by Lewis Shiner
“Let’s take a walk.”
They got outside as Skip was pulling away. Laurie wanted so badly to be sitting next to him, smelling stale smoke and leather, night wind in her eyes, that it felt like some essential part of her had in fact stowed away in the Mustang’s passenger seat and left the rest of her behind to cope alone.
“So,” Gabe said. “I hope it was worth it.”
“Were we really that obvious?”
He sat on the trunk of the LBD. “Give me a break.”
“Okay.” She sat down next to him. “It was pretty fantastic.”
Gabe sighed. “Maybe I should have pushed you two at each other from the start. Gotten it over with.” He folded his arms across his chest. The effect was somewhere between stern and pouty. “The band will either survive this or it won’t.”
“I’ll hold it together with my bare hands if I have to. At least until we finish the record.”
“If making a record is so important to you, why did you have to—oh, never mind.”
“Where do you get off being such a Puritan? What did you do with that black-leather fantasy at the Duck the night I met you? Play mah jhong?”
“I’ve known L’Shondra since grade school, actually. We’ve only been lovers for five years. She’s an orphan too. Neither one of us has got much in the way of family history, you know? But we’ve got each other. She’s got a Masters in social work, by the way, and helps run United Way for LA county. She dresses differently for work than for clubbing, if that’s any of your business, but then I’m not sure there’s a huge difference between judging people by the way they dress and judging them by their skin color.”
“Are you ever going to slow down long enough for me to apologize?”
“I don’t know. Should I bother? I’m still pretty pissed off at you.”
“I’m trying to tell you I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, okay. I guess you are.”
They sat and looked at the night sky, muffled in haze and reflected light. “Your real parents,” Laurie said. “Did you ever find out who they were?”
“My birth parents, you mean?”
She’d never seen Gabe this way before: quibbling, sarcastic, contentious. This is my fault, she thought.
“Yeah,” he went on. “My father was a black soldier in Viet Nam. He died over there. My mother was what you call Eurasian—half French, half Vietnamese. She died over here, when I was five months old. Heroin OD. My dad got her hooked on it when they were shacked up together. That’s one of the reasons I’m so rabid on the subject.”
“I don’t remember that being the subject.”
“We were talking about Skip, remember?”
“Oh my God. Are you saying Skip…”
“You mean you didn’t know? You honestly didn’t know?” She shook her head and Gabe sighed. “As far as I know he’s clean right now, been clean as long as I’ve been playing with him. And I think I could tell. In his day, though, he was one of the king junkies of all LA.”
At the same moment that she was thinking, My God, I had unprotected sex with an IV drug user—at that exact moment she was also thinking, You poor son of a bitch, there truly is a world of pain in those eyes.
“So you can see,” Gabe was saying, “why he has a lot of mixed feelings where success is concerned. That ‘five-figure’ advance from Warner you read about went straight into his veins. If he ever really hit the big time he’d probably do himself in.”
“My God,” Laurie whispered. “What else is there I don’t know about?”
“Well, there’s Dennis. He’s into teenage prostitutes.”
Laurie stared at him and he waved one tired hand. “Kidding. Just kidding, for Christ’s sake.”
“We’re doomed,” Laurie said.
“That,” Gabe said, “would be the most obvious conclusion.”
She thought of Ron Tuggle and took a modest sip of air. “What are we going to do?”
“We’ll do what you said. We’ll rush right into making the album instead of waiting until the songs are road-tested and refined and totally solid, because the more successful we get, the faster the clock is ticking down.”
“You must hate me.”
Finally Gabe unfolded his arms and scratched his forehead. “Nah. I’m a little pissed off, but I’m not going to hang on to it. If it wasn’t for you, we’d still be pissing our lives away, going nowhere, twice a week.” He stood up. “I guess I’m done, if you are.”
“Gabe? Thanks.”
“For yelling at you?”
“For giving a damn.”
“The Buddha says the more you care the more you get hurt.” He shrugged. “Let’s go see if there’s any coffee left.”
Tracks
Nothing on the answering machine from Skip when she got home, and by the next afternoon he still hadn’t called. Three washouts from the want ads left her nostalgic for Mazola Mike. She cleaned the entire apartment for the third time in a week to distract herself from the twin specters of guilt and anxiety.
When the phone rang around three o’clock she snatched it on the first ring. It was Jim, who had just finished using Dennis on some other singer’s demo. “You want to come over and work on a couple of drum tracks?”
She’d been so sure it would be Skip that she had trouble orienting herself. Working on drum tracks was exactly what she should have wanted, but she had to struggle not to let disappointment creep into her voice. “I’m there,” she said. “That’s me, knocking on your front door.”
She made it to Whittier in forty minutes flat, under a cold, gray sky. Intellectually she knew Skip wouldn’t be there. Reality tap-danced on her emotions just the same.
For the first half hour, Dennis battered away while she and Jim moved microphones and fiddled with echo and EQ to get the drum sound she wanted: crisp, contained, not the Led Zeppelin recorded-in-a-stairwell boom she was tired of hearing every day on the radio. Periodically she glanced over her shoulder, convinced someone had that moment walked in behind her.
Finally they went to work. Isolated behind padded plywood partitions, Laurie did a guide vocal and guitar track so that Dennis could keep his place in the song. Playing helped. She was able to lose herself in the music for entire seconds at a time.
They ended up with finished drum tracks for “Neither Are We” and “Angel Dust,” and Jim took them to Taco Bell to celebrate.
They ordered and took their drinks to a table by the window. Jim stripped half the wrapper off his straw and shot the other half at Dennis. “Cheer up,” he told her. “We got two tracks today.”
“Two drum tracks,” she said. “With four more instruments, plus vocals, plus overdubs, plus eleven more complete songs, to go.”
Their number came up and Dennis went after the food.
“You don’t realize how good that guy is,” Jim said, once he was out of earshot. “Two tracks in an hour and a half is major league. And even without the rest of the band, or a click track, he still moved around the beat, swung in behind it to push on the choruses, and never lost the tempo.”
“Despite my screwing up.”
“It’s a different discipline, that’s all,” Jim said. “You’ll get used to it.”
“If Dennis is so good, why do you give him so much grief?”
“He’s a drummer. It goes with the territory.”
Being on the road, she thought, would be like this. Junk food, casual put-downs, all the music talk she could ever want. And Skip would be there, with nothing to distract him from her.
Dennis returned with two heaping trays. “What did he say about me?” he asked Laurie.
Jim didn’t give her a chance to answer. “I was telling her our motto. ‘Those who can, play. Those who can’t, drum. ’ ”
“Can’t what?”
“Never mind, Dennis. I’ll explain it to you later.”
Laurie poured hot sauce onto a chicken taco. “Your wife,” she asked Jim. “Molly? Does she work?”
“She’s
a secretary for Parks and Recreation. High stress, low pay. With me working only half time at my real job, and never knowing what money’s going to come in from the studio, we’ve always depended pretty heavily on her paycheck. But it’s getting better now, and we’re almost to the point where she can quit. Unless Sam wants to, like, go to college or something ridiculous like that.”
“I went to college once,” Dennis said. “It sucked. If I’m going to get up at eight in the morning, I expect to get paid or laid, one.” He looked at Laurie. “Speaking of which, is it true that Skip has this really enormous dick?”
She felt her face go hot and then cold. “Excuse me,” she said, with a reflexive smile. She went to the bathroom and stood over the sink, scrubbing at her face, thinking, this is exactly what you were so convinced you could handle. How do you like it? Still want to shut yourself up in a van with these people?
She gave Dennis long enough to think about what he’d done—a favorite concept of her mother’s—and then went back to the table. Jim said, “He’s sorry. He’s an asshole and doesn’t know how to behave.”
Dennis said, “Sorry.”
She’d had time to think it out. Pretending she hadn’t slept with Skip had no mileage in it, and she wasn’t about to apologize for it. “So,” she asked Dennis. “Who told you he has a big dick?”
“I don’t know,” Dennis said, squirming like an adolescent. “I read it somewhere. What d’you call it, Vanity Fair or something.”
“Vanity Fair?” Jim said. “Vanity Fair? You’ve never read Vanity Fair in your life. They have a minimum IQ requirement for Vanity Fair.”
“You’re making that up,” Dennis said in a mildly offended tone.
“You ever read Harper’s? Atlantic Monthly?”
“Hell, no. Why should I?”
“Well, see? There you are.”
Dennis ate a taco in two bites, wiped his mouth, and said, “Neither of them ever had Demi Moore naked on the cover.”
It was over that quickly, the crisis more or less averted and the subject changed, albeit self-consciously. Dennis hadn’t meant anything, Laurie saw, had simply said the first thing that popped into his head. Still, the knowledge of what she and Skip had done was loose in the general population, free to multiply. The first cracks had appeared in the band’s foundation, and it was nobody’s fault but her own.
The set
Skip was plugged in and waiting for them at the garage. Laurie’s heart jumped when she saw him. He showed her a smile she hadn’t seen before, knowing and intimate, that made her blush for the second time in an hour.
They had fifteen songs on the set list now, an hour’s worth, and with stops and starts they made it from top to bottom in two hours. They took a break and then played it again, this time in an hour and a half, with the tape deck rolling.
“Don’t Make Promises” chilled her as they sat on the dirty carpet and listened to the playback. The lyrics now seemed prophetic: songs that were all about tomorrow, people telling lies in their sleep.
She left when Skip did, and this time Gabe didn’t move to stop her. She had to hurry to catch up to him on the driveway. “So,” she said. “You want to come over to my place?”
His smile seemed tired, but she dismissed the thought as paranoid. “Sure,” he said. “Why not?”
Once on the freeway, he kept disappearing from her rear-view mirror. The first couple of times, she slowed until he came roaring up behind her again. The third time she decided he could find his own way to her apartment. He’d done it before.
He pulled up as she unlocked the front door. She waited for him and let him walk in first. Inside, with the door locked, she turned to him, her breath caught in her swollen throat. He came to her in four pounding, cowboy-booted steps, tangled one hand in her hair, and kissed her.
On the drive home she’d made herself a promise, and now, with the last of her fading will, she went through with it. “Uh, listen,” she said. “Don’t you think we should be, um, using a condom or something?”
“No,” he said. “I hate those damned things. They’re not natural.”
“Well, have you ever been tested?”
“Yeah.” He took a step back. “I’ve been tested. Heterosexual AIDS is a myth. Men don’t get it, not from women, not doing the things you and I did.”
The past tense and the tension of his shoulders made her wish she’d never said anything, but it was too late now. “Women do,” she said. “From men. And I wasn’t implying you might have gotten it from sex. Hetero or otherwise.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Needles,” she said. “I was worried about needles.”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“You’re saying you’ve never shot heroin?”
“That’s what I’m saying. Who the hell told you I did? Gabe, again?” When she didn’t answer he said, “Maybe we should just skip it.” He looked at the door but didn’t actually move toward it.
“I didn’t mean to make you mad,” she said. “A girl can’t be too careful, you know.”
“Of course she can. It’s easier to be too careful than anything in the world.”
“Hey,” she said. “So you’ve been tested. So I’m satisfied.”
But satisfaction proved not to be so simple after all. Skip had lost the mood and she was unable to coax it back.
“It’s late,” he said at last, reaching for his clothes. “I should go.”
“Don’t,” she said. “Please. I don’t want to fight. Can’t you just stay with me? I don’t care about the rest of it.”
The miniblinds above the headboard broke the glow from the streetlight into stripes across his bare chest. He shrugged and turned away from her. She got up to brush her teeth, and when she came out of the bathroom she saw him quickly shut his eyes.
She lay with her back to him, her brain buzzing with thoughts of her aging car and the rent she could not pay, of the meals she’d missed in the last six months, of the long hours wasted at Mazola Mike’s coffee shop, of the clothes at Nordstrom’s that she couldn’t afford to try on, let alone buy. For a second or two, listening to the playback of that night’s rehearsal, she’d let herself believe her life might change, but she saw now she’d only been kidding herself. She couldn’t even cry properly, or so much as reach for a Kleenex, because there was someone next to her in bed that she didn’t want to be there. It was a situation she’d promised herself she’d never let herself get into again, and yet here she was.
Around three o’clock—she’d been watching the second hand crawl around the lighted dial of her alarm clock for an hour—Skip said softly, “You awake?” She didn’t answer or turn to look as he dressed in the dark and let himself out.
When she heard the Mustang roar away, she got up and locked the door and put on a T-shirt to cover the body that no one wanted, and, finally, fell asleep as the sun crawled out of the darkness.
Double lead
Practice was scheduled to start at seven. She made herself wait to leave the apartment until 6:55, just to show them, then chewed her fingernails all the way to Whittier as she tried to anticipate how Skip would react when she finally walked in.
In the end it was an anticlimax of the mildest sort. Skip was fully present, neither flirtatious nor distant. Once Laurie got past her nerves, she felt like a key turning in a lock. Everything meshed, especially between her and Skip: the double lead on “Neither Are We,” the duet on “Don’t Make Promises,” the words Skip had written for “Fools Cap.”
They broke for coffee and played the set again, and there were long seconds at a time when she didn’t seem to have an existence separate from the others. When the last notes of “Carry On” died out, Gabe looked at Laurie and said, “We’re ready.”
Everyone was a little giddy, Laurie included. She felt like she might start laughing at the smallest thing and be unable to stop.
Jim nodded. “I’m going to make some calls, follow up
on that demo.”
“Yes,” Laurie said. “Yes, I want to play somewhere.”
Everyone looked at Skip.
Skip popped his guitar strap loose and laid the guitar in its case. “Go ahead and book some things.”
“Does that mean we can count on you?” Laurie said. She hadn’t meant anything beyond the most immediate context, but in the sudden quiet she could see that it sounded much worse than that.
Skip straightened up slowly. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. They looked at each other for a second or two as Laurie wondered how she was supposed to take it. Don’t worry because yes, he would be playing? Don’t worry because the band was going to break up any minute, so the question was irrelevant?
Jim said, “You want to work on some more tracks tonight?”
The elation from the set was already fading. “I’m tired,” she said, and it seemed true once the words were out. “Maybe tomorrow.”
She was the first one out the door. It’s come down to this, she thought. Searching every word, every act, for signs and portents. If he speaks to me before I get to the end of the driveway, it means he loves me. If I step on a crack, we’re doomed.
She walked straight out to the LBD, low heels clacking on the damp pavement in a brisk, no-nonsense rhythm, in case anyone was listening. Guitar and amp into the trunk, not turning to look behind her. Unlock the driver’s door and get in. No fair peeking in the rear view mirror. Count to three, start the engine. Nothing to hold her here. Let the brake off, ease away from the curb, now check that mirror for cars.
No cars, only Skip. Stopped in the middle of the misty midnight street, hands palm out at his sides. She rolled down her window and looked back.
“In a hurry to get somewhere?” Skip asked. He had a half smile on his face, bowed legs, the boots, the big silver buckle on his belt.
“Depends,” she said.
“Give me a ride to my car?”
His car was all of thirty feet away. “Sure,” she said.
He put his guitar in the back seat and got in next to her. When she glanced over at him his eyes were closed. He looked years older that way.
