Imperfect Solo

by Steven Boykey Sidley

  And so the conversation settles into the percussive and unhurried chirrups of friendship. I miss Grace. I want her here. Her absence is clamorous, but I settle back into the warm hum of the moment and enjoy it with a sense of unalloyed peace.

  But being at peace almost always fills only a small moment in time.

  CHAPTER 46

  IT SEEMS TO me that life should have a narrative arc, like a work of driving fiction in which there is a third-act climax and the tying up of loose ends that leaves us with a sense of resolution, of pieces fitting, and behaviors and consequences explained and put to bed. My little inarticulate rambling to my Thanksgiving guests was meant to open this debate, triggered by my series of unfortunate events and the bewilderment they have engendered.

  But the everyday events through which we meander are nothing if not untidy. It is a great irony that the stories and books and films and TV shows that we seek to amuse and inform us are shoehorned into neat paradigms while our lives conform to exigencies of an entirely different kind.

  Fuck it. Before all of this shit started I simply plodded along, putting one foot in front of the other, my mind largely empty of anything, guided only by the gods of small pleasures. Now I have become a clumsy contemplator, sprouting sidewalk philosophies about the meaning of life. I have always thought that people indulging in these sorts of self-indulgent musings should be shot to protect the rest of us. But I seem to have become one of them.

  I head down to Hollywood Music to buy reeds for my saxophone. I like hanging out there. The owner is a grizzled old rocker who goes by the name of Wasted. About forty years ago he played guitar with some of the names of the time (Jackson Browne, Allman Brothers, Deep Purple, Joe Cocker), and ricocheted from the Roxy to the Whiskey to the Troubadour to the grand Hollywood Bowl, doing the carpe diem dance. And when the public taste gave breeched birth to the monstrosities of New Age and Disco and Punk, when guitar solos became a scarlet letter, he hung up his kit and opened a small store in Hollywood. He stocked it with some Stratocasters and plectrums and Marshall amps and Jefferson Airplane sheet music and watched the hopeful pour through the doors to bask in the smell of varnish and skin. Today the store is legend and he still holds court—gray, bejowled but sparkling, the old man of popular music.

  The store itself is an order of magnitude larger than his original store, a marvel of pop architecture and creative utility. Nobody who is anybody shops anywhere else, and there is rumored to be a secret lounge on the second floor that continues to be homage to excess, where drugs and groupies are on permanent appointment to serve the promise of rock ’n’ roll, even now in this jaded time. I have never been invited in, which is fine, because Wasted seems to have grown fond of me nevertheless, having heard me play during the years when all seemed possible. He is happy to shoot the breeze whenever I visit.

  “Yo, Meyer, how’s it hanging?”

  “Wasted, my last friend on earth, it’s the roller coaster of a life. Know what I mean?”

  “You heading up the hill or down the slope?”

  “In the middle of the Loop the Loop right now. Not sure which way is up. How’s business?”

  “The Internet, surprisingly, tickled my toches.”

  He has learned a good deal of Yiddish. Told me it sometimes comes in handy.

  “How’s that?”

  “Live is the last thing left, baby. Everyone wants to play live because that’s where the money is. I supply the nuts and bolts. Wanna head upstairs to the inner sanctum? Have some coffee or something?

  “The inner sanctum? To what do I owe?”

  “I have a soft spot for aging musicians. I am the fucking old man of aging musicians. The kids out there are young enough to be my grandchildren.”

  “Wasted, I’m only forty. Still a chicken to you.”

  “Nope, you have the weary eyes of an old fuck. Let’s go.”

  We traipse up a flight of stairs, down a dark corridor and through a bland door. Inside is a bar, deep soft fabric couches, a pool table, pinball and video machines, a kitchen and chef, an oversized Jacuzzi. There are a couple of rooms off the side, closed doors with names. The Freddie Mercury Room. The Amy Winehouse Room. The Karen Carpenter Room. The Kurt Cobain Room. The Keith Moon Room. The Jim Morrison Room. Casualties all. I expect that excess happens behind those doors. There are huge posters on the wall, historical treasures—a Buddy Holly from the ’50s, a Stones concert poster from the ’60s, Led Zeppelin and Dylan from the ’70s. Hundreds of autographed photos from the feted to the forgotten. Oh, and a few desolate but gorgeous young women, who look hopefully at me before losing interest as my age and anonymity become apparent. Wasted heads off to the cappuccino machine, pours a twin.

  “Need anything special?”

  “Like what?”

  “A joint. A bump?”

  “Nah. I’m good.”

  “That’s what I like about you, Meyer. Been there, done that. Past it. Like me. You playing at all?”

  “Yep. Tangos and swing and klezmer and shit. At The Beast Belly.”

  “Nice. Something different. Original stuff?”

  “No. Just unusual.”

  “You got a day job?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “What were you doing?”

  “I’m a software guy.”

  “Hmmm. How good?”

  “I can program any computer you name into multiple orgasms.”

  “You looking for a job? I could use you on the floor. This stuff is way beyond me now.”

  “Thanks, Wasted, but I’m taking it slow right now. Planning to plan my next move.”

  He nods slowly while lighting a cigarette. He gestures at one of the young women.

  “Nadia, come over here. I need you.”

  A willowy young thing unfurls herself from a couch and wafts over. He taps behind his neck.

  “A shoulder massage, love.”

  She steps behind his seat, drapes her long fingers over his shoulders, and starts kneading. Her face is without expression, almost robotic, as though it contains no moveable muscles. She is impossibly beautiful—statuesque, alabaster skin, large green eyes with just a dark hint of decadence in the skin below, marine-cut short white hair, swan neck, sharp angled jawline.

  “Nadia here is from Russia. Or Belarus. Or Kazakhstan. Or some fucking place. She wants to meet a rock star. Don’t you, darlin’?”

  There is no reaction at all.

  “She also speaks almost no English. I haven’t a clue how she got here, where she sleeps, what her story is. She just sort of arrived one day, and now she spends most of the day up here, watching MTV, looking at fashion mags. Occasionally a muso takes a fancy and she disappears for a few days, sometimes more. I don’t pay her, she gets to eat for free. The other girls around here are about the same. They are basically groupies. The spoils of rock ’n’ roll.”

  I smile at her. She smiles back. Maybe she is not a robot. Although with visual recognition systems these days, you never know.

  Wasted turns around to look at her and then points at me.

  “This Meyer. He big star.”

  She looks at him, then looks at me uncertainly, and then smiles again. She has impossibly large teeth through which a small tease of vermillion tongue protrudes. I feel a small flutter of lust and disgust. The disgust part is buried deep, something about taking advantage of the lost and lonely that rattles me, perhaps something about the proximity of this girl’s age to Isobel’s. In the old days, lust usually won out. I have more trouble with it now.

  She continues with Wasted’s massage, now stealing looks of interest in my direction. I tear my attention away from her before unspeakable images of dark and wet undo me.

  “So, Wasted. You miss the action? The bands?”

  “I did at first. The store was just a way to pay bills while I planned my next band. And then it just took over and I started making money. And I didn’t have to travel and I found a girl and settled down. A few times. Anyway, it’s not as though I�
��m not close to the action.”

  “What about the whole performing thing? Don’t you miss that?”

  “Meyer, you are a wise man. You could have asked me if I missed making music, which would have been the wrong question, and, no, I don’t miss making music because none of us really makes music, at least not like Miles or Mozart. We’re circus acts. We satisfy a need. So, do I miss performing? Yeah, you bet. Standing up there while a bunch of assholes who don’t know shit from Shinola adore you? What’s not to miss?”

  “Know what you mean.”

  “At the end of the day, all of us, even the most fucking superstar asshole, know that we are going to get old and ugly and that nobody will remember us a hundred years from now, except possibly as a footnote in some pop-history coffee-table book. We will never be discovered by future generations as Shakespeare or Chopin or Monet or Ellington were. A guy like Martin Scorsese knows he’ll be taught at film schools for a long time to come. But you think they will dedicate music college classes to Adele? Snoop? Madonna? Gaga? Footnotes, man. Who remembers Deep Purple? Uriah Heep? Luther Vandross? Chicago? Joni Mitchell? Crosby Stills? The Clash? The Ramones? The Sex Pistols? These guys could once fill any stadium in the world. Now dead and buried. And it has only been a couple of decades. Go to any high school and mention these names. You’ll get nothing. Nada. You know what it all comes down to, Meyer? The stadiums and the crowds and the screaming?”

  “Sex?”

  “Yeah, sex. In the big sense. Fucking the fans. Fucking your parents. Fucking the man. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. Fuck responsibility. I don’t give a fuck. Just wanna fuck. That’s what it is, Meyer. Kids in a candy store gorging themselves before they throw up.”

  “No exceptions?”

  “Far and few, man, far and few. Yeah, some of the guys can play pretty good, a couple write lyrics that maybe will be remembered. A few songs become anthems for the age. Some of the famous musos use the platform to do politics and good works and shit. But most of it? Circus performances, like I say.”

  “That why you stopped?”

  “What? No! I fuckin’ loved it. I miss it every day. This music store is not maturity. This is my compromise, man. Not a bad compromise. But nothing gets close to standing up there and tearing through a solo and spotting this one teenager in the second row whose face is all shiny and smooth and you just know she’s going to be on the end of your dick later. It’s just that primal, man.”

  Wasted. He has it all sorted out. Found a wormhole through the universe. Given up on his dreams and replaced them with reasonable facsimiles. And he stills gets to smell the greasepaint. I envy him.

  That’s what I want to do. Find a reasonable facsimile of the life I want and step inside. I bet it will be all warm and snug in there.

  CHAPTER 47

  I AM SITTING in my house browsing job sites on the Internet without much enthusiasm. I give up and start fucking around on the web. I do this more often when I am depressed. My current set of circumstances exceeds that considerably. So I meander off to sites whose content is so depressing that by comparison my problem might recede. Economics, for instance. What could be more distracting than a spot of deep economics, peopled by experts who are certain to be more battered than I. I am particularly fond of economics blogs. Years of reading abstruse arguments about monetary policy and debt reduction and quantitative easing and stimulus packages and employment statistics and stag/in/deflation have achieved little in the way of personal edification, but they have armed me with few impressive buzzwords and a certainty that no one, particularly economists, has the foggiest idea how to get us out of this mess. These people, all armed with PhDs from our most august institutions and a quiver of formidable mathematics, seem to be unable to agree on which formulae will solve the world’s manifold economic problems.

  Not only do they disagree with each other, they disagree with prejudice, insulting each other with alarming abandon, throwing statistics at each other like deadly weapons. It is like watching cage fighting. There is blood on the floor. This somehow pleases me. One of the smarter bloggers, a happy pessimist by the name of John Mauldin, has a neat theory that if economic problems get bad enough they tip over into a singularity, a word borrowed from physics, where the laws of economics no longer apply, much like the breakdown of traditional physics in a black hole. This pleases me even more. And if the smartest people in the world are drowning in bewilderment and laws no longer apply, far be it from me to expect more, given the comparative puniness of my own concerns.

  Gordon, the proprietor of The Beast Belly and my last handhold on normalcy, calls.

  “Bad news, Meyer.”

  I wait. The silence is like deadweight. I hear a cackle deep in the recesses of my damaged ego.

  “I sold the place. Going back to the Midwest. Gonna marry my childhood sweetheart.”

  “As we all should. What’s the bad news? Although I can guess …”

  “New owner. He’s gonna turn it into a cabaret place.”

  “HE IS WHAT?”

  “A cabaret place.”

  “A FUCKING CABARET PLACE? SHOW TUNES? FUCKING SEQUINS AND FALSE EYELASHES?”

  “I guess. Sorry, Meyer. You were my first. You never forget your first.”

  “When?”

  “This Saturday is your last gig.”

  “Perfect.”

  “Sorry, Meyer.”

  “Why are you selling?”

  “I never came to LA to make it, Meyer. That’s just a fool’s game. I came to have some fun. I did that. Made a small pile too. Time to move on, to have a family. It doesn’t take a genius to know that. You should think about it before you are too old.”

  “I did it when I was too young, actually. Got a couple of families already. That’s the thing. It’s all about timing. Sounds like you may have it right. OK, I’ll tell the guys. See you Saturday.”

  I call Van.

  “Gordon’s shutting down. It’s our last gig.”

  “Huh. Want to come over and get high? Marion’s out protesting something.”

  “No, thanks. So what d’you think?”

  “About what?”

  “THE FUCKING END OF THE GIG! JESUS!”

  “Stop shouting. It is what it is. It’s always temporary. We’ll find another.”

  “Why does everything have to be temporary?”

  “Not everything is temporary.”

  “Name one thing.”

  “The universe.”

  “Firstly, the universe is temporary. But that’s another story. I am talking about temporary here and now. Lifetime scale.”

  “OK. How about aging?”

  “Aging?”

  “Yeah. Not temporary, it goes on till you die.”

  “You’re deep, Van.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I have to go put my head in the oven for a while. I will see you on Saturday.”

  “OK.”

  Everything is temporary. Yet another cheerful thought to consume me. No, wait. Dread is not fucking temporary. It is fucking permanent. Why can’t dread be temporary like all the good stuff?

  I am struck by a lacerating sadness now. I crawl upstairs and get into bed. It is barely noon. They are taking everything away from me. It is a plot of conspiratorial dimensions. Like Bush blowing up the Twin Towers. JFK. The Protocols of Zion. That’s it—anti-Semitism. This is an anti-Semitic plot carried out by dark forces bent on my destruction.

  I vaguely remember a story I once read in which the plot was that the earth was actually a toy in some alien’s living room. The alien kids would come home from school and fuck with people and weather and wars and disease and would watch what happens. Then they would laugh uproariously at pratfalls and other unintended consequences. Sort of like The Sims. Eventually they get bored and go off and have dinner with the parents. Finally, there is a fight between two of the youngsters vying for time on the earth toy and the loser stomps on the toy out of spite, breaking it into a million pieces.

&
nbsp; The story is startlingly apposite. Someone is fucking with me. I expect the crew to jump out and shout “Candid Camera!” any moment now. No amount of intellectual rigor can explain all this. It is all a game. It will end soon. Then we will all go out and have a beer and a laugh.

  I call Isobel on her cell phone.

  “Hi, sweetie.”

  “Hi, Daddy.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Why do all teenagers say that?”

  “Because it’s a dumb question. You have to be specific, Daddy.”

  “OK. Do you have a boyfriend?”

  “Not that specific.”

  “OK. How’s school?”

  “Fine.”

  “The answer ‘fine’ is even worse than ‘nothing.’”

  “Because it’s another dumb question, Daaaaad.”

  “OK. What was your last test?”

  “Math.”

  “How did you do?”

  “84.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “That’s great, sweetie. What else?”

  “What else what?”

  “How’s your mom?”

  “Fine.”

  “Aaaargh. Dumb question, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you think of Daniel?”

  “He’s OK. He’s pretty nice.”

  “You’ll let me know if he gets creepy?”

  “Daaaaaaaad!”

  “Sorry, that was out of line.”

  “OK. He’s not creepy. He’s pretty cool.”

  “As cool as me?”

  “Never.”

  “You know I’ll always love you. Always. It’s not a temporary thing. It goes on forever. No matter what. Not temporary. Permanent.”