Gabe tells me. “She came out to our show on the Riverwalk in San Antonio. She looks good, she’s put on a little weight. I tried to get her up on stage, just to do one song, but she refused in a pretty final way and I didn’t push. She was glad to see me, though you could tell it was making her really sad at the same time.

  “I thought about telling her that you were bringing her guitar, except she was so definite about not wanting to play that I got to thinking, maybe just as well to let you surprise her.”

  Was she with anybody when she came to see you? I wanted to ask. There was no way to do it without giving away entirely too much, without admitting things to myself that I wasn’t ready to say.

  “She ruined me,” Gabe tells me toward the end of the conversation. “I miss her and I miss being in a band. I never thought I’d say that.”

  Corky Moss

  Laurie’s brother Corky did in fact join the Navy, and is stationed in San Diego where he’s working on submarine engines. When he gets a weekend pass, he hitchhikes from the National City shipyards to wherever Dennis’s new band is playing and hangs out with them afterward.

  In his letters home Corky raves about the weather, the ocean, and the women. “Laurie,” he says, “was crazy to ever leave California.”

  Laurie Moss

  For three months Laurie stayed with her mother, working temporary jobs and setting money aside until she could get an apartment and make a down payment on another Datsun, this one red.

  The same week that she moved out of her mother’s, she landed a job with a computer company as an entry-level technical writer. She’d never been on salary before, and she was as amazed and puzzled by the permanence of it as she was by the size of the check.

  I call her on Monday afternoon at three o’clock, from a pay phone in a Taco Cabana. I’m sweating, not just from nerves, but from the Texas heat that the restaurant’s air-conditioning can barely keep at bay.

  We agree to meet that night at her apartment and order pizza. Then she says, “My boyfriend may be there. Is that okay?”

  “Of course,” I say, as if it really is. “No problem.”

  She’s living in an anonymous complex of dark-gray brick apartments, mirror images receding to infinity. I ring her bell at seven o’clock exactly. The guitar is sitting on the landing, invisible from inside the apartment. All the moisture in my body is rushing to my palms. I wipe them furtively on my jeans.

  Laurie opens the door. She is shorter than I had imagined her, only about five foot six. She’s heavier than in her photos and there’s a blemish on her right cheek. Her hair has reverted to its natural brown and is cut just below her ears. Still I sense what Fernando saw when she first came to Los Angeles: the strength in her hands, the life in her eyes. And I am captivated by her mouth, which smiles at the sight of me.

  She holds out her hand and I take it. “You look exactly like I pictured you,” she says. “Down to the sport coat and the pink T-shirt. Except completely different. Come on in.”

  I reach for the guitar and look up to see the emotions suddenly streak across her face: curiosity, wariness, hope, doubt, pain. “They found it last week,” I say tentatively, afraid now that I’ve done this the wrong way.

  “Oh my God,” she says. She backs up, her eyes never leaving the guitar case. I can’t tell if there’s any joy at all in her reaction. I step into the apartment. It is small and sparsely furnished—a couch, a card table, some folding chairs. A man gets up from the couch and looks at us. He has short dark hair and a mustache; he’s wearing a green polo shirt and khaki pants, and there is a thick tangle of hair on his chest. He looks to be no more than thirty. For some reason I think to myself, a little sadly, that he is nothing at all like me.

  I set the guitar case down and close the front door and move a few steps away, into the living room. Laurie kneels in front of it, slowly lays it flat, opens the latches, then looks up at me, as if for reassurance that this is not another of life’s cruel jokes. I nod and smile and she opens it up.

  We stay that way for a long time. I see at last that Laurie is simply overwhelmed. Eventually she closes the case and latches it again. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I know this is terribly rude, but…excuse me.” She picks up the case, takes it into the bedroom, and shuts the door.

  “Is that really her father’s guitar?” the man says.

  I nod and introduce myself.

  “Oh, I know who you are,” he says. “I’ve been hearing about you for weeks now. I’m David Rabkin.” We shake hands, he brings me a beer, and we sit on the couch. He asks about the book, and about my trip, and then, while we wait for Laurie, he tells me how they met.

  It turns out that he’s a music writer, so we do have something in common after all. He does a weekly column for the San Antonio Express-News and works one afternoon a week on the Third Coast Network, a local radio show that features Texas and Louisiana music.

  “I’ve been playing Laurie’s record since that first homemade release,” he tells me. “That album absolutely bowled me over.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  He nods. “Of course you do. So when I looked up one night at this barbecue place and saw her, I had to go over and ask if she was Laurie Moss. She was with a bunch of her girlfriends from work and I got this completely icy reception. She told me she wasn’t playing much these days, which was an understatement, and so I shrugged and gave her my card and went back to my table.

  “Fifteen minutes later she came over and apologized for being standoffish and said—I’ll never forget this—that it was like I had mistaken her for her twin sister, whom she had loved very, very much, but who’d been run over by a cement truck. Then she told me what had happened—getting dropped, folding the band, coming back to Texas and living with her mom. I think I fell in love with her on the spot.”

  “How is she doing? I mean, day to day.”

  “Not so good. I’ve been around creative people all my life, and she’s got as much creative juice as anybody I’ve ever seen. She’s so smart it scares me. And every once in a while she’ll forget herself and sing along with the radio and there’s that incredible voice. She’s got all this talent and no place to put it, and it’s flat out got to be killing her.”

  Laurie reemerges a half-hour later and all three of us pretend she hasn’t been crying. During the two hours in which we finally order pizza, and eat, and talk about inconsequential things—movies, politics, other people’s music—and then long into the night when I’m alone in my motel room, I try to reconcile this real, physical Laurie—sturdier, and yet more easily hurt than I expected, possessed of a startlingly coarse laugh, devoid of the languid sensuality that I’d imagined—with the fantasy creature I’ve been carrying around in my head for two years, a creature patched together from photographs, a disembodied voice, and words on a computer screen, like a digital voodoo doll.

  Sometime after midnight I put Of The Same Name on my Discman and the Laurie of my imagination is there, unchanged, waiting only for me.

  Tuesday Laurie leaves work at noon and we drive to Brackenridge Park. She takes me to the Sunken Gardens, where we sit looking down at the bamboo and flowering trees and koi. Out of nowhere she says, “Did you come to Texas to seduce me?”

  I’m too flustered to answer. She says, “It’s my fault. It was very sexy to open up to you that way, and have my little fantasies, and not have to think seriously about consequences. When I first started writing you, I had this tiny, hermetically sealed existence. You were the one good thing I had left from my life as a rock star. And I didn’t want to let go of that. Though I should have told you about David.”

  I shrug. “He seems pretty crazy about you.”

  “He’s wonderful
and sweet and supportive of all the crazy moods I go through these days. He’s undoubtedly better than I deserve. But it’s early yet. Maybe I’ll grow into him.”

  “Jim warned me you were seeing somebody.”

  “And you came anyway?”

  “I had to bring you your guitar.”

  She smiles. “You’re very sweet. And very unhappy, I think.”

  Of course our six-month-plus correspondence has not been one-sided. My interviewing style—even when an interview is all it is—has to do with conversation, and quid-pro-quo.

  “Let’s not talk about me,” I say.

  “Oh, let’s do. Could it be that you came all the way to Texas to seduce me so that you’d have an excuse to leave your wife?”

  I feel dizzy. The heat and the humidity are making it hard for me to breathe.

  “You can just leave her, you know,” Laurie says. “You don’t need me for that. You can do it all by yourself.”

  She stands, giving me a moment to collect myself, and looks out across the water, very still, as if she’d slipped loose from her body for a moment. A hot breeze gently touches her hair. Then her eyes snap into focus and she says, “Look! The turtles I wrote you about.”

  I stand next to her and follow her pointing finger. There are two of them, the larger gliding rapidly underwater, the other paddling quietly on the surface. They remain close together without obvious intent, as if connected in ways that I can’t see. The sight of them is somehow enormously comforting and gets me through the moment and on to the next.

  “I never thanked you for bringing my guitar,” she says as we walk downhill toward the carousel and the zoo. “Thank you.” A minute or so later she says, “I wrote a song last night, after you left. I haven’t touched a guitar or let myself think in anything but the past tense for over a year, you know, trying to convince myself that everything was over for good, and then, wham.” She stops and faces me with a coy smile. “You want to hear it?”

  It is a stupid question. She sings the first lines for me:

  God blew into town last week

  In his fat white Cadillac

  Bought the house next door to me

  And commenced to dealing crack

  Put a truck on blocks in the front yard

  And a pack of wild dogs in the back.

  “It goes on in a similarly bitter and self-pitying way for seven more verses. I doubt it’ll be on the next album.”

  Before I can recover from that particular bombshell, she runs up to a concession stand and buys cotton candy. “Do you want anything?” she calls to me. I shake my head.

  “So,” I ask when I catch up to her, “were you toying with me, or are you really going to do another album?”

  She sighs. “I’m going to have to, aren’t I?” The pain and reluctance in her voice seem completely genuine. “I didn’t sleep last night, thinking about it. I’ve got all those new songs that I wrote on tour, and the song I wrote for Grandpa Bill. I can do the guitars and lead vocals here on my four-track and send them to Jim. He can add himself and Dennis and Gabe.”

  “And then…?”

  “That’s the hard part, isn’t it? We’ll have to scare up the money to put it out ourselves. I couldn’t face another record company, not now, probably not ever. Jim can sell it on our Web site, I’ll sell some if I play out anywhere, which I suppose I’ll have to do now, at least in town.” An ironic smile flickers across her mouth and disappears. “Now that I have a guitar again.”

  “Is that going to be enough for you?”

  “I guess it’s going to have to be. Because I can’t go through another year like the one I just had. When I picked up the guitar last night I remembered all the times that the music was enough, and it seemed possible. It seemed like I could settle for just a part of what I used to have, if it was the right part.” She stops and makes a face and throws the cotton candy in trash can.

  “People can change, can’t they?” she asks, looking straight into me. “If they have to, if their lives depend on it?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, speaking for myself at last, wondering if there is in me any part of the courage I see in her.

  She drops me at my car, which we’ve left in the parking lot of her office. Without her needing to say it, I know that this day has been my reward for bringing her guitar from California, and it seems generous indeed. I doubt I will have another day like it.

  I walk around to the driver’s side and Laurie rolls down her window. “Thank you,” I say.

  “Are you—”

  “I’ve got what I came for. I’ll head back first thing tomorrow morning.”

  She nods. The air is hot and still, and the sun glares from the mirrored glass of the building in front of me. I lean forward slightly and she tilts her face toward me and I kiss her. It lasts little more than a single warm, soft, heart-stopping second. Then I step away and raise my hand and watch her until her Little Red Datsun crests the entrance ramp to the freeway and disappears.

  This reporter

  I took the long way home, via Durango, Colorado, and Flagstaff, Arizona, thinking all the way. When I got home I asked Barb for a divorce. I won custody of Tom on Mondays through Fridays, and came away with child support and the house. I work mornings at a frame shop while Tom’s in school, and we get by. As Jerry Lee Lewis used to sing, I can make it through the week, but oh, those lonely weekends.

  “Fernando”

  I see Fernando one last time, in March of 1998. I am in Los Angeles with Tom to celebrate finishing the second draft of this book, and to listen to Laurie’s new album on the cassette player in Jim’s kitchen. The record is called Based On A True Story, and in contrast to the detached character studies of the earlier songs, these are all in first person immediate. Laurie has asked me to write the liner notes, and I know from the first sound of her voice on the tape that it will be a labor of love.

  An urge to tie a few last loose ends makes me stop by Fernando’s guitar store afterward. He is glad to see me and invites Tom and me out to dinner.

  We drive to a beach front restaurant in Venice, where I learn that Fernando too is recently divorced. I’m even more surprised to find out that he’s about to be married again—and not to Summer.

  His fiancée is in fact the young, tanned, blonde waitress who is bringing us our blackened chicken sandwiches, and who leans over to kiss Fernando on top of his newly-shaven head.

  “In a weird way,” Fernando says, “Summer was actually a part of my first marriage. I know that sounds weird, man, but when the marriage finally fell apart, so did Summer and me.”

  From where we sit we can see a neon-pink sun sink slowly into the haze over the Pacific. It is the kind of view that makes Corky wonder why Laurie went back to Texas. I look at my hands, as they rest on the edge of the table, and then look at Tom, whose neck is craned to watch the TV set over the bar. I have the sudden and comforting knowledge that there is nowhere else I have to be.

  “I know I’ve let people down in my time,” Fernando says. “And I’ve had some days that I didn’t think I was going to make it through. But dude, what can I tell you?” He too looks out at the picture-post-card sunset, and then he shrugs and smiles. “Life goes on.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Gordon Van Gelder took a chance on this book the first time around, for which I will always be grateful. Thanks also to Steve Snider and Maureen Troy at St. Martin’s.

  Melody Rich of San Antonio, voice teacher par excellence, did her best to teach me to sing, and in the process helped give Laurie her voice. Richard Butner gave me the key to the structure of the book, valuable suggestions throughout, and a crucial reading of an early draft.

  Two musicians gave generously of their time to help me visualize Laurie’s personality and career. Cindy Lee Berryhill read me some of her unpublished fiction and taught me that Laurie would have to be in love with words. Dana Kletter of the band Dish shared her experiences of being caught up in a major label feeding frenzy, and an
swered long lists of questions. Big thanks also to Bobby Lloyd Hicks of the Skeletons and David Dennard of Gary Myrick and the Figures.

  George R.R. Martin loaned Laurie his LA apartment, John Accursi gave me a tour of LA clubs, and Art Fein introduced me to Club Lingerie. Danny, Jim, John, and Viki Blaylock gave me a home base for my LA research. Special thanks to friends who modeled, unknowingly, for character portraits, especially R.P. Alberts, Sr., Duane Aumann, and Cathy Pogue. Other friends provided advice, support, and corrections: Mike Autrey, Bill Finke, Karen Fowler, Joan Gordon, Steve Grant, John Kessel, Cynthia Killough, Pat LoBrutto, Jack McDevitt, Mark Van Name, Bob Wayne, Paul Williams, and the “real” Chuck Ford and Dan Villanueva.

  CMJ’s New Music Monthly used to have a back-page “Localzine” feature that covered the music scenes in various cities. These were invaluable in placing the band at real clubs on the road.

  For the new edition, thanks as ever to Bill Schafer of Subterranean, to my copy editor Jenny Crisp, and to my partner, Orla Swift.

  By Lewis Shiner

  NOVELS

  Outside the Gates of Eden

  Dark Tangos

  Black & White

  Say Goodbye

  Glimpses

  Slam

  Deserted Cities of the Heart

  Frontera

  COLLECTIONS

  Heroes and Villains

  Collected Stories

  Love in Vain

  The Edges of Things

  Nine Hard Questions about the Nature of the Universe

  About the Author

  Born in Texas, Lewis Shiner is a musician, rock music journalist and award-winning author, writing across genres. He has published six short stories collections and eight novels, including Glimpses, winner of the World Fantasy Best Novel Award.

  An Invitation from the Publisher