Getting in Tune

by Roger L. Trott

  Rob, sitting cross-legged on his bed in his boxer shorts with a copy of Rolling Stone, looked up and grinned. Elton John, wearing a silly sweater and sillier eyeglasses, also grinned back at us from the magazine cover.

  I surveyed the room with a surge of pride. The destroyed bed, the littered floor, the feathers floating in the air from our sleeping bags: We were truly becoming more like the Who every day.

  Sam crossed over to the remains of Yogi’s bed and peered down at him. “Where are those animal cookies? I’m still hungry.” He leaned over and grabbed the paper bag that Yogi had stuffed under the sheets.

  “I give up.” Yogi sighed and pulled a pillow over his head.

  After taking a handful of cookies, Sam handed the bag to me, and I took a couple before handing it back. They were the good kind of animal cookies: iced pink and white elephants, rhinos, and bears. We stood in the middle of the room, munched the cookies, and looked at each other. Going to sleep now didn’t seem possible. What to do, what to do?

  Sam’s face suddenly took on a demonic look, an evil grin emerging from beneath his bloodshot eyes. “Let’s go out on the balcony.”

  Since he had the cookies, I had no choice but to follow him out into the cold. Sam leaned forward against the rail of the balcony and shielded his eyes with his hand, like a sea captain searching for dry land. “Yeah,” he said to himself.

  I wrapped my arms around myself to keep warm. “ ‘Yeah’, what?”

  He turned toward me. “You know, I wouldn’t be so pissed at Mick if it wasn’t my turn to sleep in the big bed. But after what he’s doing in it tonight, I’ll never be able to sleep there again.” And then he grinned. “It’s payback time.”

  He looked into the bag of cookies and selected what appeared to be a pink frosted bear. I thought he was going to eat it, but he instead took careful aim and flung the cookie in the direction of the room window. The pink missile bounced off the brick wall about two feet left of the window.

  With a sense of loss, I watched as the shattered frosted fragments of the cookie dropped into the shadows of the parking lot. Sam pulled another cookie out of the bag.

  “What are you—”

  The cookie went flying toward the window.

  Smack! This one landed squarely in the center of the lower window pane.

  “Hah!” Sam grabbed my arm. “Down, down!” We knelt on the platform and watched the window through the vertical iron bars of the balcony. Nothing happened.

  “Hmm,” he murmured. “I thought that’d get his attention for sure.” He peered into the cookie bag. This time he pulled out two, one pink and one white. He licked each one and then pressed them together, twisting and turning the cookies until the sticky icing held. “O.K.,” he said, surveying his creation in the moonlight. Once again he wound up and flung the cookie bomb at the window.

  Whack! This one bounced off the top pane. For a second I thought he’d cracked the window, but I couldn’t tell for sure. We knelt again on the balcony, watching the window. After a few seconds, the window blinds started moving. They parted and Mick’s eyes and forehead appeared. Moonlight framed his pale face, a face that turned one way and then the other. Without his glasses, I knew Mick would never see us, especially in the crisscrossed shadows created by the railing and the balcony above us. Mick’s face disappeared back into the room.

  Sam was choking with laughter. “That’s ... that’s”—he finally caught his breath—“that’s worth another beer.”

  “Good idea. I’ll get a couple.” I stepped back into the room.

  Rob was still sitting on the bed. “What’re you guys doin’ out there? What’s so funny?”

  “Sam’s launched an attack on Mick. A cookie attack.”

  “Good Lord,” Yogi murmured from beneath his pillow.

  “A cookie attack?” Rob looked puzzled. “This I gotta see.” He grabbed his coat and pulled it on over his T-shirt and boxers. I went out with him, a beer in each hand. Sam was at the rail again, readying himself for another attack. The cookie went sailing through the night, this time missing.

  “Wide right,” Sam declared. I gave him a beer.

  “You hit it yet?” Rob asked.

  “Oh, yeah. Twice. But I’ve missed the last three times. It’s a pretty good toss to that window. Guess that’s why I was never a quarterback.” He took a long swallow of beer. “I’ve got an idea. Let’s all try at the same time. One of us is bound to hit the fucker.”

  He handed out cookies: a white elephant to me, a pink camel to Rob, and a pink bear for himself. We braced ourselves on the small balcony, and Sam counted down the launch. On “blastoff,” we heaved the cookies. I heard two smacks against the brick wall, but the third cookie found its mark, rattling off the window. I knew it was mine.

  “Down!” I whispered. We all knelt, jockeying for position. This time it didn’t take long. The blinds shot up and Mick’s face appeared at the window. He seemed to be struggling to put on his glasses.

  “Oh-shit, oh-shit, oh-shit,” Sam whispered.

  Mick finally got the glasses perched on his nose, and his head jerked around as he searched for the source of the attack, training most of his attention on the parking lot below. I thought Rob’s bare white legs might give us away, but Mick apparently couldn’t see us or didn’t know where to look.

  Rita’s face appeared briefly at the window before both faces disappeared. This time Mick left the blinds up as they retreated into the darkened room.

  “We got the bastard that time!” Sam said. “Let’s let ’em stew.”

  We sat on the balcony for a few minutes drinking our beers. With my back against the wall, I glanced across at Sam, who was leaning against the balcony railing, a look of deep concentration on his face as he apparently contemplated his next attack on Mick. Beside me sat Rob, smiling to himself in an amused kind of way while he peered into the bag of cookies to see how many were left.

  Despite the bitter cold, I felt myself grinning, realizing how great it was to be in a band. What other job provided you with friends who went with you everyplace, friends who loved the same things you loved, friends who would go crazy with you when the time was right? And then, in a moment of mental clarity, the good feeling evaporated as I remembered that Rob was on his way out.

  I sipped my beer and looked upward at the gloomy night sky.

  Sam finished his beer first, crumpling the can between his hands. “It’s time to finish the bastard off,” he said, standing.

  He took the bag of cookies from Rob and held it up to his face, studying the contents. “We’re runnin’ outta ammo. I think the shotgun approach is our best chance.”

  He gave Rob a few cookies, handed me five, which were reduced to four after I ate one, and then emptied the remains of the bag into his right hand.

  “O.K., this is the plan.” Sam’s tone was hushed. “On the count of four, we throw all the cookies at once. You got that?” He looked at the two of us.

  “You’re not gonna ask us to synchronize our watches, are you?” Rob asked.

  Sam ignored him. “All at once, right?”

  We nodded, exchanging looks of determination, our feet set, right hands bulging with cookies. “Ready?” Sam asked. “One, two, three ... four!”

  I heaved mine as far as I could. Then I gazed out, where I saw, with a mixture of shock and glee, that Mick’s head was sticking out of the window, something that none of us had noticed as Sam counted down. Mick was looking down into the parking lot, apparently unaware of what was coming at him from our direction. With the sky raining cookies, I held my breath, but not for long. The little iced projectiles hit everywhere, including the brick wall on both sides of the window and the pane of glass above Mick’s head.

  His face was right there, and at that moment the last of the cookies came flying down through the night air, smacking Mick right in the middle of his forehead. His hands flew up, his head pulled back, and his glasses went sliding off sideways into the night.

  Knowing
that Mick would see us for sure, I opened the door to the room and we all tried to shove through at the same time. Rob bumped me from behind and I slid on the nylon sleeping bags lying in a heap on the floor. We all went down in a convulsed mound of twisted nylon.

  “Good God!” Yogi exclaimed from beneath his pillow. “Is there no end to this?”

  I gazed across the mound of sleeping bags at Rob, who looked back at me with a lopsided grin.

  “You’re gonna miss this,” I said to him.

  18

  FROM WHERE I sat in the backseat of the station wagon outside of Pam’s Cup O’ Coffee Café, Yogi’s round head was a sickening sight. It wasn’t so much that the view of his head was particularly nauseating, although it was a little too circular to be human; it was just that everything had been making me sick today, from my coffee-and-cigarette breakfast at Pam’s to the smell of our bedroom when Sam and I had finally gotten into it earlier in the afternoon. And now this. Why, at Yogi’s urging, we’d ever agreed to dinner at Evangeline’s was well beyond me, especially considering our looming date with the Hell’s Angels in a few hours.

  I hung my head out the window and breathed in the soggy air, opening a bloodshot eye every few seconds to watch for Evangeline at the front of the café. A fat lady walking a pink poodle drifted down the sidewalk, saw me, and scurried by.

  I shifted back inside. “Yogi, move your head.”

  He turned around. “What’d I do?”

  “Nothing. Just move your big head outta my way.”

  “God, Daniel,” Rob said from the other end of the backseat, “take some more aspirin or something. And maybe you should’ve eaten breakfast.”

  I grunted back at him and sagged into the seat. What good was it having a hangover if you couldn’t bitch about it?

  Sam glanced back at me from the driver’s seat. “I guess we shouldn’t have had those last two beers, huh, Daniel?”

  Yogi turned and handed me a small paper bag. “It’s half a sandwich. It might make you feel better.”

  I pulled out the sandwich and unrolled the paper wrapping. Roast beef. It smelled O.K. I carefully took a bite. Not bad. “Someone got a Coke?” I asked. Yogi handed me one out of another bag he had on the front seat.

  “Where do you get all that food, Yogi?” Rob asked from beside me. “You’re like a walking grocery store.”

  Sam leaned forward to look toward the café. “Shit,” he said, “where is she?” Evangeline had told us that she’d be off by five, but we’d been waiting in front of the café for twenty minutes. “Yogi, go see what’s keeping her.”

  To my relief, the back of Yogi’s strangely balloonlike head slid from view. I closed my eyes, wondering once again how the Who survived their nightly hangovers as I nibbled on the sandwich. But my eyes soon reopened at the sound of approaching footsteps, and I saw Mick’s cocky face coming down the sidewalk toward us. He slid into the seat vacated by Yogi.

  “How’s it goin’, mates?” Mick said, flashing us a cheesy smirk. “Get a good night’s sleep last night? Mine was about perfect, thanks to lovely Rita. By the way, sorry you two had to do without your pillows.”

  Glances flew around the station wagon with the realization that Mick apparently didn’t know who had launched the cookie attack on him.

  “So where’ve you been?” Sam asked, trying to keep a straight face.

  We hadn’t seen Mick all day. He was gone by the time Sam and I returned to our room to shower and change clothes following our late breakfast. The bed had looked like a war zone: covers and sheets all over the place. Sam had left a note, incorporating a few choice phrases, on a stained spot in the middle of the bed, telling him where we’d be.

  “I’ve had an absolutely splendid day,” Mick said. “Took Rita out for a bit of lunch. Then I walked the lass home.”

  “Home?” Rob said. “Is she old enough to have her own place?”

  The smug look faded. “Well, not exactly. She still lives with her mum and dad.”

  “You mean you just walked her up to the front door? You’ve got balls.”

  “Yeah,” Sam said, “I can just see it: ‘Nice to meetcha, Mr. and Mrs. Jones. Here’s your daughter.... What’s that? Oh, yeah, she really puts out.’ ”

  Mick scowled. “You think I’m daft? I left her at the corner near her house.”

  I rallied my strength. “So, Mick, how old is she?”

  He didn’t answer. Instead, he gazed out the car window toward the front of the café.

  Sam elbowed him. “Yeah, Mick, come on. How old is she?”

  He mumbled something into the window.

  “What?” we all asked.

  “Bloody hell. Sixteen, O.K.?”

  Sam let out a howl. “Sixteen? Oh, man, your ass is grass. You ever heard of statutory rape?”

  “She won’t tell anybody.”

  “Sure, Mick.” Sam nodded, his head moving up and down with exaggeration. “I hope it was worth it.”

  The smug smile returned. “Aye, it was worth it. She had a lovely time.”

  Groans filled the car, but Sam’s expression suddenly changed. “Hey, Mick,” he said, glancing back at me, “sorry about the pillow thing. Hope we didn’t mess up your timing.”

  “My timing?” Mick looked sideways at him. “What’re you talking about?”

  “Well, we felt kinda bad intruding on you. I mean, you’re kinda known as the Rembrandt of love. We wouldn’t wanta screw up one of your masterpieces, right, Daniel?”

  “Right,” I answered.

  Sam started in on him again. “So the rest of the night went pretty smoothly, huh? No interruptions?”

  “Why d’ya ask?”

  “Oh, I dunno. You know, I’ve heard there’s ghosts in the hotel....” He finally broke out laughing.

  Mick’s face shifted from suspicion to realization. “You yobs! You were the ones, weren’t you? I knew it. You almost scared Rita away.” He looked around at our laughing faces and then threw himself back against his seat.

  “They were only animal cookies,” I pointed out. “We thought you and Rita might be hungry after all that activity.”

  “You too?” Mick said.

  “So what happened to your glasses?” Rob asked.

  “They’re O.K.,” Mick replied glumly, “no thanks to you yobs. I found them in a dumpster in the parking lot.” He looked around at the three of us, shaking his head and breathing out an exaggerated sigh. Then he went silent. Rob leaned forward and glanced past me toward the café. I followed his eyes and saw Yogi and Evangeline coming out the door. We all piled out of the car, except Sam, who stayed behind the steering wheel.

  “Hi, guys,” Evangeline said. Her clean dark hair was pulled back; her genial face looked bright and cheerful. I saw her name tag still pinned to her waitress outfit. “Thanks for picking me up. Sorry I’m late.”

  We played musical chairs, with Mick and Yogi angling to see who would sit next to Evangeline. I didn’t care; I just wanted to be next to an open window. I returned to the back seat, and Rob got in on the other side. Evangeline slid in next to Sam, and before Yogi could react, Mick grabbed the seat beside her.

  Yogi stood on the sidewalk for a few seconds, and then he tried to slide in next to me. “No way,” I told him. “If you don’t want your sandwich back, I suggest you sit in the middle.”

  Yogi immediately climbed back out of the car and waited for me to get out before sliding in beside Rob. I got back in and shut the door.

  Sam turned the ignition. “Everybody ready?”

  “Ready, Dad,” Rob answered.

  Sam popped a Fleetwood Mac tape into the eight-track and we were off.

  Evangeline guided us south through town. I watched the passing scenery, soon seeing Kitten’s apartment complex slide by, reminding me of my appointment with her after tonight’s show. A few blocks beyond, in an area confused by a jumble of small subdivisions and older strip malls, Mick turned his head, caught my eye, grinned, and nodded toward an unusually bright bl
ue house sitting beneath a streetlight on a corner. “Rita,” he mouthed.

  I ignored him, cracked my window, and rested my chin on top of my forearm on the window edge. Closing my eyes and yawning, my ears popped. Above the sound of the wind whipping by my ears, I heard Evangeline’s voice.

  “I don’t know how long I’ll stay here,” she said in response to a question from Sam. “I used to think I needed to stay near my hometown because my mother was alone, but she remarried, so there’s nothing holding me here. But so far I really can’t afford to leave. And where would I go, especially by myself?”

  I opened my eyes and looked over at her. In the green glow of the dashboard I could see her simple but sweet face, a little puzzled but determined. The air through my open window blew long strands of her dark hair across her face. Yogi leaned forward, putting his head almost between hers and Mick’s. “You could come to California,” he said.

  Evangeline smiled back at him. “I’ve thought about it, but I’m not sure my car would make it. That’s why I usually take the bus to work. Besides, I like the mountains and the ” ocean.

  “We’ve got mountains,” Yogi said, “and we’ve got lakes where we live. Lots of lakes.”

  “Maybe someday, Edward. But tell me more.”

  I stopped listening. My stomach churned as the car swung around a corner and chugged up a hill, then ran halfway down another before pulling over in front of a large Victorian.

  “Lovely place,” Mick said, pulling himself out of the car. “You live here alone?”

  She followed him from the car. “It’s a fourplex,” she answered, searching her purse for keys. “I rent one of the units.”

  We followed Evangeline around the left side of the house to a porch. She flicked on a light as we filed through into a small living room alive with the warm smell of incense. A dining area and kitchen were located immediately to the left.

  “Make yourselves comfortable,” she said. “I’ll be right back.” She went through the living room into a back bedroom separated from the rest of the apartment by a rainbow curtain of beads.

  At first glance, the living room was notable only for its lack of furniture and haphazard arrangement of spider plants. A greenish couch and a simple end table were set against the left-hand wall. Opposite the couch, a cheap stereo and a few record albums were stacked on brick-and-board shelves resting on the brown shag carpet. A small television sitting on a metal stand in the corner, with a stained-glass swag lamp hanging above, completed the furnishings. But on closer inspection, it became clear that the room held much more.