The five or six solo drinkers scattered across the cavernous room seemed more interested in nursing their first early-evening beers than in us putting our instruments in order, but I kept an alert eye anyway for any stage-rushing rowdies. Not that I would know what to do if any trouble did break out—my last fist fight being a grade-nine rumble with Pete Elson over a broken road-hockey stick and who was going to pay for it (I like to remember it as a well-earned draw)—but I blew the hair out of my eyes with purpose as I assembled my crash cymbal so that everyone could get a better look at my drop-dead sneer. That’ll keep them in their seats, I thought.
Much more effective at making us all feel a little bit safer was Scotty playing his usual skid-row regal role, lording over his own private table topped off with his usual glass of beer, today’s Daily Star, and the ink-smeared sheets of his newest poem. I took his calming cue and gradually set to work in earnest putting my kit together. Even if I’d never played in public before, everybody knew that the drummer was always stuck way at the back of the stage, protected behind everyone else. I got on my knees and screwed in my bass pedal and counted my blessings.
Except for saying where to put that and let me carry those, none of us had spoken a word yet about what our odds were of surviving past the first set. Slippery, I’m sure, didn’t even notice. Thirty-plus years on and off the road from Salinas to Cincinnati, he’d probably seen a lot worse. Christine, though, had even more reason to keep her shoulder to the wheel of the job at hand than me.
A couple of the bar’s relatively younger patrons in red flannel lumberjack shirts managed to look up from their beers long enough to discover that, hey, that bald hippie girl up there on stage with no shoes or socks on and wearing no bra is real easy on the eyes, isn’t she? It was like watching some new Olympic event, synchronized leering. Ogle for ogle, every one of Christine’s even slightest body movements was matched exactly by the two pairs of eyes. Because of where they were sitting, the spirited run of commentary the two were carrying on was thankfully out of earshot. I caught Christine’s eye as she plugged her bass into the amp beside my drums.
“How’s it going?” I said.
“Fine.”
I nodded, tested my bass pedal.
“I think it looks worse than it actually is,” I said.
Christine heaved a deep, bothered breath and shook her head. “What? What looks worse?”
“You know, the really dangerous dog is the one that doesn’t look it. Same thing as here, only the opposite.”
She stopped fiddling around with the dials on the amplifier long enough to say, “If you’ve got something on your mind, Bill, spit it out, okay? I haven’t got time for riddles right now.” She stared at the amp like if she looked at it long and hard enough the answer to why she was here and not somewhere else might suddenly appear. The thing wasn’t even turned on.
I took off her bass, set it down, and grabbed her hand. “C’mon,” I said.
Heather shot up from her spot on stage. “Where are you two going?” she said, pulling down her long purple peasant skirt on all sides.
“Just outside for a minute,” I said.
“Can I come?” she said, stamping out her cigarette, coughing, waving away the heavy cloud of smoke encircling her head. Having already emptied her own pack of Player’s while waiting for Thomas’s return, she was smoking Slippery’s Marlboros, but without having quite gotten the hang yet of the extra nicotine punch.
“We’ll be right back,” I answered, pulling Christine toward the side door.
Hurriedly gathering up her fringed cloth bag, “I’m coming with you.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, “Thomas’ll be back any minute now.”
She tugged down her skirt over and over again, like if she didn’t the thing would fly up over her head. Hugging herself tight with a gently freckled arm, “Why is it taking him so long then?” she said. “What’s he doing up there? What’s going on? Why is he leaving me alone like this? He knows I don’t like being left alone like this, Bill.”
Christ, I thought. Haven’t I already got one petrified woman on my hands as it is?
From the other side of the stage, “You and Christine go on and get yourselves some fresh air,” Slippery piped in from behind his pedal steel. “Heather, if you ain’t too busy, I’d appreciate your help over here.”
Heather turned around and faced him but didn’t say anything, still clutched the handful of cigarettes he’d given her so hard that several had snapped in two, tobacco slowly spilling onto the stage.
“This here’s what you might call a spiritual matter,” Slippery said. “I think I might be in need of a dose of them foreseeing cards of yours.”
Heather looked once again in the direction of the bar in the other room. Thomas was laughing at something Leone had said, Leone smiling and pouring Thomas and himself drinks from a bottle of Crown Royal. Heather turned back to Slippery and loosened her grip on herself a little. She licked her lips as if to speak, but nothing came out.
Slippery pulled out his red-and-white pack of Marlboros from the top pocket of his shirt, tapped out two, and stuck one in his mouth. “Like I say,” he said, holding out the other cigarette, “I’d be much obliged if you could help me out.”
Her arms gradually relaxed, fell to her sides. Slippery produced his blowtorch of a silver lighter and lit first her smoke, then his.
Heather sucked deeply, exhaled. “What month were you born?” she asked.
“November.”
“I knew it,” she said. “I knew you were a Scorpio.”
“We’ll be back in five minutes,” I said.
In spite of the warm night and the fairly heavy foot traffic of unshaven, unsteady men, no one asked Christine or me for any spare change. It took me a while to realize that the hard-up don’t panhandle the hard-up. Poor people might not usually have much education, but they’re not stupid. They can’t afford to be.
The occasional old man’s long lecherous stare in passing at Christine kept us a little unsettled, though, so we hung close to the side door I’d jammed open a crack with one of my drumsticks. I put my arms around her waist and pulled her close. “Are you going to be all right with this?” I said.
She wouldn’t look at me, kept her eyes on the sizzling red sign over the shop across the street. Bud’s Bond Office was now ud’s Bo ice.
“All right with what?”
She said it, I heard her, but she didn’t mean it, I heard that, too. Right then and there I was ready to tell Thomas we were packing up and heading back to the village and if he didn’t like it he could find himself a new drummer. Period. All Christine had to do was say that she hadn’t finally found in Yorkville a place where nobody cared if you decided to shave your head or got arrested for civil disobedience or slapped a bass guitar in your bare feet if you felt like it only to end up playing Playboy centrefold to a bunch of dirty old men. All she had to do was say it.
But Christine had been the only one the cops had had to literally drag away during the Yorkville bust, forcing two of them to carry all 125 protesting pounds of her to their waiting paddy wagon. Christine didn’t know what a white flag was.
We hugged. Then Christine told the next greybeard who lingered a little too long in his lusting, “Get a good look, grandpa, it’s the closest you’ll ever get to getting any in this life,” and we hugged again, this time topped off with a long, hard kiss and a beautiful bare foot snaking up my leg. Then there was Thomas.
“Sound check, y’all,” he said.
This time Christine took me by the hand and we went back inside. I pulled out my drumstick and the door shut tight all on its own.
34.
SUCKED WOULD BE too strong a word.
I mean, no one walked out on us. But, then, there weren’t that many there to begin with, maybe double the half-dozen or so who’d watched us set up. True, no one covered their ears or booed or hissed or hurled cold French fries in the direction of the stage, but no one appeared to
be actually listening, either. The end of each song was received with the exact same echoing silence, Thomas’s occasional between-song banter ignored as much as our music.
The second set went about the same as the first except that at one point a man with a spaghetti-thin moustache that he must have gotten the idea for from an old gangster film on late night TV and decked out in a brown pin-striped suit that was too tight in the jacket and too short in the legs got up to dance with a woman who was either his girlfriend or wife. The song was a slow one, the Everly’s “Take a Message to Mary,” Thomas and Christine trying out their close high harmonies for the first time in public.
Before they made it to the chorus, though, the woman for some reason pulled back a balled fist, punched the man square in the face, and stomped off to the washroom. The man managed to find his seat, sit back down, and order another round. Periodically he’d dab at his bloody nose with a white handkerchief. By the time the next song was over the woman had returned to their table and was sipping the fresh rum and Coke that had been placed in front of her and wiping the man’s nose, shaking her head in slight disgust the entire time. The bleeding eventually stopped and no one else decided to crack the boards for the remainder of the evening.
I saw the entire thing from behind my kit. Whether he wants it or not, a drummer, I found out, always has the best seat in the house.
35.
LEONE, IT TURNED OUT, either didn’t mind or didn’t much care what our Duckheaded take on bar-band C&W sounded like, and wasn’t even all that concerned about the meagre crowd or the less-than-rabid audience response. Leone had a cardboard sign in the window that said LIVE ENTERTAINMENT FIVE NIGHTS A WEEK, and if we were willing to work for the pittance he was paying and capable of keeping the hippie shenanigans to a minimum (“No whacky-tobaccy breaks in the bathroom”), the job of being the Canada Tavern’s official house band was ours if we wanted it. Thomas told us we did. Christine and I weren’t so sure.
The afternoon after our first show was Slippery’s one-more-week-sober payday, and he neatly folded the wad of bills Thomas handed him into his silver money clip and let us three worry over the band’s immediate future. The day was a dazzling duplicate of the one before, but no matter what the blue sky outside the opened studio doors said, just the idea of putting our collective nostrils through the ordeal of another long night of backed-up toilets, mildewy rugs, and cheap cologne was enough to make it feel like the middle of gloomy February all over again. I’d brushed my teeth twice and taken three scouring showers but still couldn’t get the smell of stale cigarette smoke out of my pores.
Christine walked over to the balcony and breathed in a good, long noseful of fresh air like she was storing up for what she knew was ahead. Still apparently stuck on not being the party-pooper to say that this particular cut-off to the Interstellar North American Musical expressway was a tad bit rougher than she’d imagined, she was putting me in the rare position of being the one to go toe-to-toe with Thomas. I gave it my best shot. I didn’t have a chance.
“There were twelve people there last night,” I said. “Believe me, I counted. But the way those zombies were paying attention, there might as well have been none.”
“But that’s the beauty of it,” Thomas said, “that’s the best part. That’s just what we need right now.”
“An audience full of drunks?”
“Elbow room, Buckskin. All the time and space we need to stretch out and get ourselves ready to get to the next level. Five nights a week, two sets a night of uninterrupted elbow room.”
“Five nights a week after working five days a week,” I said. “Where does sleep fit into this equation? Twenty bucks a week isn’t going to pay anybody’s rent and groceries.” Or anybody’s student loan, either, I could have added, but didn’t. Thomas looked down at the mandolin in his hands. Slippery looked away. They both knew I wasn’t talking about either of them.
Standing right in front of me now, plucking away at the thread of a melody I’d never heard before, “There was a reason I didn’t want anybody we know there last night,” Thomas said.
“We were all right,” I said.
“We were just where we should be right now. The question is, are we prepared to go where we need to be?” He turned his attention back to the mandolin and closed his eyes, concentrated on coaxing out the emerging tune.
The sounds he was making weren’t like anything I’d ever heard before. The dozen or so songs of his he’d taught us so far were definitely out in left field, but this thing, now we weren’t even in the ballpark any more. 1883 Old West yellow. Psychedelic cum-shot purple. Infinite snowstorm white-noise white. And orange. The setting sun a flaming tangerine ready to burst juicy burning bits of fiery pulp all over the parched earth’s scurvy-scarred face.
For nearly five minutes the melody arched and looped and curled through the air like lunatic smoke, repeating bits and pieces of chord progressions along the way, at times even seeming to pull itself apart as if looking around inside before finally drifting back to catch the next melodic wave. And all of this on a mandolin. Even Slippery was paying attention now, tilting his head to one side like a puzzled dog.
Song finally finished, its harmonic hum still alive and hanging in the air, “What is it?” I said.
Thomas looked up from the instrument, the slightest smile on his exhausted face. His brow was wet. “Something I’ve been working on,” he said. “One of a whole bunch. Something new.”
The first time—the only time—was when Thomas was eleven and Selma got the new vacuum cleaner his father had been promising her for months and everyone was standing around the parlour watching her haul the huge machine around behind her. The thing looked like a small silver tank and made almost as much noise. So much so that Thomas’s mother only stayed around long enough to smile politely in response to her husband’s raised eyebrows in the direction of his kind-hearted purchase. One by one all of the Grahams eventually quit the room and left Selma to her work. All except for Thomas.
Thomas stood glued to the same spot listening to the sound the vacuum cleaner made until Selma poked at his white bucks with the end of her nozzle for him to move out of the way. He sat on the couch until she was finished and had shut off the machine and unplugged the cord from the wall and asked him what he was doing just sitting there.
“Nothing,” he said.
“Well, you can do that just as well outside in the fresh air.”
Thomas nodded but followed her up the stairs and from bedroom to bedroom anyway. Every room, same thing. He’d just stand there until she needed to get where he was with the cleaner, then be startled awake with a nudge from her nozzle and go and sit on the bed until she was done and ready to move down the hall. After a while Selma got tired of asking him what he thought he was up to sitting there like that and him mumbling “nothing” every time she did. Besides, it was nice to have the company.
When there weren’t any more floors to clean, when all of her work was done, Selma stepped on a silver foot pedal and the long white cord slithered back inside the machine, its loud plastic-to-metal snap waking Thomas up for good. Selma asked her little helper if he wanted to come downstairs with her and have a piece of Chess pie and a glass of milk, but Thomas said no thank you and went to his room and locked the door and lay down on the bed and tried not to forget.
But what he heard in his head was like the sound the chugging Mississippi Southern made at night coming in his window so loud and so clear and then, three minutes later, so faint and so gone, just like the picture on the TV screen when Daddy turned it off for the evening, sucking down in seconds to a dying silver dot. Notes, chords, and even entire fully formed melodies floated fat and bright before his eyes, but not the whole thing, not the one long remarkable song of before. He tried so hard to remember what he’d heard that he got an upset stomach and a pounding headache and had to stop trying. He fell asleep exhausted, thinking this must be what Momma felt like when she didn’t come out of her roo
m for sometimes two days at a time and he and Becky weren’t allowed to talk above a whisper and Daddy seemed mad about everything.
The next time, the next week, Thomas was right there and ready when Selma lugged the machine out of the closet and set to work. But it was just the racket from a vacuum cleaner and not the most perfect music he’d ever heard. This time, before she was even halfway done with the parlour, he did go outside, and without her asking.
He climbed to the top of his favourite Dream of Pines pine and stayed there until dark. By the time he came back down, he knew who he was.
36.
YOU KNOW YOU’RE a regular when the bartender starts taking phone messages for you.
“Your boss, Kelorn Something, called,” Leone said, refilling my glass of Coke from a black nozzle behind the bar. “She said to tell you you left the lights on again.”
“Shit.”
“And that she had a couple complaints about the store not being open.”
“Shit.”
Leone spotted an empty draft glass and lumbered off to replace it with a swiftly poured other. With only one drink legally allowed per person per table at a time back then, one thing I’d learned for sure over the month and some we’d been playing at the Canada Tavern was that the number-one requirement for a good bartender was excellent long-range vision.
I sucked the brown glob of foam off the top of my glass, nose involuntarily wrinkling at the Coke’s tickling fizz. It was incredible I wasn’t immune to the stuff yet. Alcohol we had to pay for the same as everybody else, but Leone gave the band free refills on coffee and pop. Twenty-five cents down and I was set for the night, by the time we were all packed up and ready to go home was more jingle-jangle wired than Mr. Tambourine Man himself.
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