by Lewis Shiner
Toward the back fence she saw Connie Sigurdson, part of Shawn Moore’s high-school A-list, leading lady of drama club and senior musical, in a knot of admirers. She was dressed in a black silk sweater and black slacks, her blonde hair cut sharply to chin length. It didn’t hurt her popularity that she was sharing a couple of tightly-rolled joints she’d brought with her from New York, where she’d landed an understudy role on Broadway. “I do some Tuesday nights,” she shrugged, “and all the Sunday matinees.” Her acting had improved; Laurie nearly believed her nonchalance.
“So,” Connie said as Laurie moved into the circle and accepted a hit. “I hear you’re in LA now.”
“Waitressing, mostly.”
“But you are playing, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, I’ve got a regular club gig.” Laurie was embarrassed to find herself resorting to false modesty in the face of Connie’s palpable hunger for an audience. In high school, Connie had promised suicide if she wasn’t a star by twenty-five; but that was high-school, and understudy on Broadway was the real world, and closer to stardom than 99.9 percent of anybody ever got, closer in fact than Laurie had ever been.
“See?” Connie said, looking around. “She knows. I love San Antonio, and I’ll always think of it as home, but pro basketball and a Hard Rock Cafe do not a cultural Mecca make. If you’re headed anywhere, the very first thing you have to do is leave town. Laurie? Am I right, here, or what?”
Laurie shrugged, feeling her heart sink. “You’re right.”
“So,” Connie said, the argument, if there’d been one, clearly over, “how long are you in town for?”
“Tomorrow,” Laurie said. “Just till tomorrow.”
Auld acquaintance
She regained the two hours she’d lost and was safely back in her apartment, showered, and tucked into bed by ten Tuesday night. She apologized to Los Angeles for being tempted to return to her mother’s. “I didn’t mean it,” she said. “I’m glad to be home.”
If it hadn’t been true before, it was true once she said it, both the “glad” and the “home.”
On New Year’s Eve, she and Summer did the Strip until eleven, then opted for a bottle of cheap champagne and a slumber party at Laurie’s. They watched the countdown on TV, where the commentators had already seen the clock roll over in three time zones and there was not much left for California but empty bottles and confetti all over the stage. But then, Laurie thought, being in her twenties at the end of this particular century, she was used to the party being already over.
They made Summer a bed on the couch and talked by the flicker of a candle on the coffee table, Laurie sitting on the floor so their heads were only inches apart. Summer told her that Fernando was married, and that was why they weren’t together for New Year’s. Laurie played her the song her father had sent her for Christmas.
There was a quiet tap at the front door, and Laurie opened it to find a slightly inebriated Catherine from next door, her hair up, wearing a low-cut black dress that no longer fit as well as it once had. “Join us,” Summer said from the couch. “There’s a little warm champagne left.”
“No more champagne,” Catherine said.
“Where’s Shannon?” Laurie asked, sitting back where she’d been.
“With her grandmother in Santa Barbara for the weekend. Allowing Mom to go out on a real date and get a little schnockered.”
“How’d it go?”
Catherine sighed and sat on the floor next to Laurie. “Maybe I will have just a taste of that champagne.” She topped off Laurie’s glass and drank half.
“A jerk?” Summer prompted.
“No, he’s actually very sweet. Known him since college, brought me flowers, good looking, not gay, not married.”
“Maybe you should introduce me,” Laurie said. “What’s the matter with this guy?”
“It’s not him. It’s me. I’m bored. I can’t help it. I think I’m genetically programmed to fail. The only men I’m attracted to are jerks like Shannon’s father. Cocky, arrogant jerks who never grew up and who will inevitably dump me for somebody closer to their own mental age.”
“Maybe it’s all part of Nature’s plan,” Summer said. “If we hooked up with somebody stable, instead of these philandering Neanderthals who knock us up and move on, they’d always be around to screw up the kid.”
Laurie got another glass and split the rest of the champagne three ways. “A toast,” she said. “To 1995. May this be the year for all of us. May we find fame, fortune, and true love.”
They touched glasses and Summer said, “Or any two out of the three.”
First contact
A week later she met Gabriel Wong at the Duck. She kept her foot inextricably in her mouth for the entirety of their first conversation, rescued only when Brad announced her second set. The warm tide of resultant applause carried her back toward the stage. I’m for real, she reminded herself. People clap for me.
She set about her conquest of the audience as a stepping stone to winning Gabe for her demo. It started with one stranger and then another setting down a drink, looking up at a break in the conversation, allowing her voice to slip from background to foreground. At some pivotal moment the very nature of the experience changed; then none of them were strangers, and a silence opened up under the music where the murmured voices and scraping chairs and clinking glasses had been only a moment before, and she owned them.
It never lasted long, but it came that night when she needed it, and it came with the reckless energy of falling in love. When she walked offstage, soaking wet, giddy and exhausted, Gabe was there to hand her a business card and say, “Call me. It’ll be good.”
And it was good, despite her terror, despite her fleeting regrets at the hundred dollars she could ill afford to pay him for the work, despite the fact that as soon as it was time to actually start she was seized with profound loathing for her songs, for her voice, for her pitiable lack of talent.
And it was good on that Sunday in the garage in Whittier, where, of all the emotions that surged through her, the strongest was wonder: that her familiar song could be transformed into this rich new entity with life of its own; that she could be drawn so deeply, so suddenly, so comfortably, into a sense of community with these men that she barely knew, one of them a certified legend; that they could simply sound so good.
The next night she called Gabe and he confirmed that yes, it had really gone well.
“I knew that.”
“Sure you did. That’s why you called, right? Well, it went so well, in fact, that I think some of us got scared.”
“Like maybe one of you in particular? Maybe with the initials Skip Shaw?”
“Maybe.”
“So you guys all, what, sat around and talked about me after I left?”
“Some. We all think you’re too good to be playing in a garage in Whittier. Not merely too good. Too commercial. We think you’re going to be very, very big.”
Her heart was in her throat. “If that’s true, then you could all be very big with me.”
“Maybe, but some of us seem to like garages.”
“One of you? Skip again?”
“Two. It is Jim’s garage.”
“It’s very safe there.”
“Right the first time.”
“So,” she said. “What happens next?”
“We thought maybe we should try it again. Wednesday night, day after tomorrow? Maybe it’ll be terrible.”
“I can see how that might make things a lot simpler for some of us.”
“It might indeed.”
One to go
On the lunch shift Tuesday she’d served too much coffee to a girl with matted hair and last night’s mascara bruising her eyes. The boy with her, shirtless under his black leather jacket, seemed disappointed with whatever he kept seeing on his watch. At the end the girl said, “Two more cups of coffee,” and he said, “Make one of them to go.”
The words had lodged in her head and anchored a refrain
that played there all afternoon. Once at home with a guitar, the right chords all seemed to recognize each other and settle in comfortably together. Verses followed, winding up with an extended meditation on an empty styrene cup clattering down a deserted gray-guttered street.
If it was a bit bleak, at least the pieces all snugged together perfectly, and what’s more she’d written it top to bottom in forty minutes, a time not, perhaps, in league with some of Skip Shaw’s, but a new personal best.
Wednesday, faced with two girls sick, unable to persuade Laurie to work a double, Mazola Mike said, “You find this all rather puerile, don’t you?”
She had seen him on break studying a battered red paperback called Vocabulary is Power! “Of course not,” she said, showing him the truth in her eyes while her mouth went through the motions. “It’s just too late to change my plans, that’s all.”
Five minutes later he’d cornered Mildred, late thirties, three kids, no husband, in debt twenty or thirty dollars to every woman in the place, and he had her nodding tiredly to the rhythm of his supermarket erudition.
That will never be me, Laurie thought, holding the new song in her head like a plane ticket and a passport, like a numbered Swiss account.
She and Jim and Gabe and Dennis had been working on “One to Go” for an hour when Skip arrived, wearing jeans and a stained white T-shirt, unshaven, his hair apparently unwashed since the last time she’d seen him. She attempted to keep playing despite his looming in her peripheral vision as he set his guitar case by his amp and stood with folded arms, staring, Laurie thought, right at her.
He waited until she had struggled through to the end of the song to walk slowly to the refrigerator for a beer. Once he had everyone’s undivided attention he said, “Don’t mind me. You just go on ahead.”
Jim said, “We’ve been here since seven.” It sounded to Laurie more like apology than accusation.
“I got held up.” Skip took a leisurely drink, then opened his guitar case as if unsure what he might find.
“Did you hear the new song?” Jim asked.
Skip paused in the act of strapping on the guitar. “ ‘The new song,’ ” he repeated, as if these were words he could not be expected to interpret.
“Laurie’s new song,” Gabe said.
“Yeah, I heard it.”
Jim and Gabe both looked away, avoiding confrontation without, she thought, being consciously aware of it. The song was barely a day old, fragile, with no strength of its own yet. It could be so easily crushed. “What is it, exactly,” she said, “that you don’t like about it?”
He finished plugging in his guitar and turned to face her. His eyes, if they indeed opened on his soul, had steel shutters over the windows. “Nothing, darlin’,” he said at last. “There’s nothing I don’t like about it.”
He hit his low E string and waited for Jim to sound his pitch. It was the alpha male’s call for submission, and the sight and smell of it made her queasy and desperate for fresh air. To her disappointment, Jim played the low E.
Skip tuned up quickly, at high volume, and went immediately into a shuffling blues. He played by himself for a long time, long enough to have sensed the reluctance all around him, if he cared to, while Laurie stared at him. His own expression was vacant, as if she’d ceased to exist, or at least to matter. Behind her, Laurie heard Dennis take up the rhythm on his cymbal. Jim hit a tentative chord and Laurie unplugged her guitar.
Gabe crouched next to her as she packed up. “Listen, I’m sorry about Skip.” He was not playing, but neither was he unplugged. “Stick around, will you? He’ll calm down in a minute.”
“I don’t need this,” she said, hating the way her voice came too close to a scream in order to top the noise. Jim’s hands dropped away from the keyboard as she passed him, and by the time she’d slammed the door to the studio, Dennis had dropped out as well. That left only Skip, and she heard him all the way out to the street, where the car keys fell out of her trembling fingers twice before she could open the LBD’s trunk to stash her equipment, and a third time opening her door. He was still playing as she drove away.
Partners
She was home and showered by ten, making sleep an unexpected option—though in fact she was so tense that the mattress felt like steel plate. She called Summer and let her wring the entire sordid story into the open. At the end of their commiseration, Summer proposed the duo and the timing, it seemed to Laurie, couldn’t have been better. Skip had flattened her ego with the indifference of an interstate trucker running over a soft drink can, and if a duo with Summer wasn’t the future she’d been imagining since the previous Sunday and her first very different trip to Whittier, at least it was a future where somebody wanted her, and not a future of lying on a sheet metal bed listening to her bones creak as her muscles wound ever tighter. “Come over Saturday,” she told Summer, “and we’ll work a few things up.”
Saturday, cloudy and cool, was a dozen glazed and two Styrofoam vats of decaf, five hours of guitar and gossip, a song list and tentative arrangements. Sunday night was a long black knit dress fresh from the thrift shop, two songs on her own then the crowd’s eager pleasure as Summer joined her, a performance that felt like an event, that felt, Laurie tried to convince herself, like history in the making. All in all it would have been perfect, had she not looked into the audience during the third set and seen Gabe.
When, during the next break, he came to her table and told her Skip was outside, she saw disappointment flicker over Summer’s face, and tried to ignore the sudden jump in her own pulse. “And?” she said coolly.
“He didn’t tell me what he wanted. I would guess he wants to apologize.”
“Go,” Summer said. “If you don’t you’ll be pissed off at yourself, and probably me besides.”
When she got out to the car, in the clouds and moonlight, with the Pacific crashing into the rocks below, she found herself leaning with her back to the car, talking to a disembodied hand with a cigarette in it. “So,” Skip said. “What exactly is it you want?”
“Excuse me? I didn’t call this meeting.”
“If you were to come back to Jim’s studio, if we were to play again, what would you want out of it? What would your intentions be?”
“You sound like I’m trying to date your daughter.”
“I had a daughter, as a matter of fact, and she would have been about your age if she’d lived, though that doesn’t have jack shit to do with the topic at hand. Just spitball a little for me. If you could have your way, what would you want from us?”
It wasn’t the death of his daughter as much as the offhand way he exploited it that upset her balance, and of course that was exactly what he’d meant to do. Still she let herself be lured inside and even smoked a little weed with him, and she told him exactly what she wanted. “I want to be part of a real band, not just have some backup musicians. I want to make a record, with my name on it, and hear it on the radio in my car. I want to play out a couple of hundred nights a year, some of it on the road. I want to make enough not to be in debt and not to have to waitress anymore.”
Skip barely seemed to have heard her. “I stood outside,” he told her, “and listened to your new song for a while before I went in the garage last Wednesday. I stood out there and thought, man, you better run this little girl off right now. Because if you don’t you’re going to fuck up and let her down and break her heart.”
The rest of what he had to say was a variation on the same theme: a species of arrogant masochism, with no gesture of contrition or of commitment. When she got back to the club Summer was already on stage, singing “One More Lie” by Skip Shaw, and when she saw Laurie she winked and smiled.
“How’d it go?” Gabe asked her.
“I think you were wrong,” she said. “He didn’t seem to want to apologize after all.”
Laurie waited out the end of the song, then took the stage to no inconsiderable applause. She knew Gabe heard it; she allowed herself the small fantasy that S
kip might have pulled up to the curb outside long enough to hear it too.
They played until two, counting the four encores, and afterward Brad called them into his office to offer them a standing Saturday night gig as a duo, two hundred apiece, two sets instead of four, approval of opening act. “Give us a minute,” Summer said.
With Brad out of the room she said, “I don’t know about you, but I loved tonight. I think we make a hell of a combination.”
Laurie, buzzing with Skip’s dope and the crowd’s approval, said, “Me too.”
“Should we do this?”
“We should absolutely do this,” Laurie said.
“Your thing in Whittier, that’s not going to happen?”
“It doesn’t look that way.” She stuffed her second thoughts where she didn’t have to listen to them and stuck out her hand. “Partners?”
Summer took it and drew her into a hug. “Partners,” she said, and after they told Brad, the three of them repaired to the Rock and Roll Denny’s to celebrate. At three-thirty, however, consensual time took hold again with the suddenness of an enchanted carriage reverting to a pumpkin. She saw that, with the exception of the clientele, this was a Denny’s like any other, with ugly plastic booths and brown Formica tabletops, too much like the booths and tabletops where she was due in three and a half hours.
She woke up in her own bed at a quarter of seven from a dream of a room filled with telephones, where as soon as she answered one of them another began to ring. She saw then that she’d slept through forty-five minutes of alarm with her head under a pillow.
She was an hour and a quarter late to work, and as Mazola Mike wrote out her termination check he said, “Here’s a week’s pay in lieu of notice.” A banner day for him, she thought. He not only got to fire her, he got to say “in lieu of.”
