by Jack Baran
“Come and watch the end of the game. Eighth inning, Yanks can clinch tonight.” He sits up stiffly making a place for her, never taking his eyes off the TV.
Punto, the Twins runner takes a big lead off second, the pitcher throws one in the dirt; the catcher blocks the ball, holding the runner. On the next pitch, the batter connects for distance but the ball curves foul. Pete notices her eyeing the legal pad. “Never know when an idea might materialize.”
On TV, the batter gets a single off the glove of the second baseman. Punto thinks about trying to score, makes a wide turn at third. Nick Swisher, the right fielder, hustles in, comes up firing and throws behind the runner who, unable get back to third, is tagged out. Amazing play. Pete leaps to his feet pumping his fist, wincing in pain. “Way to go! Way to go!”
“I need to do something about your back.”
“After the game.”
“I promise a happy ending.” She winks at Pete, goes upstairs, taking the legal pad with her.
The Yankees will have to clinch the Division Series without him.
“Undress,” Cleo commands, rolling out his yoga mat. “Lie on your stomach, close your eyes and relax.”
Pete takes his clothes off.
“These notes are for something called, Strawberries, what’s that all about?”
Pete sits in half lotus. “I sold a new idea that will finance our project.”
“New idea?”
“What can I say? Interacting with you has put me in a creative mood. It’s a musical.”
“First there was a series.”
“I passed, like I said I would.”
“Then Jackson’s demo.”
“A week of non-exclusive work, a labor of love.”
“And now you’re writing a musical?”
“On the side, no deadline, our book is the priority.”
“Meaning?”
“The screenplay is in second position.”
“Promise.”
“I promise.”
“I believe you.”
When was the last time anyone said that to him?
Cleo strips off her clothes, folds them neatly, and then liberally oils her arms, legs and torso. Pete smiles appreciatively. “I have to go to a wedding next Saturday, I want you to come with me.”
“Who’s getting married?”
“My best friend’s daughter, near Miami.”
“Desirée loves to watch guys fuck in South Beach.”
“Is that a yes?”
Cleo shakes her head. “Miami is a no fly zone for me.”
“You said that about LA.”
“I feel safe here.” She hugs Pete. “Lie down on your stomach.”
“Must I?”
“What did I promise?”
Pete does as told.
Desirée oils him down. “A Thai masseuse taught me this sacred technique. You have to remain absolutely still to receive the full benefit of the treatment.” She lays face down on Pete’s back pressing her oiled body against his. “My nipples press prime points on either side of your spine, my mound of Venus lines up against your coccyx.” She slithers back and forth.
Pete groans. “I feel better already.”
“You can come this way.” She continues to slither.
“I’d rather be inside you.”
“This is more therapeutic.” Her oily skin is heating up, so is his. “On your back, don’t move.”
Pete rolls over – he has a hard on. Cleo slides up and down his body, allowing the shaft of his cock to rub against her clitoris.”
“Which one of us does Petey like better?”
“I love you both.” He looks deep into her eyes.
“Who do you see?”
“The real you.”
“There isn’t a real me.” Desirée’s body undulates.
Pete tries to enter her.
“What did I tell you?”
Unwillingly, he remains motionless.
Cleo returns to deliver the happy ending, her body sliding back and forth vibrating all over. “Pete,” she gasps.
“Cleo!” Pete moans letting go.
Ten minutes after coitus, Cleo reads off Pete’s computer. “Marshalltown, a neat farming community in central Iowa, was settled by Scandinavian Lutherans in the late 19th century. These self-reliant, industrious, optimistic people thank God every day for leading them to the promised land. Twins, Camille and Amber shared a Kodachrome childhood in a modest house with a wide veranda. Marshalltown is the perfect place to raise a family.
Cleo puts a finger down her throat.
“That bad?”
“Kodachrome childhood? Where did that come from?”
“The narrator.”
“Why do we need a bland narrator?”
“Delete the page.”
“Really?”
“It sucks.”
Cleo smiles, deletes the text. “I love working with you.”
“And me you.”
“Not Desirée?”
“I said, I love you both.”
“You’re working with Cleo who wanted to finish college, not be a swimsuit model or fuck whomever Roy wanted her to. Desirée could out fuck anyone she worked with. That’s her claim to fame, mine will be the book.”
“What happened to Roy?”
“He was there ’til Carlos, that was the end. Chapter Roy is finished, now I’m with you.”
“Miss him?”
“Do you believe in past lives?”
“No.”
“You and I have a long term connection.”
Is such a thing possible? Pete considers the easy familiarity they share, like they’ve known one another forever.
Cleo sits down on the chaise. “The last time our paths crossed was at a wild party in Hollywood eighty years ago.” She takes a small bottle from her purse, taps a mound of white flake on to the glass frame of a photograph of Pete, Barbara and baby Annabeth. “Cocaine was all the rage in the 20’s.” She snorts a line, offers one to him. Pete, tempted, passes. “I wasn’t a star, featured parts mostly and you were a writer that hadn’t sold a thing. We lived in a Deco apartment building off Sunset near Crescent Heights. I took care of us by fucking rich men for money. But in the end, you abandoned me, and I killed myself.”
“Our story will have a happy ending.”
She smiles. “Coke the lips of Precious.”
“Coke the lips of my pussy” is a line from Lost In The Cosmos 2, the scene where the jaded roué watches Desirée masturbating but tonight it’s Cleo while Pete writes.
“The house we lived in, my room on the second floor, a tree outside the window. I remember a baby falling in the lake, I remember floating peacefully gazing at the sky. I remember my mother’s voice. I remember my father’s hands.”
CHAPTER 19
A white church steeple is etched against a gray sky; stained glass lancet windows are spaced symmetrically around the sides of the building. Dreamland Recording Studio dwells in what was once a house of the Lord.
A few remaining pews line the walls of the nave. Threadbare Persian carpets cover areas of the worn wooden floor. It’s been a long time since the last paint job.
Do-rag and Quinn are set up in the middle of the large open space surrounded by sound baffles. It’s a stretch for them to see Jackson isolated in a glass booth at one end of the room, or Sam and Jim in similar booths at the other end. The band members hear one another over headphones; it’s very disorienting.
Pete, in the control booth, listens intently to the take while Annabeth exchanges texts with her friend Annie, whose father agreed to listen to the demo. Annie wants to know if the boys in the band are cute. Annabeth texts back “definitely marketable, photos to follow.”
Phil the engineer adjusts the pots, filters and equalizers on a sixty-track board recording digitally on two computers running Pro-tools. Whatever the engineer is trying to achieve isn’t making it for Pete who paces behind him, frustration building. Technology gets in the way
of the band’s raw sound, rendered lifeless by this set-up. The song doesn’t climax, it simply peters out.
“That’s a keeper,” exclaims Phil.
Pete grimaces. “That take ate shit.”
“Dig the separation.” He plays it back.
“You killed the feel, man. You’re a murderer.”
“You’re putting me on, right?” The engineer, a graduate of a famous school of sound recording, has an attitude. “You want to give it a shot? Go right ahead.”
Pete reaches down and kills the playback, his voice menacing. “Phil, you are the technician, I’m the producer, you work for me and I say this sucks. I want my guys playing together in the middle of the nave.”
Annabeth pockets her phone. Her father is usually passive aggressive, not confrontational.
“We’ll lose the individuality of the instruments.”
Pete explodes. “I don’t give a fuck, it’s the band I’m paying to hear!” Quaking, Phil follows him into the studio. Annabeth trails after.
Jackson, brooding behind sunglasses, sits in a pew. Quinn is on his cell phone explaining to his boss at Stromboli Pizza why he can’t work this week. Sam and Jim grab some fresh air in the doorway, while Do-rag, smoking a joint, wanders around admiring the stained glass windows. Intermittent bursts of sunlight illuminate dust moats floating in the air.
Pete calls the band together. “This shit ain’t working.”
Jackson’s fears are confirmed. “Song sucks, right?”
“The song is great, the sound is way too clean.”
Jackson points at the engineer. “Isn’t that what he wants?”
“He was wrong. Right Phil?” The intimidated engineer nods his head. “Everyone move their gear in here. Annabeth, work with Phil, help reset the microphones.”
“All right!” Jackson exclaims.
Pete steps outside and calls Cleo. She never answers her phone, so he leaves a message. “Hey it’s me thinking about you.” Pete pauses, finally says it, three words he rarely uses. “I love you.” Feels good. He goes back inside.
The band stands in the center of the church, surrounded by their equipment. Phil is freaking out in the control booth trying to set levels for each player and balance the overall sound. The musicians are comfortable playing against the hiss and rumble of their pawnshop equipment.
“Those amps need to be replaced,” the engineer complains. Flipping a couple of switches, the sound becomes compressed, less immediate.
“Don’t fuck with it Phil, no limiters.”
“This is unacceptable, the recording will sound amateurish.”
“It will sound real. Let’s try one.”
A couple of false starts, one loud fart, and some laughter precede the energetic opening riff of “Missed Connections,” the new song. At last, the band takes flight.
“Give Jackson’s vocal some reverb,” Pete tells Phil. The engineer brings it in. Pete smiles at Annabeth.
It’s impossible to understand all the lyrics, but who needs every word when the syncopated beat makes you want to move? Bluegrass harmonies ring out over a stomping fiddle interlocking with a wicked banjo lick and Jackson on lead guitar.
Annabeth is worrying that the engineer might be right; the Sidewinders sound may be too raw for a mainstream LA label exec. But when she stops thinking, she can’t resist the band’s deep roots groove.
Pete is ecstatic, the engineer in despair over the distortion of the recording. Over the next two hours, the Sidewinders record five takes. The first and best is too long. By take four, the keeper, the song times out at three minutes and ten seconds.
The dining room walls at the Reservoir Inn are hung with deer heads and fish trophies. Mixed in with the taxidermy is local art, nature photographs mostly. The adjoining bar is packed with bow and arrow hunters drinking in anticipation of the first day of deer season tomorrow.
Pete sits at the head of a big table in the main room pouring beer from a pitcher while the band gorges on Bruges mussels, osso bucco and chicken parm with sides of linguini thick with marinara sauce. Phil loosens up with drink, turns out the recording engineer has a gift for mimicry, doing a spot on imitation of Pete whom he now loves.
Sometime during the feast, Howard, the young lawyer, arrives to interview his new client. When Cleo waltzes in arm and arm with Jamie, Pete’s heart swells. She sits down, kisses him warmly.
Pete and Barbara’s open sexuality had always embarrassed their daughter. Annabeth doesn’t feel any better with dad and his porn queen. She’d never been demonstrative with any of her boyfriends.
“Zabaglione for desert,” Pete orders extravagantly. He takes Annabeth’s hand. “We’re capturing lightning in a bottle, Bethy. Lightning.”
Back at the studio for a second session, fueled by grass and lubricated by beer, the band gets down on a song about Jackson’s father, the man he never met, murdered on a rainy night in Vegas. It’s a slow grind that burns in the gut. “No overdubs,” Pete declares after the last take. “Let’s call it a night.”
“We always end with this tune.” Jackson counts off.
Jim picks out the melody on mandolin of the Band’s classic, “Rag Mamma Rag.” Sam plays it back on banjo. The tempo is up. Jackson jumps in on electric acoustic, all three playing flat out. Next time around, Quinn kicks in with Levon’s patented backbeat followed by Do-rag’s bass; the Sidewinders wail on a song they learned to play as kids.
Jackson sings, improvising lyrics, the band playing the chorus over and over until Sam picks up his trombone and blows the song to an end.
In the control room Pete, Phil, Annabeth, Howard, Jamie and Cleo go crazy. The engineer nods his head in satisfaction, a total convert to low-fi.
For the rest of the week Pete is up at seven, quick breakfast, short yoga practice and fast personal hygiene. He goes to work with Cleo by ten, but every day something happens to prevent him from actually finishing the opening chapter. Even so, the time is never wasted as he continues to nail down the overall story, producing lengthy legal pad pages of notes. Afternoons into the evenings are devoted to the recording sessions and final mix down. The twelve-hour days feel like being in production on Nasty, incredibly intense but satisfying working toward a deadline. The demo must be finished by Friday because Saturday, Annabeth flies to LA to play it for Annie’s father, while he goes to the wedding in Florida
Pete’s baseball obsession is for the moment focused on who wins the Angels/Red Sox series. He needs to scout the opposition, but every night Cleo or Desirée waits for him in bed, up for anything. Spontaneous sex is what he yearns for; performance courtesy of the blue pill is what he gets. Since she’s there when he wakes up in the morning, he’s not complaining.
Pete liked early morning sex best because it was uncluttered by the day’s events. Barbara once accused him of sneaking up on her when she was still asleep, but that was later, when she couldn’t stand his touch. He argued that her subconscious wanted to fuck him because her pussy was wet. Is that not evidence of desire?
“You may think your cock opens all doors,” she screamed, “but it doesn’t own my cunt.” After a transgression, under no circumstance would Barbara let Pete touch her.
He sips his morning coffee and contemplates the news that the Angels eliminated the Red Sox setting up a final confrontation in the American League Championship Series. The Anaheim Angels as they don’t want to be known are the only team with a winning record against the Yankees over the past ten years.
Cleo straightens up Annabeth’s room without a forensic investigation. Not to worry, his daughter will restore disorder in a heartbeat. Pete makes his own bed; all his wives ceded that responsibility to him, another of his good features, like washing the dishes and programming music. Whatever Pete’s state of mind, he could be counted on to do his few chores.
Cleo empties the electric broom. “I loved helping mom do the housework.”
“You sure you won’t go to Miami with me?”
She shakes her hea
d. “But I’ll be waiting for you to return, maybe I’ll even write something.”
Annabeth has been staying with Jackson to avoid witnessing her father’s pathetic behavior with Cleo. The boy lives in a converted shed behind his mother’s small house, the most primitive place she’s ever slept in. It’s a medium size room heated by a wood burning stove. The makeshift bathroom is challenging, so is sharing a single bed.
The first time they made love was messy, but somehow Jackson wasn’t uptight. She had never been with someone like him; it was like making love for the first time. In the morning, back at the Streamside, she finds domestic bliss, her father washing the dishes while Cleo cleans. She is being so nice to Annabeth, like a big sister, but no way will Bethy trust this witchy woman.
The recording sessions produce six originals, plus two covers - a rocking version of the Dylan classic “Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat” to go with “Rag Momma Rag.” It’s been an intense week. During the final mix-down, whenever Phil tries to clean something up, Pete places his hand on the engineer’s shoulder and whispers, “The demo is meant to be a diamond in the rough.”
Annabeth is anxious again. “You know what LA is like, dad.”
“Slick and derivative, they manufacture music according to whatever formula is working, but it is a guaranteed historical fact that youth always rebels against force fed crap. The Sidewinders are the real deal.”
“My generation avoids reality.”
“This music rocks, you can dance to every song, especially the slow ones. Couples cheek to cheek, intimate.”
“We don’t dance cheek to cheek anymore.”
“You should.”
Annabeth’s apprehension is swept away by her father’s certainty. After consulting with Annie, they limit the demo to five songs, four originals plus the Dylan cover as a bonus. She takes a picture of the band standing outside the church that becomes the jewel box cover. SIDEWINDERS DEMO is stamped across the church steeple.
On the last night Pete returns home late from the studio. It’s Friday, game one of the ALCS. Cleo is waiting for him in bed, but Pete won’t go up until it is over. Sabathia, pitching a gem, shuts down the Angels in the eighth. The big man walks off the field to a standing ovation after giving up just one run and four hits, striking out seven. Rivera pitches the ninth inning, his cutter darting, bats splitting, a masterful Mariano save. Yankees win 4-1. Pete feels a surge of confidence, knows they will take the Angels. He goes up to bed relieved to find Cleo asleep.