by Stuart David
‘No.’
‘Go.’
‘Fuck off.’
Ray came over then. He gave us a great big smile.
‘How are you guys doing?’ he asked. ‘Things going smoothly?’
‘Perfectly,’ I told him, then I turned to Bob. ‘The wee man’s just off to get the rest of the records from the car.’ I said, and the wee man gave me a murderous look. And off the wee man went.
I didn’t have long to bask in my fucking victory, though. A few seconds later I was cursing the wee bastard’s luck. It started with Ray’s hand on my shoulder.
‘Alright,’ he said. ‘We’re going with doors in five. Are you guys ready to go? There’s a crate of beer for you there in the booth. If you need anything else, just let me know.’
And then he was gone again. He had quite a talent for disappearing it seemed. And a couple of minutes later all the fucking lights went off. All I’d had time to do was open a beer, and now I couldn’t see a fucking thing. I fumbled around in the booth trying to feel things, and luckily I stumbled on a wee light. I pointed it around and tried to work out how to switch things on, then I looked up. The place was nearly fucking full already. I nearly fucking shat myself. I couldn’t work out where in fuck they’d all come from so quickly, and I knew it would take Bob fucking ages to get back.
I looked at what was there. Two record decks and a space-age CD player, and some other fucking complicated looking thing with knobs and sliders on it. I started to sweat. I unbuttoned the Afghan, and started taking it off—and that’s when I was saved. There was something in there—something bulging in the pocket, and my heart fucking leapt. It was the big man. Glen fucking Campbell. To the rescue again.
I managed to get the weird CD player open and I slammed it in there. Then I found a switch on the complicated looking thing that said ‘CD’ and I sparked it up. And on it came, blasting out through the club, —’Dreams of the Everyday Housewife.’
I was fucking thrilled. It probably wasn’t what they were expecting to hear in there, but it was fucking music all the same.
Good fucking music.
* * *
By the time Bob got back I’d gone through ‘Galveston’, ‘Guess I’m Dumb’ and ‘Country Boy.’ I was just trying to decide what to give them next when he came staggering back into the booth under the most enormous stack of LPs I’d ever fucking seen. They were piled up so high in his arms that only his eyes were showing over the top.
‘What the fuck’s going on here?’ he asked me, as he tipped them down onto the floor.
‘We’ve started, son,’ I told him.
‘I can see that, but what the fuck are you playing?’
‘Glen.’
‘Glen Campbell? Jesus Christ, Peacock. Help me find something else in here quickly. You can’t play Glen Campbell at a night like this.’
‘It’s going alright,’ I told him. ‘Have a beer. That whole crate’s for us. Free.’
He shuffled about amongst his records and then looked out over the top of the booth.
‘What the fuck gave you the idea that it’s going alright?’ he asked me. ‘Have you looked out there?’
‘I haven’t had time, son,’ I told him.
‘Well take a look now.’
I had to admit they all looked pretty confused. There were certainly a lot of them, but most of them were standing staring at our booth.
‘Hurry up,’ Bob said. ‘Help me find something in here.’
So I got down onto the floor with him and started rummaging around.
‘How much did all this cost you?’ I asked him.
‘Practically nothing,’ he said. ‘I just grabbed everything from the fifty-cents bin.’
It fucking showed. He’d got a lot of shite. I certainly couldn’t find anything in there that was going to be an improvement on what we were already playing. To start with, about half of it was classical.
‘Fucking hell,’ I said, and Bob scrambled about—pulling out heavy metal records and recordings of American poets. Then he jumped up.
‘Alright,’ he said. ‘This’ll do to start with.’
He’d found a compilation of TV funk themes from the 70’s, and he slammed it onto one of the decks.
‘How does this work?’ he asked me.
I moved the switch on the thing from ‘CD’ to ‘Phono 1’. Glen had just been starting up ‘Gentle On My Mind’, but that put paid to him.
‘Jesus, Peacock,’ Bob said. ‘That was fucking smooth.’
But he was one to talk. He put the needle down and the song sparked up half way through. Then the needle skidded across a scratch, and came to a rest just before the start of the next song.
‘Have a beer,’ I told him, when the next song started. ‘We’ll let this side play through.’
I opened one for him, but after one slug he was straight back down onto the floor, hunting amongst the records.
He found one compilation of chart-hits from the 80’s, and when the TV themes reached the end of that side he put it on, and alternated one song about between that and the second side of the funky TV stuff.
I’ll tell you—there wasn’t a lot else in there. We had to get through the four hours from there till the end of the night with just a Brazilian Carnival album, the soundtrack from Grease, and a Jane Fonda workout record—skipping it as best we could over her exercise instructions between the songs.
If you do the sums you’ll realise that just doesn’t add up to four hours. It leaves a lot of extra time.
To fill some of it Bob managed a wee bit of genius. He’d noticed that one of the songs on the TV themes started just with drums, and he said he’d heard you could keep winding a record back to keep the same bit playing over again. So he practiced that on the free deck through the headphones, until he thought he could do it okay. And when the record on the other deck finished I turned the switch to play that one.
To be honest, it didn’t really sound that good. He was getting it right some of the time, and wrong some of the time. But mostly it was just nearly right, and it didn’t sound great.
Still, it didn’t look as bad as earlier out front. I had a wee peek out over the booth, and most of the people weren’t staring at it anymore—they were facing in all different ways, talking and drinking. A few of them were even trying their best to dance to Bob’s fucked up drums.
‘Peacock!’ he shouted at me then.
‘What?’
‘Get one of those classical records and find out how to make both decks play at once.’
I looked at him.
‘Go on,’ he said. ‘It might work. We can’t keep this fucking drumbeat playing all night on its own.’
So I put one on. Most of the time it didn’t fit in with the drums at all, but occasionally they came together.
We probably kept on with that for longer than we should have, about half an hour in all. But then Bob started to get a cramp in his hand, and it all seized up in a weird fucking spasm. He let the record go then, and the funk started playing along with the classical, and I made a quick grab for the classical one and pulled it off.
‘Fucking Jesus,’ Bob shouted, flapping his hand about.
I opened him another beer.
‘I’ll tell you what we should do,’ I shouted at him.
‘What should we do, Peacock?’ he said. ‘What’s your next fucking master plan?’
‘We should finish up with some more Glen,’ I told him. ‘Give the evening some coherence.’
‘Coherence? What the fuck are you, an artist now?’
But he couldn’t really argue, cause we had fuck-all else left to play.
I put on ‘By The Time I Get To Phoenix’ and ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’, and just as I started ‘Reason to Believe’ the lights came up. We’d fucking made it.
I shook Bob’s spastic hand.
‘No bother, wee man,’ I said to him. ‘No fucking bother at all.’
Chapter 13
She’s on her way.
I fucked it up.
I fucked it up, and it was all down to that free case of beer.
We drank that whole thing between us—me and Bob. About half of it during the club, and then the other half back at the hotel—with our two thousand dollars spread out on the floor in front of us.
Ray hadn’t seemed that impressed when we’d gone to get the second half of it from him.
‘That was… unusual,’ he said.
But we told him that’s just what we do.
‘Some people like it and some people don’t,’ I said.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘That’s our style,’ I said. ‘As far as we’re concerned people can take it or leave it.’
‘What?’
I took a deep breath. I felt pretty sure he was a gun-in-the-drawer-type guy.
‘That’s our set,’ Bob told him. ‘It’s not to everyone’s taste, but when people like it…’
‘Hmm,’ Ray said, but he paid us all the same.
We went back out through the club and took the beer, then we looked at the pile of records. We were going to just leave them there, but we decided that would probably cause more trouble than taking them, so we gathered them up.
‘Who the fuck is this Michael guy?’ I asked Bob as he wove the car slowly about the road, and we looked for a hotel.
‘He’s a shithead.’ Bob said. ‘I thought he was a friend.’
‘Who is he?’
‘Just a guy I know in New York. He plays in a few bands. I took his girlfriend out a couple of times when he was away, but I didn’t think he knew. I guess he must have found out.’
‘So this whole thing is about that?’
‘I guess so.’
‘Fuck… ‘ I said. ‘Still, I’ll bet he didn’t know what we were getting paid tonight.’
‘I’ll fucking bet he didn’t,’ Bob laughed.
So we drank the rest of the beer back at the hotel, and we got drunk enough not to realise we had nothing left to try now to get this fucking record made. And then, when Bob had gone back to his own room, I did a quick calculation on the time and phoned the wife.
It was a big fucking mistake. I was too drunk and too pleased with myself for having just pulled off what we’d pulled off, and I started going on about how well we were doing.
‘You wouldn’t believe it,’ I told her. ‘They like our ideas so much out here they’ve started paying us to DJ. Take a guess at how much we made tonight.’
‘For what?’
‘For playing a few records. Five hours work—if you can call it work.’
‘How much?’
‘Two thousand dollars. Two thousand fucking dollars.’
She let out a wee scream.
‘That’s fucking magic, Peacock,’ she said. ‘So how soon can you fly me over?’
I put my head in my hands.
‘I… I’ll look into it, hen,’ I told her. ‘I’ll sort it out tomorrow.’
She was over the fucking moon. I couldn’t fucking calm her down.
‘I’ll give you a wee phone tomorrow when I know what’s happening,’ I told her. ‘You take it easy now, hen.’
Then I hung up, and wept.
* * *
We were quite a sight at breakfast the next morning, me and the wee man, with our bloodshot eyes and our thumping fucking headaches. And what a fucking breakfast it was. We were sharing a pot of macrobiotic twig tea, and eating wholemeal pancakes—in some fucking hippy place where it was all roots and shoots.
‘I can’t fucking believe it,’ I said to Bob. ‘There’s no fucking stopping her. I can’t believe I fucked up like that.’
‘We’re at a dead-end anyway,’ Bob said. ‘What are we going to do now? We’re all out of leads.’
He took a drink of the tea and winced.
‘There’s only one thing we can do,’ I told him. ‘We’re going to have to find someone ourselves. Hire someone. We’ve got the fucking money now.’
‘I guess so.’
‘How hard can it be?’
Bob shrugged.
No harder than getting through that breakfast, that was for sure. We fucking struggled with that. And we didn’t feel any healthier for it afterwards either.
‘Should we look for someone here?’ I asked Bob.
He screwed his face up.
‘There’s a lot more on offer down the coast,’ he said.
‘Where should we go then?’ I asked him.
‘There only one place,’ he said. ‘L.A.’
And that was that.
Chapter 14
‘Look at it,’ I said to Bob. ‘Jesus Christ.’
We were at the airport; Los Angeles International Airport. We’d been there for three fucking hours, waiting. Still, it was a spectacular place. It should have been space shuttles that were flying out of there, rather than planes. It looked like a fucking futuristic city.
All the same, the ‘it’ I was drawing Bob’s attention to wasn’t any feature of the airport—we’d already been there long enough to study all that. The ‘it’ in question was the honourable Mrs. Johnson—the fucking wife; teetering out through baggage control on her four-inch heels, carrying more stuff than I thought we owned, and smashed on the free drink from the plane.
‘Give me a hand here, Peacock,’ she shouted, dropping everything.
Bob hurried forward and picked up a couple of her bags.
‘Look at the state of my hair,’ she said. ‘I had it done before I left. It was lovely. All nice and high. Look at it now. It’s collapsed. And I fell asleep on this side of it on the plane. What do I look like? I could do with a loan of your hairnet,’ she said to Bob. ‘Hello, by the way. You must be the wee-mad man.’
‘Evil,’ I told her. ‘Evil Bob.’
‘Hello Evil Bob,’ she said. ‘I’m Beverley. Call me Bev. You’re right, Peacock. He does look like someone. Someone famous. What a horrible flight that was. I left the house eighteen hours ago. Then it’s delayed by three hours. Have you been here long?’
‘Aye,’ I told her. ‘Three hours.’
I picked up two of her bags, and we made our way out to the car.
She gasped when we got outside.
‘My God,’ she said. ‘It’s roasting, Peacock. You should see it back in Glasgow. It snowed on Wednesday. It’s freezing there. Oh, but this is glorious. You must have been having a great time here. Where’s your sun tan, Peacock? You’re still as white as me. What have you been doing?’
‘We’ve been working,’ I told her. ‘Besides, we just got here. It hasn’t been like this everywhere.’
‘I’m knackered,’ she said. ‘How far are we from the hotel, Peacock? I’m going to have to go to bed when we get there.’
‘It’ll take us about forty minutes,’ I told her, and we jammed her into the back seat, along with most of her bags. There wasn’t room for most of her bags in the boot, and it wasn’t a small boot either. There had been room for me in there, for fuck sake. But there wasn’t room for most of Bev’s bags.
‘What the fuck have you got in there?’ I asked her.
‘Just my stuff,’ she said, and she pushed about amongst it all—trying to make a space for herself to sit in.
Once we got moving she’d somehow managed to clear enough room to poke her head forward into the front, between me and Bob’s seats, and she was off again.
‘Is it the guy who plays Frazier?’ she asked us.
‘What?’
‘You know, on the telly. The show about the psychiatrist. Is it the guy who plays him?’
‘Where?’
‘That he looks like. Is that who the wee-mad man looks like?’
‘I fucking hope not,’ Bob said.
‘You do a bit though. A thinner version. With hair.’
‘And a different face,’ I said.
‘He does a bit though.’
‘Nah,’ I told her. ‘It’s someone else.’
A couple of minutes later she was snoring. Snoring loudly. It didn’t so
und too pleasant, but I told Bob to enjoy it.
‘This might be the only break we get,’ I said.
And we were in luck. It lasted pretty much all the way back to the hotel—with just one break when she suddenly appeared between our seats again, and stared at herself in the mirror.
‘My God,’ she said. ‘Look at the state of me.’
And then she was asleep again.
At the hotel she groaned all the way up to the room, half asleep with her hangover starting to kick in, and I put her into bed and turned the air conditioning on.
Then I went out to sit at the edge of the pool with Bob. To relax and get some rest before the evening.
* * *
We’d got a lot of things started since we arrived in LA, me and Bob. We’d found a few people and worked a few things out, and it hadn’t been hard. Things were fucking easy in LA. I kept telling Bob we should have come straight there in the first place. There was just so much going on, so many people trying to get things done. And there were so many people who’d come there expecting to become stars, with all different kinds of talents, that you could easily find someone who could do just whatever you needed. Someone who hadn’t become a star yet—and needed any kind of work they could get—just for the money.
There were hundreds of people always looking for something to do, so me and Bob had found our first guy pretty easily. All we’d had to do was look up the back of a newspaper, and to be honest we didn’t even really have to go that far. There were things hanging off lampposts, and on bins and on newspaper dispensers, saying-
‘I can do this. Do you need me?’
Things with perforated tickets on the bottom that you could tear off, with their name and phone number on it.
But we’d put a bit of effort in, and found our guy up the back of a newspaper. Or a free arts magazine.
It said something like—’Turn your idea into a hit.’ Something fucking daft like that. But we gave the number a phone and went along to the place.
It was just one guy in a wee room with a lot of computers and machines. It didn’t look like he’d been there long, everything seemed pretty new.
‘So what are you looking to do, guys?’ he asked us. ‘Are you a band?’
‘Do we look like a band?’ I said.