by Lewis Shiner
Cole parked and sat on the front steps and remembered the last time he’d walked down them, on his way to Woodstock, dreaming of glory. Now he was poised to try again. Los Cuervos was one of the top bands in Austin, headlining at the Armadillo and Liberty Lunch. Two albums out on local Fable Records and a new one on Warners scheduled for July release. They were supporting themselves and then some, playing festival gigs in Houston and San Antonio. They were ready for the next step. Valentina was star material and Cole recognized that they had to make the transition to a national act or he would lose her.
He’d bought his own plane ticket to test the waters with Graham. If Cole could miraculously get back in his graces, it was a shortcut to the top. If he failed, it would only cost him his pride, a couple of hundred dollars, and some painful memories. Nothing he hadn’t paid before.
He got back in the Vega and zigzagged south and west to Haight Street. Before the sunshine had faded, the neighborhood had gone dark. Most of the stores were closed and junkies nodded off in shuttered doorways. Cole ducked into a Chinese restaurant for mediocre noodles and a couple of bottles of Tsingtao.
The Berkeley Barb was still publishing and Cole flipped through it as he ate. He no longer recognized the music scene. Most of the space went to national touring acts at the Cow Palace and the Great American Music Hall, and the rest was bands he’d never heard of at venues he didn’t know. The only thing scheduled for the Winterland was a Kinks show two weeks away on the 19th. The economy was gone that had once supported three nights in a row of the Grateful Dead or Quicksilver at the Fillmore. Bands wanted more money, and the kids that had showed up to hear live music every night had moved away or gotten day jobs.
He decided not to take musical potluck. He was exhausted from nervous tension and the long flight, so he had another Tsingtao for the road and drove to his motel.
At 11 the next morning he was back in Graham’s office. This time when Graham emerged he wasn’t shouting. “You’ve got some fucking balls, I’ll give you that. Did I not tell you to never come here again?”
“Yes, sir. But I flew out here to apologize and I never got a chance yesterday.”
“One of my trade secrets. Never let the other guy get a word in.”
Cole took a breath. “I fucked up and I’m sorry. I know the reasons don’t matter, but my marriage was breaking up, and the band sucked at Woodstock, and Lenny quit, and I had a kind of a breakdown. You went out on a limb for us and got us a lot of breaks, and I was irresponsible and cost you money.”
“Is that it?” Graham had already started to turn away.
“I want to pay you back.”
“Really? How do you pay somebody back when you’ve betrayed their faith in you?”
“I have a new band—”
“Oh no,” Graham said, the volume starting to rise. “No fucking way. I can’t believe you make this cornball apology and immediately turn around and try to sell me something.”
The important thing was not to sound desperate, to keep his voice calm. “If you booked us, you could keep my share of the money until you felt like you were satisfied. I don’t want the rest of the band to suffer for my mistake. It’s a great band. We do a lot of Latin material that you would love.”
“Out,” Graham said. “Get the fuck out of here.” He was louder, but he wasn’t yelling.
When Cole returned later that afternoon, Regina stared at him. “You must not value your life.”
“I wanted to drop this off,” Cole said. He gave her a rough mix of the Warner’s album, Something to Crow About, on cassette, a pub shot of the band with Valentina looking particularly sexy, and contact info for their management and booking. “Give me at least a ten-minute head start before you pass those along.”
“You’d really play for no money?”
“What can I say? I know it’s supposed to be every man for himself these days, but…” He couldn’t think of a way to say what he wanted that didn’t sound pompous or self-righteous, so he shrugged and smiled instead.
Regina smiled back. “I’ll do what I can for you.”
*
Alex couldn’t stop trembling, maybe from fear, maybe from anger, maybe both. He’d been standing outside his father’s office for over three minutes and was still not under control. He gave up and went in.
His father was on the phone. He motioned Alex to sit down, which Alex was too wound up to do. Alex leaned against a wall out of his father’s line of vision and continued to vibrate.
The phone call went on and on. The fact that his father sounded so relaxed and was making jokes only stoked Alex’s outrage. When he finally hung up, his father spun around in his chair and looked at Alex with concern. “Are you feeling okay? You don’t look well.”
Alex laid the manila file folder on his father’s desk. His father looked a question at Alex and opened the folder. He paged through the documents inside and smiled. “I remember this. This was a real piece of luck.”
“Luck? That’s the best luck I’ve ever seen. You bought that land for seventy-five hundred an acre. It’s worth, what, half a million an acre now? The southern boundary picks up exactly where the northern boundary of dfw airport leaves off. I mean, exactly.”
“Making it a great location for a hotel,” his father said. “Which is why I put one there.”
“The only thing is,” Alex said, the tremor now in his voice as well, “you bought this land in February of 1964. Which was before the site for the airport was chosen.”
“Officially,” his father said. “A smart man could see where things were headed.”
“It takes more than brains to see an exact latitude and longitude. It takes inside information.”
“It takes more than that. It takes some pull with the guys who draw the final lines.”
Now Alex did sit down. “I can’t believe you’re bragging about it. This is illegal. You could go to jail for this.”
His father looked troubled, for the wrong reasons. He shook his head and said, “Alex, I love you, my son, but you are a long way yet from understanding business. This is the way the game is played. Nobody got hurt. There’s nobody to complain.”
“What about the farmer who sold you the land? You cheated him out of millions of dollars.”
Alex saw that he’d crossed a line. His father’s smile dropped away and one eye narrowed. “Don’t use emotional language to muddy up the truth. The man who sold me that land knew I was speculating. He could have kept it for himself, but he got greedy and wanted to take the short-term profit.”
“He didn’t know what you knew.”
“He knew I knew something. Because he, unlike you, understood business.”
Alex had forgotten the potency of his father’s disapproval. It had been many years. Still he said, “This was wrong, Papa.”
His father closed the file and held it out. “Put this back where you found it. And go back to work.”
Alex sat at his desk for an hour, his guts churning, then drove home. Magdalena, the Honduran nanny, was about to put Gwyn down for her afternoon nap. Alex gave her the rest of the day off and picked up the battered copy of Mr. Brown Can Moo, Gwyn’s current favorite. Gwyn was two now, and talking most of the time she was awake, though much of what she said was in some private language and the rest was evenly split between English and Spanish. Callie thought it was wonderfully creative and encouraged her, one of the many, many things that she and Alex disagreed on.
Callie herself was in Marfa that week, at the Donald Judd ranch. She’d been making trips there for a year, and Alex suspected she was having an affair—not with Judd himself, who was married and seemed a decent sort, but with one of the many hangers-on who had answered the gravitational pull of Judd’s project. Some days it made Alex frantic with jealousy. Today it was just one more straw.
He was able to read Mr. Brown without engaging his conscious brain, leaving it free to torment him. More than anything, he wanted to quit, to run away to New York or Austin or Mexico
. Bad enough that he hated the job, hated the fact that he was slowly turning into his father, hated the house and the nanny and the polyester slacks and shirt and necktie that he wore every day, hated his routine of poker every Friday, dinner every Saturday at his parents’ house, tennis every Sunday with Stanley Marcus of Neiman Marcus. Now the job had driven a wedge between him and his father, as if to prove that there was nothing it couldn’t contaminate.
Yet he couldn’t quit because there was no other way to make the money to pay for the house that was a condition of his unhappy marriage. And he couldn’t leave the marriage because of Gwyn.
When Callie had turned up pregnant, Alex wasn’t sure either of them had what it took to be a parent. Callie surprised him when she quit smoking the day her test came back positive, and then again when she started taking Lamaze classes. From the start she had loved the baby cheerfully and unconditionally.
Alex too. Which meant he could neither give Gwyn up, nor ask Callie to. The trap was perfect, inescapable. He had a vision of himself running down an infinite hallway, doors on both sides slamming shut as soon as he approached. If he didn’t come up with something soon he’d be howling in the streets.
Gwyn’s arms relaxed at her sides and her fingers began to twitch. Alex slipped out of her bedroom and put on the first side of Live Dead, keeping the volume low enough to hear Gwyn if she called.
He sat at the kitchen table and thought of his anti-capitalist rhetoric in college, of his father’s land fraud that had helped pay for it. He fantasized about the many young and available women in the office that he knew better than to approach. He wished he were stoned or drunk or tripping, knowing that even that small release was unavailable without somebody to look after Gwyn.
He could ask Madelyn. She showed up once or twice a month, usually on very short notice, to take advantage of whatever babysitting arrangements were in place for Gwyn. She was always wary, as if he might have Cole hidden in a closet somewhere. He wasn’t sure their current relationship allowed him to ask for quid pro quo.
He had nobody to call and unload on. Susan had too many problems of her own, as she watched her loveless second marriage come apart. Cole would make excuses for his father and ever-so-nicely imply that Alex was to blame for marrying Callie in the first place.
Which left him circling the idea that had been lurking in his head for six months, ever since the last family trip to Guanajuato. He and Callie had been sitting on a bench in the Jardín de la Unión when he thought he saw a familiar face. «¿Álvaro?» he said.
The man turned. «¿Alejo? ¿Eres tú?»
Mexico had been through a financial crisis at the end of August where the formerly fixed exchange rate had been cut by nearly 50 percent. Overnight people lost half their savings, half their paychecks, half the value of their houses and cars. Wage and price controls had artificially slowed the resulting inflation and the economy had collapsed into recession. In the midst of these hard times, Álvaro looked prosperous in bell-bottom jeans with chrome studs, a double-knit shirt with a loud floral pattern, and a brand new black cowboy hat. He was obviously also eating well. Alex stood up and Álvaro grabbed him in an abrazo, squeezing hard. When he finally let go, Alex introduced Callie.
In formal Spanish, Álvaro said, «Clearly you are an amazing woman, to have captured the restless heart of mi primo Alejo.»
«No hablo,» Callie said with a forced smile.
«Qué lástima,» Álvaro said, and winked at Alex. «Perhaps you can translate for her later, in private.»
Alex gestured at his clothes. «Did you give up el mariachi for norteña?»
«No more music for me, primo. I’ve become a man of business.»
«What kind of business?»
Álvaro looked both ways. «The yerba business. We should talk, but not here. You free for lunch tomorrow?» He glanced at Callie. «Just you?»
The next day at one in the afternoon they met at the Hotel Posada Santa Fe on the plaza. Álvaro wore an expensive suit and an open-collared white shirt. In daylight he looked a good five years older than his chronological age, as if his internal clock was running fast. His mustache was still thin, and his eyes still tended to go off in different directions. He’d been a spooky-looking kid, and now, with physical heft and self-confidence, he exuded danger. Sitting across the table from him made Alex feel nervous and flattered at the same time.
Minding his manners, Alex kept the conversation to mutual friends, family, fútbol, and other neutral topics until they were well into the meal. «Bueno,» Alex finally said, «how’s business?»
«Business, mi primo, is very, very good.»
«Is it safe to talk here?»
Álvaro smiled. «As long as we don’t shout.»
«I read in the papers about Operation Condor, and it sounded like they poisoned all the yerba in Mexico with this paraquat mierda.»
«They did poison a lot of yerba… in Sinaloa. But you guys in the US, you have such an appetite, and we don’t want you to do without. Sinaloa dries up, Guadalajara steps forward. And Veracruz, and Columbia… Paraquat was great for our business.»
«I would like to buy a little from you before I go back.»
«You can buy a little… or buy a lot.»
Fear narrowed Alex’s vision to the plate of carne asada in front of him. «What are you saying?»
«I thought about you last night. Because of your father, you’re in a perfect position to help us out. And make yourself a lot of money. Your father has refrigerated trucks that run from Monterrey to Laredo and then all the way up the highway to Dallas. Everybody knows those trucks. Nobody would ever search one of them. Add a few kilos of yerba to each one…»
Alex shook his head. «No, never, I would never risk my father’s reputation by doing something like that.»
Álvaro put a big hand on Alex’s forearm and looked genuinely repentant. «I apologize. I should never have suggested such a thing. Your father is a good man and you are completely right.» He squeezed Alex’s arm, and then smiled. «You, however…»
«I’m not the man my father is, that much is certain.»
«You could, without involving your father in any way, drive a fancy rented car across the border at Laredo, and return with a couple of well-hidden kilos.» He held up one hand. «Don’t say anything now. Give it some time.» He pushed a business card across the table. «That number is good twenty-four hours a day. Leave a phone number with whoever answers and I’ll call you.»
As Alex walked home, the streets were full of students and young Mexican tourists, their lives still rich with possibilities, their hands flying in all directions as they laughed. He knew that the rivalries between the Mexican drug gangs were getting more and more violent. Álvaro’s assurances of how easy it would be to cross the border with a few kilos of dope were pure fantasy. Still he couldn’t stop thinking about it, not on the long walk home, and not in the six months since.
He was still not prepared to use his father’s trucks, even after what he’d learned, even though it would serve his father right, and take away some of the bitterness of the memory of sitting there with Álvaro and praising his father’s nobility. He was, however, more prepared than ever to consider the other possibility, the possibility that scared the living shit out of him, the possibility that sent a jolt of electricity through his life, that might just make it bearable.
*
Friday evening, when Cole and the rest of the band pulled up in a limo for sound check, hundreds of kids were already in line at the front gates of Oakland Coliseum. No reserved seats, which would mean a stampede when the gates opened at nine the next morning. Los Cuervos were supposed to start at 11:00, followed by Rick Derringer’s band, followed by Zeppelin at 1:00. Cole saw kids no older than 13 or 14, dozens of them, on their own, guys with hair past their shoulders, girls in lots of makeup and skimpy clothes, smoking cigarettes and dope, drinking anything that came their way. He wondered if their parents knew where they were.
Three Zeppelin
security guards opened the limo doors. Cole was the last one out. The guards were enormous, all dressed in black tour T-shirts with the falling angel logo from Zeppelin’s record company, all in sunglasses against the last of the July sunlight. Their silent menace took away Cole’s normal affability and muted the excitement he’d been feeling for days. He’d heard stories about the brute force that manager Peter Grant used to protect his clients. This was something else again, poisonously bad vibes, like something out of a gangster movie. He glanced at Valentina, who’d been smiling less than a minute ago. Her face was unreadable.
The guards led them through a series of concrete tunnels and overpasses to stage left, where Linda’s drum cases and their amps sat in orderly piles. One of the thugs said, “Get your gear ready, then sit.” He pointed to a row of folding chairs. A few yards away, a couple of Derringer roadies were unpacking Vinny Appice’s drums and mounting amplifier heads on speaker cabinets.
Cole had a good view of the oversized stage, complete with fake standing stones and a giant cloth hanging in the back painted in red and orange rays. A big redheaded man, long-haired and bearded, was tuning Jimmy Page’s sunburst Les Paul to the piano. Lined up in the near corner of the stage were Page’s purple Telecaster, his famous double-necked sg, another sunburst Les Paul, two full sized acoustics, and a mandolin. The man approached one of the vocal mikes and said, “Ready for me, mate?”
“Give it a go,” said the voice from the monitor speakers.
The man plugged into a Marshall stack and played the signature riff to “Whole Lotta Love,” which echoed massively off the walls of the empty stadium. Cole, despite the negative energy all around him, felt his spirits lift at the reminder of where he was and what he would be doing tomorrow. The man then stepped on an orange effects pedal and played the phase-shifted intro to “Achilles Last Stand,” followed by the opening rapid-fire chords. When he paused, the monitors said, “That’s lovely. Give us a bit of the Tele, then.”