Mooky climbs out of the pool. “Desmerelda, I got to split. I got a session across town.”
“Mr. Mooks, it’s been a pleasure.”
Mooky laughs. “Shit. Dolphins.” He walks back into the music room, where he left his clothes. My mother watches him go. “Who’s that, Desmond?”
“Mooky Saunders, the best dolphin-man in the world.”
“Oh, yes. And who is this little piece of trash?”
Mom is in one of her moods, not that she ever isn’t.
“Aw shit,” mutters the alien Claire, climbing from the pool. “Just when I was beginning to enjoy myself.”
“Don’t let me stop you,” says my mother Claire. “No doubt my son finds you in some way amusing. I like for my son to be amused.”
“Mommy, she’s on a mission from Toronto. I’m sure she’s been given instructions not to interfere with the life forms here, and I think we should respond with similar courtesy.”
“Oh, Desmond,” sighs my mother. My mother aims deadly eyes at the alien. “What exactly is your mission?”
“Just crashing, that’s all,” she answers.
“Oh!” It all becomes clear to me.
“Hey, lady.” The alien raises a finger, points at my mother. “Desmond and I are friends, okay?”
“Desmond has no friends,” sighs my mother.
“I’m going in the house now,” says the alien Claire.
“Make yourself at home!” yells my mother. “Take advantage of my son’s weakened mental condition! Help yourself to whatever you need or want! See how much money you can cheat him out of!”
The alien Claire spins around. She places her hands on her hips and cocks her body. “Did you go to Bitch College, or is this a natural talent?”
“Oh, I went to Bitch College, my dear. I did post graduate work.”
“I’m pleased to see you two getting along,” say I.
“I just need to know one thing,” says my mother, “out of concern for my son’s well-being. Exactly how old are you?”
“In earth years,” I remind Claire.
“I’m twenty. How old are you?”
“I was twenty once.”
“Hold it against me, why don’t ya?”
“Run along and play now. I have to talk to Desmond about his treatments.”
“Right.”
I watch Claire as she runs along. Her buttocks are small and very firm. They are also bright red, unaccustomed as Claire is to the proximity of the sun.
“Dr. Tockette has been calling me,” says my mother. She lights a cigarette. She takes a couple of puffs and then puts it out. My mother doesn’t really like smoking, but she enjoys showing off just how elegantly she can light up.
“I have no need for Tockette,” I respond. “I’ve made great strides. Why, just yesterday I almost went to bed. I almost got into my nappies, pulled down the covers and waited for Mr. Sandman.”
“He says you won’t let him in the house.”
“People come and say that they’re Dr. Tockette, but they’re not, because the real Dr. Tockette knows the secret password.”
“Dr. Tockette refuses to indulge you in this secret password business, Desmond. He says it’s necessary for your treatment that you open the door and invite him in.”
“There, you see, a Mexican stand-off.”
“It costs us two hundred dollars every time you won’t let him in.”
“Ha! I could find people who would do it for half that.”
“Desmond, Desmond,” she sighs. “I found an empty bottle of whiskey.”
“Yes?”
“You’ve been drinking.”
“Perhaps a small sip. Forestalling a cold.”
“Don’t you want to get better?”
“I only want to be happy.”
“Happy? What makes you think you have any right to be happy?”
“I am a life form. Watch the whales, Mommy. They’re happy. They swim around the world in happy pods. They lunch off the coast of Peru, they gather for cocktail hour just south of Greenland. They sing songs. I’m throwing a big party for them, just as soon as I’ve finished the Whale Music.”
“Enough.”
“You’re invited. Bring that husband of yours, what’s his name?”
“You know very well what his name is. His name is Maurice.”
“Yes, yes, Maurice. How is Maurice?”
“Maurice is very ill.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Are you? Are you really, Desmond?”
The ringing in my ears suddenly becomes deafening, the little hobgoblins have gotten hold of sousaphones and crash cymbals. I pull myself out of the water. I feel so uncomfortable on dry land. “Mom, come into the music room. Come hear the dolphins.”
“Put on your robe, please.”
I plod into the music room, locate the bathrobe in the control room. My mother enters the dim room, leans against the wall. She has a new lemon gin in her hand, they seem to materialize there. “Listen,” I instruct her, although, what with the twenty or so speakers mounted on the wall, it’s not as though she has any choice. I feed the tape into the module. The “Song of Flight”, I announce, and then the music starts. Wait, though. This is not the “Song of Flight”, this is something I’ve not heard before. A sound akin to giggling, an idiotic marching drum thud. Chords float throughout, juicy major sevenths. The soles of my fat feet start to itch. Then there is a voice—“Claire, the way the sunlight bounces in your hair.” Good voice, whoever it is. Lush harmonies, the high voice gliding up to the ninth whenever it gets a chance, which, to my way of thinking, is as close as you can get to Heaven and still keep the change in your pocket. Pretty as this might be, it is not the “Song of Flight”, featuring Mooky Saunders. I’m about to press STOP when I catch a glimpse of my mother. She is smiling. She is smiling the way she used to smile when Danny made a joke. Or when I made a joke for that matter. My mother is twisting her body back and forth, too, her hips connected to the heavy bass drum. I allow the music to continue. A trumpet solo now, savage and hawklike, keening through the soft clouds. This is all right, this music, whoever it is. The chorus. My mother joins in, finding the only available harmony, fitting her voice into the music like she fits her small hand into a satin glove. A tear rolls down her cheek, tumbles into her lemon gin. Just the single tear. The music ends, that is to say, it disappears forever to journey in the cosmos.
“Desmond,” says my mother.
“Yes?” I speak into a microphone, amplify my voice twentyfold so that it echoes in the recording chamber.
“Desmond. You still got it.”
“Did you think that was me?”
“Of course it was you.”
“Son of a gun.” Even I’m impressed.
“And you wrote it about me?”
“Claire,” I point out, “is your name.”
“Has anyone from Galaxy Records heard this?”
“Well, no. I’ve a policy of not allowing record executives in the house, except for purposes of committing ritual suicide.”
“You won’t even allow Kenny into the house?”
“Especially Kenny. He alarms me.”
“I’m the first person to ever hear this?”
“As far as I know.”
“It is very beautiful, Desmond. I’m proud of you.”
“Do you want to hear the ‘Song of Flight’?”
“I should be getting back. Maurice needs me.”
“If there’s anything I can do, you know.”
“Could I have a copy of that tape?”
“Mommy, you can have the tape. It’s not Whale Music.” I rewind, hand her the inch master. My mother kisses me on the cheek. “I’m sorry I was rude to your little friend.”
“It must be ghastly up on Toronto. She has something painful in her, Mom. She seems to be happy, but inside I think she’s very sad.”
“We could start a club.”
“She likes the Whale Music.”
“Toodle-oo.”
My mother disappears. I feel strangely energized. I think it is time to begin work on the last movement of the Whale Music, the “Song of Congregation”.
Do you know what I find strange, besides most everything? Motherhood is biological, correct? God concocted this scheme, He thought it was mighty clever, a little egg monthly shoots down the pipe, if some male-making matter is at the same time going up, you get babies. (Well, most of the time. Fay, astoundingly, could not conceive, even though her whole body seemed to swell and burst with the full moon.) But here in the War Zone, this process becomes unbelievably complex.
Much better to be as whales. Momma calves, the child weighs a mere tonne, it swims beside mother and for a few days swigs at the teats. Before long, it’s tata, mater, I’m off to Kuchino Shima, me and the gang are having a little get-together. And the mother simply bellows goodbye, perhaps cautions her lad to be careful in those Japanese waters, and that’s it. They may pass each other in a decade or so. They will surface, blow off a delighted hail, and then go their separate ways.
Yowzer, that stings! I’ve been playing tuba for the past little while (long while?) and it has torn hell out of the old chops. My chubby cheeks are woefully flaccid, I don’t think I could speak a word that didn’t sound like shit sliding down a brick wall. I lean back, stretch my arms behind my head and yawn like a sea-elephant. Time for bed, then—Call Dr. Tockette!—time for beddy-bye, indeed. I wander out into the backyard in hopes of a brief but spiritually rewarding gaze at the heavenly firmament. Wrong again. It’s daylight out here, sunny with a vengeance, Claire is reclining in the chaise-longe reading a book. Well, I’m adaptable. If it’s not time for bed, then it’s time for something else. I plod over, allowing my flat, ugly-toed feet to fall loudly, because I don’t want to alarm the little creature. They are skittish up on Toronto. “Hi,” I give out, the traditional Earth greeting.
“Desmeroony,” she smiles. “What’s doing, hon?”
“Oh, you know. I’ve been working on the Whale Music. What have you been doing?”
“Reading. Eating. I cleaned up around the place some. Des, I found a cheque for like twelve thousand bucks. You think maybe you ought to put it in the bank or something?”
“I don’t know.” How did my mother miss that one? She is distressed by Maurice’s health, I suppose. I momentarily feel remorseful, but I have had plenty of practice at hardening the heart. I sit down on the ground beside the chaise-longe. “Did you crash into the sea?”
“Huh?”
“Let me guess. Your craft started sputtering in the exosphere, the air being too rich for your carburetor. Happens all the time. Then the ship plummeted into the ocean. Dolphins ferried you to the shore.”
“Desmond,” says Claire, “sometimes you get just a little bit too snaky. I mean, I’m used to weird people, but you push it.”
“I thought you’d come here for a purpose.”
“Oh, yeah. I came here because back home they’re after me with butterfly nets.”
“A renegade, a refugee! How exciting.”
“I guess I should tell you, Desmond, you’d probably be in a lot of trouble if they found me here.”
“They won’t find you. And if they do, we fight. Er, just how sophisticated is their weaponry?”
“Pretty fucking sophisticated. They use electricity.”
“Aha! Then we repulse them into the water.”
Claire laughs lightly, but she is not cheered.
“Why are they after you? What did you do?”
“I didn’t do fucking anything. They did stuff to me. It doesn’t matter.” She waves her small hand in the air, dispersing her speech like stale cigarette smoke. Speaking of which, I think I’ll have a butt. I extract a crumpled package from one of the bathrobe pockets, pull out a bent Salem Menthol. Claire tsks her tongue. “Cancer-stick,” she says. “You ought to quit.”
“I mean to,” I lie. “Just as soon as the Whale Music is completed. Perhaps the morning after the party.”
“Party?”
“I’m inviting the whales. They can sit in the ocean there, at the bottom of the cliff. We can wave and smile at each other as we listen to the music. You’re going to stay for that, aren’t you?”
“I wouldn’t miss it for the world, Des.”
“Yours or mine?”
“Huh?”
“Tell me about Toronto.”
“Well, it’s a lot like it is down here. It’s got some nice parts, some shitty parts.” Claire turns over on her side, leaning close to me, and excitement sparks in her eyes. “I’ll tell you the best and the worst thing about Toronto, Des. The best thing is that it’s got more seagulls than anywhere in the universe. We got billions and billions of the little dudes. There’s this place called the Leslie Street Spit, and you can walk down there and see nothing but gulls. And I like to do that, don’t ask me why. And the very worst thing about it is that everybody thinks this is a big problem. They say that seagulls are stinky, smelly birds, and people want to poison all the gull eggs and turn snakes and mongeese and hawks loose on the Spit. And when I hear people talk like this, I get mad. I think, hey, slime-bucket, if these seagulls are so bad, why did God make so fucking many of them? Don’t you think He knows what He’s doing?”
“He makes a lot of everything,” I point out. “That may be His way of compensating for engineering and design flaws.”
“Weird Desmond,” laughs Claire. “He only made the one of you, babe.”
“Torque Torque” was a local hit. It was a hit because the father shoved it down the throat of every disc jockey he could find. It was a hit because, as Kenny Sexstone noted, the youthful record-buying public was very much concerned with automobiles. It was a hit because the young Danny took a good picture, because he looked like a greaseball that would be polite to your mother. It was a hit, in part, because it was a good tune.
We were the Howl Brothers, the names Des and Danny bracketed underneath on the forty-five. The triumvirate—the father, Maurice Mantle and Kenny Sexstone—decided that we needed a band, that the Howl Brothers had to play live in order to promote the record. They decided to accent our youth, auditioning only people between the ages of fifteen and eighteen.
The drummer they found was a small, dark-skinned boy named Sal Goneau. His hair-do was something to see, a shiny and intricate sculpture that always looked like it was about to slide off Sally’s head. Sal had a face like a bird, a nose that could be used as a letter-opener. He wore his shirt open to the navel as if proud of the fact that a swarthy Latin type like himself could have not a single solitary hair growing anywhere on his person (except for the precarious bouffant perched atop his noggin). Sal wasn’t a very technically competent drummer, but he was awesomely mechanical. Once he got into a groove there was no stopping the lad. I’d pit Sal against a metronome any day of the week and bet good money that the machine broke time before Sally did.
On bass we had Dewey Moore. Dewey is doing well these days, isn’t he, I believe he was recently voted Country and Western Artist of the Year. And I likewise believe he’s in the Guinness Book of World Records for most marriages. When I first saw him he hadn’t any of this silver-haired dignity for which he is so widely regarded. He was a scrawny, leather-jacketed man with his four-day beard doing a re-enactment of the Civil War. Dewey’s eyes were red and ringed like Saturn. He walked into the auditioning room dragging his bass dolefully. A cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth, little flecks of what looked like vomit spotted his filthy jeans. The triumvirate regarded him sceptically. Finally Maurice asked, “How old are you?”
Dewey removed the cigarette from his mouth and spoke. His voice sounded like someone was making mud pies in Hell. “Sixteen,” Dewey croaked, and then he strapped on his instrument and commenced to play.
He got the job, mostly because not a lot of bass players showed up that day.
The guitarist was, as you probably k
now, Monty Mann, he of the quote-unquote Californian good looks. What was Californian about his good looks is beyond me. I think of California as ruggedly beautiful, redwoods, jagged coastlines, Big Sur, etc. Monty had a tiny nose, a tiny mouth, tiny ears. I couldn’t look at him without imagining God creating Monty Mann, mincing around like a hairdresser and exclaiming, “Too cute for words!” Danny took a glance at Monty and hated him. I didn’t hate Monty, but I did think he was a lousy guitar player, ruthlessly dragging slothful quarter notes out of his Telecaster, pulling and working at them like they were goobers stuck up some musical nostril.
The father attended the rehearsals regularly, but he didn’t seem at all concerned with our musical progress. Instead, he’d show up with wardrobe ideas. Where he was getting these “costumes,” I’ll never know. We never had to make a firm veto on any of them because the father was quick to change his own mind. “Naw,” he’d holler as soon as we were all uniformly attired. “No schnooze.” The other thing the father had in abundance was ideas on hair. “You’re all gonna dye your hair white!”
Sal Goneau shivered at this prospect. Dewey Moore’s hair gave the impression that it would fight off tampering of its own volition. Monty’s hair was close to being white anyhow, and replacing God-given bleach with a bottled brand was to him repugnant. This is the first true fight we had with the father, Danny leading the attack.
“No way,” he said.
“I’m the boss!” screamed the father.
“No way,” repeated Dan.
“I made you!” The father was perhaps referring to the two doggedly relentless bits of sperm that had produced my brother and myself. This was not the last time we would hear this peculiar claim.
“We are not dyeing our hair,” Danny said with finality.
The father crossed quickly to Danny and slapped him twice on the face. Danny then reared back and caught the father with a roundhouse, laying him out on his duff. I picked the father up, whispered that I would be willing to dye my hair. He said, “Who cares?” and stormed out. The incident was never mentioned again.
Whale Music Page 6