Say Goodbye

by Lewis Shiner

  “I think we can afford it, just this once.” He went behind the board and played “Carry On,” rhythm, bass, drums, and Laurie’s scratch vocal, at substantial volume. Laurie watched Mitch out of the corner of her eye as he bobbed along to the music; she was sure he’d practiced in a mirror to get the most effect from his big hair.

  “Nice guitar sound,” he said afterward. “Is that Skip?”

  “No,” Skip said from the doorway, “just Skip’s amp.”

  Laurie cringed. Her tiny practice amp had no tone or sustain, so she’d talked Jim into letting her use Skip’s Fender Twin. She’d meant to find a better way to break it to him, and now she would have to face the repercussions. Skip gave Jim a Look and then said, “Mitch, how the hell are you?”

  Skip and Mitch shook hands like they were arm wrestling. That apparently wasn’t enough, so they had to grab each other’s shoulders with their left hands at the same time. “Lookin’ good, bro,” Mitch said. It made Laurie glad she’d used Skip’s amp. She wished she’d blown it up.

  “So, have you met everybody?” Skip asked him.

  “We’ve met,” Laurie said.

  “Jim, if you could dub off one of our rehearsal tapes for Mitch, he could be working on it in case we ever need him.” Jim nodded, put a fresh cassette in the deck, changed out the big reel.

  “Skip, could I talk to you outside?” Laurie asked.

  “No. If you’ve got something to say, say it.”

  “Okay, fine. What I wanted to know is, is this the Skip Shaw Band now? Because if it isn’t, I think the rest of us get a vote on who’s playing in it. No offense, Mitch.”

  “No sweat,” Mitch said. “None taken, man.”

  Skip locked eyes with her. “Mitch can do the work, learn it fast, and step in without rehearsing. You got somebody else can do that, bring ’em on. If not, we should get started. It’s late.”

  Laurie turned away and picked up her guitar. Before she’d slept with him, she thought, she could never have hated him this much.

  Mitch sat on the couch and played through a pocket-sized amp and headphones, inaudible over the band, looking at Skip and never down at his instrument. Laurie led them through the set twice, with only a ten minute coffee break in between, and what her performance lacked in empathy it made up in raw power.

  At the end of the second set Mitch took the rehearsal tape from Jim, packed up his guitar, and left with Skip in tow. Everyone else adjourned to the kitchen table.

  Jim said, “He didn’t seem that pissed off about us using his amp, really, did you think?”

  “Jim, for God’s sake,” Laurie snapped. “Can’t you see what’s happening?”

  “Skip said from the start there’d be gigs he didn’t want to play,” Jim said. “We all agreed.”

  Gabe cleared his throat. “I think Laurie may be concerned that Skip’s getting ready to quit.”

  Jim said, “Oh come on, he—” He stopped and thought.

  “If he never shows up again,” Laurie said, “he doesn’t have to deal with his conscience, because he gave us this…this Mitch to supposedly take his place.”

  “What have you got against Mitch?” Jim said. “He’s actually a very good player, you know.”

  “He looks like some 80s hair band refugee. People will laugh at us.”

  Gabe and Jim looked at each other. Gabe said, “Have you been getting enough sleep lately?”

  “Yes, thank you, and I’m not having my period, either.” At that instant she had a sensation over the entire surface of her skin as if she’d just dived into cool water. For two or three seconds she was completely and perfectly in two places at once: Jim’s kitchen on a spring night in California, and the boardwalk at Fiesta Texas, outside San Antonio, on a fall afternoon. She smelled rain and felt a breeze tug at her hair.

  “Laurie?” Gabe said gently. “What’s going on?”

  “I’m fine,” she managed to say. It was very peaceful there on the boardwalk and she didn’t want to come back.

  Distantly she heard the rattle of Dennis’s newspaper, and then his voice saying, “She needs food.”

  “Is that right?” Gabe said. “When was the last time you ate?”

  The sensation faded. There had been words in her head, possibly important, and they were gone too.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Yesterday?”

  Jim’s chair squeaked on the linoleum. “How about scrambled eggs. You like eggs?”

  “I’ll be okay in a second,” she said. “You can stop humiliating me now.”

  “You’re not driving until you eat,” Gabe said. “We’ll take your car keys away if we have to.”

  “You and what army?” she mumbled. She suddenly realized she didn’t have enough strength to stand up.

  Jim put a glass of orange juice in front of her. “Drink this,” he said, “and tell us why you stopped eating.”

  All she wanted was to find Fiesta Texas and the smell of the rain again. She didn’t know where it had gone. She picked up the orange juice glass with both hands and drank. Then she told them about her landlady and her last ten job interviews, and she barely stopped herself from going on to Skip and Grandpa Bill and the kitty she saw run over when she was seven and a half.

  Jim gave her a plate. Eggs scrambled with cheese and hot sauce, a couple of flour tortillas. He opened her hand and put some pills in it. “Vitamin C,” he said. “Now eat.”

  She ate, and at the taste of the food she started to cry.

  “Too much hot sauce?” Jim said. Then, “Oh. Sorry.”

  Gabe handed her a Kleenex. “Would you all stop staring at me, for God’s sake?” she said.

  Jim ran some water in the skillet and sat down again. “First things first,” he said. “Your landlady’s right. It would take months to evict you.”

  “Second,” Gabe said, getting out his wallet, “I want you to have this.” It was the hundred-dollar check she’d written him in January for playing on the demo tape, now creased and stained.

  “Come on,” she said, pushing it back toward him. “You earned that.”

  “Give it to me when we get our record contract,” he said, and tore the check to pieces. “Right now it’ll buy some groceries.”

  “Third,” Jim said, “can you type? Also, you might want to slow down a little, with an empty stomach and all.”

  “Okay,” she said, crying more now because of Gabe, “and yes, I can type okay.”

  “I may be able to get you some part-time clerical work at a place I know.”

  “That would be…that would be great. But couldn’t we just start getting some paying gigs?”

  “I talked to Art Fein, who books Club Lingerie, and he’s pretty interested. I’m also working on the Teaszer. So that’s going to happen, maybe pretty soon. But it’s no money. We’d be getting a split of the door after they pay the sound man and the guarantees for the headliners. We’re talking five or ten bucks apiece if we’re lucky.”

  “Classic Ronnie Reagan supply-side economics,” Gabe said. “The clubs get all the breaks. People got to be in three or four bands to get any work. You get a virtually endless supply of goods, in this case bands, who have to take whatever they can get. It’s a real inflation-stopper.”

  “Thanks,” she said, blowing her nose on her napkin. “Get me depressed enough and I stop crying every time.”

  “So,” Jim said. “You want me to check into that job or what?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I guess maybe you’d better.”

  “One more thing,” Dennis said. “Cheer up, will you?”

  Temp

  And so it was that she started word processing at Sav-N-Comp, a service bureau that operated out of a storefront in Glendale, thirty hours a week at eight dollars an hour, and her life was once again transformed. She was suddenly free of the guilt of sitting in her apartment without making money and yet, at the same time, she was frozen in a reverse metamorphosis, halfway between the band she’d nearly imagined into reality and a
regression to the quotidian caterpillar existence her mother had always pushed her toward, where one hour of no creativity followed another.

  Five days a week she got up before eight, pulled on jeans and a T-shirt, knotted her hair, grabbed a muffin and a glass of juice on her way out the door. She got to the office by nine and then typed, proofed, and poured text into templates until three. Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays she drove from there to Jim’s house to work on the album until six, sat down to dinner with Jim and Molly and Sam, then practiced with the band until midnight or so. Wednesday night for laundry, Friday to collapse and put herself back together for her Saturday gig with Summer.

  From “Angel Dust” right up until Sav-N-Comp she’d been writing steadily, at least a song every week or two, and if only one out of four gave her the little chill that made her want to play it again, at least she was productive. Not even waitressing for Mazola Mike had kept her from it. Now she didn’t dare let go of her emotions long enough to see where they might venture on their own. She opened her guitar case on Saturday nights at the Duck or in Jim’s garage, and some nights she didn’t bother to take it home from Whittier.

  As for Skip, he’d been a model of responsibility ever since the Big Hair Incident. That had happened on a Thursday, and the following Sunday Skip was early, diligent, and left a half-hour before Laurie did. When she went outside she found him lying on the hood of her car, smoking. He said, “You want me to go away, you just say so.” Only much later did it occur to her that she could actually have said it, and by then they’d already been to bed and Skip was curled in sleep with his back to her.

  By mid-April of 1995 they had three finished tracks in the can, half a dozen more nearly there, and the rest with at least drums and scratch vocals. They’d had to replace two cover songs in the live set to keep it from going stale, and it was going stale anyway. They were becalmed.

  Laurie arrived for a Tuesday recording session to find Jim even more obsessive than usual, adjusting mike stands, shuffling tape boxes, leaping up to empty Skip’s ashtray or carry out a half-finished Pepsi can.

  When Laurie refused to take “Nothing” for an answer, he finally admitted that Art Fein had called an hour before. “We’ve got a gig. A week from tomorrow, Club Lingerie. We’re opening, Estrogen second, Caustic third.”

  The inside of her brain lit up like a pinball machine. “We’re ready,” was the first thing she said. Then the bells began to go off, bing-bing-bing. “This is fantastic. Great! Is Skip going to do it? Do you think anybody’s going to be there on a Wednesday? Club Lingerie. This is so great.”

  “Art’s got this cable TV show he does called Art Fein’s Poker Party, and I asked him about us doing that, but he was, uh, noncommittal. He goes for cult bands, rockabilly types, people even I’ve never heard of. I get the feeling he thinks we’re a little mainstream.”

  “Is that bad?” She cared less for her credibility than she cared about finding a place to play. The sooner the better.

  “Not necessarily. Maybe we are going to be mainstream. Maybe we’re going to be big.”

  She felt big, bigger inside than out, as if she’d swallowed the future and it was expanding inside her. “Can we work?” she said. “I really want to work right now.”

  Later, over dinner, Laurie said, “What if it did happen? What if we did get big?”

  In her peripheral vision she saw Molly set her silverware on the table and look at Jim. Sam, following the action, put his own silverware down and looked too.

  “We’ve talked about it,” Jim said carefully. “If something actually did happen, I’m old enough and smart enough now that I’d know what to do with the money. And some real money would be nice. It’d be worth the effort.”

  “You been waiting a long time,” Molly said. She reached across the table for his hand and he stretched it out to her. “You deserve another shot.”

  “Another?” Laurie asked.

  “I was supposed to be big back in the 80s,” Jim said. “I was with this band called Harm’s Way, and we were hot stuff in Jacksonville, Florida. Headlining clubs, winning talent shows, getting played on the local radio. We’d gone as far as we were going to get locally, so we threw everything we had in the van and drove the entire length of Interstate 10, Jacksonville to LA, in two days. This was back when ‘Money for Nothing’ was on MTV every fifteen minutes. Live Aid, the Jacksons’ Victory tour, Hall and Oates. We all had short hair and skinny ties and played Two-Tone ska bands in the van all day and night.

  “We’d been putting money aside for two years to get out here. All five of us lived together in this crummy garage apartment in East LA, which wasn’t too bad except we couldn’t leave anything in the van overnight and once a month somebody would shoot one of its windows out. We hustled our demo all day, played auditions and open mike nights and went to clubs every night. And it never happened.

  “Later we found out our manager had no clout at all, was kind of a laughing stock in the business. On the other hand, she had a couple of big names and they were working. So maybe it was her, maybe it was bad luck, maybe we weren’t really all that good. Anyway, we stuck it out for four months, then the other guys went back to Florida and broke up.”

  “Why’d you stay?”

  “I had a job, for one thing. And LA had started to get under my skin. And I’d met Molly and I thought maybe I was in love.”

  “You were in love,” Molly said. “It was nearly tragic to watch you.”

  “Did you try to start another band?”

  “I didn’t have the heart for it. Or the time, by that point, between work and chasing after her.”

  “Did you miss it?”

  “Did he ever,” Molly said. “He was a wreck. I wanted him to get another band, just to shut him up, but he didn’t want to do it. I wonder how I managed to put up with him sometimes.”

  “It was easy,” he said. “I’m hysterically funny when I’m bitter.”

  “Was that when you started the studio?” Laurie asked.

  “Eventually. I spent a couple of years not playing at all and that almost put me in a rubber room. I guess it was like an alcoholic trying to dry out.”

  “No,” Molly said. “It was like somebody with a brain-chemical imbalance going off their medication. Wasn’t any twelve steps or higher power would have helped you. You weren’t healing up, you were getting worse and worse.”

  Behind the kidding Laurie could see old wounds that had scabbed over but never healed. Even so she envied them, envied the two hands clasped together, brown and cream on the green Formica. She wanted to picture herself sitting like that with Skip—not married and living in the suburbs, necessarily, merely openly affectionate—but her inner eye refused to go even that far. “After all that you’re ready to go out again?” she asked. “You’re not scared?”

  “Sure I’m scared. Molly’s scared too. But it’s different now. I need to play, but I don’t need the fame, not the way I did then.”

  “The way I do now.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But you’re not going to big-brother me and try to talk me out of it?”

  “I’d be wasting my breath.”

  Nerves

  Instead of sleeping that night she agonized over what she was going to wear, over the set list, over whether Skip was going to take the entire band down in a phosphorescence of self-destruction.

  Wednesday night she practiced guitar instead of doing laundry, searching for the gist of Skip’s lead parts. Nothing flashy, nothing she might fumble under stress, no more than a musical life vest to float her through a show if Skip should happen to founder.

  Thursday afternoon the new Weekly hit the street and there she was, “Laurie Moss,” in the Club Lingerie ad, “And Band” a few points smaller underneath. She took five copies and left one folded open on the seat as she drove to Whittier, so that it could provide peripheral comfort and reassurance.

  That afternoon she ran the boards while Jim laid down a cheesy organ part fo
r “Carry On” with a borrowed mid-sixties Farfisa. Then they sat together at the console and mixed it onto a DAT master that already contained “Neither Are We,” “Angel Dust,” and “One to Go.” In playback the sound quality was so pristine that they could hear the catch of the pick as it first hit a guitar string, hear the ridges of a cymbal as a drumstick brushed across them, hear the air subside after a bass note.

  After dinner Molly stuck around to help address FedEx way bills to a dozen independent record companies. “FedEx is just to get their attention,” Jim said. “It doesn’t mean they’re actually going to be in any hurry to get back to us.”

  “Okay,” Laurie said.

  “They get approximately one million tapes a day. And just because I know these people, that doesn’t mean they want to listen to a tape I happen to be on. In fact, a couple of them are probably going to feel like I’ve betrayed some kind of a trust by making them do it.”

  “Okay.”

  “I just don’t want you getting your hopes up too high, you know?”

  “I know,” she said.

  “So it turns out a guy I’ve worked with at Matador is going to be in town next week, and he told me he’s coming to the show. Because he’s coming, a guy from Alias Records said he’d come too, and a guy from Cargo.” Jim was deadpan, as if trying to deliver bad news in the least alarming way possible.

  “That’s good,” Laurie said. “Isn’t it?”

  “I don’t want to scare you, but this is kind of an important window for us. People in this business are very jaded, and the things that get their attention are either old established bands with track records, or brand new bands that might possibly be the Next Big Thing. So I’ve been working hard to get a buzz going about this gig. If we don’t get noticed right away, it could take years. We become familiar and they lose their sense of urgency about us.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  She concentrated on her pen strokes, holding everything inside her like an explosion at the bottom of a mine shaft, watching for tremors. She opened up a hairsbreadth at practice and was barely able to make herself quit playing; after which she took a cassette dub of the four finished songs and drove half the night with it, past Riverside to San Bernardino and back, out to where the mountains and the desert reclaimed the right of way and stars burned fiercely through the smog.