My spirits rose. “I guess Astley was right about this being Heart country. Maybe they’ll stop by and check out our show Saturday night.”
“Dream on, man.”
We joined the others, who had migrated to the front of the hotel, and looked up the three steps leading to the double-wide glass doors and large plate-glass windows. Closed blinds hid the interior of the hotel and bar from the sidewalk outside. Tarnished bronze lettering affixed to the brick front advertised its amenities:
THE MAI TAI HOTEL
QUALITY ACCOMMODATIONS
FINE DINING AND DANCING
Next to the door, a large, hand-lettered sign was taped to the inside of the window.
LIVE MUSIC
TUESDAY-SATURDAY
9:00 TO 2:00
$2 COVER, 2 DRINK MINIMUM
Right below the sign, crudely taped to the window with masking tape, was a photo backed by hot-pink paper. We crowded up onto the sidewalk to check it out. It was us. Our eight-by-ten publicity photo had been duplicated by Big Country Productions, and our name and their logo were printed at the bottom of the picture. NOW APPEARING had been scrawled across the top of the pink paper and FROM CALIFORNIA was written across the bottom under our name.
For a few silent moments, we stared at the photo and it stared back at us: five young guys trying to look tougher than they were.
Mick, who had pulled the hood of his purple sweatshirt up over his head, leaned closer and squinted at the photo. Then he let out a whoop. “The Killjoys from California. We’re bloody stars!” He did a little hopping dance around us before noticing that we weren’t joining in. “What’s with you geezers?”
“Looks like a wanted poster,” Rob observed, expressing what the rest of us felt.
Leaving the photo behind, we straggled into the dark lobby of the hotel and stood inside the doorway, trying to get our bearings while our eyes adjusted to the darkness. I squinted down at the stained red carpet covering the lobby’s floor and wondered why all the blinds were drawn.
The deep, narrow lobby contained a small check-in desk, with old-fashioned wooden mail slots behind it. Farther down the lobby, along the left side of the wall, I saw soft drink and cigarette vending machines glowing in the semidarkness. An elevator and stairs were cut into the wall across from the vending machines. Foghat’s Slow Ride seeped through padded green swinging doors on the right that apparently led to the bar.
Astley had told me that the place was owned by someone named Mr. Tom, but where was he? The lobby was empty, so I walked through an open doorway immediately to the left of the check-in desk and found myself in a small restaurant. Some sort of food stewed in a kitchen off the back of the restaurant. I looked around. No Mr. Tom—no one else for that matter.
I stepped back into the lobby where the other guys stood clustered in front of the desk. They looked uneasy, as if afraid someone might get picked off by a predator if he strayed too far from the herd.
In spite of my own nervousness, I grinned. “Loosen up, guys. It’s not haunted. I’m gonna check the bar. I’ll let you know if I see any ghosts.”
I pushed my way through the heavy, swinging doors, and my eyes started spinning trying to take in an even-darker room. Before the doors had even swung shut behind me, I was hit by the odor of stale cigarette smoke and beer, and something that unexpectedly smelled like aftershave lotion. Was it ... Old Spice, my dad’s favorite?
My eyes adjusted to a surprisingly spacious room. I sensed the bar counter off to my left, but I stood just inside the doorway and took in the scene. Straight ahead, a maze of round tables covered much of the bar’s worn, hardwood floor. Chairs were stacked upside down on the tables. On the far side of the jumble of tables, a large, rectangular area of floor, scuffed and stained, had been left clear. Apparently the dance floor. On the other side of the dance floor, a wide plywood platform rose a few feet off the floor. The stage. Our stage. A green neon sign advertising Ranier Beer glowed on the wall behind it.
The walls of the room held nothing else, or so it seemed. To my right, yellowed blinds covered the windows overlooking the sidewalk, and flat black paint covered everything else, including the ceiling, the restroom doors on the left, and the load-in doors to the right of the stage. A disco ball dangled over the dance floor. Except for the disco ball, it was like being in the hull of a dank, old ship.
Then I had a déjà vu sensation. And I knew what it was. The bar looked just like the Marquee must’ve appeared in ’64 when the Who played it. Of course, I’d never been there, and maybe the Marquee was nothing like the Mai Tai, but I had played the Marquee somewhere in my dreams, and I was certain it had the same smell, the same feel. The Who had used their Tuesday-night gigs at Soho’s Marquee Club to build a huge following of Mods, young, style-conscious Londoners tripping on uppers and maximum R&B who adopted the Who as their own. Maybe we could do the same thing here at the Mai Tai.
Slam!
I looked left, toward the long wooden bar that dominated most of the room’s back wall. Two young men and a woman sat together on bar stools playing liar’s dice.
Bam! The man sitting nearest me again slammed the dice cup down on the lacquered top of the bar’s wide counter and then tilted the cup to peer at the dice. He and his companion looked as if they’d just rolled off the same fishing boat. One wore a hooded gray sweatshirt, stained jeans, and heavy work boots; the other a faded red cap, flannel shirt, and blue overalls. His wind-burned face was partly obscured by bushy sideburns that almost met at his chin. The woman sat disinterestedly beside them, smoking a cigarette and peeling the label from a beer bottle.
A middle-aged Asian man was behind the bar. He contrasted sharply with his three customers. His hair was neatly cut, parted on the side, and his white Oxford shirt and grey slacks were nicely pressed. Not a wrinkle on him. A clean white apron was tied around his pencil-thin waist. He leaned against the back counter of the bar, arms folded and eyes half shut. I walked over to the bar, and he turned his head toward me.
“Can I getcha drink?” he asked without moving anything other than his lips. The woman’s head turned my way.
“I’m looking for Mr. Tom.”
“I’m Tom. Who’re you?”
“I’m Daniel Travers with the Killjoys.”
Mr. Tom tilted his head as if he hadn’t heard me. I tried again. “I’m with the band playing here tomorrow night. The Killjoys? Rick Astley of Big Country Productions sent us. He said that you’d give us rooms.”
His expression suddenly changed. He smiled, but it was one of those here-today-gone-tomorrow kind of expressions. “Yes, yes. Killjoys. You’re early. Good. Two rooms. Yes, yes.” He stiffly extended his arm across the bar, and we awkwardly shook hands. A cloud of Old Spice drifted by my head. Now I knew who was drenched in aftershave lotion.
The guy with the bushy sideburns paused with the dice cup raised above the bar. “Always plenty of rooms here at the Mai Tai. Used to be the best whorehouse in town before the cops busted it. Now it’s just the second best.”
I forced a laugh that I knew sounded unnatural. Maybe this place was nothing like the Marquee. “We’ve never played a whorehouse before,” I said, forcing bravado. “Might be interesting.”
The guy smiled and went back to his game. As he did, the woman swiveled toward me, unraveling herself like a cat, and pushed back the long, black hair hanging over her left eye. Her face was gaunt, like a model’s, and she had the sleepy-eyed look of someone who spent most of her time in bars. She was dressed in a white lace-up blouse that was anything but laced at the top. Farther down, she had on skintight jeans tucked into brown boots with thick crepe soles.
“Aren’t you a little young to be in here?” the woman asked, her voice raspy, cigarette-burned, her sleepy-eyed gaze sharpening as her eyes moved up and down over me.
I wasn’t sure how to reply, so I kept my mouth shut, already feeling that maybe I was too young to be in here. I took a closer look at her. Contrary to her world-weary app
earance, she wasn’t that much older than me, perhaps a couple of years. Unlike the two guys with her, who looked like the kind of semiharmless losers you’d find in any bar anywhere, she looked out of place. Maybe it was the calculating look in her eyes, like a tiger watching its prey without twitching a whisker, hungry but watchful. In a flash, I suddenly saw a younger and more lurid version of Mrs. Robinson sitting before me.
As if on cue, she leaned forward on the bar stool, letting the top of her blouse hang open. At the same time, she stubbed out her cigarette and moistened the filtered end of another with the tip of her tongue. “So you’re one of Astley’s bands, huh?”
“You know Rick Astley?” I said, surprised that she would know our agent, who was based three states away.
“Yeah, I know him,” she answered sharply. “He comes by to check out the bands once in a while. And you guys better be an improvement over the last band he sent out. A bunch of lightweights. You guys are gonna have to rock if you wanna play this place.”
The two men stopped their game long enough to look over at me and grin.
I glanced at Mr. Tom, but he seemed to defer to this woman. Her tone suggested that her role here was something other than a typical barfly. But who was she? As my eyes drifted back to her, I tried to think of a clever comeback but failed. The view down the front of her blouse was distracting. “Yeah, well, I think we’re pretty good.”
“I bet you are,” she said, seeming to know where my eyes had gone. She smiled, an unnerving, leering expression that made me hold my breath for a moment. “And I’ll be back tomorrow night to check you out.”
Christ. Was it my imagination or was she coming on to me? I looked at the two guys again, both still grinning at me. Shifting my eyes back to the woman, I sensed, maybe hoped, that she was just one of those hard-ass kind of women who get off on playing head games with guys, especially in front of other people. Either way, she was making me nervous. To my relief, Mr. Tom finally cut her off with a wave of his arms. “Come, come, come. Rooms, rooms.”
He pulled up a hinged side section of the bar and stepped through. With a sideways glance at the woman, I followed Mr. Tom out the bar doors and back into the lobby, where the guys were scattering to let him get through to the check-in desk. A cloud of aftershave trailed him.
“Two rooms. You boys get two rooms.” He paused and smiled in turn at Mick, Rob, Sam, and Yogi. “You good boys?”
The guys glanced at me and nodded. “Yeah, sure.”
Mr. Tom lifted two sets of keys from the pegs next to the mail slots. Keys hung from virtually all of the other pegs. He gave the room keys to me, and I waited, expecting to fill out a registration card. Instead, he motioned the guys over to the desk. He smiled again and raised his right hand, extending five fingers. “You play five night, five hours.”
We nodded dumbly.
“Nine to two. Fifteen-minute breaks. O.K.?”
“No problem,” I answered, “that’s what we usually play at clubs. By the way, do we get paid after each night or at the end of the week? Astley said we’d get our rooms and $750 for the week, right?”
Mr. Tom either didn’t understand me or chose to ignore the questions. “You good boys, O.K.? I lock the doors at three. You don’t come back late. Elevator no good. Use stairs. You be good boys.” I wasn’t sure if it was a question or a command. He smiled again. And then he was gone, back through the swinging bar doors, leaving a vapor trail of Old Spice like some old buccaneer.
We walked outside to get our bags from the station wagon.
“Man, that was weird,” Rob said. “I hope we’ve got this money thing right.”
“Don’t sweat it,” I said. “I’m sure it’ll get handled just like every other place we’ve played.”
But something in the eyes of the woman sitting at the bar told me that the Mai Tai was unlike any other place we’d ever played before.
WE FOUND OUR two rooms after climbing the lobby stairs to the second floor. The rooms weren’t next to each other, or, for that matter, even on the same corridor.
The floor was laid out like a T, with the stairwell located at the bottom of the T. We found the first room adjacent to the stairwell, and then we walked along the patchy green carpet, past five rooms on each side of the corridor, before reaching the hallway branching right and left. The other room was the fourth down the left corridor. The hotel’s heavy, musty smell reminded me of an old lady’s house that had been closed up for the winter, and I doubted that many of the rooms in between ours were being used.
The room next to the stairwell held a queen-sized bed and a roll-away, the other, two twin beds. Both rooms were “bleedin’ grotty” in Mick’s words: dark, grimy, TV-free, phoneless boxes. After touring the rooms, we stood in the hall discussing sleeping arrangements, but Rob quickly decided the matter. “I want one of the twin beds. Nothing personal, but I’m not sharing a bed with one of you guys.” He turned and started down the hallway to the room around the corner.
“I’m with Rob,” Yogi said over his shoulder as he fled down the hallway. “You’ll be partying all night. I need to get my sleep.”
“Arseholes,” Mick yelled after them.
The three of us trooped down the hallway like children disciplined and banished to their rooms. We stood in the middle of ours, looked at the two beds, and then looked at each other. “Rob’s right,” Sam said. “I ain’t sharing no bed.” We flipped a coin for the beds, which we agreed would rotate among the three of us during the week. I won the queen; Sam got the roll-away for the first night. Mick was on the floor in one of the sleeping bags we’d been smart enough to bring along.
With my victory in hand, I walked into the bathroom to use the toilet, eyeing the unfamiliar facilities. An old porcelain sink, stained around the drain, stood next to a grungy toilet that flushed with a yank of a chain hanging from the tank. Mom would not like this place, I thought, which brought a smile to my face. I gingerly pushed aside the yellowed curtain hiding the shower stall and my smile faded. “Hey! You guys gotta check this out.”
Mick and Sam pushed their way into the bathroom. I held the shower curtain back so that they could see the huge mildew spot growing in the middle of the back wall of the shower. The greenish center spread and diffused to a sort of blackish brown at the edges. The wall was starting to collapse inward at the center of the foot-wide stain.
“Somebody get a gun,” Sam said.
I let the shower curtain fall back into place. “Nice accommodations, huh?”
“Just lovely,” Mick replied, pulling his hood back over his head. “Can we go home now?”
8
I PUSHED BACK my plate of scrambled eggs and fried potatoes. I wasn’t quite full, but the bitterness of something green that had been chopped and added to the eggs dampened my appetite.
With the remnants of uppers burning away in my nervous system and no alcohol to counteract their effects, I had slept fitfully, my mind ticking off an endless list of worries. We needed to unload the equipment, set it up, run a sound-check, play through the new songs, figure out how to extend some of the solos to fill five hours, get the set list straightened out. And the hotel hadn’t helped my sleep. Floorboards creaked, and I thought I heard voices above us, but I may have been dreaming. Oh, yeah, and the room smelled like a wet shoe. Mick didn’t seem to sleep any better on the floor, tossing and turning in his sleeping bag. Only Sam succumbed to the bliss of unconsciousness, snoring softly most of the night.
During my few moments of sleep, I had dreamed of Pete Townshend and his damn perfect chord. Over and over and over he played it, shouting, Can you see the real me? Behind him stood the woman from the bar, grinning conspiratorially. I remembered straining to figure out the chord he was playing, but I couldn’t make out the tangle of fingers and strings, just like I couldn’t untangle the voices and impulses that made up the Real Me. Especially with that woman grinning at me. I was better off awake.
Now I sat in the hotel restaurant, still trying to w
ake up. I nursed my third cup of coffee, feeling like I was practicing to be old. The restaurant was empty. Maybe it had something to do with the time, almost 11:30 in the morning, but maybe it had something to do with the food.
Yogi, who had been missing all morning, joined us halfway through and ordered his second meal of the day. Before ordering, he had pulled off his plaid hunting jacket, revealing a Cal sweatshirt.
“Boy, you guys sure sleep a long time,” he said, smiling away like a kid at a carnival. “I was up at seven.” He had already said the same thing three times. Mick squinted at him over the cup of coffee he was desperately gripping between his hands.
“Yeah,” Yogi continued, his rusty crewcut looking redder than usual, “it was a beautiful morning.” I feared he was about to break into that Young Rascals song.
“Was it?” Mick asked dryly. “Sorry we slept through it.”
“Totally beautiful. The fog burned off and the sun came through. And I had a great breakfast at that coffee shop down the street on the corner. Pancakes, eggs, hash browns, orange juice. It was great. And the place was really friendly, especially my waitress.”
Yogi was absolutely wired, his eyes big and bright. He didn’t drink coffee, so it must’ve been the sugar from the pancakes he had eaten earlier and the milkshake he was now working on.
Rob, Sam, and I shoved some dollar bills and the check toward Mick. “It’s your turn. Have fun with the bear.”
ROB AND I stretched out our legs and leaned back against the hard slats of the unvarnished bench. Gazing out at the choppy ocean, we listened to the rhythmic lapping of the waves against the wooden dock. I put down my book and grasped the collar of my Army surplus jacket, pulling it closer to my throat, wishing that I’d brought something heavier and warmer. I felt the smooth metal of the dog tag against the skin of my chest.
While we killed time until dinner, the other guys were off hunting down a music store for Sam, who needed backup reeds for his sax. Mick had also mentioned something about looking for Bowie’s latest album at a record store we’d seen coming into town. They wanted to explore the town; I wanted to collect my thoughts. I knew I wouldn’t relax until we played the first night. We had spent most of the afternoon unloading the van, setting up the equipment, sound-checking, and running through some songs. The brief rehearsal had gone well, and we were all happy with the warm acoustics of the lounge, which smoothed the rough edges of our sound. We were ready to play. But now we waited. This was the part of being in the band that I hated.
Getting in Tune Page 7