“Man, I’m just a junk salesman. Why you trying to dump all this in my lap? Some Jane blows into town and takes the wrong guy home with her—what does that have to do with me?”
“She was raped too, more than likely, Vick. My blood type is B positive. I wonder what yours is.”
“I’ll be glad to tell you, you buy something.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, say a pack of strings. You use those Rotosound round-wounds, don’t you? Give me twenty-five bucks, I tell you my blood type.”
“I’ll give you something else, you fat son of a bitch.”
“You feel froggy, Martin, go ahead. Jump.” He folded his hands over his belly, closing his eyes and tilting his head back so that the fold of his extra chin disappeared. The old notion of fat people being jolly came to mind. Vick was too strange for the word jolly to fit. But there was something unformed and boyish about his big round face. The fat seemed to inflate all the details out of his expressions, making them seem like childlike curves drawn on a ball of dough. He was smiling now.
I wanted to slug him but I didn’t. He leaned forward and backhanded me playfully on the stomach. I didn’t like it.
“Martin, do I look like a rapist?” he said, holding his hands out to his sides, emphasizing his bulk. “She wasn’t squashed flat like a tostada, was she?”
“This is not a joke, Vick. And you haven’t answered any of my questions.”
“Go to hell or Hollywood, man. You ain’t the police. I told you I was here. I don’t hardly go out anymore anyway.”
“And Ed was here with you. After the party.”
“That’s right.”
“That’s very convenient. Especially since we both know Ed has a temper.”
“Fuck you, man. I’ll talk to the police, straighten this shit out. While I’m down there, I’ll ask ’em if they checked you out properly. They’ll tell me, too. Vick Travis been an institution in this town a long time. I’m big, man. Ha, ha, ha.”
I could hear him still laughing as I went back through the store.
“I’m big, man,” he bellowed. “I’m big as shit.”
&&&
I went home and moped. The cat crawled up in my lap and rubbed against me, breathing asthmatically, his eyes big and round as marbles. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to give or receive sympathy. It didn’t much matter. I called the police station a couple of times, but Lasko never came to the phone. I called his trailer, but there was no answer. I called his beeper, but no one called me back. There was one message on my machine, from Billy, returning my call. Call me tomorrow, he said, he
was going to bed. He felt like the road was catching up to him.
I got back inside my jacket and walked down to the Continental Club to catch last call. Other than the bartender, who gave me a couple of drinks on the house, there was no one there who could help me. I thought about Ladonna and wondered if she was awake, and, if so, if she was thinking about me. Those thoughts got me nowhere. I bought a pack of cigarettes and lit one for Retha Thomas. It wasn’t a candle, but I wasn’t Catholic. I set the cigarette in an ashtray and watched the smoke curl up from it, hoping that she’d be OK. When there was nothing left but a slim finger of ash, I put the pack in my pocket and walked home.
CHAPTER FOUR
“Hello?”
“Martin?”
“Lasko? What is it? What’s the word?”
“I’m sorry to wake you, Martin. It’s Jeff LeRoy. I’ve got a gig for you.”
“Uh . . . I’m sorry. I just dropped the phone. I was expecting another call. What’s the deal?”
I supposed I’d gotten two or three hours of deep sleep and a couple of hours of unpleasant horizontal time, eyes peeled back, cold sweat, shaking hands, ice cube toes. I accepted the gig and digested the details pretty professionally, considering the fact that my frayed nerves were taking to raw wakefulness like a naked person diving into a snowdrift.
The gig was a part of the local chamber of commerce’s efforts to help out the music scene. They felt a bit guilty after relentlessly promoting the type of economic development that reaped a bumper crop of skyscrapers and microchip consortiums at the expense of skyrocketing downtown rents that forced a lot of clubs to shut down. The guilt came after the real estate boom went bust and the new buildings stayed empty and the industries they wooed with tax concessions and university endowments skipped out of town. Then someone did a survey and found out that most of the town’s residents felt that—surprise—the Fabulous Thunderbirds, Antone’s, and the Cannibal Club were just as important (if not more important) to Austin as IBM and Motorola. And a majority also felt that Austin had suffered a decline in the quality of life, one of the elements that had been loudly trumpeted in the brochures and portfolios used to lure industry and investment to Austin in the first place. Someone sensed a vicious cycle at work.
So the chamber of commerce was picking up the tab for air time on the local stations. Joe Ely had been scheduled to do a ninety-second spot—eighty seconds of music and ten seconds saying, “Get off the couch tonight. Turn off the TV and go see a band.” But something had come up for Joe and we were going to do it instead.
I felt lucky that I was able to locate all three of my bandmates plus one of the roadies—Nick—and get them to agree to show up at the Channel 36 studio at one o’clock. Then I checked my watch: eight o’clock. It hadn’t been luck; they’d all been in bed, like me. I’d have to call them later and remind them that it wasn’t all a dream.
I had less luck getting in touch with Lasko. I called back and asked for the lab, but no one there would talk to me. I called Brackenridge Hospital. There had been no change in Retha’s condition.
Ray and Leo were late as usual. Ray was consistently twenty minutes late. Leo could run from an hour to an hour and a half late, showing up only five or ten minutes late once in a blue moon just to throw off the average and to make you think that the rest of the time he just couldn’t help it. The technicians were getting nervous, so they helped Nick unload and set up the gear. It wasn’t like setting up a heavy metal band with walls of megawatt amps and double-bass drum kits or racks of synthesizers, tape machines, and flash pots. We were stripped down retro and proud of it. I used a customized Fender Bassman tube head and a cabinet loaded with two heavy-duty fifteen-inch speakers. Billy kept the beat with a kick, floor tom, two racks, hi hat, ride, splash, and, occasionally, a cowbell. To go with his thirteen electric guitars, Leo had about half that many amplifiers, though he never packed along more than two of them. Lately he’d been using a Pro Reverb. Nick had everything plugged in and tested inside of thirty minutes.
Leo straggled in at a quarter of two hauling a triangular guitar case with a pink tag attached to the handle. A new guitar. He set the case down, opened it, and slung a vintage red Gibson Flying V over his shoulder. He grabbed the guitar cord Nick handed him, plugged in, and said, “Hello, Martin. How you like it?”
With its flawless fire engine red finish on the V-shaped body, rosewood neck, and original square headstock, it was a beauty—the prototypical Albert King model. But what got my attention was the white plaster cast on Leo’s right hand.
“Don’t worry, man,” he said, acknowledging my stare, “I can still play.” He held up the cast. His index finger and thumb were still free, and there was a pick between them. “See?” he said, and slashed out the loud three-chord riff to “Mannish Boy.”
BUH BAAH BAH DUM
In the key of E, it was the rudest, machoest musical figure that had ever been bora. Leo slashed it out again.
BUH BAAH BAH DUM
You could almost hear Muddy Waters growl his fearsome testimony of elemental manhood, you could almost feel the sawdust on the floor. Leo Daly’s mojo seemed to be working.
BUH BAAH BAH DUM
The cast was disturbing, but the guitar tone said it was all right. Leo’s face said something in-between. The chords shook the room, causing toes to tap, heads to nod. That riff had been us
ed in everything from real folk blues to burger commercials. It was a deeply rutted thing, second nature to rock and rollers and blues players alike, as basic as the missionary position, but like that tradition also, oh, so serviceable.
Leo stood with his legs apart and slung his head back in a grimace, deviating from the riff by ripping into the strings with a series of quick runs up and down the frets. It wasn’t flawless, and it wasn’t the best he could do, but it would work. He let out a big sigh and wiped his hair out of his eyes with the cast- encased hand.
“What happened?”
“I fought the wall and the wall won.”
“Was that after you were up on top of the American Bank building howling like a gut-shot dog?” I asked.
His grin died an ugly death. He unscrewed the top off a quart of Jack Daniel’s, took a big slug, and set it on top of his amp. “Nope,” he said. “It was before.”
A couple of the techs had gathered around and they nodded and elbowed each other, impressed. They looked fresh out of college and, having been weaned on the excesses of the Stones and Led Zeppelin, they thought they were witnessing rock and roll attitude incarnate. But they were nervous, looking up at the studio clock every couple of seconds, then looking back at me and the empty spot on stage right where Ray’s saxophone stand waited like a bride at the altar.
And then Ray sauntered in, cocky and sharp as Dick Tracy’s jaw—straw racetrack hat, houndstooth suit, wing tips, black- and-white thick and thin socks. Every hair in place, his mustache actually looking as if it were drawn with a fine tip felt pen. His saxophone case was at his side and Kate was behind him, on high heels in a Chanel-esque suit and pillbox hat and tortoiseshell Ray-Bans, cigarette smoldering at a right angle between two black-gloved fingers, around her neck a round patent leather purse on a chain big enough to hold one large pill or maybe a silver dollar, but not both.
He put the case down, pointed to a chair out of camera range for Kate, and wrinkled his nose as if it had just detected a trace of drugstore cologne. He looked at the cameras and techs, then me. “Are you off the hook yet, Martin?”
“Any minute now,” I said. “Once they get the lab results . . I let it trail off. Ray was smirking with amusement at Billy’s casual green rayon shirt, the usual pack of Kools showing through the translucent material. As Billy rapped his snare like a judge banging a gavel, Ray gave him a wink, then glanced toward Leo, who was turning around from his amp, tuning up. When he saw the cast on Leo’s hand, the perpetual sneer seemed to freeze in place, his lip quivering slightly, as if he were having a stroke.
“Leo,” I said.
“Let’s just get on with it,” snapped Ray, obviously irritated beyond any reason that I could see.
“We waited for you, Ray,” I said. “You think we could wait for Leo to tune up?”
He regarded me coldly. “What you do with your time is your business. Right now it’s my time, and no one’s going to waste it, especially, you know.” He paused and gave me a strange look. “Where’s your bass, Martin?”
We finally got started. Stupid, stressed-out me: My P-bass was at police headquarters, a realization that was awful in both its timing and implications. The band members groaned a bit, but they were pretty understanding. Lasko had questioned each of them since yesterday. I had a spare, a Danelectro, but it was at home and we were already late. It turned out that one of the studio interns had a Gibson EBO-1 in the trunk of his car and he loaned it to me. Whereas a Fender Precision represents perfection in style and function, an EBO does not. Either burpy and muddy at best or muted and untrue at worst, it would have to do.
We decided on a song and proceeded to come up with an eighty-second segment that would work. We were a blues band and not a radio jingle band, so it took some doing. We never knew the length of any of our songs until they appeared on the local records we put out and we saw the times on the labels, but we never played them the same way again anyway. The song we picked for this spot, “Who Put the Sting on the Honey Bee,” was a hard-charging song with enigmatic lyrics that Leo drawled out of the side of his mouth, letting the inflections he used on the words reveal their true meaning. Like when he sang, “When I’m out of luck, late at night, the way you touch, treats me right ...” the word touch sounded nastier than a word that rhymed exactly with luck. Not that he was above singing lyrics that left little to the imagination.
The song was in F# minor arranged around a slight deviation of the usual I-IV-V twelve-bar pattern, and the crew was grooving to it, laughing, tapping their toes, miming applause when we wound it up. But when I botched the announcement at the end by saying, “Get off your band tonight, go see a couch,” no one laughed or clapped. They laughed the first couple of times, but not the fourth.
“We could do a voice-over,” suggested the producer. “You’re playing at Antone’s Saturday night, right? We’ll just tag that on the end. You guys just smile at the camera, or look tough, or whatever, after you hit the last chord. How about that?”
“That might do,” said Ray. “Or Leo can do it. We don’t want Martin telling people to come see us at Antone’s, blome of the hues.”
A voice-over would be fine, we decided. Just before we did another take, Billy summoned me over to his kit. “Martin . . .” he said, and counted off the song, then played the beat, emphasizing the feel by elongating the spaces before the snare beat. He played a couple of bars, staring at me, bobbing his head along with it. “You see?” he said. “Like that. I know you’ve got something else on your mind. Just try, man, and we’ll get out of here.”
Leo came over and slapped me on the back. Ray was busy adjusting his reed. We tried it again.
Billy was right about other things being on my mind. I couldn’t help it. It wasn’t the bass. It sure wasn’t the music. I’d played the song hundreds of times and played songs just like it thousands of times. The riffs were a part of me, the different modes and nuances being no different than words in a conversation. But when I glanced down at my hand around the neck, it looked like a fist holding a club. Someone had held my bass like a club and clubbed Retha Thomas almost to death with it. And that wasn’t all they did. She was a girl I’d just met. A girl who, well, I’d thought was pretty good-looking at the time, hadn’t I? Maybe I hadn’t planned on going back to the motel with her, but I was just off the road and half crazy from it, maybe subconsciously I’d been thinking I’d just play it by ear, see what happened . . . That’s not a crime. After all, Ladonna and I weren’t married. But if I was just going to see what happened, then I got a hold of a drink that had been spiked, then what? Casual sex being OK, what about casual murder?
“Martin . . .” It was Billy.
Everyone else had stopped playing.
“You missed the change,” said Leo.
My face burned red. “Sorry. One more time.”
I put the thoughts out of my mind. Only the song, only the song would be on my mind this time. Billy gave a four-count and off we went. A crunching, sleazy beat. Greasy. Smell of barbecue, sounds of horns honking on South Congress on a hot afternoon. Guitar clank, saxophone growl. Billy kept it on that East Side cruise mode, and rumbles came from the bass in my hands, hands that I would not look down at. Leo sang, snarling . . .
It’s Saturday night and I got a right
to a cocktail and a smoke
the way she did that walk on me
got to be a running joke
money talks but love can sing
every ache and every sting
there’s a lump in my throat
and it’s got a name
I’d call her up but I’m ashamed
guess you know that girl put my heart in a sling
Who put the I in satisfy Who put the oooh in the foo-ooo-ool
Who put the flame in the three-alarm fire
Who put the boo in the boo hoo hoo
Who’d put a hex on a guy like me
Who put the sting on the honey bee . . .
And just beyond
the too bright lights, Lasko walked in. I recognized his dark silhouette—the gimme cap, curly hair, beard, beer gut. Gun sticking out under a Hawaiian shirt, rocking back and forth on his cowboy boots. Then his hand came up, giving the OK sign. The rocking back on his boots, I knew, was for the music. The OK sign was from the lab.
I nearly blew the tempo as I sighed with relief, but jumped back on track before it was noticeable, and we climbed up to the high note, chugged it, then clanged the last chord, letting it die out until all you could hear was the buzzing of the tube amplifiers under the lights.
“All right, all right, all right,” said the producer. “That’s it. That’s a wrap.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Given all the questions in the world that begged for answers now, even after getting a few of the most pertinent ones answered, why did I have to decide how I really felt about Michael Jackson?
Michael DiMascio wanted to know. And he didn’t know about any of the other questions, only his own.
We sat together on Ladonna’s soft sofa. She relaxed in the recliner. She’d had a hard day at work, and her time with me this evening had been no picnic. Michael had his mother’s dark eyes and fair skin but his late father’s dark hair, cut in a Beatle cut. On an inquisitive eight-year-old, it looked just right.
“Ronnie Gilroy says Michael Jackson is a fag,” said Michael.
That was a tough one, too. I looked at Ladonna. She nodded at me, meaning that she wasn’t going to offer any help. “Well, Michael, I doubt that Ronnie Gilroy knows that. Is Ronnie one of your school chums?” Michael nodded. “Well, like I said, I doubt if Ronnie would know that. Michael Jackson is very secretive about his private life.”
He just sat there for a bit, knocking his Converse All Stars together. He looked from one side of the room to the other without moving his head. Then he said, “What’s a fag?”
Tough Baby (Martin Fender Novel) Page 5