by Lewis Shiner
At home with blinds drawn, having laboriously gone through all her uncollected mental trash without coming upon sleep hidden behind any of it, she found herself returning to two items over and over:
With all the jobs she’d walked out on, she’d never been fired before. What had the world come to when she couldn’t even hold on to a crummy waitress job?
And…
Why had she committed herself to a semi-acoustic duo when what she really wanted was a band with bass and drums and high amperage?
By afternoon she’d developed all the symptoms of a full-blown cold, contracted, she was sure, while standing drenched with sweat in the chill night air talking to his highness, Skip Shaw. No recrimination too petty for me, she thought, no forgiveness in view.
Gabe’s phone call caught her on Wednesday afternoon when her immune system, having triumphed over the forces of disease through the application of Nyquil, sitcoms, and Vitamin C, was back in the driver’s seat. She had, after all, her severance pay and two hundred a week coming from the gig with Summer. She could find another job. She was freshly showered and dressed in clean black jeans that fit her for the first time in months. It was enough, in the words of a song she’d written in college, to make her carry on.
If Gabe had not caught her in such an up mood, if Skip had not been cute and funny with his Lichen act, history might have sauntered onto another path. As it was she grabbed her guitar and amp, got in the LBD, and drove to Whittier, putting on mascara and Carmex on the 101 South.
Game plans
Back in San Antonio, in another life, Jack had once explained male sexuality to her. Put a balloon over the end of a faucet, he said, and turn the water on. If it doesn’t get relief on a regular basis, something’s going to explode. Her first reaction had been horror, then eventually a grudging pity as she saw how well the explanation fit her own observations.
For Laurie sex was more like eating dessert. It was a pleasant habit she could fall into, but the longer she went without, the less she missed it. Except, of course, for the occasional craving.
Jack had been very concerned about his balloon exploding, which meant there had been a number of times that Laurie had ended up with dessert without a meal first, dessert when she wasn’t hungry, dessert first thing in the morning when she hadn’t yet brushed her teeth.
And yet there had been times when what she’d begun in resignation had become so much more than that, when their bodies had locked into a call and response so effortless and universal that it seemed as if she’d just that moment fallen in love. As if love and contentment were imprecise synonyms for the simple, mechanical state of existing in synchrony with an external rhythm.
It was the only explanation she could find for the way she felt when she walked into the garage where the band was already playing “One To Go,” when she tuned up, plugged in, and fell into the rhythm. Skip was exactly the same person who had driven her out of the garage a week before, the same person who’d sat next to her in his Mustang on Ocean Boulevard, staring straight ahead into the red and green neon reflecting off the damp streets, and yet now they were both wheels on the same locomotive, roaring down a steep grade in total darkness.
They did three takes, and after the last one Laurie said, “Harmony. Anybody here besides Skip sing?” Gabe and Jim both raised their hands and they spent another two hours working out parts for “Neither Are We” and “One To Go” and doing overdubs. It was after one o’clock when they settled around the kitchen table to watch coffee trickle into a pot.
“Is it too soon,” Jim said, “to start talking game plan?”
Skip looked uncomfortable and Gabe cleared his throat. “Jim always wants a game plan.” He seemed to be apologizing to Skip even as he looked directly at her.
“Thinking out loud,” Jim said. “Four or five songs is a good number for a demo. We’ve already got two. I could get us listened to. If we do a few live dates, get any kind of press at all, I can probably swing us a showcase at the Whiskey.”
Images stampeded through Laurie’s mind. Before she could recover, Skip said, “To what end?”
Jim shrugged. “Get Laurie a record contract. Go on tour. Become obscenely rich. Buy a huge farm and raise rabbits and live off the fat of the land.”
Which was when Skip finally shook his head and made his speech about how he was on some mysterious “never work in this town again” list, and how he would play on the demo and maybe do some gigs, and if there was an album, maybe that too, but in his own way and his own time.
And so what they’d had in the studio began to slip away, and eventually she did too—after promises to meet them again on Friday—back to Studio City and unemployment, back to an answering machine with Summer’s voice on it wondering where she’d been, back to guilt pangs and the worry of where her next month’s rent would come from, back to an uneasy sleep from which she awoke more than once with “One To Go” still playing in her head and visions of record contracts shimmering just out of reach.
Don’t make promises
Summer caught her flat-footed after they practiced on Thursday, suggesting they do it again the next night. As Laurie stammered out transparent excuses, Summer looked straight into her eyes, as if daring her to tell the truth. But she couldn’t, not yet, not when all the band had was a game plan and one scheduled rehearsal. She still didn’t know for sure who would be there Friday night, whether it would still be the Good Skip or whether the Evil Skip might be taking alternate practices.
In fact it was yet a third Skip who showed up. This one sat on a folding chair to play and drank one beer after another all night long. He was pliant and subdued, and at one point Jim actually had to ask him to turn up his guitar. They spent most of the night on “Angel Dust,” Laurie playing thick, distorted power chords while Skip strung slow, single-note phrases between them.
Inevitably they found themselves sitting at Jim’s kitchen table afterward. Ley lines must have crossed there, or some Indian mound lay directly under the linoleum; the spot’s emanations of comfort had little to do with the tubular steel and blue-and-green-patterned plastic of the chairs. While Laurie warmed her always-cold hands on her coffee cup, Dennis paged through the sports section of the Times and Gabe read an essay that Sam had brought home from kindergarten. Skip put his boots on the table and tilted his chair back as he drained his sixth or seventh beer, then crushed the can and hooked it into the green recycling bin by the back door. “So,” he said, suddenly focusing on Laurie, “where’d you learn to play guitar?”
Other than lending a reddish tint to his eyes, the beer didn’t seem to have affected him. His attention rendered her excruciatingly self-conscious. “When I was twelve, my dad showed me, like, a G and a D, and told me that now I could play every Velvet Underground song ever written. That was the beginning of it. I’d had enough piano lessons to know some theory, so after that, every time I saw guitar players on TV I would watch their hands. It went from being, like, the Eleusinian mysteries to something possible, like using a sewing machine.”
Skip nodded encouragement.
“Then, in ninth grade, there was this boy.” She tried to ignore the rush of blood to her face and neck. “He kept asking me to come watch his band practice, and one time I did. And it was the same as when I saw my father play, only more so. This scrawny little kid put on a guitar and he was still bratty and he still had bad skin but he was completely transformed. He was instantly sexy.”
“So did you sleep with him?” Skip asked.
She looked at her hands, folded on the table, and did not look anywhere in Skip’s direction, but she could nonetheless see the gently mocking smile on his face. “Yeah, eventually. But it wasn’t what you’re making it out to be. It wasn’t sex for guitar lessons. It was because of the way he made me feel when he played. And part of me was amazed and appalled that anything could affect me that way. So I asked my mother for a cheap guitar for Christmas, and I made Eric teach me so I could break that hold he had over me.�
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Finally she looked at Skip, expecting condescension at the very least, and what she saw instead was another scrawny kid who used to get beat up on the playground, who knew exactly what it meant to find redemption in the electric guitar. She couldn’t seem to look away.
“So,” Jim said finally, splintering the moment, “are we going to do cover tunes?”
After a sip of coffee, Laurie’s parched mouth worked again. “Sure,” she said, and went to the garage for her guitar. She was weaker about the knees than she would have preferred to be, so she perched for a second on the edge of Skip’s folding chair to catch her breath. She could smell the ashtray on top of his amp, and she could see the stains and scratches that he’d worn into his guitar over the years. For God’s sake, she thought. He’s halfway civil to you for once and you go to all pieces.
She brought her guitar into the house and showed them “Say Goodbye,” from Tonio K.’s Amerika album, a raggedly pretty song about the death of everything and how to let it go. Everybody liked it and Jim wrote the title on the right-hand side of a legal pad page he’d labeled “Originals” and “Covers.”
Then Skip took the guitar and started talking about Tim Hardin, about knowing him in the strange twilit interval in the seventies between the time Hardin stopped writing and the time he OD’d. All the while Skip was sounding chords very quietly, and at some point he started singing “Don’t Make Promises,” a bouncy little countryish song full of the blackest hurt and despair. It was the first time Laurie had heard him sing an entire song, live and in person, and his singing revealed things that most professional singers learn early on to hide.
She slept badly that night. She kept seeing Skip’s face, and it seemed to her that the face wanted something from her, or, more precisely, it wanted something and was asking her if she was the one who could give it to him. Every time she found herself going down that road, she would hurl herself into a new position and pound her pillows into a different shape and start with a fresh thought, like, how many other women has he given that look to this week? Or, this is why men complain about having women in the band, because they want to go to bed with us, and God help us if they get what they want. Or, why don’t you just act like a professional and go to sleep?
Summer knocking on her door at noon woke her up. As Laurie wandered through the apartment in a fog, making coffee, putting on odds and ends of clothing, it seemed an easy thing to simply tell her everything. Then, when she saw the hurt and disappointment on Summer’s face, she wished she could suck the words back into her mouth.
“A week ago,” Summer said, “you said the band wasn’t happening.” She had her arms folded over her chest and her eyes were glacial.
“A week ago it wasn’t. I’m sorry, okay? Look, this doesn’t change anything between you and me.” The sentence trailed off unconvincingly.
“Of course it does. Don’t play the naïf. It’s insulting.”
“What I’m saying is, I want us to keep playing together. I already told them I have to have Saturdays off.”
“And what happens when you get a record deal and a tour?”
“If that happens, then I’d have to make a decision.”
“Sounds to me like you already have. I can feel your footprints on my back as you climb right over me.”
“Come on, Summer, everybody in town is in more than one band.”
“Not me. I’m over thirty, which makes me an old woman by the standards of this industry, and I don’t look like I’m on sabbatical from Melrose Place. Which means this is about as far as I’m ever going to go on my own. I haven’t learned to live with that—I mean, who could really learn to live with a thing like that?—but I’d kind of gotten used to the idea. Then you come along and start throwing hope at me, and then inside a week you’re gone again.”
“I’m not gone,” Laurie said. “I’m right here. Playing with you at the Duck is the only real thing in my life right now.”
“The only thing that pays real money, you mean. But that’s okay, don’t panic. I need the money as much as you do. So I’ll see you tonight, and we’ll do our job and collect our pay.” She picked up her guitar and was gone so fast that Laurie was left staring at the open door.
Get ready
At the Duck that night Summer apologized and Laurie apologized and they got up and played two great sets, better sets, ironically, than they’d played the week before, even as Laurie knew that the crack that had opened between them would only get wider and deeper.
Over the next two weeks the band learned her father’s song, “Last to Know,” and one of Laurie’s oldies, “Carry On.” She brought in “Just Another End of the World,” her song about the fireworks over Disneyland, and they did Tonio K.’s “Say Goodbye.” Not to mention a half dozen other attempts that didn’t stick. The process seemed virtually effortless.
Late on a Sunday in February, while everyone else repaired to the kitchen, Laurie stayed with Jim in the garage and watched him mix her five originals onto a cassette. “Voila,” he said. “Une demo, as the French say.”
Laurie took the cassette into the kitchen and they listened to it on Molly’s jam box that sat over the sink. Dennis’s feet tapped out the drum parts on the linoleum. “This is good,” he said, smiling.
“I could get a cleaner sound,” Jim said. “One instrument per track, get more control over the levels…”
“Would you guys be quiet?” Laurie said.
When it was over, Dennis said, “I’d hire us.”
“Wouldn’t that be nepotism?” Jim asked.
“Gross!” Dennis said. “No way I’d do it with a dead person.”
“It sounds great,” Gabe said. “Really great.” Even Skip was nodding. For her part, Laurie was fairly sure it was either brilliant or it was the Emperor’s New Demo and club owners would laugh her out of town. She desperately wanted to listen to it another eight or ten times but was embarrassed to ask.
“So,” Jim said, “whose name goes on the label? Do we cobble up some hokey band name, or are we Laurie Moss?”
“How about Mohammed Dali,” Gabe said, “after the famous surrealist boxer?”
“That would be good,” Jim said. “Or the Pro-Crust Dough Boys, from the makers of Procrustean Bread.”
“I think we’re Laurie Moss,” Skip said quietly. Jim and Gabe turned to look at him. “I think she wants to hear a record with her name on it on the radio.”
So, Laurie thought. He’d been listening after all, sitting in his car that night. For him to repeat her words was a gesture of such intimacy that she could feel a bright spot of heat in the exact center of her body.
On the drive home she pushed Skip out of her mind and focused on the tape. She played it over and over, objectivity eluding her. She’d have gone deeply in debt to buy herself temporary amnesia, to let herself hear her own music with innocent ears, but instead she was left hanging on every note, searching for clues.
Tuesday was Valentine’s Day. She took Summer to the LA Natural History Museum for the day rather than sit around the house. “You’re a genius,” Summer said, looking at the life-sized woolly mammoth replicas in the La Brea tar pits. “On this day of days, to have found the perfect metaphor for love.”
On a Wednesday in early March, Laurie took a couple of old, unfinished songs to Whittier. Skip was late again. She’d run through what she had of “Brighter Day” for the others, remembering the last time Skip was late and promising herself that nothing, absolutely nothing, would bring her back if it happened again, when Skip’s voice behind her said, “That was nice. Why’d you keep going to the F? The B7th is a lot prettier.”
“I don’t know,” she said, giddy with relief. “I was young at the time. Do you always sneak up on people?”
Skip picked up the scrap of paper with the verse and a half and the chords. “Is this all there is?”
“I never finished it. I thought maybe we could…”
Skip nodded and turned toward the kitchen with the pap
er and his guitar case.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“I was going to take a shot at it.” She could see him start to retreat into himself. “That is, if you wanted me to, of course.”
“Uh, yeah. Sure. I guess.”
Skip nodded again and closed the door behind him. Laurie looked at Gabe, who shrugged. “Who is he supposed to be?” she asked. “Lord Byron? Heathcliffe?”
Gabe and Jim looked at each other and then Gabe said, “He hasn’t written a new song, all by himself, in fifteen years. But he’s still Skip Shaw. He’s got that voice, and he plays the shit out of the guitar, and he knows more about songwriting than anybody else I’ve ever known. And he’s got history. You can hear it in everything he does or says. I guess that buys him a lot. From me, anyway.”
Jim nodded and gave Gabe an E.
“So anyway,” Gabe said when he was tuned. “How do you feel about Motown?” By the time they’d worked their way twice through “Get Ready,” with Laurie faking the words and Gabe and Jim stepping up for the “ah ah ah ah ah” harmonies, Skip had returned. He was smiling. He laid the sheet of paper on Jim’s Yamaha and Laurie turned it to face her. He’d added two verses and a bridge, crossed things out and written between the lines, drawn circles and arrows and sketched a couple of chord diagrams.
“This is weird,” Laurie said. “I never wrote a song with anybody else before.”
“I didn’t write it with you,” Skip said. “I just doctored it a little, that’s all. Hell, I used to do it for Elvis.”
Laurie looked to Gabe for confirmation and Gabe shrugged.
Skip said, “Those last few albums, in ’75, ’76? Promised Land, From Elvis Presley Boulevard? I’d come in, do a polish in an afternoon, pick up some change. Some of them turned out okay. You ever hear ‘Moody Blue’? It got pretty big after he died.”
“You worked on ‘Moody Blue’?” she asked in amazement.
Now it was Skip who shrugged, as if it didn’t matter. He seemed to want her flustered and confused, and she preferred to disappoint him, if possible. “Okay,” she said, “fine, whatever you say.” She pointed to “Brighter Day.” “What does it sound like, now that it’s been doctored?”
