Whale Music

by Paul Quarrington

  “Boy,” I mutter, “do I have problems.”

  Fred makes no response. I expected none. He lifts up the napkin, seems surprised to see a half-eaten jelly-filled there.

  “Yes,” I persist. “I lacked foresight, recorded a melody line on one track, and now I want it to be stereo, and what am I to do?”

  Fred lowers his head. He links his fingers together, he is very proud of this dexterous ability. I am starting to think this is a lost cause, but then Fred mutters, “Bounce.”

  “Ah! Well you may say bounce, but Fred, I have left myself no tracks.”

  “Nyuk.”

  “Freddy?” I start to get excited. “Did you just go nyuk?”

  “Nyuk-nyuk.”

  “What is it?”

  “Shunt frequencies.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Like at a train station. Reroute the frequencies. Eight hundred megahertz, track four. Sixteen hundred, track nine. Get another machine to use as a switcher. Choo-choo. Shunt frequencies, you get a free track. All the way to Alaska. One free track, bouncy-bounce, split the signal from the melody line, pan left, pan right, stereophonic. Tres facile.”

  “Now that’s a very good—”

  “Desmond!”

  “Yes, Fred?”

  “Why are you sad?” Freaky Fred says all this overloud, he is bellowing in the kitchen.

  “I’m not sad, Freddy.”

  “Oh. Why are you unhappy?”

  “I … I miss someone.”

  “Did you miss me?”

  “Yes. Yes, I did.”

  “Do you want to go shunt frequencies now?”

  And in the music room Fred Head calmly assumes the chair behind the console. It has been some years since he’s done this sort of thing, and technology has advanced in leaps and bounds. The concept of digital recording, for example, was sci-fi stuff when Freddy went away. He doesn’t seem at all daunted, though. Fred knows machines. The computer behaves towards Fred like a friendly puppy, it leaps up and licks his face. Fred spends a few minutes deciphering its language and then programs in some basic information about noise. He picks up the various black boxes, compressors, expanders, etc., he looks at their circuit board diagrams and nods. It is only a short while before Fred is ready. He rubs his hands together, glances at me (I think I see a small smile buried underneath his beard), Fred reaches over and pushes the PLAY button on the big machine.

  He listens to the “Song of Congregation”. Fred always did that, concentrating very hard on the first play-through, touching exactly nothing on the board, just hearing the sounds as they were recorded. The Yamaha 666 howls at highest pitch, the control room shakes with the Beast’s fury.

  When the song is finished, Freaky Fred Head turns his head. He takes off his sunglasses, stares at me and says something he’s never said before, not in all the time the two of us recorded gold and platinum records, things that sold mega-units to the Hutterites. Fred says, “I think it’s a hit.”

  Hits, hits, hits. We had an unprecedented string of the buggers. I was hugely famous, I was inconceivably wealthy, I upped the dosages, I drank mightily, I did some things I’d just as soon not mention.

  One morning I woke up, crawled to the bathroom, had a sip of water and threw up. This is indicative of poor shape, when your body refuses to deal with H2O. Sicker still was the old spirit, do you know the feeling, you can’t walk within a mile of railway tracks or freeways for fear that your soul will summon its last reserves and hurl your carcass towards oblivion? Fay was God only knows where, even her icy glares and fierce recriminations would have comforted me somewhat.

  Monty Mann entered the bathroom. Monty later claimed that he was drawn to my house, to the washroom, by some urgent psychic beckoning. I believe he was drawn by some urgent need to drain his bladder. At any rate, he knelt beside me, he was kind enough to hold me, after a while I began to feel semihuman, at which I point I dipped into the pharmaceuticals, and in no time I was feeling fairly well. Monty, sensing my general despondency, insisted that I accompany him and his girlfriend Starflower to a lecture that evening. By then I was feeling well enough to have started drinking again, but for some reason this didn’t reinforce my normal need for aloneness. I agreed.

  We picked up Starflower who, I have to tell you, eclipsed me in the weirded-out department. Starflower wore a chiffon dress and a baffled expression. This is what happened when the debs were given bad drugs—girls with names like Muffy Seton-Beaton dropped acid, adopted astronomical and/or botanical monikers and lost the faculty of intelligent speech.

  We drove to a huge stadium. Talk about your drug casualties, the psychically damaged, there were tens of thousands of us, all there to hear our spiritual leader, the King of the Fritzed, Babboo Nass Fazoo.

  Inside the stadium hung a huge representation of the Babboo’s blissful visage. It was an idealized portrait, but it still made me shudder, which gives you some notion of how ugly the Babboo could be at close quarters. I’ll tell you what to do, make one of those hand puppets, curl your fingers and stick your thumb through so it forms a mouth. If you own an old, wrinkled hand this will work particularly well. All right, now imagine hair on this hand, grey greasy hair of a length of two-plus feet (subtract a mangy baldspot) and you have some idea of the appearance of Babboo Nass Fazoo. He came onto the stage (riding a great satin pillow carried by eight henchmen) gesticulating wildly. People rushed forward to lay flowers at his gnarly feet.

  The Babboo began to speak, in a voice like a chipmunk being throttled. “Life is a powl of zoob,” he began, then he told us about breathing exercises, he identified a spot about the size of a dime on one’s palm that was the site of “energedig imbulzes,” he turned quite wiggy for a bit, seeming to imply that if we weren’t having sexual intercourse for three days straight we weren’t doing it right. That’s the bit that hooked Monty, I’m sure of it. I have no such easy excuse. Babboo Nass Fazoo seemed to know where one could purchase peace of mind, and I dearly wanted some.

  The next night I dragged Danny down to the stadium. I think what got him was the breathing exercises. The Babboo snapped his fingers and approximately twenty-three thousand, four hundred and sixty two pert breasts stiffened. Dan became quite the zealot, and was in large part responsible for the Babboo’s tremendous popularity. Danny was a good walking advertisement for it, he stopped drinking, his face acquired this robust rosiness, his dark eyes glistened with inner knowledge, a cherubic grin bloomed across his face.

  Sal Goneau and Dewey Moore were persuaded. Dewey’s first marriage had just failed, he was eager for any sort of distraction. Sal was, well for god’s sake, how can I put this, Sal was spiritual. I know it’s hard to believe in this day and age, but there you have it.

  We all five flew to India to study with the Babboo. Our next record album, At Play in the Fields of the Lord, was dedicated to him, the songs all espoused the Babboo Nass Fazoovian philosophy.

  The record was a whimpering dog, it sucked like piglets at the teat, I am well and truly ashamed.

  The “Song of Congregation” is like a searchlight in an inky sky, forgive me my immodesty, it is largely the work of Freaky Fred Head at any rate, he has worked on the music like a masseur, he has loosened the little knots, he has toned and conditioned.

  I would be happy, I would be blissfully happy, except that there is no sign of Claire.

  How do you figure a guy like Danny? I mean, really. You must picture the scene. There we are in India, all of us, our wives and girlfriends. Even Fay came briefly, although she decided that the Indian sun was bad for her complexion. The Jamaican sun, the French Rivieran sun, those suns were acceptable, but the sun that hovered over India, it was all wrong. Also down in India were the Beatles. I was somewhat impressed with George Harrison because he persisted in his sitar studies even when the master Ravi Shankar stated publicly that it would be some years before George learned to hold the thing. A little-known bit of trivia: Monty Mann took up the sitar, Ravi Shankar said t
hat he would never learn how to hold it.

  It was an idyllic existence there in India. We meditated, made music, went on long walks. We dressed in robes when we dressed at all, what with the human body being like a bowl of soup.

  So who would have thought that such Elysian surroundings would wake the slumbering Stud E. Baker?

  I first became aware of Baker’s re-emergence while being tutored by the Babboo Nass Fazoo. The Babboo would give you private tutelage if he thought you were (a) capable of true enlightenment and (b) revoltingly moneyed. He would lead you down to a stagnant pond, point to the shade of a tree and giggle, his lackies would arrive with pillows, bare-breasted women would come bearing fans like garden rakes, children would rush forward with refreshment, dewy fruit and the Babboo’s favourite beverage, Labatt’s 50, a beer he had flown in by the Boeing 747-load. The Babboo would expound his philosophy and giggle, as if he himself could not believe that anyone was actually buying this drivel.

  I had seen Daniel the day before, wandering around the site dressed in a snow-white robe. His face was ruddy from the sun but possessed of a tranquillity that I could scarcely credit. Beside him walked (floated, more like it) a naked woman. Her breasts were large, mother-of-pearl, traces of vein shining lightly. Daniel didn’t seem to notice. He was holding a blade of grass in front of his face, concentrating on the symmetry. He was approaching true holiness, I’m sure that cow-patties would have jumped out of his way had he, in his contemplative state, come close to treading through them.

  I felt happy for Danny and thoroughly ashamed of myself. For one thing, I wasn’t buying any of the Babboo’s malarky. I know, I know, I was won over by the lecture back in California, I admit that for a while I was quite boringly het-up about the whole thing, a rabid proselyte, but my enthusiasm waned. I was there with him only because I enjoyed the atmosphere, the tranquillity, I was there because we didn’t tell Kenneth Sexstone where we were going, ha ha! Babboo Nass Fazoo was very down on the use of drugs (“drupping rappit-belledz indo the powl of zoob”), but I was ingesting them by the handful, me and (this is in Geddy Cole’s mean-spirited little publication anyway, it’s not like I’m divulging secrets) Johnny Lennon. John and I would also get into the booze a little bit, that fellow could put it away, if Fate had allowed John an old age, I’m sure he would have been one of those crimson-faced, blossomed-nosed gits who sits around the nobby all day picking fights with the publican. “ ’Ere,” he’d growl, “that weerent us. It weer the Dave Clahrk Foive!”

  No, I was not in harmony with my surroundings, even to the extent of hobbling around with an all-day boner. It’s hard to believe I have trouble popping a chub these days—in my youth I couldn’t shake or slake them.

  On this particular day, the Babboo was droning on, the bare-breasted women were wafting cool air over us, my mind was wandering, all of which was run of the mill for India, when suddenly I caught sight of Stud E. Baker.

  He stood some fifty feet away, taking a leak into the pond. His hips (wrapped in filthy bluejeans, the denim stretched tight as could be) were thrust forward, the legs would often buckle in a muzzy, beery fashion. Stud was holding his pecker in an insouciant overhand fashion. His upper half was T-shirted, the T-shirt full of holes and rents, a deck of smokes rolled into one sleeve. I thought I was imagining things, I blinked and rubbed my eyes. Yes, it was Stud all right, the trademark Confederate Army cap rammed onto the greasy do.

  Stud E. Baker took the cigarette from his mouth and flicked it into the pond. He turned and caught sight of our little circle. Babboo Nass Fazoo continued his philosophizing unmindful, his back, and the backs of the bare-breasted women, to Stud E. Baker.

  Stud had just finished stuffing his wad back into his jeans, but at the sight of the fan-wavers he pulled it out and flapped it gleefully. He dropped on to his hands and knees and started crawling towards us commando fashion. The Babboo was reaching the main point of his argument when, with whoops and shrieks, the fan-bearers suddenly tumbled over. Stud E. Baker pounced, he started licking them with puppylike fervour. “I own the pud that boils the blood!” he screamed. There was confusion and thrashing of limbs. Caterwauling and scratching of eyeballs. Babboo Nass Fazoo giggled. (That’s when it occurred to me that our spiritual leader was, in fact, severely brain-damaged, the fuzzy little groat will be giggling even as they tan his hide in Hades.) The Babboo’s henchmen came to get Danny, they were ex-Australian Rules Footballers, there was very little Danny could do about it, although I picked up a fairly substantial stick and managed to open a gash on one of their thick and numby skulls.

  Some little newsrat must have infiltrated the camp, because this became big news, HOWL BROTHERS BANISHED FROM BABBOO’S PARADISE. Photographers came to record our mass exodus—Daniel and me, Dewey Moore (leaving behind a spiteful strain of gonorrhea), Sal Goneau, but note that Monty Mann elected to stay behind. With us on the plane, however, was the very addled Starflower. She folded her hands gently, protectively, over her swelling belly. She would give birth to Beth Mann, who would become drunken Daniel’s child bride, his final wife.

  Daniel stared through the window at the clouds. He turned to me and grinned. My brother had one of the nicest grins ever, even though the Babboo’s gorillas had knocked out two of his teeth. “Well, Des,” he said. “I guess this plane’s headed for the Land of Nod.”

  “Where?”

  “East of Eden.”

  Daniel held a bottle of Wild Crow, so I discounted all this as drunken blabber.

  “Know what they got there, Desmond? Know what they got in the Land of Nod?”

  “What?”

  “Rock’n’roll, my son. Rock and fucking roll.”

  “We are not talking,” I inform Freddy Head, “we are not talking great maturity. She is in many ways very childish. When crossed she gives a display of petulance that is quite bone-chilling.”

  Fred is ignoring me. Wait, I am not being fair, he is simply single-mindedly trying to run a patch cord from the front of the console to some rinky-dink machine he’s fabricated. I am blocking his way, gesticulating grandly as I speak, waving a cigarette in the air. (Do you know, I think I will give up smoking the day after the Whale party, the habit has ceased to be enjoyable and is robbing me of my wind, ill as that wind usually is.)

  “Excuse me, Desmond.” Fred holds the male end aloft. “The um, er, enhancer.” By this Freddy Head means the strange black box that looks as though it either creates fissures in the time-space continuum or dices carrots.

  “Enhancer?” I give out with a snotty harrumph. “No one uses enhancers anymore, Fred. They are old hat.”

  “I need it,” whispers Fred, “for the delphinoid herald.”

  “The what?”

  “Delphinoid herald,” the man repeats, staring at the ground. He blindly lashes out with the cord, hoping that it plugs into something.

  “The sax, you mean?”

  “Saxophone.”

  “If you mean sax, say sax, Fred. We have to communicate.”

  Fred Head virtually shoves me out of the way, he waddles over to his contraption and shoves the cord into a female receptor. He breathes heavily with relief, rubs his fat hands together. Fred looks at me and tilts his head like a bewildered hound. “Very nice.”

  “Hmmm?”

  “Très sportif.” Fred grins. He has been taking Conversational French at the loony-bin.

  “Oh! Oh, this.” I know what he means, I am looking rather jaunty. My lower half is bedecked in jodhpurs (Fay bought us both riding clothes because she’d thought briefly that we might take up equestrianism, a notion she abandoned at her first good snootful of horse) because they are baggy and comfortable around my fat thighs. Mind you, the circulation through my calves is constricted somewhat, greatly if one goes by the purpling of my toes. I couldn’t find a shirt to wear, so what I did was, I took an old satin dressing-gown, cut off the lower three feet and sashed it tightly. It looks a bit like a smoking-jacket or a karate gei. I am wearing wraparound shade
s and a pith helmet. I have trimmed my beard. The whiskers are still orthodox-rabbinical length, but they are uniform and approach neatness. Incidentally, I noticed that over half the hairs that tumbled into the sink were grey. I even took a few runs with the scissors into the ears. I have little shrubberies in there, tufts of gnarly hair. I hadn’t realized how virulent the aging process could be, I must muster my last reserves of dignity. I suppose Danny avoided all this, the one advantage to attempting manned flight in a silver Porsche.

  “Why, um, er?” Freaky Fred is wagging his finger again.

  “ ‘Why, um, er’?” His ineloquence bothers me a bit. “Speak, man!”

  “Why are you dressed like that?”

  “Why?” I clap my hands together. “No time for idle chit-chat, Fred! We must get this mixed so Sal can master it before he expires. I must say, you’re doing a very good job.”

  Freddy grins and plucks up another patch cord. “I’m going to enhance the delphinoid herald,” he informs me.

  “Very good.”

  “It’s Mooky, huh?”

  “Hmm? Yes, yes. Mooky. He rose from the dead and …” I shake my head violently, the fat on my cheeks producing loud wubba-wubba noises. The ringing in my ears has started (I suppose it is always sounding, but I identify a sudden increase in volume as commencement) so I reach over and power-on the tape machine. The “Song of Flight” fills the room. “I love those drums!” I scream gleefully. “The snare sounds like seaspray.”

  Freaky Fred Head sings along, the two of us are beached whales, I join in with baleen harmony, and then suddenly I reach over and whack the bright OFF button.