Outside the Gates of Eden

by Lewis Shiner

  Alex said, “I’ve got the song list here. I put a check mark by the ones we’ve been working on.”

  “Did you do ‘Last Time’?” Cole asked.

  “Uh, no, not yet.”

  Mike said, “It’s just E-D-A, right? I know it.”

  Gary shrugged. “You want me to count it off?”

  In response, Cole played the opening riff and muffed it.

  The old Cole, Alex thought, would have made a joke and laughed it off. He would have won Mike and Gary over and gotten them pulling for him. The new Cole squeezed his pick and started again. This time he got it close enough for Mike to fall in on rhythm guitar. Alex and Gary came in behind him and gradually, shakily, the song lifted off.

  Instead of a proper pa, they had three microphones running through Mike and Alex’s amps, carefully placed so they wouldn’t feed back. Cole walked over to his mike and started to sing.

  His voice had changed too. It had a rougher edge, and it was like he’d been thinking about the lyrics, like he wasn’t just using them to hit notes with. He sounded like Lennon to Alex’s McCartney. Alex stepped up and sang the harmony at the end of each line, and suddenly it was happening. In spite of being loose, of the drums being too loud in the confined space, of Cole missing notes and words here and there, the music had a power and momentum of its own, as if they had summoned it rather than created it. Alex felt a pure joy bubble up inside him.

  Gary and Mike were both smiling, obviously feeling it too. They made it all the way to the end, Cole vamping somewhat unconvincingly on the “no no no no” before it broke down and rattled to a stop.

  Alex let out an involuntary “Yeah!” and waited for Cole to join in, to bind up the wound he’d opened, to give up some word of praise or enthusiasm. Instead Cole said, “Hey, Mike, during the lead, could you play the chords up here?” He ran through the E, D, and A at the twelfth fret. “Just the top three strings.”

  “Sure,” Mike said, and played the lick back. “Why don’t we do that for the ending, too? Once to set it up, then the second time back to the low E to end?”

  They tried the ending a couple of times, then played the whole thing through. Alex kept waiting for Cole to smile. Instead he finished his beer and said, “How about ‘Daytripper’?”

  Cole kicked it off and they all fell in, but after a few bars Alex waved them to a stop. Cole went through the riff one more time after everybody else had quit.

  “The accents aren’t right,” Alex said to Cole. “It has to go, dah, dah da-da-dee dah de dah, harder on the dah de dah.”

  Cole stared at him for a second, then looked at the floor. “Yeah, okay.” He started it again, still not perfect, but better. Alex let it go.

  Cole blew the lead, stopped, and that slow fury came again, twisting up through his spine and his right hand. His eyes were dead, like those of an old man on a park bench staring into space.

  “Take it from the bridge,” Cole said. “The first B.”

  The second time was better but still not clean. Cole stopped them and said, “Again.”

  The third time he got it just like the record, the high A note ringing clear above the bent and released E. They cycled through the last coda a few times, then Cole raised his guitar neck and ended on the E chord.

  Alex saw that Cole was impatient to move on. He stopped them anyway to work out the harmonies and play through the whole thing again from the top.

  When they were done, Cole said, “You guys know ‘Corrine, Corrina’?”

  Alex said, “It’s not on the list.”

  “Fuck the list,” Cole said, with a casual contempt that made Alex’s face burn.

  Predictably, Gary said, “Big Joe Turner or Ray Peterson?”

  Though Cole was being an asshole, Alex knew the mixture of embarrassment and irritation that he was feeling and his instinct was to diffuse it. “Cole, meet Gary. He does this all the time.”

  Cole said, “Turner, he did ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll,’ right?”

  “Right.”

  “Peterson,” Cole said.

  Gary wasn’t ready to let it go. “Have you heard Turner’s version? It really swings. I can bring it next time.”

  Cole said, “Let’s do the Peterson right now, okay?”

  “Chords?” Mike asked.

  “Same as ‘Daytripper,’” Cole said. “E, A, B. It’s just a blues.”

  “‘Just a blues’?” Gary said.

  Cole ignored him and played some arpeggiated chords with heavy vibrato in a kind of half-assed samba rhythm. What the hell are we doing? Alex wondered. He’d never liked Ray Peterson, a whiny wimp from an era that was over and done. Why would you want to play this song in the first place, other than to rub salt in your wounds?

  Gary dutifully played straight 4/4 on his hi-hat while Mike lagged behind, working out his part. Alex played what he remembered from hearing the song on the radio. The parts all pulled in different directions. Cole plowed through two verses and the chorus, then tried to play the hokey string section melody as a lead before he shook his head and quit. “Well,” he said, “that sucked.”

  “Maybe we can come back to it,” Alex said.

  “Yeah,” Cole said. “What’s next?”

  Alex picked up the list. Before he could say anything, Gary said, “How about ‘Sloopy’?”

  “Fine,” Cole said.

  “Uh, listen,” Alex said.

  “Now what?”

  “We’re doing a kind of a different arrangement.”

  “Why?”

  “Just try it, okay?” Alex nodded to Gary. “Count it.”

  Gary took them into their hybrid version, which now incorporated some of the grinding Vibrators heat. Alex had the lead vocal and Cole followed along, until the song went into a vocal break instead of a guitar lead. Finally he stood with his hands on his hips and watched, shaking his head at the end. “It’s too slow.”

  “It’s not really any slower,” Gary said. “It’s just got a different feel.”

  “Well, I don’t like it.”

  Gary and Cole stared at each other. Gary smiled a nasty, superior kind of smile.

  “Let’s take a break,” Alex said.

  Cole took off his guitar and went out the side door and into the back yard.

  Gary said, “We waited all summer for this?”

  “I’ll handle it,” Alex said.

  Cole stood at the edge of the pool, his back to Alex. Alex fought the urge to push him in.

  “What the fuck is the matter with you?” Alex said.

  Cole turned around. “With me? Whose band is this? This was supposed to be you and me, that was the idea from the start. Now it feels like I’m auditioning in there, and if you guys don’t like it, then I’m out.”

  “You know what?” Alex said. “You are out. I’m sick of this shit. You’ve turned into a complete asshole and I don’t want to do this with you. We’ll find somebody else.”

  At first Alex thought Cole hadn’t heard. Then Cole began to collapse in slow motion. He sank down onto one of the chaise lounges and folded his arms across his chest, the left protecting the right. Alex saw that he had taken away the last thing Cole had.

  Cole’s face went through a progression of emotions, from anger to despair. After what seemed like an hour, he said, “I’m sorry.”

  Alex waited.

  “I don’t know if I can do this,” Cole said. “It hurts and I’m scared.”

  “You were doing it. There’s nothing the matter with your guitar playing that a little practice won’t fix. Your singing is great. The problem is that you’re being a total prick.”

  “I’m sorry,” Cole said. He had trouble getting the words out. “Give me another chance. Please.”

  “One,” Alex said. “No more drinking when we’re playing. Two. I run the practices. With suggestions from everybody, but I call the shots. Three. If you’re enjoying this, act like it. If you’re not, then get out.”

  Cole slowly nodded.

  “Give
me five minutes,” Alex said, and went back in the garage.

  “Is that the same guy I played with this spring?” Mike said. “Because I don’t remember him being such a total asshole.”

  “He’s been through some real shit lately. I’d like to give him another shot.”

  Mike grunted. “His singing’s pretty good. The guitar playing, I don’t know. He gets things right the second time. That’s not going to cut it live.”

  “He’s never played with a band before. And he’s only a few days out of his cast. He’ll come around.” Alex sounded more sure than he felt.

  “I guess we’ll find out,” Mike said.

  “You all right?” he asked Gary.

  Gary shrugged. “You don’t expect to get along with everybody in a band. A little tension, not necessarily a bad thing. I will say, I’ve never punched anybody with a crippled hand before. I would probably feel bad about that afterwards.”

  Alex considered his options. “Let’s hope that doesn’t become necessary,” he said.

  “We can hope,” Gary said.

  Alex went to the door and motioned to Cole to come inside. Cole was subdued. He put on his guitar and then said, “Look, I… I’m sorry, okay? I just… I’m sorry.” He turned his back on Gary and Mike and checked his tuning.

  “What’s next?” Gary said.

  Alex looked at the list. “How about ‘Look Through Any Window’?”

  They got through another half dozen songs. Cole turned on a few watts of his old charm and Gary backed off on the blues purist crap. Alex’s mother came out to check on them and made sympathetic noises over Cole’s hand. When it was over they agreed to do it again the next day.

  As Alex drove him home, Cole said, “Maybe tomorrow morning we can go get me an amp.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “If we’re going to be doing gigs, I need something bigger.”

  “Your parents will spring for it?”

  “I’ve got the money from Tyler.”

  “I thought that was supposed to be for college.”

  “They want me to go to college, they can fucking well pay for it. After what happened, they’re not going to tell me how to spend that money.”

  Mr. Hyde had come out again. Alex changed the subject. “What are you going to get?”

  “I don’t know. You tell me.”

  “If you can afford it? Twin Reverb.”

  “I can afford it. I need to keep it at your place, though, all right?”

  “All right.”

  Cole scrunched down in his seat. His right hand was in its splint and he cradled it chin-high with his left. “I wish it was tomorrow already.”

  *

  Cole had his best night’s sleep since leaving the hospital and that allowed him to see what a mess he’d been at rehearsal. He apologized again when Alex came for him at ten, and Cole saw that Alex was going to let it go.

  From Alex’s house they called around for prices and Cole watched in admiration as Alex negotiated him a great deal at Brook Mays Music. They brought the new amp to Alex’s garage, and Alex helped him mount the casters he’d retrieved from the junk box in his father’s shop. The amp, the size of a big suitcase, contained two 12-inch jbl speakers that weighed 20 pounds apiece, making it a bitch to move around without the wheels.

  He’d also sprung for a Gibson Maestro Fuzz-Tone like Keith Richards used on “Satisfaction,” a fat black doorstop that made his beautiful clean Fender tone sound like it was coming through a bag of broken glass and scrap metal.

  They were fooling around with the amp and Alex was getting on him about “Daytripper” again, so he started playing that one section of the lick over and over again, and then suddenly he heard something. He slowly picked out a descending version of the same six notes and played it back-to-back with the original. He punched in the fuzz-tone and tried again.

  “Do you hear it?” he asked Alex.

  “Hear what?”

  “Our first single,” Cole told him. He threw some chords against the notes—D and F#, which he quickly changed to F# minor, for the first half. He tried a few unexpected options from there, then went with the obvious G to A for the second half. He got Alex to switch to guitar and play the chords behind the lick.

  “Yeah,” Alex said. “It might work. You just need lyrics, a chorus, and a bridge.”

  “That’s the easy part,” Cole said. As if I’d done it before, he thought.

  He was so excited about it that he couldn’t stop himself from playing the lick during practice.

  “What’s that?” Gary said.

  “Just something I’m fooling around with,” Cole said. He called out the chords to Mike as he went through the lick slowly. They played it a few times at tempo, Mike on rhythm, Alex on bass, Gary sitting out.

  “Where’s it go from there?” Mike said.

  “D,” Cole said, suddenly hearing it. “C, then A. Just a barred A moving down the neck. Hold that last A, then the lick comes in again.”

  “Nice,” Mike said.

  “Sounds like ‘Daytripper,’” Gary said.

  I should have kept it to myself, Cole thought.

  “You should try it with a shuffle beat, it would sound more original,” Gary said. He played a mid-tempo shuffle. “Come on, try it.”

  Cole, making an effort not to lose it, said, “I don’t hear it with a shuffle beat. Can we do it the way I wrote it?”

  “Maybe we should do it the way Lennon and McCartney wrote it.”

  “Fuck you,” Cole said.

  “Hey, man,” Gary said. “Relax. I’m just giving you shit. Don’t get all bent out of shape.”

  “You’re really a prick, you know that?” Cole said.

  Gary was smiling. “Well, any time you want to do something about it, let me know. You might want to wait until your hand heals up.”

  Cole looked at Alex and Alex looked back at him like it was up to Cole to get himself out of it. Cole hadn’t left himself a lot of options. Either eat shit or quit the band. “Next song?” he said.

  “How about ‘Get Off My Cloud’?” Alex said.

  “Good one,” Gary said. “Let’s go.”

  *

  That night Cole sat on the edge of his bed, taking his mind off how much he hated Gary Travis by playing the lick from his song over and over, waiting for the notes to suggest something. After ten minutes he fell into a trance, and that was when he heard the words, “You never cared for me,” and then the next time through he heard, “You let me take the fall.”

  He sang them and they fit, so he tried, “You brought me to my knees,” and from there the last line was obvious, “You never cared at all.”

  He sang the whole thing through a couple of times. He couldn’t tell if it was moronic garbage or if it was okay. It didn’t seem any worse than the words to “The Last Time” or “Hang On Sloopy,” though it obviously wasn’t Bob Dylan. He would aim higher next time. He got out his Chevelles notebook and turned to a blank page and wrote them down.

  He played the verse through again and then played the chords for the chorus and there it was, “You got me free fallin’…” And then, he thought, it should be a girl’s name. “Laura Lynn,” he sang. He’d never heard of anyone named Laura Lynn, but it fit, and because it was a name he’d never heard before, it added a bit of mystery.

  By that point he’d figured out what the song was about and the second verse came as fast as he could write it down.

  You never said goodbye

  You left me hanging on

  The phone just rang and rang

  You were already gone

  One more? he thought. He had to poke at it to make it come out.

  You had us all lined up

  You led us in a dance

  You never stopped to think

  I never had a chance

  The phone was on a shelf in the hall, with a cord that was long enough for Cole to take it into the walk-in closet on the opposite wall. He huddled there with his guitar a
nd notebook, the phone cradled in the crook of his neck, and played what he had for Alex. When he was done, Alex said, “Let me get my guitar.” Not exactly the reaction Cole had wanted.

  “I’m back,” Alex said.

  “What did you think?”

  “I think it could work,” Alex said, which was not what Cole wanted to hear either.

  “Try this,” Alex said. “After the second chorus, go to E minor seventh, then A. Then… G, then G minor. Then up to A on the fifth fret. From there back to D for the next verse.”

  They played it through together on the phone. “I don’t know,” Cole said. “It feels like part of a different song.”

  “It’s a bridge,” Alex said. “It’s supposed to feel like that.”

  They took it from the top, played verse, chorus, verse, chorus, and into the bridge and by then it had already begun to feel inevitable. Even as he resented Alex moving in on his song, he couldn’t hide his excitement. “Damn,” he said.

  “This free fall, this is some of your astronaut shit, right?” Alex said. “You should go with that. The bridge should just be imagery, clouds or something, as you look down at the Earth.”

  “Sure,” Cole said. He’d looked out of too many airplane windows at a landscape of clouds and imagined walking around on them. “Clouds like a frozen/Field of snow/something something/So far below.”

  “Blowing and drifting,” Alex said.

  “Yeah, that’s it.” Cole wrote it down.

  “That’s good,” Alex said, “it’s like a punchline, the clouds below instead of overhead.”

  “Yes. Oh man, this is so cool.”

  “The part about ‘got me on my knees,’ how about, ‘I landed on my knees,’ like as opposed to landing on your feet.”

  “Okay.”

  “Sing me the third verse again.”

  Cole sang it.

  “Where you say, ‘You never stopped to think,’ what if… just a minute… what if it was ‘You never reached for me,’ back to the freefall thing.”

  “Yeah, that’s good.” And also true, Cole thought.

  “One more thing. How stuck are you on the name Laura Lynn?”

  “I don’t know.” He didn’t want to admit that he wasn’t entirely happy with it. Alex had already changed so much.