Dirty Beat

by Venero Armanno

  ‘So you don’t remember your real mother and father?’ she said. ‘You poor boy.’

  ‘Fuck my real father,’ I replied, not being one to fish for sympathy or to enjoy it if it came my way. ‘And I remember everything about my ma. She was good. I’ve got nothing to complain about.’

  ‘You’re nineteen, but you sound like you’re forty or something.’

  I thought that was a put-down. Now I knew I was going to get out of there and never come back – but she said something that changed my mind.

  ‘I never had a baby,’ Patti whispered, and that’s when she wanted me to finish the breakfast. She led me back to her little bedroom and as she was coming she said, ‘Just say my name, just say Patti.’

  So I did, and spoke ‘Patti’ into her hair, two, three, four times, never asking her the obvious question of why she never had a baby. Some things don’t need to be asked. Some people just get forgotten, and maybe sometimes you have to whisper their names in their ears so they can remember who they are, or who and what they might have become, if things had been a degree or two different.

  The next weekend I took my toolbox and went back over, installing safety deadlocks and latches all through Patti’s flat. I put a thick chain on her door, too, made those easy-access windows secure. She took me to her bed one last time, and when it was over her face was serious.

  She said, ‘That’s my thank you, okay?’

  ‘If that’s what you say.’

  I dressed, not really wanting to leave, but I knew that was it. For whatever reason she didn’t want me back. When I left her flat it was like I was weighed down with bricks.

  Patti quit the supermarket. I missed her. It was seven years before I saw her again.

  VIII

  Someone’s coming down the centre aisle. A neat grey suit can’t disguise spindly legs and gangly arms. In a way, he’s a sail that’s had the wind blown out of it, but in another way he’s no out-and-out dud. Not many millionaires are.

  Long before Tony Lester ever made a dollar I can remember him saying, ‘Why don’t you turn this group into something good, do originals?’ He was slurring all over the place. ‘Who needs covers? So you play Hendrix and Bad Company, so what? You need a real singer. You need songs. That’s where the money is. Let me do it. Where’s the microphone? Listen to this.’

  It was more than a year after I’d formed the band and in that time we’d played parties and pubs and that was it. Our repertoire was the standard stuff for drinking beer and dancing without inhibitions. If you tried anything else you’d get booed off the stage. Tony Lester was a non-playing friend of mine who’d kept his talent in a sack where no one could see it. Then out of nowhere, full of bottle courage, he crashed one of our rehearsals and declared himself.

  Tony grabbed a microphone and leaned hard into the stand for support. While we stood around he gave us an a cappella rendition of a couple of songs he’d dreamed up. His secret was revealed. When he was finished we shouted, ‘Yeah!’.

  Well, in our enthusiasm for Tony we also ensured our demise. It crushed him when we eventually bombed; it sort of cheered him up years later when he made his first property million – but the first dream always dies hardest and it’s the one that stays with you for life.

  Before Tony joined we used to split vocal spots, but now it was the start of 1977 and there were four of us: Tony Lester, old pal, new singer and hero; Peter Kelley on lead guitar; Joe Whitehead on bass; and me. Our communal decision was to declare ourselves a new group. We called ourselves Manoeuvres for the simple fact that none of us could get the spelling right. That included other people as well; if we were going to be so awkward and play only original material too, then our songs and sound had better be good. It took us too long to realise they weren’t, and by then we were so burned out that even if success had come our way – which, with Debbie Canova joining, it nearly did – we wouldn’t have been able to cope. Our biggest problem was ourselves. We infuriated anyone who wanted to listen to us by refusing to do the simple thing. Like have a catchy name; like write and perform music people wanted to hear.

  So this rake in a $1500 suit was supposed to be our ticket to success. His shoes – look at them today, you could buy a small car for the price he must have paid for those Milanese works of art. Odd to think that for years this man was not only my band’s vocalist, but also my soul-mate. Yes, sex does make you heartless, and Debbie Canova was entering our world.

  Tony Lester’s a rich man these days, on paper. His soul’s a little less fertile. That boy always had a gift none of the rest of us in the band was ever blessed with. We used to think his gift was for song-writing but after the band ended our singer’s real talent revealed itself: it was for the knack of reinvention, a scarce commodity, and important too, if you’re going to give yourself any kind of life.

  I liked Tony Lester better before he became a real estate prince. We used to howl, squelch and slam through his ever-increasing repertoire of original tunes. Every practice session he’d turn up with scribbled lyrics and brilliant ideas for new chord progressions and melody lines. These weren’t little bits and pieces. All of his stuff was formed: beginning, middle and end. Untrained musically, he made abrupt key changes and awkward time signatures somehow come together. My drumming gelled with his weird approach and I could always find the perfect rhythms, beats and change-ups or downs to match his style. So then of course I’m to blame for our failure too. It wasn’t that the songs didn’t work, it was just that they didn’t work enough.

  We did what every band does to hide its deficiencies. We turned our amps up all the way. I played harder and louder, losing most of the fine technique and skill my stepfather had taught me. The bass player developed tinnitus. The lead guitarist wore ear plugs concealed beneath his greasy long hair. Still, even these things weren’t what killed our dreams.

  IX

  Come the end, Tony lay in depressed silence for more than a year, then that was enough and he got his face up off the floor.

  By now it was 1982 and he was twenty-six. He dusted himself off and put his notepads away, and burned – literally burned – his collection of over-tight cock-rock blue jeans and sleeve cut-off t-shirts. His heart sort of went up in smoke too. He went to an executive salon in the city and got himself three things: a trendy haircut, a blow dry and a manicure.

  Newly coiffed after decades of greasy long hair, he fronted the reception desk of a huge real-estate firm. None of the principals would agree to see him today, tomorrow or ever. He smiled at the secretary and left. In the car park, behind the wheel of his ute, he wiped tears out of the corners of his eyes, consulted the list he’d made, and proceeded on a door-to-door mission until he got himself a job. By his list’s number twelve, he had. The next day he traded his ute on a clean four-door sedan.

  Tony sold houses. The market was good and it didn’t take him long to learn the ropes and little tricks, like calling on the elderly owners of soon-to-be deceased estates and making friends with them. Or personally going in and scrubbing-to-gleaming said deceased estate once he had it in his listing. He was so focused on his new career he barely noticed a man named Bob Hawke come to power, or a boat race stop the country, or the nationwide drought finally breaking. He missed power-pop, Ronald Reagan, Rambo, New Romantics, goth-rock and Bananarama. Girls called him a yuppie and he took that as either a compliment or an invitation. It was both. By his thirtieth birthday he was moving toward becoming very rich off people’s predilection for selling their homes to one another. We weren’t on speaking terms any more, but I followed his career. You couldn’t help it. Newspapers always love local success stories. Real estate gun, then mogul, then property developer, and, later, author of self-help finance books. I never read any, though I could never resist looking for the latest Anthony Lester title whenever I was in a book shop. They sold by the truckload; he was full of common sense.

  He’d made himself a Beamer-driving reconfiguration of the lovely kid who used to keep one eye on me
through each and every song. He wasn’t yet twenty-one when he joined the band; Manoeuvres lasted four years and early on he developed that knack for using an uninterrupted sightline to keep the two of us in synch, voice to beat, so that all the other instruments breathed inside the glorious space we left in between.

  I couldn’t get enough of his songs. Some artists carry pain, but he owned whole worlds of torment. These ate at his heart even in his happiest moments. There were some that I knew about: for instance, I often noticed a moment’s hesitation in his speech, his mind having to plan what his mouth was going to say, legacy of the stutter that had plagued him into his late teens. Then, some otherwise-kindly family friend molested him when he was nine – and, of course, there was the no-good father who kicked him out of home at age thirteen. Our stories weren’t the same, but we had a commonality. I served those six months in stir, courtesy of a series of break and enters capped by a drunken misadventure in a closed-up bottle shop, where I stole nothing but did lie down on the floor at midnight and go to sleep. Tony was also behind bars as soon he could be legally incarcerated: eighteen months for the Porsche 911 he stole and tried to sell in a car yard three thousand kilometres away. It was his third car-theft offence. In stir, of course, he paid a price for the stutter that hadn’t been completely tamed. On top of which the spectre of the molesting family friend was ever-present, now in the form of bigger men who were a whole lot less kindly about it.

  Tony suffered all right, and the results were guitar riffs that could burn your skin. Sometimes when I listened to him sing and howl the hair on the back of my neck would rise and my arms would tingle. He had a primal energy and what he was able to make in his music was something I secretly shared. I would never have said it but I knew it deep down: we were adults who were hurt kids; we were sons with bad fathers and those songs contained the sound of it. Tony was the blood and I was the heart, and I loved him, the bastard, the treacherous little bastard, so reincarnated as an entrepreneur and businessman.

  Funny thing is, last word he ever said to me was the same one: Traitor.

  And here he comes into my funeral as if it hasn’t been twenty-five years since I’ve seen his face, and twenty-five years since we wrestled and belted one another senseless over a girl, and he’s stick-walking like he’s got piles or something, or maybe that’s the awkward swagger of successful businessmen. I preferred it when he was a swaggering rock-and-roll singer with an eye for the girls and a kind word for every pimple-faced kid who ever spent all their piggy-bank money on a first guitar or bargain-basement set of drums. And, guess what, he preferred it too, and that’s what makes his heart such an arid no-man’s land these days.

  Tony sits next to a lanky guy I don’t know, some grey-faced individual with a terrible paunch, receding hair and a face as craggy as a mountainside. They acknowledge one another. Icily. Wait, isn’t that Pete Kelley? He’s another one I haven’t seen since the band broke up, but where you can still see the Tony in this Anthony Lester, you can’t at all see the Pete in this Mr Peter Kelley. Not a bit remains of the kid he used to be. Not anything; he looks like a total stranger.

  I try to get inside Pete but there’s a wall, a veritable wall that he’s built around himself. He needs it so that he can function as the middle-aged middle-management sort of guy he is today. Impenetrable. What must his wife make of him, his children, what must they feel living with a man so utterly well-defended? The two fat black moles over his left eyebrow give away his identity, but that’s all. Those moles are the only part of him that hasn’t really changed. Otherwise, he’s a tired, different man. The Pete Kelley I knew used to do high kicks when he hit the high notes of his soloing.

  Still, it’s sort of a breath of fresh air to realise that the same sort of protecting wall isn’t around Anthony Lester. Around Tony. I say Hi to him because I know that deep down he wants to say Hello too.

  Tony smiles in recognition of my voice. He thinks to himself, I’ve missed you, you know, Max. You were my drummer, but more than that, you were the most like me. Weren’t we sort of two of a kind?

  That’s it, Tony: two of a kind.

  Funny thing is, Max, somewhere in the back of my mind I always wondered if one day we’d get together again. Me singing, you at the kit. Do some of those old songs of ours, but who’d want to listen, huh? Now it’ll never happen, not unless we find some way to resurrect you. Which is kind of funny because I dreamed about you last night. You were back from the dead and we were still friends. The band was playing again, and you said to me, Where’s a new song, you little prick, don’t tell me you haven’t written anything? You were teasing me for slacking off, for not being serious enough.

  I tell him, Well, you used to be very serious.

  Tony sighs. Peter Kelley next to him sighs too. One passes it on to the next. Someone further down the row also sighs.

  In his heart or mind, whichever place it is that allows a living man to speak to a dead one, Tony Lester tells me, Goddamn you, Max, I hate sitting here because the whole thing seems useless to me now. Why did this have to happen? Why didn’t you take more care of yourself? And why the hell did I come here?

  He stops himself, now thinking better of trying to speak to the departed.

  Instead, in his mind he turns over the way that he will go home tonight, and will have a few drinks on his own, and a bite to eat on his own, and maybe ring his daughter and his youngest boy and the kid in the middle too. Each of his offspring has a different mother and Tony looks after them all even though he lives with none of them, and his house is a pink mansion of quiet indifference that he shares with a parrot and two dogs. The only time the whole benighted place seems alive isn’t when he throws another party, another gathering of the beautifully mummified and damned who are supposed to be his business colleagues and friends, CDs blaring the latest dance music as if anyone there knows anything about hip-hop, trip-hop, rap, MCs or new century pop. No, the only time that place is alive and Tony Lester a little alive with it, is when he throws out the dogs, locks the doors, shuts the little bridge-way to the kidney-shaped pool and pulls the windows tight.

  These actions aren’t meant to protect the ears of the neighbours, at least not in the typical sense, but to protect himself. To make sure no one hears the embarrassing music he really wants to play. And that music is so goddamned loud he might as well be on stage with a microphone stand in front of him and a stack of Marshals behind him, and me back there too.

  And when all of this is happening, guess what but he’s a tough, lost boy again, even though he’s playing ancient, well-loved vinyl records on a professional DJ turntable that must have cost him five and a half grand if a cent.

  In that noise that brings back to life the sadly lost but seldom-mourned dinosaurs, brontosauri and pterodactyls of rock-and-roll circa 1967 to 1975, Tony Lester can be himself again. The entrepreneur isn’t born yet. Nor is the father in him, or the three times ex-husband, and this hour of abandon, or should I call it freedom, is good, I mean good, and he means really good, Tony knows it, clear and plain as day. That kid in him is still there somewhere and doesn’t need buttoning down, at least not until the hour of remembering and dancing like this is over, and the grim day back again. Then the vinyl will be neatly restacked, re-alphabetised, all albums back in their proper place with the seven thousand eight hundred-odd of the rest of them.

  Tonight, he tells himself, he’ll do it in honour of his deceased drummer. On the way home from this funeral he might stop off at local vinyl revival store, treat himself to some new old records. Mint plus and mint plus and not a grade less. When you have money, nostalgia needn’t come cheap. Pink Floyd through the chapel’s speakers and Manoeuvres in his heart have put him in a mind for heavy stuff; he’ll play it all night if he has to, and maybe not get to sleep at all, because it’s not just me gone but the backbeat of Tony’s life too. The thing is, he knows as he’s always known, that he surrendered too early. There was no reason why he shouldn’t have formed another ba
nd after ours fell apart, no reason for him to stop writing songs, but that’s what he did, and soon enough he found that he’d lost his peculiar knack for writing so completely that the talent might as well have been removed like a blown gall bladder. Why couldn’t he have used that dead time after the band to go to music school or something, and learn the real craft, and one day maybe have composed something everyone wanted to hear?

  He returns to our conversation after all.

  I thought we’d catch up one day, Tony tells me, and I tell him back, Me too. We’re a dumb pair aren’t we?

  He nods. We could have made up, he says. All it would have taken was a phone call, Max, me to you or you to me.

  Yep.

  He sighs again. Three people in the row sigh with him. He says, I guess you remember her pretty well, don’t you? and he might as well ask if I remember the last sunrise I ever saw.

  X

  It was a new decade and we’d been out in the country for two months already, on what you’d need rigorous self-deception to call a ‘tour’.

  The band was so broke that any money we earned barely put enough fuel in our tanks, vehicular or human. We were travelling in a big Bedford truck and Tony Lester’s ute. In order to get us from town hall to town hall, watering hole to watering hole, to community group gatherings, or to whatever type of place was willing to pay us, we had to limit our food consumption to about one meal a day. Playing to country community groups was the best part of it; the locals were so starved for entertainment they welcomed us with open arms and often even fed us and donated jugs of beer to our cause. But, really, we were so unsuitable to be heard by families that we took it upon ourselves to tone our playing down. When we did, we sounded bad. When we played in our usual way, kids cried and grandmothers yelled at us.