by David Gates
The owner said “Sell!”
Jean said, “It’s your money.”
Willis was flush that year. His father had died and his mother had moved back up to Etna, into their old house with the eyebrow windows; the old man had never taken her name off the deed. She sold her apartment in Brookline and split the proceeds three ways with Willis and Champ, actually using the word reparations. Willis did some rough figuring. If he put twenty thousand down, it would mean making payments on a twenty-thousand-dollar loan, plus property taxes. What, three hundred and change a month? It was nothing. It was like an extra-bad phone bill. He could actually do this. And once he’d exposed the beams and the wide floorboards, built bookcases and brought in Oriental rugs and blue-painted pie safes, Jean might be less freaked out by the whole Preston Falls gestalt—that was the word, gestalt. The trailers. The ratty chalets and A-frames. The Bondo’d-and-primered cars up on cinderblocks. The wandering chickens. The dead raccoons and the roadside litter. The snarling dogs coming at you until their chains stopped them short.
This was before he saw that these were his secret allies.
4
When Willis wakes up it feels like late afternoon, and the Unnamable’s rigid. Sort of tries to polish himself off but can’t think what to think of. The temptation: Tina bent over in biker shorts. Some taboo there he can’t articulate.
He goes downstairs, pisses, starts coffee. Clock says 3:27. Only mid-afternoon. Wednesday? So it’s tonight he’s supposed to go jam with What’s-his-name. An hour to get there, probably, and an hour back. Which is crazy. But to play with actual people again? And if he stayed here he’d do what—lie on the couch reading books where the men say Damme, Sir! and the women are named shit like Louisa. Peter somebody—no, Philip. Philip Reed. He’d have to leave around eight. So four and a half hours to kill? Well, cook some oatmeal and take a shower and you’re down to four. Play guitar a little to get the feel, maybe take another crack at that ceiling? He ends up reading more of Dombey and Son.
It’s dark again when he loads the Twin and the Tele into the back of the truck. He sticks the guitar stand behind the seat, then decides he’ll look like a dilettante and takes it back to the house. Then he wastes more time dithering over tapes; he ends up with Buddy Guy for the drive there, to make his playing subliminally blues-drenched, and Public Enemy to keep him awake on the way back.
He stops at the cash machine in Preston Falls and gets FAST CASH $40. Pitiful: in Chesterton it’s FAST CASH $100. But he’s only got about a thousand to last him these two months, and nothing coming in. Then over to Stewart’s, where he pours a cup of coffee and pisses away a dollar and a quarter of his forty on a Want Ad Digest. Showing up early would be pushy, so he sits in a booth and looks through Musical Instruments, Motorcycles, Personals and Farm Equipment. He’d like to find an affordable 8N with a brush hog, not that he could afford it. The coffee gets him queasy, so he goes back up to the counter and buys a kaiser roll with butter and peanut butter, on the theory that it’s porous. Then he feels as if something big is swelling inside him, pushing up on his heart. Willis and his body, those ancient enemies.
Halfway to Sandgate, he remembers he forgot Calvin Castleman’s fucking hundred and fifty dollars.
Philip Reed’s directions turn out to be good. The house either is or is not lime green (too dark to tell), but it sure does have a plastic gila monster on the porch roof. Fucker’s the size of a German shepherd and glowing, lit from within; you can see the cord going into its mouth. Party boys. Willis comes jolting up the two-rut driveway past the house, as instructed, to a barn where he recognizes Reed’s Z-whatever between a rusted-out Econoline van and an old bulbous Volvo from the days before they made them boxy. When he cuts the engine he can hear electric guitars tuning.
He hauls his guitar and amp through the tall barn door, held open by a cinderblock, and follows the sound up steep, trembling stairs to a hayloft, resting that fucking Fender Twin on every other step. When his head clears the floor of the loft, he can see a few sagging brown haybales and, in the far corner, a giant cube of cloudy plastic sheeting over a frame of two-by-fours, and the blurred, faceless forms of people inside. What might be a billed cap. A red shirt. A guitar neck, probably. Willis lugs his stuff over to where two sheets of plastic overlap, parts them with his guitar case and gets a skunky noseful of reefer.
Reed’s kneeling on the shag carpeting that covers the hilly floorboards, plugging cords into a couple of stomp boxes, a black Les Paul slung over his shoulder on a tooled-leather strap. He looks up and says, “Hey, here’s the man.”
“I think I found the right place,” Willis says, and sportively sniffs the air. There’s a drum set (a fat longhair is tightening a snare), a mixing board set up on a card table, two old-time capsule-shaped mikes on mike stands, two speaker horns on sturdy tripods, two scuffed-up floor monitors. For decor, campy LP covers pushpinned to a beam: Lawrence Welk with lifted baton, Sgt. Barry Sadler, Jim Nabors, some goony-looking country singer even Willis doesn’t recognize: This Is Tommy Collins. A rusty oil-drum stove resting on cinderblocks, with a salvaged piece of corrugated aluminum roofing underneath: the stovepipe sticks right out through a circular hole in the wood siding, without a baffle, or flange, whatever you call it.
“Gentlemen?” says Reed. “Doug Willis.”
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
“Okay, we got Sparky”—leveling a finger at the fat-boy drummer—“and Dan”—finger moving to a tall, lanky guy in a plaid hunting cap with the earflaps down—“and Mitch”—to a short guy with bug-eye sunglasses and a red shirt, wearing a low-slung Strat that looks too big on him.
The little Strat guy nods at Willis’s case. “So what have we here?”
“Tele,” says Willis. “Nothing special. Early seventies.”
“Cool,” the little guy says. “Come on, early seventies? They hadn’t gone to shit then. By any means.”
“Yeah, me either,” says Willis.
“You got that right,” says the drummer. He cocks his head and hits the snare once with a drumstick. Shakes his head.
“So whip it out,” says Reed. “Yeah yeah, whip it out,” says the little guy.
“You fuckin’ guitar sharks,” the drummer says. “Man just got here. Here, man—I forgot your name.” He offers Willis a stubby brass pipe from an ashtray sitting on his floor tom.
“Oh right,” says the one with the earflaps. “Get the fuckin’ guy dusted, good idea. Everybody ain’t a fuckin’ animal like you, man, that they can play behind that shit.” He picks up a Fender P-bass with most of the finish worn off.
“Fuck you, man,” says the drummer. “Try to hoover up enough of that shit of yours to get off, man, I fuckin’ choke to death.”
“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” says Reed.
“Why don’t you plug in over there?” says the bass player. He points to a power strip that’s plugged, in turn, into an orange cord snaking outdoors through a knothole.
“Here, I got some weed here that’s just weed.” Reed takes a half-smoked joint out of his shirt pocket.
Willis holds up a hand. “No, I’m good. I just had a bunch of coffee.” He stopped smoking dope years ago: officially because it made it harder to stay off cigarettes, actually because it made people around him seem evil. These people already seem evil.
“Well, listen,” says the bass player, taking his bass off again. “I’m a do a couple lines here and like whoever wants to join me.”
“Ah hell,” Reed says.
“Ho-yeah,” says the little Strat guy. “Yeh-yeh-yeh.” He puts his tongue out and pants like a dog, which is all Willis needs to cross him off.
“Twist my arm,” says the drummer.
“Hey, twist my dick,” says the bass player. “I thought you said you choke to death.”
“Hey, I like to choke, man.” General laughter. “Like those dudes that hang theirself to get a boner, you know?”
“Hmm,” Willis says. “I guess a little
of that never hurt anybody.” Suddenly he feels like he has to shit: the excitement of being bad.
The bass player has taken the pushpins out of This Is Tommy Collins and set it on top of his amp. He pours white powder from a Band-Aid box onto Tommy Collins’s sincere face, and hands the little guitar guy a box of plastic straws and a pair of orange-handled scissors. “Hey, anybody got anything with some kinda edge?” he says. “Never mind, fuck it.” He grabs a cassette, dumps out the tape and the paper insert—Stevie Ray Vaughn and Double Trouble—and uses the plastic box to chop and scrape and push the shit into a pair of parallel lines. The little guitar guy hands him a two-inch length of straw, and he bends down and hoovers them up. Then sinks to sit on the floor, snuffling and flogging his nose with his index finger, saying “Wowser.”
Willis scrapes together a pair of lines half as long and half as wide, out of both good manners and caution. He snorts a line into each nostril; it stings his sinuses and begins dripping and burning down the back of his throat. Except that his heart’s racing just a teeny bit—which is probably just psychological because he’s all of, what, five seconds into this—he actually feels surprisingly great, though he does hope his heart won’t start going any faster.
He watches the little Strat guy take his turn. Shit, these aren’t bad people. He’d actually really like to get to know them. “So,” he says, “you guys are all married?”
This gets a big laugh. Willis didn’t realize what a really funny thing it was to say at this juncture, but he now feels privileged to have the secret key to cocaine humor: to be completely out there, yet at the same time right in there.
“Hey, Counselor,” the little guy says, “you better step up to the plate. This shit is so fucking excellent, man. It’s definitely Howdy Doody Time.”
“You’re dating yourself,” says Reed, straw poised above two ridges of powder.
“Fuck it,” says the drummer. “I’m a fuckin’ get ripped.” He picks up his pipe and starts slapping at his shirt pockets with his other hand, right side, left side, right side.
“Like you ain’t fuckin’ ripped already.” The bass player’s back on his feet. “Here, this what you’re after?” He hands the drummer a pink butane lighter.
“So we in tune here approximately?” says Reed. “Whew. Holy shit.”
“Yeh-yeh-yeh, let’s do it,” says the little guy. “Break out that bad-ass Telecaster, man.”
“Absolutely,” says Willis. He opens his case, snap snap, and slings his guitar on. “Anybody got a tuner?”
Reed hisses and makes a vampire-repelling cross with his index fingers. “We’re strictly organic here. Fuckin’ goat cheese, whatever. Mitch, you’re in with yourself, right? Whatta you got for an E?”
So they all stand there stoned as pigs, tuning for about eight hours. Twang twang. De de de de de. With the tuner this would take two seconds. But on the other hand it’s great, like lights going down at the movies.
“Dan, you somewhere close?” Reed says.
“Fuck if I know.” The bass player flips his amp off standby, twaddles strings with the first two fingers of his right hand, and big notes come hooming out. “Somebody give me a fuckin’ G?”
They all stroke G chords at him.
“Yeah, how about just one a you?” he says. The little guy plays a G chord and the bass player starts hitting harmonics and cranking at his tuning pegs, trying to get one howl up level with another howl. “Golden,” he says, though it doesn’t sound like he’s improved things any. “So what are we doing?”
“Can you play ‘Far, Far Away’?” says Reed. “Rimshot—where’s the rimshot?” He turns around to the drummer. “Ah fuck.” The drummer’s lying on the floor; he’s taken the round seat cushion off its chrome-plated tripod to pillow his head.
“Hey, what about ‘Walk This Way’?” says the little guy. “You do ‘Walk This Way,’ right?” He plays the riff at Willis.
“You know I actually never have?” says Willis. Aerosmith was always too thug for him. “I mean, I know the tune.”
“You’ll pick it right up. Starts off in E, man, then the verse goes to C, like yah dah DAHT! up from B flat, like.” He plays it to demonstrate, yelling yah dah DAHT! as he moves the bar chord up the three frets.
“Right,” says Willis. Normally this would be within his scope. “Play the hook again? The E part?”
He plays it at Willis again and, amazingly, Willis plays it back at him. Either cocaine is a miracle drug or this hook is something a retard could play. “Yup,” says the little guitar guy. “That’ll work. Okay? ‘Walk This Way’? Starts with the drum thing?”
“Let me get my shit together just a minute here,” the drummer says from down on the floor.
“Oh fuck,” says the little guy. “Fuckin’ Sparky, man.”
“Hmm,” says Reed. “Looks like time to bring in Iron Mike.”
The little guy winces. “Oh man? I hate fuckin’ playing with a fuckin’ drum machine. I mean, what do we have a fuckin’ real drummer for?”
“Makes a great conversation piece,” Reed says. “You got to give him that.”
“No problem, man.” The drummer’s eyes are closed. “Use the thing for a couple songs, man. I’m gonna be right with you.”
“Unbelievable,” says the little guy. “Sparky, man.”
“Fuck him. Forget it,” Reed says. “So what are we doing, again?”
“ ‘Walk This Way,’ ” says the little guy.
“Okay, cool. You got the tune programmed in there, right?”
“That’s not the point, man. You know what I’m saying? Last time we played the Cabin we played half the fuckin’ night with the fuckin’ drum machine.”
“I don’t know, I sort of dug it,” says Reed. “Like with his head inside the bass drum? Crowd was into it.”
“Hey,” the bass player says. “The thing keeps better time than him.”
“Hey, fuck you,” says the drummer.
“Okay, so ‘Walk This Way,’ right?” Reed says. “Does it start in E?” “Jesus,” says the little guy. “No, it starts in fuckin’ W.”
“And it goes to what, again?” says the bass player. “In that other part?”
“Come on, man. We played the fuckin’ song last week. Through B flat to C. Right?”
“Right right right. Yeah, no, okay, man, I remember it. It’s just weird to me. Comin’ off a E to a B flat. It’s like out of nowhere.”
“Yeah, but then you’re in C,” says the little guy.
“Yeah, I know you’re in C, but what I’m sayin’, Mitch, that little thing is still weird to me.”
“Well, that’s how the fuckin’ song goes, man.”
“But it seems like it would make more sense if you went A, B, C.”
“Are we gonna play this fuckin’ thing or what?” Reed says.
“No, let’s fuckin’ talk about it for another fuckin’ hour,” Mitch says. He takes off his Strat, goes back to the board, does something, and the drum machine starts up: Boom boom ba-doom-doom-DOOM. Boom boom ba-doom-doom-DOOM. Boom boom ba-doom—
“Too slow, too slow,” the bass player yells.
“That’s exactly where we had it last week,” says Mitch.
“Bullshit.”
“Okay, fine, man. You know so fuckin’ much about this tune, man, you fix it how you want, okay?”
“Well, it’s gotta go faster than that, man,” says the bass player.
“Okay, so put it up where you want it. Put it up your ass, all I care. Can we just play the fuckin’ song?”
“I hate this fuckin’ song, you want to know the truth,” the bass player says. “Why don’t we just play a blues?”
“I suggest we play something,” says Reed. “Not a blues, necessarily.”
“Okay,” says Mitch. “You fuckin’ masterminds work it out and you let me know, okay?”
Willis wants to think this is still banter. But he doesn’t know these people, and it’s too much to process when you’re having such a
great time being high, which he really is.
“Okay, okay, fine,” says Reed. “Mitch, why don’t you just put the thing on sort of a shuffle, you know, doot ta-doot ta-doot ta-doot-ta, doot ta-doot ta-doot ta-doot-ta.” He sings in embarrassing fake Negro: “Checkin’ up own mah bay-bay, doot ta-doot ta-doot ta-doot, find out what she been puttin’ daown, ta-doot ta-doot ta-doot ta-doot.” The drum machine is still going boom boom ba-doom-doom-DOOM.
“So that’s what you want to play now?” Mitch says.
“Well, not that, necessarily,” says Reed.
“So you want like a medium shuffle.”
“Well, yeah. Sort of medium.”
“Five fuckin’ hours later …,” says the bass player.
“Well? So what do you have in mind?” Reed says.
“I don’t give a shit. Why’n’t we just play the fuckin’ song, man? That way we’ll have it the fuck over with.”
“Come on, it’s a killer song, man,” Mitch says. “It sounded fucked-up last week because nobody knew it.”
“Like we really know it now,” says the bass player.
“Hey, the new guy,” calls the drummer, still on the floor. “I forgot your name, man. You do any Stones?”
“We’re doing this now,” Mitch says.
“I’m just askin’ him, man,” says the drummer.
The drum machine keeps going boom boom ba-doom-doom-DOOM.
“Shit, man,” Mitch says. “I feel like I’m starting to crash already.”
Boom boom ba-doom-doom-DOOM. Boom boom ba-doom-doom-DOOM.
“Hey, can’t have that,” says Reed. “You mind turning that thing off? Drive me fuckin’ bananas.”
“I’m just gonna be a second.” Mitch takes his Strat off and sets it on the floor with that ugly clang of an electric guitar in standard tuning.