by Lewis Shiner
“Suppose,” she said, “we could drive two blocks and be anywhere in the world. Where would you be?”
“Home.” He didn’t open his eyes.
“No unfulfilled desires to see Katmandu or Mount Kilimanjaro?”
“Well, actually…”
“You’ve already seen them.”
“Sorry.”
She pulled away from the curb. “So which way is home?”
He opened one eye. “We’re leaving my car, I take it?”
“You tell me.”
He shrugged. “It’s just a car. Go west on the 72 and get off in Hollywood.”
Gallery
It wasn’t what she’d imagined the apartment of the legendary Skip Shaw to look like, though it made perfect sense once she’d seen it. The building dated from the early sixties: white brick, concrete slabs, aluminum and louvered glass, thin straight lines intersecting everywhere, the whole of it buried behind oleanders and dying palms.
He’d furnished the inside to match, with a Naugahyde sofa, a curtain of wooden beads between the living room and the kitchen, and an assortment of mismatched chairs and tables. A bookshelf made of boards and bricks, stuffed full of battered paperbacks, covered one wall. The air smelled of old cigarettes; years of them had left a yellowish haze on the paint.
What completely surprised her was the art. There were two or three prints on each wall, all of them matted and expensively framed. They were the kind of prints that named the artist and the picture and the gallery, and she hadn’t heard of half of the painters: Fernand Khnopff, Arnold Böcklin, Egon Schiele, Max Ernst, Max Beckmann, Jean Delville. They all had people in them, they were all more or less realistic, yet were all at the same time very painterly, full of intimations of doom and allegory.
She stopped in front of Edvard Munch’s Madonna. Sperm swam in a red border around a naked woman, dark, with the contours of her head and body receding into the background.
“Beer?” Skip called from the kitchen.
“No thanks.”
He came out with a long-necked bottle of Bud and stood next to her, looking at the print. “When you’re on the road,” he said, “you can stay in the hotel and get wasted, which God knows I did my share of. You can do the tourist thing, which ends up reminding you that you don’t belong there. Or you can find yourself a hobby. I used to go look at pictures. When the tour guides would come around, I would always walk away. I just bought whatever made me feel something.
“I used to be a tough guy about shit like this. You know, the whole ‘I’m just a yarn spinner’ kind of crap, like writing songs isn’t fundamentally different from making furniture. Except it is. It’s more like what these guys do, which makes you cut off your ear or jump off a bridge.”
“Do you not write at all anymore?”
“A line or two, maybe a snatch of melody. Mostly I don’t bother to write them down because the pieces don’t ever fit together they way they used to. One line doesn’t lead to the next, you know?”
She pointed to the Madonna. “So what does this make you feel?”
“I think it’s sexy. Nudity and death and conception and responsibility. Not silicon-and-airbrush sexy—real-life sexy.”
She turned to him to see if he had something in mind besides the painting. Evidently he did.
Later they lay in bed by the reflected light from the front room and smoked a joint, her head resting in the curve of his left shoulder. She asked what he did all day and he told her about the jingle factory in Van Nuys.
“What commercials are you on? You have to tell me.”
“By the time I get out to the parking lot, they’re gone out of my head.”
She turned to audit his expression. “I don’t know if I should believe you or not.” Only after the words were out did she remember Gabe and his newspaper articles.
He didn’t seem inclined to take offense. “Hell, what else am I going to do? Flip burgers? Sell encyclopedias door to door? I’m too old to get hired for a real job. There was this guy I knew in my bohemian days. He’d sold some short stories to the New Yorker, wrote this one novel that got great reviews, but somehow he never made a living at it. He didn’t know how to do anything else either. Ended up writing educational comics. Learned to do his own lettering, too, which made him a kind of a double threat in the educational comics marketplace.”
“Was he happy?”
“Happy? Writing educational comics after being the toast of New York? He was a fucking junkie, when he could afford it, and he sure as hell didn’t talk about his day job.”
The conversation was headed places she didn’t like so she changed tracks. “You don’t even own a stereo, do you? I didn’t see one anywhere.”
“No,” he said. “Playing’s one thing. Listening to somebody else…it just makes me frustrated.”
“Because you could do it better?”
“Because I could be doing it. Instead of listening to it.”
“Let me guess. You don’t dance.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t dance.”
He reached for a pair of tweezers on the bedside table to hold the roach. She asked, “What were you like as a kid?”
“Intense. I hated being a kid. All I wanted was to grow up so nobody could tell me what to do. My dad walked out when I was four. I remember him mostly from photographs. He used to eat Butter Rum Life Savers and I remember that smell. I grew up with this fantasy that he would simply show up one day and take me away with him. We used to move a lot, my mom and me, and it drove me crazy because I thought my father would come looking for me and not be able to find me. He died when I was thirteen and it turned out he’d been living in Florida with a new wife and kid and he hadn’t been looking for me after all. I wanted to go the funeral and my mom wouldn’t let me because we didn’t have any money. After that, well, after that I put my head down and slogged it out because I knew there wasn’t going to be any rescue.”
“Where did you live?”
“A long string of middle-sized California towns. Bakersfield, Fresno, Atascadero. Mom was a seamstress. We were so poor we lived out of the car sometimes. California always had good roadside rest stops, with showers and barbecue grills and everything.
“The first few weeks in a new town were always the worst. Mom would be trying too hard to impress everybody we met, and I’d be going to a new school and getting into fights.”
He was quiet for a long time and finally she said, “Where’d you go off to?”
“I was remembering my first day in third grade at Bakersfield. Christ, I haven’t thought about this in years. There was this fat kid named Chuckie Welch who sat in the back of the room and played with these little-bitty toy cars all through class, and I hated him because he didn’t get in trouble for it, the way I knew I would have. Then during lunch I got in a fight with this other kid and he threw me down on the playground and I skinned up my elbow and tore one knee out of my new Levis. And I started crying in class, and everybody thought it was because my elbow was all bloody, but it was because I didn’t know how I was going to face my mother and tell her I’d fucked up my brand-new jeans that were going to have to last me the rest of the year.”
As she listened, she realized she had no idea whether he was lying or not. She wanted it not to matter, the way it didn’t matter if a song or a short story was strictly autobiographical. But the only time it didn’t matter was when they were playing music or making love.
As she drifted off to sleep, she called up one more time the memory of how good the band had sounded, regardless of the previous night’s disaster with Skip. Despite all her premonitions of doom, her ears lulled her with comforting messages, reassuring her that sleeping with Skip would not affect the band after all.
No, she thought. Don’t get your hopes up. You’ve got too far still to go.
A day at the beach
Catherine and Shannon were in the driveway getting into their tidy white Accord when she got home the next morning. It was o
nly nine o’clock and she’d thought of nothing but going back to bed since she’d left Skip’s apartment, but when Catherine said, “We’re going to the beach, want to come?” Laurie found herself saying yes.
No need to bring a bathing suit, Catherine told her. The water wouldn’t be warm enough for swimming until June, two and a half months away. So she went as she was, going inside only long enough to drop off her guitar and amp, change her shoes, and use the bathroom, not even checking the answering machine to see if there was yet another call from her landlady. And somehow, just sitting in the passenger seat instead of driving, discussing with Shannon the unlikely trio of Barney, Beavis, and Butthead instead of arguing music with the band, all of that combined with the knowledge that she was for the moment utterly unreachable, made her feel as if she’d stepped sideways out of her own life, as if she were watching an autobiographical film.
“Little did she realize,” she said aloud, watching the highway unroll in front of her, “that tranquil spring morning, how soon she would become a prisoner of her own global fame.”
Catherine looked over at her, laughing. “What?”
“In those days she could travel in an ordinary passenger car, and walk on the beach without fear of being recognized.”
“Aunt Laurie,” Shannon said, “you are being a very silly person.”
“Soon she would look back upon those times with a nostalgia that bordered on the melodramatic.”
“Should I start looking for the nearest mental hospital,” Catherine said, “or is this a side-effect of your staying out all night?”
“Yes,” Laurie said. “Both. Either. None of the above.”
“Are we going to the Wedge, Mommy?” Shannon’s interest had already moved on.
“We’ll have to ask Aunt Laurie that, sweetie. But first she has to tell your mommy who she was out all night with.”
“I’ll tell you everything once we get there.”
The Wedge was a scrap of beach south of Marina Del Rey where a stone jetty and a sharp drop-off combined to create waves up to eight feet high, lurching up alarmingly only to crash moments later into the hard-packed sand. The water was muddied to the color of weak cocoa from the violence of the assault, while a hundred yards north it was a limpid turquoise. Surfboards were outlawed and only pathologically fearless body surfers, wearing wet suits, goggles, and small yellow plastic rudders strapped to their hands, would get in the water.
The repeated explosions of wave against beach were loud and dramatic and irregular enough to keep Laurie, who had more than once thought of herself as leisure-impaired, from becoming restless and longing for something constructive to do.
While Shannon assembled alien landscapes from sand and kelp and leaves and sticks, Laurie talked about Skip. When she was done, Catherine said, “Sounds like somebody I’d fall for.”
“Ah. That bad?”
“You tell me. Where do you see it going?”
“It’s hard to fit a happy ending on this particular chassis,” she admitted. “On the other hand, I don’t see me married to a doctor in Darien, Connecticut, ten years from now either.”
“God, I could. Let him be rich and very, very busy.”
Laurie watched a heavily-tanned man in his forties, his graying hair in a thin braid down his back, fight his way out past the break, catch a monster wave, and get slammed into the beach. When the tide pulled away, he was on his hands and knees. He shook himself off, ducked under the next wave, and paddled out again.
“What does it take,” she said, “to make you want to do something like that?”
“You mean,” Catherine said, “as opposed to what you do?”
They were home by three o’clock. As they pulled into the driveway, Laurie saw a badly dressed woman with thinning brown hair pin a note to her front door. No chance to hide out at Catherine’s, either; the woman had already spotted her.
“I’ve been calling all week,” she said as Laurie climbed the driveway toward her. “Didn’t you get my messages?”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Donnelly,” Laurie said, “but I don’t have any money. I can’t pay the rent.” She was still beside herself and listened in amazement to the words that came out of her mouth. “I don’t know what happens next.”
Mrs. Donnelly let the silence stretch painfully, then said, “What about tea?”
“Pardon?”
“Do you have any tea, then? Since you don’t have money?”
Laurie let her in and got iced tea for both of them.
“Since you were honest with me,” Mrs. Donnelly said, “I’ll be honest with you. It’s a lot of trouble to evict somebody. Maybe we can make a deal.”
In the end Laurie wrote her a hundred dollar check, leaving herself with a not entirely reliable bank balance of $7.36, and promised her another hundred the following Thursday, and every Thursday thereafter until she could pay the rest of what she owed, including late charges. Which meant that out of her two hundred a week from the Duck she would have a hundred left to buy gas for the LBD, feed herself, and pay all her bills.
And yet the longer she went without a job, the more her life expanded to fill the space that the job had formerly occupied. As, for example, when Jim called an hour later, before her hair was dry from her shower, to tell her the studio and Dennis were available if she wanted to work.
The ringer
They did drum tracks for “Carry On” and “Midnight Train” because she wanted to play something that rocked. “Dinner?” Jim asked when they were done. Dennis had already retreated to the kitchen to begin his intense nightly study of the Times’ sports page.
“Rhythm guitar?” Laurie said. It was idiotic for her not to agree to food, both bank-account-wise and hunger-wise, since she hadn’t eaten all day, but she didn’t want to lose the groove. “On ‘Carry On’?”
Jim hesitated. “You mean, you want to do the rhythm part yourself?”
“I am the rhythm player, aren’t I?”
“You’re the lead singer. And the songwriter. And, really, a very good guitar player.”
“But…?”
“But we do have Skip available. He’s done more session work than any other ten guitar players I know. And every time that brand new reel of tape passes over those analog heads you lose fidelity.”
“You’re saying I shouldn’t play my own guitar parts on my own record.”
“I’m just saying—”
“—that Skip could do it better, faster, more reliably. Too bad. It’s my record, I’m playing guitar on it. You’ve already told me I should give up on landing a major label or getting any money out of it. If all I’m doing this for is the record itself, I’m not going to listen to somebody else play my guitar parts.”
“Okay, okay,” Jim said. “Really. It’ll be fine.”
She considered the song. Each chord in its necessary and inevitable place, its name and its shape. She made everything that was not the song go away. No hunger, no pain in her back, no anger, no consciousness of the tape or the microphone or Jim waiting for her to either prove something or not. In her headphones Dennis clicked off the beat and she played the song correctly and passionately, exactly the way it unfurled in her mind, start to finish.
“I apologize,” Jim said. “That was perfect.”
“Thanks. Now how about ‘Neither Are We? ’ ”
She got it in two takes, and the only reason she needed three for “Midnight Train” was that it was getting on towards seven o’clock, time for their regularly scheduled practice, and she couldn’t keep Skip from jumping her carefully constructed mental fences.
Gabe got there first, so they laid down his parts on “Carry On” and “Neither Are We” while Jim and Dennis ate bologna sandwiches. Laurie could smell the meat across the studio and it made her faintly sick to her stomach. After “Neither Are We” there was a scratching at the door and Molly stuck her head in. “Jim? There’s some guy here looking for Skip.”
She stood aside. From the dark hallway Laur
ie saw a heavy-duty gray airline-proof guitar case edge into the light, followed by an emaciated man in a black leather jacket. “This is weird,” he said. “Skip didn’t tell you I was coming?”
“No,” Laurie said, startled by the open hostility in her voice. As was Gabe, who turned to look at her.
“He said something about learning his guitar parts? That he might need me to sub for him at some live gigs?”
“This is the first I’ve heard of it,” Laurie said brightly.
“Gosh,” he said. “This is kind of awkward.”
“Isn’t it?” Laurie said. She was trying to remember the last time she’d felt such instantaneous dislike of anyone. Part of it was physical—he could have been any one of the look-alike, big-haired, lethally-tanned, scarecrow-thin, lightning-fast, scale-regurgitating, lite-metal guitarists that had ruined pre-Nirvana MTV for her. The rest of it was misdirected anger at Skip, who had inflicted this walking disaster on her and done it behind her back.
“Well, it’s not your fault,” Jim said, and held out his hand. “I’m Jim.”
“I’m Mitch,” he said. “Mitch Gaines.”
Laurie wrinkled her nose. An odor had followed him into the garage: incense, maybe, or patchouli oil.
“I thought so,” Jim said. “You were in the house band at the China Club for a while, weren’t you? You’re really good.”
“Yeah, thanks, man, that was a nice gig.”
“This is Laurie. She’s the real talent. She writes the songs and sings lead.”
“And plays guitar,” she said, wanting to be a grownup but watching herself act out anyway, wondering when this bizarre detachment would pass, and how much more damage she would do in the meantime. She forced herself to shake his skeletal hand.
“Um, Skip told me he’d be here,” Mitch said. “Is it okay if I wait a little bit?”
“Sure,” Jim said, motioning toward the ratty sofa. “Have a seat. We were about to listen to some playback.”
Now she was misdirecting her anger at Jim, for being nice to Skip’s ringer. “Are you sure it won’t grind too many molecules off your tape?” she asked him.
