by Lewis Shiner
Peggy said she’d call him for me and get me an appointment. It was only seven o’clock on the west coast. She wanted to know what this was all about and I told her she wouldn’t believe me.
“Did you start another band or something? Didn’t you use to play drums?”
“Not for a long time,” I said.
I sat by the phone for half an hour. I promised myself that if I couldn’t get through to Hudson I would forget the whole thing. Then Peggy called back and said Hudson would see me at three P.M. Friday afternoon, the day after tomorrow.
They say bees can’t see the color red. It was that way when I told Elizabeth I was flying to Los Angeles. It seemed to roll right off her, like she didn’t accept it as real. When she asked me why, I told her it was because of the tape. She couldn’t quite see the tape either.
“Can we afford this?” she asked.
“VISA’s clear. I can charge everything.”
After a second or two she said, “Do I get any say in this?”
“Sure. If you don’t want me to go, I won’t.”
I thought it was what she wanted to hear but I had only pissed her off. I saw it go straight up her spine. She turned back to the TV in a terribly final way. “In that case, by all means, go ahead, go.”
“Look,” I said. “I’m sorry. It’s just something I have to do.”
She held up her left hand, palm toward me, and cocked it in a short wave. I understood it to mean, “Right, fine, conversation over.” The odds were she would say good-bye to me at the airport, and nothing else until then.
I called Pete to cancel Saturday. “Take some advice,” he said. “Try to have fun out there. And if some little beach bunny wants to fuck your brains out, don’t let your conscience stand in your way. Wear a rubber, but don’t hesitate.”
“I don’t think I’m the beach bunny type.”
“All I’m saying is, keep an open mind.”
After that I called my mother. I call every two or three days because I know it means a lot to her. I still dread it every time. I see her rattling around in that big house by herself, either in her robe or the jogging suits she’s started to wear the last few years. Her hair is dyed this sandy color that is nothing like the brown it used to be. She’s medium height, her posture’s still okay, though she has this pot belly that no amount of sit-ups can get rid of. I don’t have anything to say to her, and all she has to tell me are the tiniest details of her life—what was in the salad she had for lunch, the few percentile points she gains in interest when she moves her savings around from bank to bank. This time she replayed her conversation with an American Airlines ticket clerk, word for word, about the refund on my father’s return ticket from Mexico. She corrected herself every time she got a detail out of place. Finally she gave up when she couldn’t remember the last two digits of the amount, whether it was eighty-three cents or thirty-eight, and broke down in tears.
I thought about a lot of things that night. One of them was the way Peggy asked about my playing drums. I haven’t touched them in almost twenty years, since I left Austin with my tail between my legs and went to DeVry. I still dream about it, though, those frustration dreams where you can’t ever get where you need to be. I have a gig with, say, the Jefferson Airplane, only the drums never show up. Or I can’t get past the guards to the stage. Or we get set up and there are these endless delays that keep me from getting to play until I wake up.
I never wanted to play drums in the first place. I wanted to be a guitarist. I got a gut-string Silvertone acoustic guitar for Christmas of my sophomore year in high school, and I practiced all the time, with that hormone-fueled obsession that is the only card you really have to play when you’re fifteen. Then that summer, in this high-school theater company, I ran my left hand into a Skil saw. After they put me back together, I couldn’t unbend my index finger any more. Either I learned to play all over again on a left-handed guitar or I took up something else. My best friends all played guitar and they needed a drummer, so I volunteered, just to be able to play something, to be part of it.
I don’t remember ever mentioning it to Peggy. It must be more on my mind than I realized.
I’d never been to LA before. The plane flies over the middle of Palm Springs and right away you start to see the swimming pools, spots of blue in the endless tan of the desert. Then you cross the San Bernardino Mountains into L.A. itself and the air turns darker and the horizon disappears in brownish-yellow haze.
I rented a Pontiac Sunbird at the airport. It was the first time I ever had to rent a car and I felt like an idiot having to have everything spelled out for me while guys in suits shifted their weight impatiently behind me. It didn’t have a tape deck, so I got my little hand-held cassette player and some tapes out of my suitcase. By the time I got onto the street it was almost dark. I was afraid of the expressways so I took Lincoln Boulevard all the way north to Santa Monica, looking for a cheap motel.
Things in L.A. are smaller and older than I thought they’d be, lots of low Spanish buildings from the forties and fifties, nothing much over two stories unless you get downtown. I kept the windows open for a while, but without the sun the air got cool and I rolled them back up. I saw people on roller skates and skateboards everywhere, lots of convertibles, kids in leather and spiked hairdos. There were a few token Christmas decorations that couldn’t quite compete with the neon pinks and greens and yellows that everybody wore. There was music everywhere, mostly rap, played at unbelievable volume. It was like being in high school with my parents out of town, and me with the car all weekend. Everything was new and exciting and at the same time I felt more grown up and on my own than I had in years.
I turned right on Colorado Avenue and drove past Carnival Dog records, to make sure I could find it in the morning. It’s a two-story box, next to the Department of Motor Vehicles. Then I headed north again, toward San Vicente Boulevard.
My parents lived here from the summer of 1946 to the fall of 1949, in half of a four-bedroom house on Sixteenth Street. It’s still there, tan stucco, red tile roof, palm trees and porticoes, only a few blocks from the beach. My father’s aunt owned it and rented out the other half. My father had come here in the summers before the war, before he married, and he used to talk about those years as the best of his life, dancing on the pier every night, playing tennis every day. There were tennis courts down the street and he said that for the rest of his life just the sound of tennis, that distant clop of a well-hit ball, filled him with unbearable longing. The pier was different then, he said, all elegance and romance. When he talked I saw this long California sunset out over the water, heard a big band play “Moonlight Serenade,” heavy on the clarinets. The air was clean and smelled of orange blossoms and the railings were lined with beautiful women in dresses that came just past their knees, their long hair piled high with silver combs.
I drove back to the pier and parked above it on Ocean Avenue. The wind was cold and I zipped up my jacket and stuck my hands in my pockets. Fourth Street goes straight out onto the pier, arching out over the Pacific Coast Highway below. There’s a big curved sign that says, SANTA MONICA YACHT HARBOR * SPORT FISHING * BOATING * CAFES. At the closest end of the pier is the carousel, enclosed in a reconstructed Victorian-looking building. To the left some steps lead down into the sand and a small playground.
I went into the carousel building and watched the crowds lined up to ride. There are three concentric rows of horses, all brightly painted, with lots of silver and gold. Along the walls are antique-type vending machines, including a fortune-teller called Estrella’s Prophecies. I bought my fortune, which turned out to be a small black-and-white card with some old-fashioned clip art on it.
“Yes my friend your greatest fault is that you talk too much. Learn to keep a secret.” Did she mean the “Long and Winding Road” tape? “However your other golden qualities make up for your talkativeness. Your anxiety to help others, and your consideration of other people’s wishes has earned you many friends.<
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“A friend will urge you to take a trip. Don’t do it. Your best interest lies in remaining at home. I’m depending on your good sense to lead you on the right path.” For another coin, she promised to tell more. Thanks, Estrella.
Outside, all I could see of the water was the white of the waves as they broke. I pushed through the crowds and got out onto the pier proper, which is a long line of T-shirt shops and fast food franchises: the Crown and Anchor, Seaview Seafood. People line up on both sides of the pier fishing, mostly Oriental and Chicano. Signs say, NO COMER LOS “WHITE CROAKERS.” At the far end there are bumper cars, showered with blue sparks from the grid of wires overhead.
Whatever my father loved here is long gone. He’d told me that. I bought myself a Venice Beach T-shirt and a pretzel and a beer and watched the waves roll in.
In the morning I cruised through Hollywood and saw the sign on the hill and Grauman’s Chinese. A few blocks in any direction from the Walk of Fame and things get very gray and businesslike. The sun was up there somewhere behind a smog heavy enough to wash out the city’s color. I looked up at the Griffith Park Observatory from ground level, saw UCLA, and ate a hamburger in Westwood. By three o’clock I was in the waiting room at Carnival Dog Records.
The place is done up in African kitsch. There’s a thatched straw roof over the receptionist’s desk, hard wooden chairs painted purple with yellow polka dots, zebra stripes on the walls and on the steel-and-concrete staircase that goes up to the second floor. There were a few copies of the latest L.A. Weekly stacked by the front door. There are these dog heads—framed prints and paintings, plaster casts, wooden carvings—all over the place.
The receptionist had short dark hair and lots of eyeliner. She wore a T-shirt with neon colors and a black vinyl miniskirt. She had a buzzer that unlocked the doors on either side of her desk. While I sat there she buzzed a long stream of people through: a tall, skinny guy in a Twilight Zone black satin tour jacket, a heavyset guy with a black beard and a Hawaiian shirt, a woman in a short red dress and fishnet hose. I had on my good corduroy pants and a checked shirt with a knit tie. I’d even put aside my Converse All-Stars for hard shoes. The idea was to look like somebody Hudson could take seriously, and I was starting to think I’d gone the wrong way.
At three-fifteen her intercom buzzed and she curled a finger at me and smiled. She led me up the stairs and down a gray-carpeted hallway, past a second receptionist. In one corner was a plastic statue of the RCA dog, Nipper, that they’d dressed up in sunglasses, a Hawaiian shirt, and a conical party hat. She knocked on an office door, then opened it and stepped aside.
A voice said, “Come on in.” It was deep, a little hoarse, and had a bit of a Southern accent. A man behind a desk stretched his hand out toward me. “Pardon me if I don’t get up.”
I saw that he was in a wheelchair. “Ray Shackleford,” I said. I shook his hand and sat down across from him. The office has shelves on all four walls that only go shoulder-high. From there to the ceiling there are framed certificates and album covers and gold records and a pennant for the Arkansas Razorbacks. The shelves are so full of albums and books and magazines, stacks of greenbar paper, and unlabeled cassettes that the leftovers are stacked on the floor. There’s just enough room between the stacks for a clear plastic runner over the carpet, the width of Hudson’s wheels. In one corner a miniature basketball hoop is nailed to the shelves above a wastebasket. There wasn’t much on the desk. A phone, a single Regal-Tip drumstick, a stack of paper, a few wooden pencils.
Hudson himself looks to be not much older than me. His hair is whitish-blond, stiff, and combed ineffectively to one side. It looks like the exhaust from a rocket. He wore an L.A. Lakers T-shirt and a pair of checked Kmart pants with the left leg folded under, just behind where the knee would have been.
“So,” he said. “You’re a friend of Peggy’s. Is she as cute in person as she sounds on the phone?”
I was shaky, but he had a quality that kept me from going over the edge into panic. “She was last time I saw her. Of course that was before she started dating this huge Italian guy. After which it ceased to make any difference.”
Hudson laughed. “What can I do for you, Ray?”
“I guess you hear this all the time. It’s not what it sounds like. I want you—I want you to listen to a tape.”
“We don’t really do new artists on Carnival Dog. We’re strictly reissue.”
“I know all that. Give me ten seconds. It’ll be a lot easier than trying to explain.”
Hudson shrugged and smiled and held out his hand. I gave him the tape, wondering if I should offer to cue it up for him. He rolled himself back from the desk with a quick spin of the wheel rim and then shot himself over to an expensive boom box half-buried on one of the shelves. He put the tape in and started it. I didn’t know what would happen next. Maybe I was crazy. Maybe I’d unconsciously taped some bootleg cut that Hudson would recognize immediately.
The volume was up high enough to hear some hiss on the beginning of the tape. Then McCartney’s voice, the a cappella first line of the song. Hudson turned to look at me, obviously wondering what the hell. Then Ringo and George came in and his head jerked back to the machine. He turned up the volume and watched the little wheels turn inside the cassette.
“Holy shit,” he said.
He didn’t say anything else until the song was over, and the intercom dialog. Then he said, “Is that it?”
I nodded.
“Where in hell did it come from?”
“I can’t tell you that. Not right now. I want to know what you heard.”
“Something that can’t exist. I’ve read all the books, I know they never—” He went to the machine, rewound it part way, listened again, his left ear right up against one speaker and then the other. There was an equalizer built into the box and he isolated the tom-toms, then the guitar. He shook his head. “If this is a fake, it’s the best I’ve ever heard.”
I felt the muscles across my chest relax. “It’s not a fake.”
“Is there more?”
“Not yet.”
“But there could be?”
“I think so.”
“All Beatles stuff?”
“I don’t know.”
His intercom buzzed. “Howard Kaylan on line one for you,” the receptionist said.
“Never mind,” Hudson said. I understood suddenly that there wasn’t really a call, it was just an excuse for him to get me out of the office if he needed to. “Hold my calls, okay?”
Hudson looked at me. “You’ve got my attention. You brought this here for some reason. Let’s hear it.”
“I’ll tell you,” I said, “but you won’t believe it.”
“After hearing that tape…I’d believe anything.”
So I told him. About my father, about the repair business, about how I made the tape. I watched his face, waiting for his eyes to glaze or his shoulders to pull back. What I saw was intent interest.
“So you’re saying you could do it again,” he said. “Like maybe on a digital master tape.”
“I could try.”
“Then hey, let’s do it.”
“You mean now?” I felt my heart turn upside down.
“I’m game if you are.”
I let him lead, uncertain if I should offer to push. We went back out to the upstairs reception area where there was a small elevator. It let us out into a big room partitioned into cubicles. There were little pieces of paper pinned up everywhere: Scrawled notes, dummy artwork for CD longboxes, computer printouts. Beyond that was a long hallway which ended at a door with an unlit red bulb above it.
Hudson wheeled in and started turning things on. I realized I was looking at the lab where he does all the Carnival Dog digital transfers. I couldn’t help feeling excited, even if it doesn’t look much like the control room at Abbey Road. For one thing it faces a curtained wall instead of a studio. The floor is parquet and there’s a beat-up office chair with duct tape holding one
of the rollers on. As you face the curtain there’s an Ampex quarter-inch open-reel deck on the left, then a big two-track mixing console with digital readouts in the middle, then a Studer quarter-inch deck. Next to it is the Sony 1630, which I know about from trade magazines. It looks like an entire rack mount stereo system. It turns an analog signal into two tracks of digital and puts it on three-quarter-inch JVC format videotape. I wanted to take it apart, but it was not the time to ask.
To the left is a rack with a turntable on top and a couple of Tascam cassette decks. On another rack are Mitsubishi amps and preamps, the big kind with the vertical handles mounted on the face. There are three-foot JBL speakers mounted above the curtains and, above the mixing deck, a pair of Aurotone sound cubes, which I’d heard about but never seen before. They are supposed to emulate car speakers, so you can check what your mix would sound like coming over the radio. Hudson put a fresh videocassette into the 1630 and said, “Okay. Tell me what you need.”
“Monitors,” I said, “so I can hear it. And a couple seconds to like calm down and everything.”
“Nod when you’re ready.”
I settled in the office chair and closed my eyes. The air was cool and the only sounds were the hiss of the air conditioner and a faint preamp buzz in the speakers. In the back of my head I knew I had to pull this off. I wasn’t worried. I was in love with all the hardware in that room and I wanted to hear it perform. I knew the 1630 could pick up nuances that my Nakamichi never could, the scrape of the guitar pick on the strings, the tiniest variation in the cymbal strokes, the whisper of the pedals on the piano. I was up for it.
I got all the pieces together in my head. I could see Paul’s face, hear John nervously tapping one booted foot. Ringo putting out a cigarette and laughing at something. It was all there. I nodded and Hudson started the tape. I closed my eyes. Geoff Emerick said, “Long and Winding Road. Take four.” I heard Hudson shift in his chair, like I’d scared him. Then Paul started singing.