“You can.”
“No way. I don’t know the lyrics. You do it.”
I shook my head. My voice out there? Uh-oh. “I don’t know ’em either,” I told them.
“Maybe we can just jam,” Sam said. “Do something over a blues pattern.”
“How long are we gonna get away with that?” I asked.
Sam shrugged.
“I know what we can do,” Yogi said, brightening. “Let’s play your songs, Daniel. You know the words.”
All eyes turned to me.
I shrank back, my stomach churning. “Fuck that. I’m not the singer.”
“You are now,” Rob said. “Either that or our stuff gets trashed, and I ain’t going back out there to dodge bottles.”
“C’mon, Daniel,” Sam said. “We know the changes enough to fake our way through. Right, Rob?”
He nodded. “I can watch his hands if I get lost.”
I looked at Rob, finding it hard to believe that he would go back onstage, even if I was the one singing. “You’re really willing to do this?” I asked him.
Rob stared at me for a long moment before his face shifted into a twisted grin, the kind of mirthless expression I imagined you’d see on someone going to the gallows. “If you’ve got the guts to do your songs, I’m willing to back you up,” he said. “I guess I’m calling your bluff, Daniel. Weren’t you the one who told me last week that we’re all in this together? It’s up to you now, man.”
Sam and Yogi nodded in agreement. I stared back at them and realized my choices were down to what Nita had called our little secret. It was punk or nothing. Could it save my life? I hoped so. But the thought of being up there alone, with no control, nothing to hide behind, scared me shitless. I instinctively searched my pocket for the vial, but even if I swallowed a pill, it wouldn’t kick in for at least twenty minutes. No, I was on my own.
“This is crazy,” I said, breaking off eye contact. “I can’t do it.”
Rob shook his head and took a step toward the side of the stage. “I’m not taking a bullet for you.”
“Wait.” I took one last look back at Mick, who was still flat out on the floor with Evangeline and Nita beside him, and forced down the cold gut fear. “O.K., let’s do that last one I brought in. Thrill.”
“That crazy thing you wrote?” Rob’s eyes narrowed. “You sure?”
“Yeah.”
He took a long look into the lounge. “O.K.” A pause. “What are the chords?”
I grabbed my guitar, turned down the volume, and went down on a knee. The feel of the strings calmed me. “You remember? It starts on an E and walks down in half steps to the D. See? And then it drops to the B, slides up to the G, then drops to an F-sharp. Then it repeats. That’s the whole thing.” I played the elemental chord progression quickly. “I’ll start it out, and you can come in on the turnaround.”
Rob rubbed his forehead and blinked at me.
I saw his confusion and my momentary resolve faded. “This is never gonna work.”
“No.” Rob looked again at the Hell’s Angels lined up against the edge of the stage. “It’s all major bar chords, fifths, right? I can follow you.”
“I hope you’re right.” I looked at Yogi. “Remember, this thing goes fast, so hit everything as hard as you can, and above all else, make sure it doesn’t drag.”
Yogi’s head went up and down in quick, jerky motions. I realized he was still cross-topped up, but at least he was energized. He tapped his sticks, fast. “I’m ready.”
Hearing the madness in the background, I looked around at their faces, feeling the acid eating at my gut. “Let’s do it.”
Our huddle broke up. Seeing us back on the stage, the crowd quieted and someone cut the juke box. Bikers at the edge of the stage, all still in their leather jackets despite the steamy atmosphere, trained their eyes on us. One of them, a hulking dude with a red bandanna draped over his skull, caught my eye and with a glare flicked the stub of a lit cigarette toward one of our monitors. The guy standing beside him followed the arc of the cigarette with a gob of spit. They both missed the speaker, but they made their point.
I turned my back, cranked up the gain on my amp, hit a chord, then adjusted the gain upward again. I needed to be as loud and distorted as I could; something had to cover up my vocals. I slowly ran through the chords to Thrill once just to make sure I remembered them. For a moment, a surge of crazy hope ran through me. Maybe the song would work with these violent rebels without a cause. Somehow I knew how they felt; somehow I knew that the song, written during one of my darkest periods following Kevin’s death, spoke to the alienation that connected me to these people. Maybe they would feel the connection, too.
Someone kicked at the front of the stage. I looked over my shoulder and saw the bandanna guy grinning at me. “Where’s the little homo?” he growled, his grin freezing me in place.
I had to force my eyes away, my neck stiff, vertebrae grinding. Christ, I had no connection to these people. What was I thinking? The floor of the stage continued to vibrate as the biker kicked again and again at the plywood, sending splinters of sparks through my head. Was the Marquee like this? How much shit did Townshend have to take from the crowd? Did the Who get bottles thrown at them, have people spitting at them?
“What the fuck you playin’ next?” one of the bikers yelled.
“Better be Sabbath,” came from somewhere.
Oh, shit. My throat, dry and tight, hurt like a son of a bitch, but we couldn’t stall them any longer. I took a gulp of water, looked across the stage at Rob to make sure he was ready, and then turned to Yogi. “Keep it fast!”
I hit the first chord of Thrill as hard as I could and literally felt the displaced air rush from my amp and fly past my ears. I saw the heads of the bikers jerk back. My eyes jumped to the neck of the guitar, to my hand moving up and down the spaces between the frets, blocking down on the buzz-saw chords. At the same time, my mind leaped ahead, trying to remember the words of the first verse.
With a cymbal crash, Yogi was in, hard and fast, no syncopation, no accents, every beat smacked hard. He was soon joined by Sam’s tambourine. And then at the next turnaround, Rob’s bass slid into the pattern. For a moment, we were all in together, but halfway through the chord progression Rob missed a note and stopped. I angled to show him the neck of my guitar, the position of my index finger on the top string, and he nodded, locked back in, and had the pattern sorted out by the third pass through.
With the band roaring behind me, I edged up to the mike, glass from the broken bottles crunching underfoot. A larger crowd, now dotted with a few women, had gathered at the foot of the stage. Heads, only a few feet lower than my own, were pumping in time. The stage lights shifted from blue to yellow, the faces before us became a blur, and I could no longer see beyond them. I damped the strings with my palm, closed my eyes, and suddenly saw the words, just as I’d written them in my bedroom back home. I opened my bone-dry mouth, ready to go, but nothing came out. I gasped for air.
Keep breathing, keep breathing, keep breathing.
The chord progression worked its way around again. I took another deliberate gulp of air, swallowed, and told the words to come. This time, through the monitors, I heard my voice out in front of me even before I seemingly formed the first word.
The real me
Ain’t the one you see.
The real me
I don’t dare let free.
The voices tellin’ me to kill
To keep the thrill alive.
It was all around me. My disembodied voice was bouncing off the walls. I was shocked by the power, the exhilaration, of it. I’d blown out so much air a dizzying wave passed over me. I opened my eyes and sucked in what my lungs could hold.
Sam punched the lights back to blue, and I could see again. Yogi kept the beat pounding, but people weren’t dancing yet. But they were moving—milling, heaving, surging forward. I stepped back from the mike and glanced around the stage. Sam and Rob were
still back near the bass amp.
The chord progression wrapped around again and I put my lips to the mike.
They killed my brother
They messed up my mother
I’m lookin’ for another.
To help me recover.
And I’m poppin’ pills
To keep the thrill alive.
I spun away from the mike, stumbling back toward Yogi, powering the chords, windmilling as much noise as I could out of the Strat. My eyes caught Nita, still standing in the dark area behind my amp where it was relatively safe, and a thought darted through my head. This was it: She was seeing the Real Me, pilled-up, screaming out things I wouldn’t even tell my best friend.
We stayed on the chord pattern, picked up speed and volume, five times, six times through. With no clear arrangement, I just kept pumping the chords, letting Yogi, crashing cymbals and firing bass drum beats, virtually solo over the top. He built the volume and momentum up to an impossibly high level, then dropped it, locking back in. Disoriented, I careened toward the mike stand, the sea of bodies at the stage’s edge pulling me toward them. The words of the last verse moved to my mouth. I took a lungful of the Mai Tai’s searing air, closed my eyes, and let it go.
The real me
The voices all agree.
Gotta let him be,
Can’t set him free.
There’s nothing left that’s real
To keep the thrill alive.
My eyes, sensing motion near my face, flew open. Three feet in front of me, I saw a clenched black-gloved fist pumping upward, beating at the air in rhythm to the beat. And at the bottom of that fist was Butch, dirty beard, red scar, tattoos. Beside him was Whiskey, her rosy bosom heaving up and down.
Butch’s fist came flying up again. “Fuckin’ A!” he screamed at me, spit flying, eyes huge. “This is righteous shit!”
Shocked, I stepped back. He screamed it out again, this time to the bikers around him, and I watched as more clinched fists, one at a time, then all together, sprouted and filled the air like a field of black-headed poppies.
My mouth fell open.
22
NITA LEANED BACK against the outside wall of the Mai Tai Hotel and pulled her jacket cuffs down over her hands. “Man, I’ve never seen anything like that,” she said, “not even in San Francisco.”
I tried to smile, but all I could do was shake my head. “One minute I thought they were gonna kill me, and the next everything changed.” I cupped my hands and lit a cigarette. “Pretty amazing.”
Except for the motorcycles parked along the curb, the street and sidewalk were deserted. Fog had crept in tight around the hotel, making it seem as if we were alone in a cocoon of brick and mist, and it was silky quiet except for the distant static hiss, like a seashell echo, in my ears. I checked my watch. We had ten minutes left before the next set.
Nita hugged herself for warmth. “Do you remember what I asked you at the party?”
I thought back, but it was a long time ago. “As I recall, you asked me a lot of things.”
“You know, about why you play music?”
My tortured explanation now sprang to mind. “Barely.”
“Well, now I really know why you do it.” Her brown eyes sharpened. “And I was right.”
I stared at her. “What’re you talking about?”
“Transcendency, Daniel.”
“What?” I laughed, but I clearly remembered what she had said, even if I hadn’t understood it.
From behind a slightly parted veil of hair, her eyes burned back at me. “You know what I mean. You must’ve felt it, too.”
I stopped laughing. And then I understood. I wasn’t crazy. At least, not entirely. Minutes earlier I had stood at the microphone in a world reduced to my ears and my eyes, a collapsed little world where nothing else existed except me, the crowd, and the incredible noise pulsing around us. And all those strangers—people I had feared moments earlier—were taking my song, raising it up with their hands, holding on to it, and, by extension, holding on to me. I pulled in a deep breath. So that was it. We’d all been linked by that chord, that Pete Townshend Universal Chord, and for that moment it was perfect.
And Nita understood it.
She reached out and poked my arm. “You’re a star.”
I rolled the cigarette between my fingers. The perfection of the moment, held together by Nita, me, and my music, couldn’t last, I feared, but I smiled at her. “I’m just glad we survived.”
“Survived?” She giggled. “You were like the Ramones up there. The energy was almost scary.”
“Well, Mick can take it from here. I don’t have any songs left.” I was almost disappointed that Mick had recovered by the end of our set.
She poked my arm again and tucked her chin. “So what was that song about?”
“Which one?”
“The first one—what do you call it?”
“Thrill.”
“Yeah.” She leaned toward me. “I couldn’t hear all the words clearly, but there was something about your brother.” She stopped, and her eyes came up, steady on my face. “I didn’t know you even had a brother.”
Pulling in a painful line of cigarette smoke, I thought back to when I had written that song, sitting on my bed at home, with Kevin’s beat-up acoustic guitar with the nylon strings. I remembered it being dark, late in the afternoon or at night in the dead of winter, months and months after Kevin died, around the day my father left. From Kevin’s gentle folk guitar this venomous song had emerged, spilling out like it had been there all along, waiting for me to find it.
And I had found it. I had let it out into the light, and this piece of me had been embraced. My brain still couldn’t quite get around the idea that maybe I could open myself up. This realization thrilled me, but it also made me nervous.
I dropped the cigarette and stubbed it out with my foot. Could the moment last? I knew it couldn’t. But, then, this was Nita. Maybe I could tell her. I reached out for one of her hidden hands. “My brother, Kevin—”
I heard the scraping sound of the hotel’s front door being pushed open. Nita’s head turned, and I followed her eyes to see Kitten standing at the top of the steps, arms crossed, staring at us.
Kitten gestured down toward Nita. “Who’s this?”
Caught off-guard, I didn’t answer. Kitten’s eyes bounced between the two of us. “I said, Who’s this?” She came down the steps toward us.
I moved into the space between the two women. “Her name’s Nita. She’s a friend of mine from home.”
Nita came up beside me and hooked my arm.
Kitten stopped and smiled, aiming her sulfurous expression straight at Nita. “Oh. You’re Daniel’s girlfriend, huh?”
“That’s right,” Nita said. I glanced at her, startled by the forcefulness of her answer.
“So, Daniel,” Kitten said, shifting her gaze to me, “Nita’s why you’re busy tonight.”
“Look—”
“You didn’t tell me about Nita, Daniel.” In her mouth, Nita’s name became a dirty, bitten-off thing.
“Why don’t you leave us alone?” I said, knowing there was little hope that she would.
She ignored me and turned back to Nita. “You just get in?”
I felt Nita’s grip tighten on my arm. “This afternoon,” she answered, leaning into me and looking up with an expression that asked, Who’s this?
Kitten threw off a throaty laugh. “Well, you’re too late, honey. I’ve had Daniel to myself all week.”
“Shut up,” I said to her. I felt Nita stiffen beside me. “She doesn’t have anything to do with our arrangement.”
Kitten pulled a pack of Camels from her jacket pocket and tapped out a cigarette. “‘Our arrangement’? Is that what you’re calling it?”
“I know what you’re doing, Kitten. Just cut it out.”
She looked at Nita. “Did he tell you about”—she struck a match and lit the cigarette—“‘our arrangement’? Did he tell y
ou we ... sealed it with a kiss?”
Nita’s grip loosened. “What’s she talking about, Daniel?”
I pulled her toward the steps. “Let’s go back inside.”
But Kitten backed up and stayed between us and the door. “We’ve been having a pretty good time, haven’t we, kiddo?”
“She’s lying.” I looked at Nita, but I knew that she’d see that I was the one not telling all of the truth.
Kitten’s smile grew wider. “Good try, Daniel.”
Nita pulled away from me and looked at me with cloudy, accusing eyes. “You’ve been with her?”
“Look, Nita, I was going to tell—”
“Don’t worry, girl,” Kitten interrupted. “I checked out his equipment. It’s all still working.”
Nita took three steps backward down the sidewalk away from me. I went after her. “She’s exaggerating,” I said. “Believe me.”
From behind me, Kitten laughed again. “Why would I ‘exaggerate’?” She flicked her fingers around that last word.
Nita took another step backward. “I saw the way she looked at you from the dance floor.”
“Shit,” I muttered to myself, carefully moving toward her. “Let’s talk about it, Nita.”
Her eyes suddenly flashed fury. “Then it’s true,” she said, jerking at one of her sleeves. “You—damn you! You’re ... you’re just like my father.” She turned and, pulling her keys from her purse, headed down the sidewalk toward the corner.
“Nita!” I started after her. In the glare of the streetlights, I thought I saw tears glistening on her cheeks.
She ran across the street. “Leave me alone!”
I stopped at the corner and watched her slide into an orange Datsun 280Z. The car lurched away from the curb and spun off. I followed her taillights until they grew small and disappeared into the darkness.
When I returned to the front of the hotel, Kitten was still there, standing on the bottom step, smiling with dark triumph, the vile smell of her Charlie perfume all around her.
“Get the fuck out of my way,” I said, restraining an urge to punch her.
Her smile took on a wicked twist. “Kiddo, you think I’m gonna let some amateur screw up my gig?”
Getting in Tune Page 21