Say Goodbye

by Lewis Shiner

  All this time Melinda, true to Jim’s word, had been finding them work. None of it amounted to more than double figures for the entire band, but their third gig got them a mention in the “Critic’s Choice” column of the LA Reader:

  “Laurie Moss and Band. Whatever happened to Skip Shaw? A legend in the early seventies and several times nearly an obituary by the end of the decade, Shaw has suddenly surfaced again as, of all things, a lead guitarist. He’s backing a young songwriter with powerful hooks and a distinctive voice who looks to have a bright future; catch them Friday opening for the hot ska-funk of Save Ferris at the Teaszer.”

  She kept a copy on her bedside table for days. Half the time her heart would start to pound at the words “powerful hooks” and “bright future,” and she would think: This is it. It’s happening. The next time she wished she’d never met Skip, or that she’d had the foresight to walk away from him, to take Gabe and any of the others who’d been willing, and start fresh without him.

  On Thursday, June 22, they played the Casbah in San Diego. It was the anniversary of the day she’d met Summer at the Silk and Steel, a year and three days since she’d first entered the greater Los Angeles city limits. She’d tried to reach Summer on the phone, hoping they could celebrate together, and gotten her inevitable answering machine instead.

  SLAMM, the San Diego music paper, worked the same ground as the Reader: two-thirds Skip (“a living—but God knows how—legend of the seventies” who “regrettably played none of his own songs”) and one-third Laurie (“infectious tunes and a joyful energy onstage”).

  You asked for this, she told herself. You made a deal with the devil. With Skip in the band, she had probably shaved two or three years off the time it took her to get noticed. And back when she was still in San Antonio, mopping the kitchen floor, she would have lost her mind to think she’d one day be playing with Skip Shaw. Let alone sleeping with him.

  Not that she was sleeping with him that often. Playing out, which they did about once a week, seemed to energize his libido—provided Laurie was not overly aggressive herself. His rules were clear and Laurie was left to take him or leave him.

  Usually she took him, her post-coital bouts of self-disgust notwithstanding. Some nights she felt like a screenplay that had been optioned but never bought, stuck in a relationship that never developed while off-limits to potentially higher bidders. Other nights, when she looked over from center stage to see his eyes half-closed, his fingers working the guitar neck with passion and tenderness and restraint, when she heard his raspy voice flow into and around hers, then her forces retreated in disarray and she settled for whatever terms he offered.

  Some nights they would sit up and Skip would smoke and they would talk. “What was it like,” she asked him once, “when you were starting out? Were there bands underfoot everywhere you went, like now? Were club owners put out because you wanted to play there?”

  “It was different, and it was the same. There weren’t so many places to play, and a lot of the places we had weren’t used to electric instruments, so they were always trying to get us to turn down. There was a lot of hitching rides in the rain, sleeping on floors, missing meals. All the same, though, I knew where I was going and when I look back now it’s like it was this straight line from nowhere to a record deal.”

  “Did you always know? That you were going to be famous?”

  “Yeah. Always. My mom couldn’t take a picture of me when I was a kid without me trying to set everything up—dramatic lighting, moody expression—I was a prima donna beyond my years.”

  “Me too. I was always thinking how something would look when they filmed it for the movie of the week about me. When I’d come out of a door into the sunlight and a flock of birds would take off, I’d hear this dramatic music in my head. Laurie Moss, based on a true story.”

  “That’s what you should call the second record. After you’re famous.”

  “Am I?” she said. “Going to be famous?”

  “I knew it the first time I laid eyes on you. You’ve got the looks, the talent, the need. Whatever it is that famous people have, you’ve got it. In spades.” He crushed out his cigarette and turned off the light. “Now go to sleep, for Christ’s sake.”

  In July the finished CDs arrived. Laurie had moved to full-time, eight-to-five Monday-through-Friday, so she’d had the order delivered to Sav-N-Comp. She brought the first of the cartons back to her cubicle where she cut the tape and lifted out a cellophane-wrapped CD. She’d spent so many hours working on the art and staring at print-outs cut to size and stuffed into a CD jewel box that she could feel the emotion of the moment only obliquely, like a memory of the future.

  That Friday they were back at Club Lingerie for a record release party. They’d sent advance copies to the Weekly, the Times, and the Reader; the Weekly had put them in their “Pick of the Clubs” section, saying they were “the alternative to alternative” and how the “distinctive twang and churn” of Skip’s guitar “permeated” the album.

  Full-time work meant the cacophony of an alarm every morning before six o’clock, fewer practices, lapsed housecleaning, too much fast food and too little songwriting. It also meant paying her rent again, and meant her very own Fender Blues Deluxe, which Fernando sold her at his employee discount. Summer had patched things up with Fernando when she and Laurie were still doing their weekly duets; when Laurie had gone to see Summer at the Duck in June the three of them had sat together during the breaks, and if it was awkward, it was better than silence.

  Summer returned the favor that Friday night. Fernando and Catherine were there, as was a booking agent named Sid “The Shark” Modesto, drawn by the chum of publicity in the water. Sid looked to be about sixty, with fringes of white hair at each ear, aviator-style bifocals, and a blood-red terrycloth shirt. He handed out cards to everyone at the table, including the waitress.

  Also on hand was Mark Ardrey from General Records. Laurie had seen him half a dozen times since April, once at Tower Records, the others at her shows. He’d waved and smiled and she’d waved back and hurried away in another direction.

  They were third on a bill of four bands. They played for over an hour, plus encore, and while it was happening Laurie forgot the long work week, the growling in her stomach, the precarious feeling of a thousand CDs and five hundred cassettes that no one might actually want to buy. She came off stage soaked and exhausted and had to sit for a minute in the dressing room before she could go out onto the floor of the club.

  “Everything okay?” Gabe asked.

  She nodded. “It’s just the transitions.”

  When they finished the load-out, Ardrey was waiting for her. “So,” he said, “are you giving out promos of this CD to industry heavyweights like me?”

  “What’s the matter, Ardrey, doesn’t General give you an expense account?”

  “I don’t understand,” he said, giving her a dejected look that she was unsure if she should take seriously. “Why is it you don’t like me?”

  “It’s not that I don’t like you,” she said. “I don’t trust you. I don’t believe in you.”

  “You don’t believe in me? What am I, God? I can think of a few people who’d be surprised to hear me say this, but that particular pair of shoes doesn’t really fit me.”

  “No, you’re the Easter Bunny. I’m supposed to believe that if I’m a good little girl you’ll leave me a basket of gold records. Only I don’t think it’s going to happen. I don’t think you’re seriously interested in this band at all. I don’t think we’re ‘alternative’ enough or ‘techno’ enough or ‘punk-pop’ enough or whatever-adjective-you’re-looking-for-this-week enough for you to actually have the guts to sign us.”

  “Hey, now, what did I ever do to deserve this?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing is exactly what you’ve—”

  Jim walked up with a copy of the CD. “Hey, Mark,” he said. “Hope I’m not interrupting.” He gave Laurie the kind of look she’d seen him gi
ve his son that meant there would be a lecture later. “Have you got one of these yet?”

  “No, in fact I was just—”

  “Great, well, here you are. First printing, going fast.”

  As Laurie walked away, she heard Ardrey say, “She doesn’t seem to like me, and I don’t know why.”

  L’Shondra had the CDs at a table near the stage. “Eight CDs, three tapes,” she said. “That’s good, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Laurie said, relieved. “It’s good.”

  At the band table, Skip was signing a beat-up Tender Hours LP sleeve for a balding man in his forties wearing jeans and a polo shirt. “So,” the man said, “uh, writing any new stuff these days?”

  “I write a rent check once a month,” Skip said. He looked up and saw Laurie. “There’s the songwriter in the group.”

  The guy nodded at Laurie, clearly not wanting to offend, and returned nervously to Skip. “Is it, like, okay if I hang out for a minute?”

  Skip shrugged. It meant, Laurie knew, he was trying to think of a way to say “no” that wasn’t blatantly offensive. The guy misread it and sat down. “So,” the guy said. “What was it like? Smoking dope with Dylan and jamming with Lennon in Toronto? I mean, how heavy was that?”

  Skip was literally squirming. He was unable to look at the man’s face, and his mouth spasmed between a scowl and a death-mask rictus. Laurie was so embarrassed for the stranger’s sake that she would have stepped in had it not been for the immense quantity of Skip’s attitude that she’d swallowed over the last six months. The moment stretched agonizingly until Skip finally managed to say, “Uh, yeah. Yeah. Unbelievable.” He looked at Laurie with utter desperation in his eyes.

  She relented. “Listen, Skip, we’ve got that thing…”

  “Oh, yeah, yeah,” he said, leaping to his feet. He patted the guy awkwardly on the shoulder. “Take it easy, man.”

  “Okay,” the guy said, holding up the signed album and smiling radiantly. “I will!”

  They stopped by the dressing room for their guitars, and Laurie nearly had to run to keep up with him as he shouldered his way to the street. Hands reached out to slap his back as he passed, but he didn’t seem to feel them. On the sidewalk he turned to Laurie and held out his keys. “Can you drive a four-speed?”

  “Sure,” she said, startled by the intimacy of the offer. Skip led her around the corner onto Wilcox, where they put their guitars side by side in the trunk of the Mustang. She got in and reached across to unlock the passenger door. Skip, hugging himself, was looking off into the distance and she had to knock on the window to get his attention. “Your place or mine?” she asked as he got in. “I can’t believe I just said that.”

  “I don’t care,” Skip said.

  She started the engine and then nearly killed it again as she pulled away from the curb, fighting the weight of the clutch. The brakes and the steering were both manual and she had a bad moment where she thought she’d have to let Skip take over. But Skip didn’t seem to notice and within a block or two she found the hang of it. That left her free to worry about leaving the LBD overnight—though she had to admit, as attached as she was to the car, it was insured. Skip, on the other hand, was nursing the single most extreme and melodramatic mood she’d ever seen in him.

  “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” she asked.

  “I should never have done this.”

  “Let me drive, you mean?”

  He glanced at her as if only a lunatic would dare to distract him with jokes, then his eyes dulled into a thousand-yard stare that she could see reflected in the passenger window. “The band,” he said. “Playing in public. I should never have come out of the studio.”

  “All the guy wanted was a brush with greatness,” Laurie said. “I don’t see the life or death issue here.”

  “What fucking greatness?” he yelled. Laurie nearly put the Mustang into a street lamp. “Show me the fucking greatness,” he said, in a more reasonable tone, then lit a cigarette and sucked the smoke deep in his lungs. “I live in a one-bedroom apartment in a crappy neighborhood, I haven’t written a new song in twenty years, most of the people who’ve actually heard of me assume I’m dead, and the rest I owe money to. I don’t have a single record in print, I haven’t toured since Nixon was in the White House, and out of the eight million oldies stations in the world, they’re all playing the same hundred and fifty songs, and not one of them is mine.”

  It was an Everest of self-pity she’d never seen him scale before, and it left her with nothing of merit to say. After five minutes or so he went on, “I heard this guy on the radio the other day talking about how third grade was the best time of his life. And I thought, you pathetic shmuck, that is really sad. And then I started trying to figure out what the best time of my life was. And you know what?”

  He waited for an answer until Laurie finally said, “What?”

  “There wasn’t one.”

  “Come on.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “What about Tender Hours?”

  “It came out two weeks before Dylan’s Nashville Skyline. Nashville Skyline went to number one. Tender Hours peaked at number 51. I was 20 years old. I thought I was as good as Dylan. I thought Nashville Skyline was shit. And all anybody could talk about was how brilliant and innovative Dylan was to rip off a bunch of tired old C&W licks that those Nashville guys tossed out in their sleep. It was the ‘new direction’ everybody was looking for, despite the fact that the Byrds and everybody else had already been there and back again. I got left in the dirt.”

  “You’re saying there was never any time in your life when you thought, ‘this is it, I’m happy, this is what it’s all about’?”

  “In bed, maybe, for ten or fifteen minutes. The rest of the time I was always living in the future or the past. Things would start to move for me, and I’d get into this adrenaline frenzy, I’d get so worked up I’d have to get high to cool out. Getting your first record deal is such a rush, your head is on fire with all these possibilities. Then the possibilities don’t come true and you pay for all that emotional energy you borrowed against your success, the success that didn’t happen. Or didn’t happen as big as you needed, or as big as they promised.”

  His evil mood worked its way into her system like a contagion. If Skip Shaw—Skip Shaw!—feels this way, what hope is there for me? Why do any of us do this to ourselves?

  He’d turned away again, looking out the window. He had both hands against the glass, his long, thin fingers arched like spider legs, the cigarette still burning between two of them. Then he pushed his face against the glass like a five-year-old, and Laurie saw the driver of a car in the right-hand lane double-take as he passed them.

  When Skip finally tired of that he slumped down in his seat, eyes level with the dashboard, and said, “Other than sex, I guess I was happiest when I was shooting smack.”

  “You told me you never shot heroin.”

  “When did I say that?”

  She knew perfectly well when he’d said it; he’d said it when she asked him to use a condom. She was unwilling to bring that conversation up again, and she wondered if he was taking that reluctance for granted. “I asked you and you said no.”

  Skip shrugged. “Maybe you misunderstood. You ever try it?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t. Because if you like it, you’ll spend the rest of your life thinking about it. Knowing it’ll kill you, one way or the other, and trying to decide if you care.” Just talking about it, Laurie thought, seemed to cheer him up. “That’s what really happened to the sixties, you know. It turned out that the only reliable way to get the peace and satori and oneness that everybody wanted was to shoot poison in your veins. Which you bought from criminals, and which you needed God’s own worldly goods to pay for.”

  “Tell me what it would take,” Laurie said. “What would it take to make you happy?”

  He was quiet again for a while, then he said, “Sorry. I guess the time I
could even process that question is long gone. It’s like asking me what it would take to make me a fifteenth-century Chinese woman.”

  She shook her head. “All of this is because some guy wanted you to sign his album?”

  “He wanted me to ride the mystery train again. He wanted me to be a star so bad that it made me want to be a star all over again. And I can’t do it. I don’t have the heart for it.”

  “So what exactly do you have the heart for?”

  He looked at her and the whole naked moment sank into the LaBrea Tar Pit of the Skip Shaw persona. “You, baby,” he smiled. “I got the heart for you.”

  You do tonight, Laurie thought. And tonight would do.

  Mystery train

  The next weekend they packed a box of CDs and all their equipment and drove all day to play San Francisco on Saturday and Berkeley on Sunday. Skip insisted on following behind in his Mustang; Laurie, who was not in the mood for him, stayed with the others in the van. Lately it seemed to her that he was hugging the fine line between charm and bullshit, between tortured genius and depressive loser, and small variations in her own body chemistry could make the crucial difference.

  The band—minus Skip—did their first radio interview at Stanford’s KZSU, an awkward affair punctuated by questions like, “Laurie, how did you convince Skip Shaw to come out of retirement and play with you?” and “How many Skip Shaw classics are going to be in your set tonight?” When Laurie tried to get the DJ to cue up “Carry On” from the CD she’d brought, he said, “Whoa, is this the Tim Hardin ‘Don’t Make Promises?’ ” and played that instead.

  After the Berkeley show they loaded out and got on the road for LA. Laurie arrived home at nine in the morning, showered, and made it in to work by 10:30.

  When the phone rang after 3:00, it caught her nodding off in front of her terminal. It was Jim. “Did you not give Ardrey your work number?” he asked.