Phil O’Kell reared himself likewise. “Er, nope.”
Danny reseated himself, started building up the revs. The animals in the forest fled.
I was the starter, which is to say I stood in the middle of the aborted landing strip waving a handkerchief over my head. When I judged the howls to be sufficiently loud, I let the thing fall. Then I hustled my fat ass off to the sidelines as fast as I could.
The cars headed for each other, Danny quickly getting up to about sixty, O’Kell contenting himself with about thirty, as if obeying a posted speed limit. At the last possible moment—really, several moments before the last possible moment—O’Kell veered to the right.
Stud E. Baker never let up on the gas. Danny claimed that the accelerator stuck, that the brakes failed, but I’m inclined not to believe him. He flew the length of that aborted landing strip and hit the trees spectacularly. The hood crumpled, exploded into flame. From the wreckage emerged Stud E. Baker, and local legend has it that he lit a smoke from the flames before limping away.
Stud E. Baker, having defended his woman’s honour, walked by Brenda Mackey and gave her a disdainful glance. He spit in the direction of Phil O’Kell and muttered, “If you’d suck him, you’d suck ripe shit.” He kept going, waving a hand at me. “Come on, Desmo. Let’s get drunk.” I trotted to keep up, panting like an overheated dog.
The strangest part may be this: two or three days later, Danny handed me a sheet of paper. Written on it, in a cramped and arduous script, was:
Brenda, you give me peace of mind.
Brenda, like a jewel I find
In a dark place where nobody goes
In a strange place where the wind blows
In a cruel place where nobody knows
Brenda.
Danny grinned. “Fucking poetry.”
Brenda, you give me reason to
Brenda, live my life for you
In this dark place, where the rains fall
In this strange place, where the night calls
(Already I was singing in my head, lush harmonies, dense chords, sevenths, ninths—my god, a Neopolitan sixth!)
In this cruel place, I will give my all
To Brenda.
Danny gave me a little jab to the belly. “Hey, brother,” he whispered, “we are on our way.”
We went into a real studio this time, state-of-the-art machines, separate cubicles for bass, drums and vocals. The father knew that to get good product, you had to spend good money. Freaky Fred Head thought he’d died and gone to Heaven. The song “Brenda” was recorded, the five voices laid down on individual tracks, but as we listened to the playback, I was dissatisfied. “It’s not big enough,” I complained.
“Do it again,” said Fred Head.
“Well, there’s nothing wrong with the way we did it.”
“No, do it again. Sing everything twice.”
Kenneth Sexstone shook his head. “His elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top floor.” Kenny Sexstone liked to hang around the studio when we worked, and I will say that he never tried to force his will. I didn’t know that if anything had gone wrong, Kenny likely would have ordered bombers to destroy the building.
“Watch.” Freddy directed us back to the vocal booth. He set up the echo machine, a separate loop of tape that adds depth. We redid our vocal parts—doubling it’s called these days, as common as tuning-up, unheard-of back then—and then Freaky Fred pressed down on the echo-tape flange ever so lightly. There was a slight, ethereal wow, and suddenly the music opened up like the Pearly Gates.
“Freaky Fred strikes again!” shouted Danny.
“Nyuk-nyuk,” chortled Freddy. He continued this manual manipulation of the echo-tape for the rest of the song.
“What are you doing?” demanded the father. The father was still nominally our producer, although on that session he spent most of the day figuring out how to operate the intercom.
“Disturbing the phases,” Freaky Fred answered cryptically.
“Weirdness and abnormality,” noted Kenny Sexstone, not unhappily. “The ferry doesn’t quite make it to the other side.”
This wasn’t Fred’s only innovation, although it certainly is by way of being his most famous. He went home that night and designed a box to do what his finger was doing. He called his invention the “out-of-phaser,” and sold the idea to an electronics company for three hundred dollars. Nowadays the phaser is used all the time, whoever owns the patent is a multimillionaire, but Fred Head, I guess, has the satisfaction of knowing he invented the thing. (Except, you know, it’s a bit of an iffy question as to whether or not Freddy actually knows anything these days.)
His other noteworthy contribution that session was on the flip-side, the raucous number “Jaguar June.” This is the first recording where Danny lets down his hair. We’re talking Rapunzel time. Daniel entered the vocal booth stripped to his scivvies, his teeth clenched with amphetamine grit. A drunken lion with its balls in a bear trap. At any rate, there is a guitar solo overdub on this tune, and Monty worked out an effete series of licks that implied that uppermost on Monty’s mind was not mussing his hair. As Dewey Moore put it, “Sucks like my daddy’s boot in a cowflop.” Freaky Fred Head reached forward and picked up a screwdriver that was lying on the recording console.
“Freaky Fred prepares to strike again,” whispered Danny.
Fred Head walked into the studio and savagely stuck the screwdriver into Monty’s amplifier. Monty was stunned. Freddy dug the metal into the speaker and ripped the paper. Then he stood back and nodded at the guitar player. “Go,” said Freaky Fred. And of course the sucky little licks screamed out of the ruined speaker like banshees having their nosehairs tweezered.
“A classic,” muttered my brother Danny.
And it is. Ask anybody, ask a critic, ask the verminous rodent Geddy Cole if you must! Maybe five of our tunes are bona fide rock and roll classics: “Jaguar June”, “Brenda”, “Kiss Me, Karen”, perhaps “Slow Sundown” (the critics are divided), “Big House” for certain. Mind you, we had a special guest artist on that last tune, the Killer himself. Jerry Lee Lewis came into the studio, drunk and tormented. Jerry Lee banged away at the piano keyboard, each chord another step towards eternal hellfire and damnation.
Danny was very taken by this.
By the way, I am not speaking to Geddy Cole. Oh, I know, I am not speaking to anybody, if you want to get technical. But Geddy Cole is high-lighted, underscored, capitalized, and has been ever since the release of his libelous little tract, Howl! An Unauthorized Biography of the Howl Brothers.
I first encountered the scabrous lout in those early days. The Howl Brothers Band had packed our equipment into an old station wagon and lit out for parts unknown. We were playing a town in Oregon, and after the first set this kid approached us. He wore huge glasses, like his mother had bought black horn-rims four sizes too big in the hopes that the child would grow into them. This kid was also afflicted with the worst case of acne I’d ever seen. I was usually sporting a whitehead or two, but this kid looked like the pimples were battling over possession of his very soul. The kid selected me as the likeliest target for his purposes, which, I admit, was simply to make friends. He sidled and angled over, leaned against the wall beside me. “Hi,” he said.
“Hello.”
“It’s real cool stuff you cats are playing.”
“Oh, thank you very much.”
“You want to blow some reefer?”
“Oh, I think not.” I didn’t know what he was talking about, but the phrase rang with illicitness.
He removed the scrawny and bent cigarette from his shirt pocket. “It’s good stuff,” he said.
“I smoke Salem Menthols myself,” I said, taking out my pack by way of illustration.
This weird kid laughed, sucking on the intake, one of those mulish guffaws. “Hey, pretty funny. Come on, let’s smoke this.” He took my arm and led me outside. The kid fired up the little cigarette with a lighter that flamed like an
acetylene torch. He inhaled deeply and held the smoke in his lungs for a long time. He passed the thing over to me. I followed his example. “Strange-tasting stuff, not exactly pleasant, reminiscent of fetid jungle underneath trampled by smelly feet.” This kid then grabbed the thing back, I had never shared a smoke in such an urgently formalized fashion before. When we were through I turned to re-enter the club and promptly walked into a wall.
That, then, was my indoctrination to the world of Better Living through Pharmaceuticals. Very impressive. Much more impressive, in fact, than my indoctrination to Sex. That transpired in Little Rock, Arkansas. I wandered into Danny’s motel room in search of a light for my cigarette, a scrawny home-made with a taste recalling bogs in Mesopotamia. There I found three girls, in various states of undress, and Stud E. Baker.
“Big Desmond!” shouted Stud, standing on his bed in stained underwear. “What’s cooking, Daddy-o?”
“I’m watching television next door. Dewey and Monty are out somewhere.”
“Right.” Stud E. Baker bounced off the bed, caught my head in the crook of his arm and ran with me into the bathroom. He slammed the door behind us and fished two beer out of the sink. The sink and the bathtub were loaded with ice cubes and beer. Stud tossed a beer in my direction, bouncing it off my forehead. (Those scrawny cigarettes mess up your reaction time.) Finding himself in the bathroom anyway, Danny/Stud E. Baker decided to have a pee. He pulled his thing out of his underwear and blasted. Stud E. Baker had an overhand holding technique. I tried to adopt it myself, except it obscured my line of vision and usually made me spray all over the wall. “Desmo, baby,” he said, “pick your choose.”
“Huh?”
“I can’t figure three women all at once. I know there’s a way, dig, but right now I can’t figure it. So pick your choose and take her away.”
“Take her out for a soda or something?”
“Desmo!” shouted Stud. “Take her to your room and get your horn scraped, for God’s sake. Get a bee-jay, get reamed! Do whatever you like to do.”
“I don’t know.”
“How about the big one? The one with garbonzas?”
“Well …” My stomach tied itself in complicated Boy Scout knots.
“Her name is Lois. You just say, like, hello Lois, would you like to come next door and watch a little television?”
“She wants to stay with you.”
“Who can blame her? I am Stud E. Baker! I wear the wang that makes the women whimper! I own the dork that pops their cork! But I’ll say, like, you want to go with my brother, that’s cool, I’ll dig you later. Get it?”
“Umm …”
“Come on.” We re-entered the main room. Stud E. Baker removed the Confederate Army cap and became, for a moment, Daniel. “My brother Desmond,” said Dan, “is lonely. I think the world of my brother Desmond, and it makes me sad that he’s lonely. Now, if any one of you wants to keep my brother company”—he singled out this girl Lois with a stab of his hawklike eyes—“then I’ll be very, very grateful.”
“Grateful enough to give me a solo shot tomorrow night?” asked Lois.
“Absolutely, Lois. Tomorrow night, it’s me, you, the Stud and the stars.”
She bounced off the bed. “Let’s go, Desmond.”
“Don’t you want to get dressed?”
“I sort of assumed you wanted me this way.”
“Sure he does,” said Danny. “And Des, for god’s sake, take it easy on this one. Don’t break her heart. Don’t show her Paradise and then say baby, you can only glimpse it.”
“Danny—”
“Go!” Danny gesticulated grandly, he rammed the Union cap back on his head and became his alter ego, Stud E. Baker. “Present those backsides!” he bellowed at the two remaining girls. “Let’s do it jackal style, like laughing hyenas!” Lois and I ran next door to my room. I sat down on the bed and watched the television. Lois sat down beside me, laid a hand on my hip. “What’s your favourite thing?” she whispered in my ear.
“Music,” I whispered back.
“What’s your favourite pleasure?”
“Mu—” I started, but she placed a finger to my lips, shutting me up.
“How about a bee-jay?”
I shrugged. Lois worked at my zipper, she extruded the pale thing. “Hmm!” she said. I concentrated on the television. Lois placed one of my hands on one of her large garbonzas. She lowered herself, took me into her mouth.
I needn’t go on. It was less than satisfactory, and it was less than educational, as for a long while I thought that sex consisted solely of bee-jays. Eventually I grew to appreciate the bee-jays, and then I married Fay, who refused to give me one.
Up the stairs, up the stairs, a feeble ascension towards the Land of Beulah. This means I’m going to bed, I suppose, at least into my bedroom. What prompted this course of action, I’ll never know. I’ve been working on the “Song of Congregation”. It’s not going especially well, there is an undercurrent of menace, subtle, yet more than enough to drive the whales away. I think I might be depressed. Watch out.
Down the hallway, then.
Here is a photograph on the wall, one not likely to cheer me any, a picture of Fay and me vacationing in the Bahamas. She is wearing a string bikini, her breasts tumbling out of the top. I am dressed in a suit, complete with watch-fob. Fay is quite an attractive woman, I’ll give her that much. Actually, with the divorce settlement, I’ll give her a lot more, and for the rest of my life. I only glance at this photograph. (Lurking in the background is Farley O’Keefe, my erstwhile probationer and nursemaid. He is wearing a bikini swimsuit, his thick and pugnacious prong all but peeking over the top. I would mention that he is as hairy as an ape were it not for a desire never to offend apes. Look at his big muscles, look at his tiny head. I hate Farley O’Keefe.)
I pass the bathroom. Claire is in there applying makeup to her face. It looks like war paint, heavy black lines across her eyes. Claire’s body is no longer pale, it is quite a rich gold, every square inch of her. I thought I had grown used to it, but Claire’s nudity is somewhat unsettling today. I pull the door shut. And into my bedroom. There is a white grand piano. I sit down on the bench, and, because my nerves are ruffled, I draw out a major ninth. A major ninth is a lot like a major seventh, except it not only makes the soles of your feet itch, it makes the hairs in your ears tingle. Then it’s up to the second, the minor, adding a flattened seventh for lushness. The door opens and Claire bounces into the bedroom. “Sounds good,” she tells me. Her hair is piled atop her head, contained there by an ingenious arrangement of bobby pins. Claire goes to the closet. I watch her buttocks, the muscles working hard. She swings open the door and appraises her small collection of clothes. First she draws on a pair of black panties, then she puts on a frilly and feminine undershirt. Up to the third, again a minor, I’m gearing up for the next chord, which is going to be the fourth, a major seventh, except I’m going to cluster all the intervals tightly together. It will sound like God gobbing on the sidewalk. Claire pulls on a pair of leather pants, then a satin shirt, a silver one that reminds me of metal. Here comes the chord, are you ready for this, ooh, I’m horripilated, I’m … my goodness. Do you see what I see? Is that not a bulge underneath my bathrobe? Call Dr. Tockette!
Before I can stop her, Claire sits down beside me on the piano bench. She plucks out a couple of high notes—real beauties, too, the very ones I would have played had my enormous fanny been perched up at that end—and then she glances at me with a smile. I guess I have a peculiar expression on my face, she realizes something is not as it should be. “Well, well,” she says.
“There’s likely some simple medical explanation.”
“I guess.”
“You look very pretty.”
“Thanks, man.” She continues to dabble with the high notes, it sounds like a little girl playing by the side of the ocean, Saturday morning in your pee-jays, Clarabelle on the boob-tube. “You see, Des,” she begins, “I got this real problem
. My dad, he used to, like, come into my room. You know?”
“To kiss you goodnight?”
“Des, fucking grow up.”
“Oh.” When in doubt, go back to the tonic.
“I mean, he used to come into my room and get into the bed with me and do it to me. Okay?”
“It’s not okay,” I mumble.
“No, it’s not okay. And the thing of it is, like, I can’t help you with that.” She nods towards my bathrobe. “I even want to, in a way, but I just can’t.”
“Is that sort of thing common up on Toronto?”
“I don’t know. Probably. It’s not like my dad’s a real prick or anything, either. In a lot of ways he’s a pretty nice guy. But …” Claire shrugs. “I guess being a nice guy’s not what it used to be.”
“Oh, say,” I point out, “no need to worry. It has died. Wormy once more.” I curl my fingers and pound the keyboard hard, searching for ethereal polyphony, that place where logic and beauty intersect and the world makes a wonderful sense. I miss. “Why are you dressed so nicely?” I ask the alien Claire. “Are you going out?”
“Des.”
This is something new, this little undertone of annoyance that has bled into her voice.
“Yes?”
“Don’t you remember yesterday, there was a phone call? And it was your old friend Dewey Moore? And don’t you remember inviting him over for dinner tonight?”
“Company?”
“Absolutely.”
“Agh!” I blunder up from the piano bench and scurry under the covers. “Tell him I’m sick. Tell him I have trichomoniasis.”
“Desmond. He’s going to be here any time.”
“You can entertain him.”
“So now, we’re going to get dressed.”
“In clothes?”
“Yes, in clothes. Nice clothes.”
“None of them fit. Those are vestiges from the days when I approached normalcy, both physically and mentally.”
“I let these babies out.” She removes a pair of pants from the closet. “And,” she says, pulling out a shirt, “I figure you could get into this.”
Whale Music Page 8
