The Paradise Gig

by Laurence Shames

  “Don’t let it get around, okay? But I wonder what else was going on. Something they said maybe?”

  “I don’t think they talked much.”

  “Not much, fine. But you drove them thirty miles, probably with traffic. Probably took close to an hour. Does anybody sit in a taxi for a whole hour without saying anything? I doubt it.”

  “Well, okay, I guess they talked a little. But not to me. Just between themselves. I was listening to the radio.”

  “And not eavesdropping?”

  “Who? Me?”

  “Come on, Cooch, have you ever known a cabbie who didn’t eavesdrop? How the hell else do you guys put up with the boredom?”

  Cooch shrugged and his scalp crinkled up at the edges of his bald spot. “Okay, so I listen in. But I can’t remember every conversation from every ride for the last sixteen years or however the hell long it’s been.”

  “I get it. But see if you can remember something from this one. Anything. It just might turn out to be important.”

  “Important? Like why?”

  Pete twitched his tennis bag higher up onto his shoulders, took a quick look from side to side, and lowered his voice a notch. “This Mondesi guy. I don’t know what his deal is, but he seems to surround himself with kind of scary characters and I’m sort of looking out for somebody I care about.”

  “Who?” Cooch asked.

  “Doesn’t matter who.”

  “Look, you’ve been asking all the questions. Now I’m asking one. Who?”

  “Okay. Callie. Or her son.”

  “Callie has a son?”

  “Complicated, Cooch. Sometime I’ll explain. But for right now, could you please, pretty please, try really, really hard to remember anything at all about that ride or conversation?”

  Cooch said, “Well, sure, Pete, sure, if it’s important,” and then he closed his eyes, pinched his chin between a thumb and forefinger, and cupped that elbow with his other hand. Swaying slightly in the humid breeze, he took several long moments to riffle backwards through the clouds of marijuana smoke and the numbing routine of driving a cab and the accumulation of too many fleeting conversations that told too many stories that often got mixed up or ran together. After a time, his eyelids opened, but slowly, tentatively, apparently surprised by daylight as if after a long nap in a darkened room, and he said, “I think I got it. I think I got the moment.”

  Pete leaned close across his handlebars.

  “So I’m listening to the radio,” Cooch went on, “and this song comes on. I guess I’d heard it once or twice before but I didn’t really know it. And I couldn’t tell you who was doing it. Some one-hit-wonder kind of guy. Anyway, nice song. Good tune, mellow. Kind of a retro feel to it. And that’s when I hear the two guys talking, just when the song is fading out. One guy says in this gloomy kind of voice, ‘Talented kid.’ And the other guy, even gloomier, says, ‘A shame. A real shame.” And then the first guy kind of brightens just a little, the way people do when something sucks but they’re looking for a silver lining, and he says, ‘Yeah, a shame. But that song. That song at least is going to live forever.’”

  18

  T he text from Callie was simple and upbeat. Her son Sarge was coming to town for the evening to share with her the song he’d just recorded. She was very excited and proud of him, and wondered if Pete and Bert, who had been so nice to be concerned about her, would like to stop by to meet him and listen.

  So, around eight, when the last of dusk was dimming out and Key West was in a kind of intermission between the reverent ritual of sunset and the bawdier ceremonies of later on, the two men and the chihuahua met in front of Callie’s building on Whitehead Street, a block or so from Southernmost Point. The place was just as Pete remembered it, a peculiarly local combination of stately and shabby. Once a sea captain’s mansion, long ago chopped into apartments, the place still had high ceilings and handsome moldings; it also always needed paint and screen-patches, and the floors were sloped so badly that you couldn’t keep an egg from rolling off the kitchen counter. But what Pete most vividly remembered was the hammock slung between two posts on the second-story porch. He and Callie sometimes used to sleep out there amid the drowsy smells of frangipani and ylang-ylang, alcohol and lovemaking having brought on a delicious laziness; gravity would bless their affection and melt them almost into a single body in the belly of the weave. It felt puzzling now to go to his former lover’s place, knowing that at some point there’d be an inevitably awkward goodnight to be said, and that he would not be waking up to the smell of her favorite nutmeg coffee.

  The visitors climbed the outside stairway, Bert hiding his effort, one hand on the banister, the other holding his dog against his ribs. Callie met them at the top of the steps and ushered them into the living room. A couple of candles were burning. Light from a nearby streetlamp diffused through red cotton curtains. There was ginger ale and some snacks on a coffee table. Sarge stood up from the sofa as soon as the guests were shown into the room, and when he was introduced to Bert, he said, “Nice to meet you, sir.”

  “Sir? Now that’s a word ya hardly hear no more. But it’s a nice word. Civilized. Good manners. Nice ta meet you, too. And this mutt here is Nacho. Say hello, Nacho.”

  Apparently the dog did not feel like saying hello just then. It just licked around its whiskers.

  Callie introduced Sarge to Pete, and Pete wondered if the young man knew the history between him and his mother, if he’d approve, if he’d care. Pete was surprised to notice that it felt important to him that Sarge like him. They made small talk for awhile. Where Sarge was from. How he liked the Keys. It was friendly but it wore thin quickly. Everyone wanted to get on to the main event. Everyone wanted to hear the song.

  It took a little time for Sarge to get his phone hooked up to his mother’s speakers, which were several generations of technology behind. Then everything was ready, glasses were put down, the four of them sat lightly perched to listen.

  The song opened quietly, with a bass line that was as much felt as heard, and a guitar lick that sounded neither strummed nor plucked, but as if coaxed forth with a bow. The voice, at first, was not much more than a whispered secret, the lyrics like something overheard or private thoughts being murmured aloud. “Gone Tomorrow.” Each time the refrain came back, there was a different shade of ache in it. A flute offered up a melancholy dance. Cellos mourned beneath the melody. Horns filled in the empty spaces like incense spreading though a church, until the music was seamless, constant, everywhere at once. The singer’s voice was steadily lifted, confident yet plaintive; the words, sometimes wry and sometimes nakedly direct, kept rising and circling like hawks in an updraft, always doubling back to “Gone Tomorrow,” “Gone Tomorrow.” The sound got louder, richer, textures added, then, by increments so gradual that at first they weren’t even noticed, the song eased back toward where it had begun, toward simplicity, toward a whisper, toward quiet. There was a long, slow fade-out like a ship disappearing into fog, and finally the song was over and there was silence.

  For a long and dangling moment, the four people in the living room couldn’t move and couldn’t speak. It was Bert who broke the spell by bursting into what was at first a solo round of applause and saying, “Sarge, congratulations, man. That was beautiful. That was gorgeous.”

  The young man blushed slightly and said a modest thank you.

  “I mean, it’s just amazing,” Bert went on, “the talent it must take to come up wit’ a song like that. I mean, think about it, wit’ all the millions a tunes that’ve already been written, how amazin’ it is to write a new one. There’s only so many notes, right? I mean, all these tunes, they’re all made of the same notes. Which is why, I guess, a lotta songs remind ya more or less of other songs, or why they sound familiar, or why sometimes ya hear a brand new song but it feels like maybe ya heard it before, even though ya know ya couldn’t’ve. I mean, it’s just an amazin’ talent.”

  Sarge said another thank you.

&nbs
p; Pete, wanting to add something, but not anything foolish, said, “It’s a lot to be proud of,” and in the next instant he inwardly cringed because in his own ears the words sounded patronizing and almost stepfatherly.

  It turned out not to matter, because Bert rhapsodically broke in again. “And the words! The whaddyacallit, the lyrics. I mean, same like wit’ the notes, there’s only so many you can use, and usually they gotta rhyme or it just don’t sound right. June, moon. Love from above. Do a dance and make romance. Or, like, they jazz it up if the beats don’t fit. Hold me tight all through the night and baby it’ll be all right. Y’ever notice that? They use baby a lot if the beats don’t fit. But leave that onna side for now. Where I’m goin’ wit’ this is that, most songs, whadda they come down to? I like you but you don’t like me. We used ta be happy, so what the heck went wrong? I mean, simple stuff, predictable. But your song, wow. I mean, some places, it like tricks ya inta thinkin’ it’s a regular love song, other places it’s almost like a daydream or a memory or a whaddyacallit, a hymn. I mean, it’s a few different things at once. How does a person even do that? I mean, Sarge, I’m really curious. That song, how long did it take ya to write it?”

  The young man licked his lips and looked down at his thighs. Until that moment it had simply not occurred to him that people wouldn’t only listen to his song; they might ask him things about it, and if they did, he would have to choose between telling the simple truth and thereby exploding the myth of his authorship, or he could dodge and lie and, with no evil intention but just trying to get along and do what was expected, become complicit in all the endless bullshit of the music business. The dilemma soured his saliva and, a little bit behind the beat, he said very softly, “Um, not that long.”

  His hesitation seemed to go unnoticed as Bert continued on. “Hey, none a my business, I guess. Your whaddyacallit, creative process, I guess that’s kinda sacred. Why mess wit’ the magic, right? Anyway, I just gotta say, ta write a song like that, a new song but that’s so familiar, like you’ve heard it in your head even though ya haven’t, like it’s been around forever, well, I tip my cap and that’s all I’m gonna say. Salud.”

  He raised his glass of ginger ale. The others joined him in a toast. Then they drifted back toward small talk but the soiree had burned most of its energy and did not go on for long. Sarge’s secret unease made him quiet. Callie couldn’t quite hide that she wanted her son to herself for a while. And Pete was melancholy at being a mere guest. So they had a last round of congratulations and good wishes and said their somewhat uncomfortable goodnights. On the threshold of the old screen door, Pete and Callie shared a quick hug that he wanted to believe was more than friendly but he really couldn’t be sure.

  19

  T hey took the quiet way home, strolling up South Street, ignoring Duval, passing Simonton, turning right on Vernon, hugging the shoreline and, not by coincidence, walking right by the pathway that gave access both to Dog Beach and the oceanfront bar at Luigi’s Porch. At the junction with the sidewalk, the two men and the chihuahua paused to consider. The dog pulled toward the beach with its fragrant and much-visited scrub that nested at the base of coconut palms. The men leaned toward the bar. The dog won the tug-of-war, at least temporarily. Straining at the leash, paws struggling for purchase on the ground cover of damp and oily leaves, the little creature nosed in to investigate and do its business. Then it turned its bulging, glassy eyes up toward its master.

  Bert returned the stare and said, “Okay, Nacho, can we go now?” The dog may have nodded or it might have only seemed that way. Bert said to Pete, “Dog says we can go. Got time for a drink? Nothin’ against ginger ale, but I could use a little somethin’.”

  At Luigi’s, the sunset crowd was long gone and dinner service mostly over, so they had no trouble scoring a small table on the railing. Water lapped against coral nubs almost right beneath their feet. An arrow of moonlight shot straight across the surface at them. Bert ordered his usual Old-Fashioned, Pete branched out and asked for a cognac. After they’d clinked glasses, Bert said, “Nice kid, that Sarge. Polite.”

  Pete said, “Looks a little bit like Callie. D’you notice?”

  “Nah, I can’t say I noticed that. Then again, you were lookin’ at Callie a whole lot more than I was.”

  “The cheekbones,” said Pete. “The jawline. And the posture, sort of. The shoulders held way back.”

  “Sounds like you were doin’ her portrait in oils. Still got it for her, huh?”

  Pete just swirled his drink.

  “Okay, don’t answer,” Bert went on “It was one a those questions that don’t need an answer anyway. It was whaddyacallit, retractable.”

  “I think you mean rhetorical.”

  “Right, whatever. But anyway, that song the kid sang. I gotta tell ya, it gave me chills in places. It made the hair stand up onna back of my neck.”

  “Good song, great arrangement,” Pete put in.

  “Yeah, sure, but what I’m sayin’ is that it got ta me deep down. Not just the way a song ya like gets to ya. I mean deeper, and I don’t exactly know how to describe it. Deeper, like it takes ya somewheres else. Like what you’re hearin’ is a memory.”

  “Very poetic,” said Pete.

  “Okay, wiseguy, make fun of a sentimental old man who can’t always find the exact right word that he’s lookin’ for. I can take it. But what I’m tryin’ ta say, in simple English wit’ no frills or doo-dads or anything like that, is that I had this funny feelin’ from my head to my toes that somehow I had heard that song before.”

  “Bert, it’s a brand new song. The kid just wrote it.”

  “Exactly. And therein lies or lays or however the right way is to say it, the weird part. I know it happened and I know it didn’t happen. It’s a whaddyacallit, a paragon.”

  “Paradox.”

  “Right. Maybe a Buddhist could work it out. Or a Hindu. One a those guys who think ya live one life as a cockroach and come back as Groucho Marx. Whatever. Who knows, maybe I heard that song in a previous life. Not that I believe that shit. I’m just sayin’ it’s got me buffaloed.”

  He plucked the cherry from his drink and fed it to the dog. Pete took the opportunity to look out at the ocean and think about Callie, the way her short neat hair just barely grazed the tops of her ears, the way she sometimes leaned forward and linked her fingers around a knee when she was sitting, the times they’d spent together in the hammock…

  Exploding the brief reverie, Bert’s voice seemed very sudden when he started in again. He was scratching the dog between the ears like he was rubbing his own chin, and he blurted, “Wait a second. Hold everything. I just had a…a whaddyacallit.”

  “A what?”

  “Ya know, a…a whaddycallit. Shit, I’m losin’ words heah. Ya know, that thing that happens sometimes when all of a sudden ya figure somethin’ out and it all makes sense or at least in that particular moment it seems like it does. Shit, what’s that word? Not apostrophe. Not apocalypse. Not epiphany…No wait, it is epiphany. That’s what I been tryin’ ta say. I just had an epiphany.”

  “What about?”

  “What about?” Bert echoed, and for a moment looked confused. “Wow. Ya know, it’s funny, for a couple seconds there, I was so happy that I come up with epiphany that I almost forgot what the epiphany was about. But what it was about is why I just can’t shake the feeling that I heard that song before. And the reason I can’t shake it is that it’s true. I’ve heard that song.”

  “Bert, it was just recorded. First time ever. It’s a brand new song.”

  “First time recorded, maybe. But it’s not a brand new song,” the old man quietly insisted. “It’s the song I heard The Beatles singin’ inna pool at the Key Wester in 1964.”

  At that, Pete could not hold back a propulsive laugh that sent some vaporized cognac up into his sinuses. “But that’s preposterous, Bert! That would’ve been almost sixty years ago. And if I remember the story right, you heard that song exactly once, ma
ybe not even all the way through, and there was probably some splashing going on.”

  “All true. And also true that it gave me the chills. And also true that it struck me as this amazing halfway thing between a love song and a hymn. And also true that I never heard anything quite like it before or since. Until this evening, about an hour ago, at Callie’s place.”

  Pete was shaking his head and he kept it moving out of fear that a measure of belief might seep in if he stopped. “It’s just not possible. To remember a song from sixty years ago in that kind of detail?”

  “Why not?” Bert countered. “I’m sure you’ve heard some a those stories about people wit’ dementia, people in comas. What’s the one thing they remember? Music. Guys wake up from comas, they’re singin’ songs from childhood. They’re in tune, they remember every word. It just cuts a deeper groove than anything else.”

  “Okay, okay, I get that. But the song we heard tonight, it’s Sarge’s song.”

  “He seemed a little uncomfortable when I asked him about it. D’ya notice that?”

  “He’s kind of a shy kid. Probably he was nervous.”

  “Yeah, right. Tough audience and all.”

  “And come on, a lot of songs sound like other songs.”

  “Every note?”

  “Bert, are you seriously suggesting--?”

  “Look, I really have no idea what I’m suggesting.” The old man shifted the chihuahua in his lap and fastidiously smoothed the pants leg on which the small creature had been lying. “But if ya don’t mind my sayin’ so, this back and forth we been havin’, me sayin’ this thing happened, you sayin’ it couldn’t have, it’s gettin’ us nowhere. So maybe it would be a little more productive and maybe even I think the word is edifyin’ if we sorta split the difference.”

  “Split the difference how?” Pete asked.

  “Like, instead a me just sayin’ it happened and you just sayin’ it didn’t, how about we both agree that there is at least a tiny little chance it happened, a teensy little chance, and we turn our smarts, such as they are, to the question of okay, if by any teensy chance it really happened, then how the hell could it have come about?”