Say Goodbye

by Lewis Shiner

  So the opening chords at first seemed like part of the memory, until she looked around and saw that the legendary Skip Shaw was actually playing one of his own songs, something she had never seen before. And he was doing it onstage, in front of her audience. Gabe, standing behind him, stared at Laurie for a clue to what he should do about it. More out of curiosity than anything else, Laurie started to play along, and the rest of the band fell in.

  Skip stepped up the microphone. Instead of the restrained, conversational voice Laurie was used to hearing on “Promises,” something higher and stronger emerged from the power center behind his navel, and for a second Laurie thought she was seeing double. Somehow the man with whom she’d been rehearsing in a garage, driving across the country, arguing, making, for God’s sake, love, had never completely and inseparably been the same Skip Shaw on her father’s stereo until that moment, and it was at that same precise moment that she knew, like she was remembering the future with perfect clarity, that they would never make love again.

  His eyes were different too, red from drinking again, but also from emotion. He leaned into the microphone like he knew the whole crowd was there to see him and no one else, and when the lead part came, he stepped out from behind the mike stand and stood on the very lip of the stage.

  At the end of the song he said, “Anybody want to hear another one?” and the crowd, responding to his tone of voice, gave him enough encouragement that he started into “Dining Car,” with the opening lines:

  Sitting alone at the bar

  In the first-class dining car

  On the train that runs from Third Street

  Straight to hell.

  Wild applause came from the vicinity of the original request for “Orchids,” and the rest of the band, excepting Laurie, began to play along. Skip himself looked like he’d blown a convenience store holdup and now, with nothing left to lose, meant to take everyone in the place down with him.

  “Once on board,” Skip sang, “you got to ride it to the end of the line.” Laurie saw that the episode was not going to end well and put her guitar on its stand rather than shovel any more coal into Skip’s boiler. She walked behind Jim and said, away from his microphone, “This happen often?”

  “Not to me. Got any ideas?”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” she said.

  As Skip neared the end, she picked up her guitar again, and came in on top of Skip’s last G7 with the A minor chord that opened “Carry On.” Over the applause, which was now more confused than enthusiastic, she said, “Skip Shaw, everybody,” and then, with more bitterness than she intended, “the living legend, Skip Shaw.” That made Skip turn and give her a Look, which she ignored to plunge into the first verse:

  You there in the back of the room

  You haven’t heard a word I’ve sung

  Right now my night is ending

  Yours has only begun.

  In her peripheral vision, she saw Skip stand for a second, disoriented, then pop the strap off his guitar and yank out the cord. Laurie felt her heart pound and she stumbled over the line she was singing, not from fear as much as the sure knowledge that they had passed a point of no return, that unspoken agreements to look the other way, to live and let live, to maintain pretenses, had all been rendered null and void.

  She punched in the drive channel of her amp and attempted a lead, wanting to draw the song out as long as she could because as soon as it was over she was going to have to go outside and look for Skip and ask him what the hell was going on.

  But by the time they were through, Skip was gone and Laurie was denied. “I’ll kill him,” she told Chuck. She was wired for destruction with no target in sight.

  “Calm down, Crunch,” Chuck said. “Let me kill him. If we ever see him again.”

  “We’ll see him,” she said. “He left his equipment.”

  Bloomington

  By 10:00 a.m., though, Skip still hadn’t appeared, and they departed for Bloomington without him. An hour into the trip the van’s air conditioner wheezed oily smoke and died, leaving them to swelter through 95-degree late-September heat all the way to their in-store near the U. of Indiana campus. When they finally got to the club for sound check, they found Skip sitting on the hood of his Mustang near the front door, smoking a Lucky.

  “I’ll do this,” Laurie told them. “Y’all go on inside.”

  She waited until they were alone before she approached him. He was wearing a long-sleeved black Western shirt and he had his arms folded across his chest. His hair looked like he hadn’t washed it in days and the circles under his eyes were the dark green of old bruises.

  “Sorry,” he said. “It won’t happen again.”

  “What, exactly, won’t happen again?”

  “That kind of showboat bullshit. If I’m going to do this it’s as part of the band or not at all.”

  The right thing to do, she thought, would be to ask what was wrong, try to find the source of his all-too-obvious pain. The problem was, she was still furious and scared and she was tired of having to break his emotional kneecaps every time she wanted an honest answer. “So that’s it?” she said. “You’re sorry, and we just go on?”

  “You can yell at me if you want. I’ve got it coming. The only thing you can’t say is that I didn’t warn you.”

  “It’s not worth it,” she said, and went in the club.

  Details and bad timing threatened to overwhelm her. Dennis left to take the van to the local Dodge dealership to get the AC fixed. Skip followed and brought him back in the Mustang while the rest of the band did sound check. The van, it turned out, would have to stay overnight, and would be ready by noon the next day, Sunday. Neither Gabe’s amp nor Dennis’s bass drum case would fit in the Mustang, which meant the equipment would have to stay in the club overnight. The thought made Laurie’s stomach crawl. Chuck offered to spend the night in the club, but the manager, a self-important law-school flunk-out in a hunter’s green polo shirt and ironed khakis, insisted his insurance wouldn’t permit it.

  Inevitably, it didn’t end there. Due to an “oversight” the manager hadn’t printed any flyers, so they headlined for an audience of ten. Skip sulked in one corner of the postage-stamp stage, kicking at his cord, ending each song with an angry clank of his strings. When the manager tried to stiff them, Skip grabbed a handful of his polo shirt and said, “Pay us what you owe us, you son of a bitch, or I’ll throw you through a wall.”

  The manager emptied the register and Laurie agreed to settle for the $87 he found there. “Don’t come back,” he snarled, as he slammed the register drawer shut.

  “We’ll be back tomorrow,” Laurie said, “for our stuff. Like we told you. Noon.”

  They left when the manager did, then had to ride to the motel in shifts. The next day the van wasn’t ready until after 1:00, and they didn’t get to the club until 1:30. The place was shut up tight, and when Jim tried to call from a pay phone across the street, Laurie could hear the endless ringing through the padlocked back door.

  “Fuck this,” Skip said, and used a tire iron to pop the hasp that held the padlock. The door pried open as easily. It was only when Laurie saw her amp unharmed, and flipped the switches and saw the comforting ruby glow of its pilot light, that she realized how tense she’d been for the last 14 hours.

  As they finished loading out, Skip helped himself to two cases of Heineken and then propped the hasp back in place. Laurie, who’d been expecting sirens and bullets any minute, felt like Bonnie Parker, high on fear and defiance. Their $87 sat in a paper bag on the back seat of the Mustang. She had a powerful impulse to stitch her name on the wall of the club with a tommygun. “Make for the state line, Sticks,” she told Dennis as she climbed into the van, “and step on it.”

  Red dots

  Skip was nothing worse than sullen and distant until the first Saturday in October, in Virginia Beach. He’d shown up for meals and sound checks, disappeared for hours at a time after every gig and then reappeared, according to Denn
is, some time before dawn at the motel room. Laurie had begun to keep her guitar with her in the van, working on lead parts as they drove, pushing her fingers to learn years of technique in mere days.

  They were second on the bill at a former Virginia Beach grocery store turned nightclub, a cavernous suburban space with a big parking lot and room for two thousand inside. By ten-thirty the place had filled halfway. The first band was quirky and professional, and Laurie hated to walk out on them, but she was due on stage in half an hour and she didn’t know where Skip was. To her surprise she found the blue Mustang in the farthest corner of the parking lot, windows down, the familiar arm dangling out the window with a lit cigarette about to burn the knuckles.

  The arm didn’t move in the time it took her to walk over to the car and get in on the passenger side. She’d seen enough movies to fear finding him with a small hole in the center of his forehead, courtesy of the manager of the club in Bloomington. He didn’t react when she shut the car door, and only the slow ripple of his faded yellow rugby shirt told her he was breathing.

  “That cigarette’s going to burn your hand.”

  “I just dropped it.”

  “So you’re not asleep.”

  “Nope.”

  “Were you planning to come in any time soon?”

  “I was thinking about it. Thinking quite seriously.”

  “Do you want to talk?”

  “About what?”

  “About what the hell’s wrong with you?”

  He still hadn’t moved. His eyes were still closed and his head still rested against the back of the seat. “Wrong?”

  “You’re drinking like a fish, your moods careen around from one minute to the next, you don’t talk, we never know where you are…are you even listening?”

  He brought up his right hand and started to rub one eyebrow. He kept rubbing it, slowly, sensually, and his stretched-out shirt cuff drooped halfway down his forearm. Laurie reached out with forced casualness and gently tugged it down farther. It took Skip a second to realize what she was doing and at that point he tried to pull his arm away. It was already too late. She’d seen three small red dots on the inside of his elbow, and the slight purplish bruise that encompassed all three.

  It was like she’d grabbed bare electrical wires. She fell back in her seat, her mind, for one moment, wiped completely clean. Then she lurched forward to open the glove compartment and drag everything out and onto the floor: ragged maps, waterlogged match books, receipts, envelopes, business cards. “Where is it?” she said.

  “Oh, man. Don’t get all weird on me. Don’t spoil this.”

  “Spoil this?”

  “I was flying, and now you’re all in my face.”

  “In your face? In your face?” She kicked the door open and got out and slammed it after her. “In your goddamn face?” She couldn’t seem to get on to her next line, whatever it was. Back in the dressing room, she threw a beer bottle at the cheap brown paneled wall, where it failed to shatter.

  “Laurie?” Gabe said.

  “Skip’s in the parking lot,” she said. “He’s been shooting up.”

  Jim said, “Are you sure?”

  Dennis said, “Can he play?”

  She wanted to start screaming at Dennis so she answered Jim instead. “Yes, I’m sure.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Is he conscious?” Chuck asked. “Was he talking?”

  “Yes and yes,” Laurie said. “Maybe we should call the cops and let him talk to them.”

  “Maybe if he’s done this before,” Chuck said, “we should assume he knows what he’s doing and leave him alone.”

  “Chuck,” Laurie said, “that is the first truly stupid thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

  “I must have been overdue,” he said, and shrugged. “But it beats turning him over to the cops. You want me to go talk to him?”

  “And tell him what?”

  “To stop,” Chuck said, and was out the door before she realized that he meant it.

  She followed as far as the parking lot, which had turned into a scene of its own, with kids standing around or sitting on their cars, drinking from cans and bottles in paper bags, sharing cigarettes and joints. She felt them stare at her, not because they recognized her, but because she was young and female and alone. She folded her arms across her breasts and leaned against one of the building’s plate glass windows, staring straight ahead and glancing at Gabe for no more than a second when he came out to stand next to her.

  Chuck hunkered down by the driver’s side door of the Mustang. From that distance Laurie couldn’t see anyone’s lips move. After what seemed like hours, but her watch said was only five minutes, the car door opened and Skip got out. He stretched and looked around and ambled toward the front door of the club. He walked by Laurie without seeming to see her, flipping his car keys as he passed. Chuck, who was two steps behind, waited with Laurie while Skip went inside.

  “So?” she said.

  Chuck shrugged. “I don’t know. He made it sound so good I agreed to try shooting up with him.”

  Laurie stared.

  “Kidding,” Chuck said. “Chrissakes, Crunch, you need to loosen up a little.”

  “Maybe another time. What did you talk about?”

  “Are you sure you want to do this? You’re on in ten minutes.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Okay, if you want my opinion, the guy’s a junkie. Though he may go years without actually shooting up, he’s still a junkie and always will be. Give him the right set of circumstances and he’s going to use the shit. Maybe some day he’ll age out of it, or die, or maybe he’ll end up an old junkie. The one thing for sure is you’re not going to do anything about it tonight, and until he’s willing to admit there’s a problem, you never will.”

  “We can all stand up and tell him that unless he quits, he’s out of the band.”

  “So he’s out of the band. Feeling betrayed, broke, and a long way from home. What’s that going to do except let you wash your hands of him? Shit, I told you we shouldn’t do this right before the show.”

  So they got up onstage and played, Skip included, though he wasn’t very good. To be honest, Laurie told herself, it wasn’t that much worse than a couple of bad practices they’d had in LA when he’d been distracted and sloppy, but it was a long way down from what the band had become.

  She stopped him after the show as he was leaving and said, “I just want you to know you were lousy tonight.”

  He seemed bored by the very concept of conversation. “It wasn’t so bad.”

  “Yes it was. And it was the smack’s fault.” She stood blocking the hallway so that he would have to push past her to get to his car. Which was exactly what he did.

  The frying pan

  Monday morning, after a gig in Wilmington, Delaware, where Laurie couldn’t tell whether Skip was high or simply playing badly, Jim woke her at 8:00 in the morning. She dressed and walked with him to the coffee shop at the nicer motel across the street from their Motel 6. She assumed it was about Skip, right up to the moment Jim told her he was quitting.

  The waitress had taken their order and brought coffee, and Laurie stared at the bitter steam rising from the cup. She could smell the Clorox in the sour rag the woman had used to wipe down the table and it robbed her of any desire to eat.

  “Laurie? Aren’t you going to say anything?”

  The only question was what they would do without him, and the answer, she supposed, was that they would go on. As if reading her thoughts, Jim said, “You play piano. I can leave my stuff with you and you could use it on some of the songs, wherever you think you need it. And I can hang out for another couple of days, work on the parts with you if you want. It’s the least I can do.”

  “Not the least,” she said. “Close, maybe.”

  “You’re pissed off. I know that.”

  She couldn’t sit any longer. The only reason for it was to make Jim feel better, and she wanted someone to make her feel b
etter. Not that she had any candidates. She lurched to her feet, nearly running into the waitress, who said kindly, “Your food’s here, hon.”

  “Leave it,” she said. “He’ll get the check.”

  Outside the air was damp and gray and exhausted. She had an image in her head of water droplets in a hot skillet, the way they would dance together for a few impossible seconds before evaporating. Laurie Moss and her Mosslings had, for a few seconds, looked like a real band, complete with record contract, tour, and van, she thought. Before they vaporized.

  She stuck her fingers through the inevitable chain link fence between the coffee shop and the used car lot next door, torturing herself with the words that self-pity loves: never and gone and over and lost. Still the tears wouldn’t come.

  She heard the restaurant door whoosh open behind her. “Laurie?” Jim said. “Laurie, I’m sorry. What do you want me to do?”

  “Nothing,” she said, and turned to face him. “Take the next plane home. If you want to leave the keyboard, that would be nice.” Then because she couldn’t bear the look on his face she said, “Tell Molly hi.”

  “She’s going to be so surprised,” he said. “She’s not going to believe it.”

  She couldn’t hate him. He had a family and a life and a simple thing he could do that would make him happy. She envied him. But he was already starting to recede, as if he were standing on shore while the wind rose and carried the rest of them away.

  He was packed and in a taxi in thirty minutes. Gabe, Dennis, and Chuck crowded around to see him off; Skip was missing in action again. Once the cab disappeared, Laurie unlocked the trailer, took the DX7 up to her room, and got in half an hour’s practice while everyone else packed.