Collected Stories

by Lewis Shiner

  Stan’s stomach hurt. It felt like ice had formed in there. The cold went out through his chest and down his arms and legs.

  One by one they started to fall in. Stan played a roll on the hi-hat and punched accents on the kick drum. It sounded too disco but he couldn’t think of anything else to play. It helped just to move his hands. After one verse Keven backed off and let WhiteBread take over the piano. She walked around and nodded and pointed, talking into people’s ears.

  She walked up to the drum riser and put her forearms on the railing. Stan could see the fine golden hair on her wrists. “Hi,” she said. “You’re Stan, right?”

  “Right,” he said. Somehow he kept his hands and feet moving.

  “Hi, Stan. Do you think you could give me something a little more...I don’t know. More primitive, or something?”

  “More toms, maybe?”

  “Yeah. More of a ‘Not Fade Away’ kind of feel.”

  Buddy Holly was only Stan’s all-time favorite. He nodded. He couldn’t seem to look away from her. His hands moved over to the toms, right crossing over left as he switched from the riding tom to the floor toms. It was a bit of flash left over from the solos he’d played back when he was a kid. He mixed it up with a half-beat of press roll here and there and let the accents float around.

  “That’s nice,” Keven said. She was watching his eyes and not his hands. He stared back and she didn’t look away.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “I like that a lot,” she said, and flicked the side of the high tom with her fingernail. “A whole lot.” She smiled again and walked away.

  The basic track of drums, bass, and guitar went down in two takes. It was Stan’s pride that they never had to put a click track on him to keep him steady. Keven and Rosen listened to the playback and nodded. Then they emptied the percussion closet. Stan put down a second drum track, just fills and punctuation, and the rest of the band loaded up another track with timbales, shakers, bongos and congas. Keven stood on top of a chair, clapping her hands over her head and moving with the music.

  The tape ran out. Everybody kept playing and Rosen finally came down out of the booth to break it up, tapping on the diamond face of his Rolex. Keven got down off her chair and everything went quiet. Stan took the wing-nuts off his cymbal stands and started to pack his brass away.

  “Do you sing?”

  Stan looked up. Keven was leaning on the rail again, watching him.

  “Yeah, a little bit. Harmonies and stuff.”

  “Yeah? If you’re not doing anything you could stick around for a while. I could maybe use you later on.”

  “Sure,” Stan said. “Why not?”

  Rosen wrapped the session at ten that night. Stan had spent five hours on hard plastic folding chairs, reading Entertainment Weekly and Guitar for the Practicing Musician, listening to WhiteBread and Jorge lay down their solos, waiting for Rosen and Keven to tinker with the mix. Keven found him there in the lounge.

  “You’re not doing the vocals tonight,” he said.

  She shook her head.

  “You weren’t even planning to.”

  “Probably not.” She was smiling.

  “So what am I doing here?”

  “I just said I could maybe use you. I didn’t say for what.”

  Her smile was on crooked and her jacket hung loose and open. Stan could see a small mole just below her collarbone. The skin around it was perfect, soft and golden. This isn’t happening, he thought.

  There was a second where he felt his life poised on a single balance point. Then he said, “You like Thai food?”

  He took her to the Siam on Ventura Boulevard. They left her car at the studio and took Stan’s white CRX. The night air was cool and sweet and ZZ Top was on KLOS. The pumping, pedal-point bass and Billy Gibbon’s pinched harmonics were like musk and hot sauce. Stan looked over at Keven, her hair blown back, her eyes closed, into the music. There was a stillness in the very center of Stan’s being. Time had stopped.

  Over dinner he told her about the sensitive singer-songwriter who’d gotten his start in junk food commercials. The guy always used pick-up musicians and then complained because they didn’t know his songs. The only thing he actually took along on tour with him was his oversized white Baldwin grand piano.

  The gig was in a hotel ballroom. Stan and the lead trumpet player were set up next to the piano and got to listen to his complaints through the entire first set. During the break they collected sixteen place settings of silver and laid them across the piano strings. The second set was supposed to open with “Claire de Lune” on solo piano. After the first chord the famous singer-songwriter walked offstage and just kept walking. Stan would have lost his union card over that one, only nobody would testify against him.

  Keven had done the same sort of time. After high school she’d been so broke she’d played piano in one of those red-jacket, soft-pop bands at the Hyatt Edgewater in Long Beach. When she wouldn’t put out for the lead player he kept upstaging her and sticking his guitar neck in her face. One night she reached over and detuned his strings, one at a time, in the middle of his solo on “Blue Moon.” The stage was so small he couldn’t get away from her without falling into the first row of tables. It was the last song of the night and the audience loved it. The manager of the Hyatt wanted them to keep it in the act. Instead Keven got fired and the guitarist found another blonde piano player from LA’s nearly infinite supply.

  Halfway through dinner Stan felt the calf of her leg press gently against his. He returned the pressure, ever so slightly. She didn’t move away.

  The chopsticks fit in Stan’s hands like Regal Tip 5Bs. He found himself nervously playing his empty plate and water glass. Keven put the dinner on her American Express and told him Warner’s would end up paying for it eventually.

  In the parking lot Stan walked her to the passenger side of his car and stopped with his hand on the door. His throat was suddenly dry and his heart had lost the beat. “Well,” he said. “Where to?”

  She shrugged, watched his face.

  “I have a place just over on Sunshine Terrace. If you want to, you know, have a drink. Or something.”

  “Sure,” she said. “Why not?”

  Some of the houses around him were multi-million dollar jobs, sprawling up and down the hillside, hidden behind trees and privacy fences. Stan had a one-bedroom apartment in a cluster of four, squeezed in between the mansions. Everything inside was wood—the paneling on the walls, the cabinets, the louvered doors and shutters. Through the open windows the cool summer wind rattled the leaves like tambourines.

  Keven walked slowly around the living room, touching the shelves along the one wall that wasn’t filled with windows, finally settling in an armchair and pulling her jacket around her shoulders. “I guess you’re tired of people telling you how they expected to find your clothes all over the place and junk food boxes in the corners.”

  “People have said that, yeah.”

  “I’m a slob. My place looks like somebody played Tilt-A-Whirl with the rooms. And all those goddamn stuffed animals.” Word had gotten out that Keven loved stuffed animals so her fans now handed them up to her by the dozen at Foolsgold concerts. “What’s that?”

  “It was my grandfather’s,” Stan said. It was the trunk of a sapling, six feet long, maybe an inch and a half in diameter at its thickest, the bark peeled away, feathers hanging off the end. Stan took it down from the wall and handed it to her. “It’s a coup stick.”

  “Acoustic? Like a guitar?”

  “Coup with a P. The Indians used it to help exterminate themselves. They thought there was more honor in touching an enemy with one of these than killing him. So they’d ride into a bunch of cavalry and poke them with their coup sticks and the cavalry would blow their heads off.”

  “Is that what happened to your grandfather?”

  “No, he burned out his liver drinking Sterno. He was supposed to have whacked a cop with it once. All it got him was a beatin
g and a night in jail.”

  “Why’d he do it?”

  “Life in the big city, I guess. He had to put up with whatever people did to him and he couldn’t fight back or they’d kill him. He didn’t have any options under the white man’s rules so he went back to the old rules. My old man said Grandpa was laughing when the cop dragged him away. You want a beer?”

  She nodded and Stan brought two cans of Oly out of the kitchen. Keven was rummaging through her purse. “You want a little coke with that?” she asked.

  “No thanks. You go ahead.”

  She cut two lines and snorted them through a short piece of plastic straw. “You’re a funny kind of guy, you know that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You seem like you’re just waiting for other people to catch up to you. Like you’re just waiting for somebody to come up and ask you what you want. And you’re ready to lay it all out for them.”

  “I guess maybe that’s so.”

  “So what do you want, Stan? What you do want, right this second?”

  “You really want to know? I’d like to take a shower. I really sweated it up in the studio.”

  “Go ahead,” she said. “No, really. I’m not going anywhere. We took your car, remember?”

  The heat from the water went right into his muscles and he started to relax for the first time since Darryl’s call the day before. And he wasn’t completely surprised when he heard a tapping on the glass.

  She was leaning on the sink, posed for him, when he opened the sliding door. Her hair stuck out to one side where she’d pulled her tank top over her head. Her small, soft breasts seemed to sway just a little. One smooth hip was turned toward him in a kind of unconscious modesty, not quite hiding the dark tangle of her pubic hair.

  “I guess you’re tired of people telling you how beautiful you are.”

  “Try me,” she said, and got in next to him.

  Her mouth was soft and enveloping. He could feel the pressure of her breasts and the small, exquisite muscles of her back as he held her. Her small hands moved over him and he thought he might pass out.

  Later, in bed, she showed him what she liked, how to touch her and where. It seemed to Stan as if she’d offered him a present. She had condoms in her purse. He used his fingers and his tongue and later came inside her. She was high from the cocaine and not ready to sleep. Stan was half crazy from the touch and scent of her and never wanted to sleep again. Sometime around dawn she told him she was cold and he brought her a blanket. She curled up inside his arm, building an elaborate nest out of the pillows and covers.

  They made love again in the morning. She whispered his name in his ear. Later they showered again and he made her coffee and toast.

  Stan offered her one of his T-shirts but she shook her head and dressed in yesterday’s clothes. Time seemed to pick up speed as she dressed. She looked at the clock and said, “Christ, it’s almost noon. Gregg is going to be waiting on us.”

  He stood in a circle with the other singers, blending his voice on an African chant that Keven had played them from a tape. He knew the gossip had started the minute he and Keven came in together. Rosen was curt and irritable and everybody seemed to watch Stan out of the corners of their eyes.

  Stan couldn’t have cared less.

  When the backing tracks were down, Keven disappeared into the vocal booth. Jackson packed up his horn and sat down next to Stan. “Got to make a thing over at Sunset. You working this evening?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Be cool.”

  Rosen put the playback over the speakers. The song was about break-ups and betrayals:

  ...broke down all my fences

  And left me here alone

  Picking up sticks...

  As she stretched out the last word the percussion came up in the mix, drowning her in jungle rhythm. The weight of the drums was a perfect balance for the shallow sentiment. Together they sounded to Stan like number one with a bullet.

  She nailed the vocal on the third try. When she came out of the booth she walked up to him and said, “Hey.”

  “Hey yourself. It’s going to be a monster, you know. It’s really great.”

  “You think so? Really?”

  “Really,” he said. She brushed his cheek with her hand.

  “Listen,” he said.

  “No. I can’t. I’ve got a dinner date with Warner’s tonight. Gregg’s dubbing down a cassette and we’re going to play it for them. So I’m tied up until late.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  She started to walk away and then came back.

  “Do you sleep with your door locked?”

  He managed to fall asleep. It was an effort of will that surprised even him. When he heard the door open it was three AM The door closed again and he heard a slightly drunken laugh and a gentle bumping of furniture. He saw a darker shadow in the doorway of the bedroom. There was a rustle of clothing. It seemed to Stan to be the single most erotic moment of his life.

  She pulled back the covers and slid on top of him. Her skin was soft and cool and rich with perfume. When she kissed him he tasted expensive alcohol on her breath.

  “How were the Warner Brothers?” he whispered.

  “They loved me. I’m going to be a star.”

  “You’re already a star.”

  “Shhhhhh,” she said.

  He opened his eyes in the morning and saw her fully dressed. “I’ve got to go,” she said. It was only nine o’clock. “I’ll call you.”

  It was only later that he realized the session was over. He’d never been to her place, he didn’t even have a phone number where he could call her.

  It was like he’d never had empty time to fill before. He spent most of the afternoon on the concrete stoop in front of his apartment, listening to Buddy Holly on his boombox. A mist had blown in from the Pacific and not burned off. His hands were nervous and spun his drumsticks through his fingers, over and over.

  She called late that night. He should have been asleep but wasn’t. There was a lot of traffic noise in the background and he had trouble hearing her. “I’ll be by tomorrow night,” she said. “We can go to a movie or something.”

  “Keven...”

  “I have to go. See you tomorrow, okay?”

  “Okay,” Stan said.

  She was sitting on the stoop when he came home from a session the next afternoon. She was wrapped in a shawl and the clouds overhead all seemed to be in a hurry to get somewhere.

  She let him kiss her, but her lips were awkward. “I can’t make tonight,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  “Something came up. We’ll try it another night, okay?”

  “Sure,” Stan said. “Why don’t you give me your number?”

  She stood up, took his hands as if to keep him from touching her. “I’ll call you.” She stopped at the gate. “I’m crazy, you know.” She wouldn’t look at him.

  “I don’t care.”

  “I’ll call you,” she said again, and ran across the street to her bright red MG. Stan held up one hand as she drove away but she didn’t look back.

  After two days he started to look for her. Darryl reluctantly gave him Gregg Rosen’s unlisted number. Stan asked Rosen for Keven’s phone number and he just laughed. “Are you crazy, or what?”

  “She won’t care if you give it to me. I’m the guy from the CSR session—”

  “I know who you are,” Rosen said, and hung up.

  He left a call for her at the Warner offices in Burbank and with Foolsgold’s agent. He tried all the K. Staceys in all the LA area codes.

  He called Rosen again. “Look,” Rosen said. “Are you stupid, or what? Do you think you’re the only kid in town that’s had a piece of Keven Stacey’s ass? End to end you guys would probably stretch to Tucson. Do you think she doesn’t know you’ve been calling? Now are you going to quit hassling me or are you going to fuck over what little career you may have left?”

&nb
sp; The check for Keven’s session came in the mail. It was on CSR’s account and Darryl had signed it, but there was no note in the envelope with it. On the phone Darryl said, “Face it, bud, you’ve been an asshole. Gregg Rosen is way pissed off. You’re going to have to kick back for a while, pay some dues. Give it a couple months, maybe you can cruise back.”

  “Fuck you too, Darryl.”

  LA dried up. Stan hit the music stores and the musicians’ classifieds. Most of the ads were drummers looking for work. The union offered him a six-month tour of the southern states with a revival of Bye Bye Birdie.

  Jesus, Stan thought. Show tunes. Rednecks. Every night another Motel 6. I’m too old for this.

  The phone rang.

  Stan snatched it up.

  “Stan. This is Dave Harris. Remember me?”

  Harris was another session drummer, nothing special. He’d filled in for Stan a couple of times.

  “Yeah, Dave. What’s up?”

  “I was, uh, I was just listening to a cassette of that Keven Stacey song? I was just wondering, like, what the hell were you doing there? I can’t follow that part at all.”

  “What are you doing with a cassette of that song?”

  “Uh oh.”

  “C’mon, Dave, spill it.”

  “They didn’t tell you? Warner’s going to use it as the first single from the album. So they’re getting ready to shoot the video. They didn’t even tell you? Oh man, that really sucks.”

  “Yeah, it sucks all right.”

  “Really Stan, I didn’t know, man. I swear. They told me you couldn’t make the gig.”

  “Yeah, okay, Dave, hang on, all right? I’m trying to figure something out, here.”

  Stan showed up at the Universal lot at six in the morning. He cranked down his window and smelled the dampness in the air. Birds were chattering somewhere in the distance. Stan had the pass he’d gotten from Dave Harris. He showed it to the guard and the guard gave him directions to the Jungle Lot.