by Lewis Shiner
“We sat in my car and smoked a J, and I asked her what it was she wanted. She said she didn’t care if she got rich, she just wanted to make a decent living. I didn’t entirely believe her. I was pretty sure even then that she wanted it all, the limos and the dark glasses and the sunken marble tubs, but it didn’t matter. Either way, I still wasn’t the ride she wanted to catch, and I told her so. That I wasn’t one for going the distance. She got out of the car like she was going to walk off, then she stuck her head back in and asked me why the hell I’d dragged her out of her gig to tell her that.
“I told her everybody’d gotten together at Jim’s place the night before and this thing—that had never had to have a reason before—was now somehow sad because it wasn’t going anywhere. And she nodded and said, ‘I told you what I want. Maybe you need to think about what you want.’ ”
“And did you?”
“Mister, it’s twenty years too late for me to think about what I want. I think about what I need to get from one day to the next. And the smart thing for me to do would have been to walk away.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I could sit here all day and give you reasons. It would have meant not seeing Jim and Gabe anymore—I didn’t know then it was going to mean that anyway. Maybe I thought I could deal with it. The truth is people don’t do things for reasons, they do things because they ate too many powdered sugar donuts for breakfast or because they caught a whiff of perfume standing in line at the bank.
“So I ended up at Jim’s house two nights later, on the phone to Laurie, telling her I’d do whatever she wanted. She could call the album Laurie Moss and the Lichen, and I’d be a Lichen.”
Even at this distance in time there is something else behind his attempt at humor; bitterness, maybe, or resignation. “This would have been January of ’95, I guess, almost two years ago. She came over and we played and then somewhere around one or two in the morning we had a council of war. Her blood was up. She’d just got fired from some horrible coffee shop waitressing job and so the band was all she had. Jim and Gabe and Dennis had caught the fever from her, and I could see right then I’d made a mistake.
“I’d put her in the position of having to make tradeoffs. For every label exec in this town who has fond memories of ‘guitarist and singer/songwriter Skip Shaw’ there’s two that I screwed out of a big advance. I told her I’d play on the record and maybe do some gigs, but anything beyond that—up to and including putting my name on the record—had to be in my own way and my own time.”
“Was ‘Don’t Make Promises’ your idea?”
“Talk about guilt? Yeah, that was me. We were sitting around putting together a set list, talking about cover tunes, and she showed us ‘Say Goodbye’ by what’s his name…”
“Tonio K.”
“Right. And somehow we got to talking about Tim Hardin, who she’d heard of but never actually heard. And I told her about hanging out with Tim at the Chateau Marmont before he died, and I played her ‘Don’t Make Promises.’ I was against putting it on the record, and so was she, but Jim talked us into it.”
I check my notebook. “In the press kit for the album she described your singing on that song as ‘a working man’s voice trying to make it to the next verse without being torpedoed by emotion or giving up from the sheer weight of the experience it had to carry around. ’ ”
Skip leans back and for a second his eyes lose focus. Then he smiles, finally, with something like real pleasure. “She was really something, wasn’t she?”
Angels
From a pay phone in the waiting room I call Melinda Lee, Laurie’s former manager, who’s been trying to get me an interview with Mark Ardrey. Ardrey was Laurie’s A&R man, her principal advocate inside General Records.
He has politely declined, she tells me. “Sorry. He’s just not talking to anyone associated with Laurie.”
I call Jim Pearson in Whittier. He’s been trying to locate Mitch Gaines, who toured with Laurie. It seems Mitch is on the road again and won’t be back for at least a month. He and Dennis, Laurie’s drummer, were the last names on my list; I’ve talked briefly to Dennis in San Diego, where he’s living now, and he’s agreed to a longer phone interview once I get home to San Jose.
“Well,” I say. “I guess that’s it.”
“I guess,” Jim says. “Unless you happen to like football?”
And so, after a perfunctory Saturday night tour of the clubs on Sunset Strip, I spend my last Sunday in LA with Jim Pearson and his son Sam, watching the Miami Dolphins on television.
“Laurie and Dennis and I used to go to Angels games,” Jim says. Jim seems aware of the game at all times without having to focus on it. Sam is playing with Star Wars action figures on the carpet in front of the electronic fireplace of the TV. He is older than my son Tom, but still makes me miss him profoundly.
“I’m a bit of sports freak, and so is Dennis,” Jim goes on. “Laurie was not deeply into sports, but I think she found the formalities of baseball soothing. The sense of rules and order and knowing what’s expected of you. Dennis bought her an Angels cap at one of the games and she used to wear it every night on tour—you know, what with ‘Angel Dust’ and everything.”
I point out how often people talk about Laurie in past tense.
“You’re right, of course. And it’s not that I think of her as deceased or anything. It’s just…the distance.”
“When you think about her, are there pictures in your mind? Particular defining moments you remember?”
He closes his eyes to think. “When we were on stage, I was always behind her. I can see her standing in front of the microphone, the neck of the guitar sticking out to her left, arms close to her body, bouncing up on her tiptoes and leaning forward because she’s fully into it, blinding white lights in front of her, silhouetting her. That’s a moment.
“Sitting around the kitchen table at my house, late at night, her hair matted with sweat, collapsed in her chair with this exhausted smile. For her to do what she did—driving halfway across the country to get to LA, waiting tables eight or nine hours a day and then going home to work on her demo or coming out here to rehearse, all the auditions and open mike nights and free gigs—we’re talking about a very intense, focused, driven human being here. Every once in a while she did remember to enjoy it. You could see it sometimes, at two in the morning when we were working on the record and we’d nailed a take, it was like the momentum of the band physically pushed her back in the chair and spread this smile across her face, and for a little while the tension that was holding her together went away.”
He must see something in my face because he reaches over to squeeze my shoulder and says, “Sorry.”
“What for?”
“I’m not sure.” He shrugs. “I guess that I got to be there and you didn’t.” He picks up a cassette from the coffee table and hands it to me. “I dubbed off some of the rehearsal stuff for you. Maybe it’ll help. And I did email her about you.”
I thank him for the tape and then hesitate, afraid to ask the next question.
He shrugs, anticipating me. “She remembers you, that Pulse story you did. If she’ll talk to anybody, I think it’ll be you. It’s just asking a lot for her to talk at all right now.”
Red dress
A week later I am back in San Jose, transcribing interviews. It’s the day before Thanksgiving. I find I have email from someone named red_dress and I know it is Laurie. I hesitate before I open it because this is a pivotal moment: If she brushes me off like Mark Ardrey did, I won’t have enough material to do the book. I try to imagine how that would feel and discover, to my surprise, the possibility that I might be relieved. I will have failed, but it won’t be my fault.
I open the message. “I liked the story you wrote in Pulse,” it says. “Jim assures me you are very sweet, and Gabe, apparently, thinks so too. They want me to tell you everything. Should I?”
There is only one reasonable answer. “Yes, please,” I reply.<
br />
Over the next week, at the rate of two and sometimes three messages a day, we set the ground rules. Email only, no phones. Phones make her feel like she’s being stalked. I can use anything she tells me for publication, provided I make reasonable attempts to verify her chronology and cross-check her facts with Jim and Gabe. If she starts feeling wonky she can end it—no arguments, no recriminations.
I try to find a starting place that feels safe yet gives her room to talk. “Most bands play for months or even years before they record,” I write her. “You had a finished master tape before you ever played in public. How did things get so turned around?”
“Panic,” she writes back. “Sheer, visceral panic…”
THE TAPE
Brave new world
When she first left San Antonio for LA, in June of 1994, she had money enough for three months’ rent and food. Even so she’d made the trip in her Little Brown Datsun and not on the back of a turnip truck. She knew full well that three months was not long. Music careers were apt to take years, if not decades; were more prone to fail grimly and quietly than spectacularly; were fraught with dangers both unimagined and painfully obvious.
She counted not on her voice or her songs, whose worth she could never really know from the inside, but rather on her own ability to make a decision and live with the consequences—a skill she’d managed to develop in the complete absence of family role models.
In three months she thought she would have time to look for a day job, and perhaps find one. Time enough to put smells and colors and feelings with names she’d heard all her life: Malibu, Pasadena, Hawthorne, Long Beach, Anaheim, Burbank, Hollywood, Venice. Time enough to stretch herself against the city and see if she fit. Time enough to make herself available to good luck, if good luck should be so inclined. In short, she decided the time had come to invest her emotional life savings in a three-month lottery ticket.
Her reasoned, low-pressure attitude vaporized on contact with the city. In the first two weeks she found herself fighting panic on multiple fronts: Even as she was awed by the fabulous houses, the travel-brochure beaches, the palm-lined boulevards and oleander-covered hillsides, she was stunned by the amount of time she spent in bumper-to-bumper traffic, surrounded by concrete embankments and ice plant turned gray by congealed exhaust fumes. Every dollar she spent seemed to take a little of her substance with it. She begrudged herself every hour not spent in hot pursuit of her future at the same time that she found there was only so much rejection she could tolerate in a single day. Most mornings she woke up with relief to find that Jack was not in the bed next to her, and every night she listened to the noises of barking dogs, passing cars, and rattling garbage cans, all of them seeming hostile for no other reason than that she did not yet have her own connection to them.
Finding work at the Bistro d’Bobbi meant money coming in that nearly equaled the money going out. It lowered the incline of the daily uphill struggle at the same time that it consumed the majority of her waking hours. It got her through July’s barrage of phone calls from Jack that began with incredulity and quickly moved through pleading and threats to acceptance and self-pity, as if he were going through the textbook stages of death and not merely the end of a relationship—though by that time he was only talking to her answering machine.
Having a job got her through August’s humiliation of asking her father to buy a new transmission for the LBD, which meant she could no longer even say she was managing on her own. When her birthday, always the low point of the year, rolled around in September, at least there were people at work to make her a baked apple pizza with all 26 candles on it. And by the time she had to quit the Bistro in October for a once-a-week opening slot at the Sly Duck Pub—supplemented eventually with a coffee-shop day-shift to make ends meet—LA had at least become familiar. She had worn paths in the freeways that knew the shape of her tires, and there was comfort in the long, slow curve of Sunshine Terrace that led to her apartment. Her three months came and went and she saw that her stay was no longer limited by money but by the strength of her own resolve.
The resolve was the hardest part.
Once, during her two years at San Antonio College, she’d gone floating down the San Marcos River with a boy from her English class. At the shop where they rented the inner tubes she’d watched the boy talk to the owner, whose name was Ron Tuggle, about a place called Jacob’s Well.
Jacob’s Well was a vertical limestone shaft filled with clear water from the Edwards Aquifer, and scuba divers liked to work loose the grating that closed it off and explore the tunnels that fed into it. From time to time Ron had to go into the Well to recover the bodies of divers who’d drowned there. The day Laurie met him, Ron had a shaved stripe across the top of his head and stitches in it that belonged on Frankenstein’s monster. He was explaining how a cave had collapsed on him the last time he’d tried to bring a body out. He talked in a low voice, his eyes dazed and haunted-looking, stopping periodically as if he couldn’t quite remember what he’d just said. His partner had been ten or twenty feet behind him when the roof fell in. And of course his dive light went out. He was in total blackness, pinned by boulders, deep underwater, and running out of air. He knew he was going to die, he said, only he had this obsessive thought that he couldn’t get rid of. He was absolutely convinced that if he panicked, the doctors would be able to see it when they autopsied him, and he would have set a bad example to all the people he’d taught to dive. So he lay there in the darkness and took the smallest sips of air that he could manage. In the end, he said, he sucked so much air out of the tank that it collapsed under the pressure of the water around it. He’d just lost consciousness when his partner finally got to him and dragged him back to the surface.
The idea of someone she had met and shaken hands with lying in the cold and dark waiting for death was not one that rested quietly in her head. Humor was the only defense. Whenever anything went wrong for the rest of that weekend—a long wait at a restaurant, or a rude and meddlesome clerk at the motel, they would look at each other and say, “What would Ron Tuggle do?”
She was still thinking of Ron Tuggle on Thanksgiving in Los Angeles as she carried a small, hemispherical mound of turkey and dressing to a table in a deserted downtown cafeteria. She was fifteen hundred miles from her family and the house she’d grown up in but only hours away from a job she hated, so tired at night she could barely open her guitar case, thinking that good luck was perhaps not inclined her way after all. “What,” she asked herself, “would Ron Tuggle do?” less as self-exhortation than as an admission of hopelessness. She took tiny bites, imagining that each one was a sip of air, possibly her last, and in that way made it through the meal. But the next morning, peeing in the coffee shop’s dank and airless restroom, one feeling of release unleashed another and she was overwhelmed by a flood of homesick tears. When she got back to her apartment that afternoon she called her mother, who offered up a round-trip ticket to San Antonio for Christmas. Laurie said yes, not knowing the change that waited just around the corner of the new year, when she would meet Gabe at the Duck in January and ask him to play on her demo.
Texas
Grandpa Bill was standing next to her mother when Laurie got off the plane. He was dressed like a college professor in herringbone, pressed cotton, and corduroy, though he was in fact a retired postal clerk. He seemed terribly thin and pale to her, and there was more gray in her mother’s long, dark brown hair than Laurie remembered, as if Laurie’s own subjective sense of enormous time lapse had somehow aged them. But she was groggy from airplane sleep, which, like airplane food, had left a bad taste in her mouth without satisfying her.
When she and Grandpa Bill finally let go of each other, her mother hugged her quickly then held her at arm’s length. “What in heaven’s name did you do to your hair?”
“Henna, Mom,” she said, “just henna,” hating the defensive tone that came so automatically from her mouth.
She woke up at ten o’clock the
next morning—only eight California time—in the same worn-out double bed she’d slept in all through high school. She remembered countless vertiginous mornings-after with pale pink stucco looming above her and endless broiling summer afternoons with a guitar lying across her sweat-damp stomach as she imagined herself on the big concrete open-air stage of the Sunken Gardens Theater in Brackenridge Park. She’d conceived and made endless mental revisions to her first album cover in that bed and worked on her Grammy acceptance speech. She’d sought the appropriate attitude to take when Mick Jagger called to say he loved the album and would like to see her naked.
She’d dreamed of being transformed, not just different hair or more perfectly-matched breasts, but a different walk, a new expression behind her eyes, like she’d glimpsed once in her father and seen again in other men with guitars, Paul Westerberg in the early days of the Replacements, or local hero Charlie Sexton, or countless others on the MTV of her adolescence, and so rarely seen in women, except of course for the iconic Chrissie Hynde, with her defiant stance and trademark eyeliner, tough and vulnerable and rebellious, the snarl that launched a thousand careers.
Her fantasies were simpler now, though still the fuel that kept her engines turning during hard times. That fewer than one in a thousand had ever materialized was irrelevant, or should have been if she’d been able, in the gray December morning, to see past the other nine hundred and ninety-nine.
She dragged a box of old cassettes out of her closet and played them on her mother’s stereo: Bowie, Replacements, Scandal, INXS. Her head felt swollen with memories of dancing at the pavilions at McAllister Park, drinking tequila at Freddy Sandoval’s house with his parents out of town, cruising back from Austin on I-35 all alone at three o’clock on a Sunday morning. Colors and smells and overpowering emotions, family and lovers and friends.
