Best of Plans

by Christopher Blickensderfer

Luscious had purchased some new strings and effects pedals a month ago. He gave me a copy of her address from the sales receipt. Hopefully she hadn’t left town yet.

  If my tiny apartment had any good quality about it other than low rent, it would be the fact that the place could double as a rehearsal studio for a band, as a last resort.

  Lugging PA equipment or heavy amplifiers up the outside stairway was always a dangerous feat. However, considering that I was on the second floor of a two story building and that the barber shop downstairs closed early in the evening, it was possible to jam with a band up there all night with no neighbors to complain.

  We kept it simple. Me playing my old trusty Fender Rhodes electric piano. Mike playing snare, high hat and bass drum. The idea was that if we were going to debut at an open mic session, we’d need to travel light so we could get on stage, set up quick, and start playing as soon as possible. For the actual show I’d help move drums and play the Baldwin spinet.

  The third member of the trio, at least for now, was a man that always referred to himself in the third person as Bad Bob. If you’re one of the few musicians in town that hasn’t met him, you probably know someone like him.

  Bad Bob made his way around to the bars, showing up with a garage sale special guitar, or a blues harp you’d suspect he had stolen from a sleeping hobo, or some other piece of junk disguised as a musical instrument. He wouldn’t ask to sit in with the band, he’d just do it whether you liked it or not.

  Giving credit where it is due, Bad Bob could play all those instruments, the problem is that he was a master of none of them.

  Take a band that has let’s say a five star rating, the rating drops to four stars just when Bad Bob walks in the door. As soon as he starts playing you drop to three stars, and you can knock off another star for each free drink he scams from the barmaid after that.

  It’s a given that Bad Bob knew every three chord wonder, one-four-five progression song ever written. Therefore, one band I was with, we tried to devise a set list of material that Bad Bob was unlikely to know and would be too intimidated to try winging on the spot.

  We did Emerson Lake and Palmer, Rush, Yes, Kansas, and all other intellectual progressive classic rock that had ever been released on 8-track tape. Bad Bob showed up one night, with a ukulele of all instruments, looked at our set list without flinching, and worked in Hawaiian style solos on all those tunes the rest of the night.

  It was just by chance that Mike was walking by some dive when Bad Bob was getting thrown out. It occurred to him that in order to keep the momentum rolling with the trio we’d need to stop laying around listening to old Spike Jones records at his dusty row house where remodeling was always in progress.

  We needed to get someone, almost anyone, just so we could get together and start rehearsing. Given Bad Bob’s vast repertoire and rabid intent on playing with a band, Mike knew he could at least get Bad Bob over to my place to jam with us.

  I was having second thoughts as Bad Bob came up the rattling stairs with an amp that looked like it had fallen off a speeding train only to be run over by a speeding truck.

  My heart sank lower as he opened up a battered guitar case and removed something that looked like the remnants of an electric guitar with assorted wiring hanging out the back and only a few of the required six strings.

  Bad Bob hadn’t even plugged in before he asked if he could, of all things, take a shower. Evidently it had been some time since he had access to hot running water. Given his distinct aroma, I offered my best collection of store brand soaps and shampoos, and my best towel which had only three holes in it.

  When he emerged from the bathroom sometime later looking clean and refreshed, he asked if I might have any left over food in my fridge and started eyeballing the floor as if looking for a place he might lay out his bedroll for the night. With no tact at all I told him it was time to start playing.

  So we played. Our plan was to cover Cocktails For Two at our debut session, given that was the only Spike Jones song people were likely to know. For that matter it was the only song Mike and I knew of until we started hunting around at used record shops and pulled a few scratched up discs from the bargain bins in the back.

  We also worked on Spike’s version of Strangers In the Night, on the off chance we’d be asked to do an encore, but really because we knew we’d eventually have to learn a whole night of material.

  In order to cover all the wacky sound effects in addition to our regular instruments, we each had to double on something else like slide whistle, claves, or the agogo. Amazingly enough between Mike and I we had all these things, and what we didn’t have I filled in that part with kazoo or Mike played rim shots on the snare.

  It was sounding almost real after a while, and we only took a few mandatory breaks when Bad Bob had to fool with the sparking shorted wiring dangling from his guitar or out the busted backside of his amplifier. Then with no warning, Bad Bob said,

  “Bad Bob needs to run down to the corner store and get a brew.”

  He walked out the door and was never seen again. Really. I mean, I’m writing this story years after all this happened and I still have Bad Bob’s shoddy equipment. I could never bring myself to throw it out, thinking I’d run into him again. Bad Bob, if you’re reading this, get in touch.

  Luscious was the nickname Mike and I had given to Kate. A tall busty young woman with a mane of raven black hair. She had played bass guitar for us shortly before the biker bar was closed. Both of us wanted to play with her again.

  She came from a show biz family of sorts. Her father was a traveling preacher that drove their family around for years in an old school bus doing the bible belt tent revival circuit.

  As preacher’s daughter her duties included singing in the choir, providing musical accompaniment on a variety of instruments, as well as adjusting the lighting and any other stage effects so as to enhance the take when the collection plate was passed.

  So you see that Mike and I weren’t just trying to get Luscious in a band with us because she was hot. Admittedly that was a plus, but with her background she was a valuable person to have around. The trouble for us was that others knew how good she was so she was always booked.

  I think she held down some sort of menial day job in an office, but true to her show biz roots she always had some afterhours gig going like a bar band, working as a magician’s assistant, or a bachelor party dominatrix.

  When I had gotten her address from Jon days ago, I knew the place. One of the upscale marinas in the cleaner water up river from town. Not that I had any reason to stop in a place like that, its just that as a cab driver you pay attention to addresses of big places like that, cause you never know when you might have to go there.

  I was driving the day shift when by chance I had a trip going out that way. Once I had the customer dropped off I pulled in at the marina and radioed the dispatcher that I’d be out for the library for a few minutes.

  Waterman’s Yacht Club. Big and impressive. A yacht basin cut deeply off to one side of the river so there was no need to worry about drunken barge pilots. Rows of pristine white docks. An expensive little bar and grill filled with a mixed crowd of boaters and wannabes.

  I knew a little bit about boats and what it took to live on them. I thought it would be cool, like something out of a TV cop show or a John D. MacDonald novel. Problem is that to live on a boat mostly took money. I didn’t have a lot of that.

  For that matter I didn’t know how Luscious could afford to be here either. She wasn’t a gold digger, but she had been known to be an opportunist, so my guess was that she was living on someone else’s boat.

  Walking down to the cluster of buildings that served as a hub for the sprawling web of floating docks, it was obvious that I was out of place. However, this was a good neighborhood, because really there was no neighborhood at all around here, so security was lacking.

  I easily found my way to F-dock. It looked like the sh
ortest pier of all but had the most expensive boats tied up to it. Taller, longer, shinier than all the rest.

  A metal gate with an electronic lock barred my way. I looked at the keypad to one side of the gate, punched in 1-2-3-4, and there was a muted buzz as the latch was released. A lucky guess on my part.

  My destination, slip F-18, was near the end of the dock where a forty-four foot Midnight Lace cruiser was comfortably nestled in her slip. How would I know the make and model of a boat like that?

  If you ever get a tooth knocked loose by a beer bottle that flies up onto the stage, the next day when you are sitting in a waiting room listening to sappy music on cheap speakers, see if your dentist has a boating magazine among his pile of golf periodicals. You may find an article on the Midnight Lace.

  Designed to look like an old commuter boat, long, lean, pointy, acres of varnished wood bedazzled with blinding chrome hardware. A dentist can’t afford one, let alone a lowly cab driver. The name Leather & Lace was painted across the seductively curved transom in an elaborate gold script.

  I wasn’t sure of the proper etiquette. Climb aboard and knock on the cabin door? Normally I wouldn’t care about such formalities but they seemed to count here. My confusion was ended as Luscious stepped outside. It seems she had been waiting for someone, but not me.

  “That’s a good look for you,” I said. “Goes with the name of the boat.”

  She was dressed in black leather pants that looked as if they had been painted on. Her ample breasts practically spilled out of a skimpy red lingerie style top. A fantasy look, with the backdrop of a fantasy boat, I wished I had worn some baggier jeans that day.

  Sensing that she didn’t have much spare time, I quickly told her about the band, Mike’s Spike. Told her what Mike and I had accomplished so far, which wasn’t much so I embellished it as much as I dared.

  “That sounds like fun,” she said. “Certainly original. You know, Spike Jones never wrote any of his own songs, he just did spoofs of songs that were popular back then. How about Spiking-up some current tunes?”

  It was a brilliant idea. Once the chemistry in the band gelled we could probably adjust the spike-factor on the fly based on the crowd’s reaction. Luscious was hooked so we exchanged current phone numbers. The only drawback was she told me that most likely she would be leaving town in a few months to play the Holiday Inn lounge circuit.

  I heard the buzz and clank at the end of the dock as the gate opened. That’s when she gave me my cue that it was time for me to leave. Trying to act as casual as possible, on my way to the gate I passed a man who looked about twenty years older and a million dollars richer than me. He also looked a lot more gullible.

  The day was finally here. Well, really it was late afternoon. The usual open mic session at the coffee house. The usual crowd of the usual spectators and performers. We stood in the back waiting for our turn on stage, looking much too conspicuous.

  Mike was wearing a red and white striped jacket and straw hat like an old vaudeville showman. He even had a white cane to go with the outfit and said he was going to use it for sound effects on the rim of his bass drum. We hadn’t rehearsed that part and anyone claiming they will add something spontaneously during a performance always makes me nervous.

  Even as a seasoned performer I always got a case of butterflies in the stomach when waiting to go on. They would tingle incessantly until the first few chords were struck, and then magically disappear, the rest of the performance being an easy downhill glide from there.

  My gold lame’ sport coat was itchy and attracting more attention than I would have liked as I tried to stand nonchalantly in the back.

  Luscious was leather-free on this occasion, much to my disappointment and I assume Mike’s as well. Baggy jeans and some unflattering top that might have been made out of recycled tie dyed hemp, thinking it would win her over with the regular crowd.

  Our songs had been practiced, honed, and finely polished. We had even gone so far as to choreograph the quick setup of the drum kit. Luscious had signed us up on the list and supposedly we would be going on soon. Although the butterflies were churning and the pressure seemed to be building, in theory nothing could go wrong.

  That’s when the meek poet with his improper microphone approach and clearly unrehearsed verses sat down to polite muted applause, and then Charlie the night dispatcher stood up to take the stage. I had been too preoccupied to even notice he was in the room. Charlie stormed the stage like an angry bear, snatching the helpless mic from its stand in one gnarled paw.

  His intro berated the audience for being the over emotional hyper-sensitive intellectuals they were. Then he slammed down a poem of desperation from his miserable childhood where the world was full of darkness and pain and hunger.

  A world where there was no future. Only a constant present of poverty and suffering and a loser of his position wouldn’t be so foolish as to think he would be lucky enough to escape. So here he was now, the bitter young boy now grown into an angry old man, flogging us mercilessly with his abrasive style.

  Cursing and stomping about the stage to punctuate the verses and meter. Words perfectly selected for maximum effect and pain they inflicted on the audience. The dynamics flowing in a roller coaster ride from psychotic mumbling to ranting screams, the performance ending with him throwing the microphone down on the stage and storming off.

  The deafening standing ovation drowned out the squealing feedback of the abandoned microphone which lay lifeless on the scratched varnished floor.

  “Man, who the hell was that guy? That was the most brilliant thing I’ve ever heard,” said Mike who had probably read more poetry in his life than all of the people in the room combined. The applause was fading, people were sitting down, and somewhere off stage the shrieking PA system had been brought under control.

  “I can’t go on after that,” Luscious said. “I mean, that performance was impossible to follow.”

  Standard protocol was that if you hesitated for more than half a minute the next person up could take your spot. However, no one dared take the stage. Charlie, in his overkill of hatred, had left the room so negatively charged that it was now unplayable.

  For just a few seconds I thought we could salvage the moment. We could take our time getting the drums and sound effects paraphernalia on stage. Probably even get through both of our songs before anyone dared to stand in line for the open mic, but it wasn’t going to happen.

  Mike and Luscious and I stood eyeing each other with blank stares. The atmosphere had been fouled and defiled, the stage left like a scorched and smoldering battlefield in the wake of Charlie’s departure. Like most of the best musical plans that Mike and I had come up with, Mike’s Spike died right at that very moment.

  Who knows, maybe we could have tried another open mic session or booked a gig somewhere, but it didn’t help that Luscious left town a short time later on her Holiday Inn lounge tour.

  Hoping that her project would fail, I managed to slip back to the marina some weeks later to see if she was in town. At slip F-18 a stunning voluptuous blonde in a gleaming lace trimmed bikini was sunning herself on the foredeck. The name on the transom had been repainted. Satin & Lace.

  In time there were other bands, and many more miles driven with the taxi meter running before I landed a decent paying job and my life started to improve at the slow pace of dogged determination. However, I’ve carried on long enough, so those will be stories for another time.

  ###

  Dedicated to Michael Jones, Jon Stankorb, and all the others that I’ve played with in local bands over the years. Special thanks to Charlie, from a certain Lockland cab company that closed years ago. Cover photo by Leah Blickensderfer.

 
-ms-filter: grayscale(100%); filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share