Whale Music

by Paul Quarrington

  “What do you want me to do, Kenneth? Sue my own mother and her dying husband?”

  “Of course not. Don’t be absurd. But if you threaten to, maybe we could work something out.”

  “Kenny, you jest.”

  “You sued your father, didn’t you?”

  “I did not.”

  “Well, I attended the court proceedings. It seemed to me that you were suing him.”

  “That was Danny’s idea. I just happened to be there. Anyway, how fast is the record climbing? Are we charting in the small towns, in the metropoli, or what? Did we grab the chains right away?”

  “Mantlepiece Records put the rink in the dink, Desmond. It’s a scuzzy-looking label, they just sent it out to a few stations, it’s a miracle it’s doing as well as it is. If Galaxy had it, we’d do it right.”

  “If the record is out, it can’t be recalled like a car with faulty brakes. You win some, you lose some, Kenneth.”

  “Ah, yes, I see your point. However, Desmond, if we can’t manage to clear this thing up somehow, then, I hate to say it, the legal arm of Galaxy Records shall flex its impressive bicep and come out pointing at you. Do you know what that means, Desmond? It means court appearances. Subpoenas and special discoveries. Newspaper and magazine people. Unpleasantness. It means getting dressed and leaving the house, battling through the press people into the federal building and then being attacked—let’s not pretend it isn’t so—by people who have a very clear idea of how you lead your life. And, if it comes down to it, Desmond, it means an assessment of your mental capability, and I don’t want even to speculate on where that might lead.”

  “Agh.”

  “Just so.”

  “Double agh.”

  “Your mother wouldn’t want to subject you to that. So here’s what I suggest. Talk to your mother. The mere mention of legality should do the trick. Then, because Galaxy Records are basically kind-hearted folk, we shall buy Mantlepiece Records at a very reasonable price. Extremely fair. Philanthropic. Enough to ensure Moe his medical needs, for all the good it will do the poor man. We take over supervision of the record, and poof, you have another hit, you have made a comeback! Your star burns bright in the firmament once more. I sit in my counting house counting all my money. Everybody is happy.”

  “Oh, Kenneth. Are you not already fabulously wealthy? Do you not own a mansion and several cars? At what point do you say, maybe I just close my eyes and let the tilted earth spin?”

  “At no point do I say this, Desmond.”

  “Currency, Kenneth. Mere currency. At the Pearly Gates they do not ask after your material wealth. They make inquiries about such things as charity. You shall be tongue-tied, Kenneth, you shall hem and haw and mention that you once tipped a whore in Venice.”

  “I was a weird little boy, Desmond. Empathize. I was teased and taunted. The bigger boys would hoist me into the air holding the back of my underpants. But like you, I was a prodigy. At the age of four I could beat my father, my uncles, at chess. I was a grandmaster at seventeen. There exists the Sexstone Response to the Queen’s Pawn Gambit, a rare thing, but when played it is often accompanied in the notation with a series of exclamation points. It is a bit complex, but basically the response is this—take the pawn and then fuck him in the heart, screw him three ways from Sunday, leave nothing but carnage and mayhem in the middle game. Do you see where I’m coming from, Desmond?”

  “Whales have no money, and yet they are happy.”

  “Whales are ungainly, Desmond. Whales swim around going ga-ga.”

  “You’re serious, then, in this threat you have made?”

  “Absolutely. One hundred percent.”

  “Is there no one playing the game for the love of music?”

  “There’s you.”

  I knew there’d be a catch.

  “By the way,” says Kenneth Sexstone, “I detect the distinctive odour of alcohol. As your friend, I advise you not to indulge.”

  “As my friend. I see. I suppose you are considering rehiring Farley O’Keefe?”

  “And just who,” asks Kenneth Sexstone, “is he?”

  I must speak with Claire. I check poolside, she is not there. I go to the living room, she is not there. I check the kitchen, she is not there. I hope that she hasn’t fixed her starcraft and zoomed back to the planet Toronto.

  I am howling. How could I, the fat phantom, have gotten myself involved in another legal imbroglio?

  I climb the stairs, huffing and puffing, and hope that Claire might be in the bathroom or bedroom. She is in neither one, she has disappeared. Perhaps she never even existed, did you ever think of that?

  I will go to bed. Bed-going can be rather radical with me, you know. At one point I climbed into the sack and didn’t emerge for close to a year, other than hurried and furtive trips into the bathroom. Mind you, I was indulged in my egocentricities back then. There were people who would bring me food, for example. Judging from my weight, there was a whole army of the little ants. Still, I can probably live off my subcutaneous fatty tissue for a month or two, which might be enough to do the trick. You have no idea, really, how big a deal bed-going is in our society. It’s a sad thing when a person’s normalcy is established upon the regularity with which he/she scurries under the blankies and launches into never-never-land, but sad things abound. If you eat three squares a day and clock in the requisite eight hours nightly, why then, you could collect shrunken heads and no one would bat an eye.

  Yes, it’s true. Take it from me, a veteran. The indicators of mental health in this fair land are sleeping habits, hair length and beards. Those doctors hate to see beards, especially long ones, it makes them antsy. A beard and long hair, they reach for the constraining garments. If you have a beard, long hair and stay up late, why then, they shoot the drugs into you, not the fun drugs but the dark lugubrious ones, the drugs that make you go “Blah-blah-blah.” Of course, if you walk around going “Blah-blah-blah,” you’re mentally ill. Checkmate.

  I take a few steps, I lift off and deposit the girth on the mattress.

  This is not good, and I’ll tell you why. There is a scent, an odour, there is a sweetness here that certainly has nothing to do with me. Claire was no apparition, then. She existed, and now she is lost to me. I toss the pillows angrily across the room. There was a sect of monks who bedded down on nothing but dirt floors and they achieved spiritual enlightenment. I’m not willing to go quite that far, but I can do without pillows.

  Loss, loss. Is that what life is, an accumulation of things that must then be lost? Bingo. Some people become inured to it, that’s how they survive. Danny, for instance, took loss in stride, and he lost a lot. He lost money, girlfriends, wives, control of the silver Porsche.

  What are the chances, do you figure, of me falling asleep? I’m talking actual slumber here, the restful variety. Las Vegas odds-makers would give you a long line on me going to sleep, but I’m here to tell you, go put down two dollars at a thousand to one, because I think it might actually take place.

  Yes, quickly, two dollars at a thousand to one …

  So here we are in Dreamland once more.

  You likely won’t notice any big difference. Whales occasionally happen by, the furniture is strewn with seaweed, otherwise it’s situation normal. Which is to say, I get locked in a Memory Room from which there is no escape. The irony of the situation is not lost upon me, I mean, I can’t remember what happened seven minutes ago, but when there is no music in my head, the Anamnesis Association holds a convention, there is drunkenness, cavorting and mayhem.

  I’m seeing Fay Ginzburg for the second time. She has undergone a metamorphosis. Her hair is no longer red and piled like autumn leaves; it’s black and industriously straight. A great bolt of it covers most of her face. One grey/black eye burns beside this hank, the tip of her nose pushes through, otherwise Fay Ginzburg’s aspect is one of midnight, witchy blackness. She’s lost weight, is more than slender. Her body has trouble coping with the bombastic breasts and
buttocks. Fay wears a turtleneck sweater and a skirt that shows off her dimpled knees. I’ve just come off stage. I’ve sweated profusely, I smell rank. Fay has pushed her way backstage, she seeks me out and kisses me soundly upon the lips. “Desmond,” she whispers. “Coming back to my place?”

  “Um …”

  Fay grabs my arm, we march out of the dressing room and into the night. I see Karen out of the corner of my eye—she is standing in a corner looking like an addled kitten staring at sunbeams. Danny will ignore her for the rest of the evening. If he’s in an especially sensitive, kind-hearted mood he might try to slip out without Karen noticing, otherwise he’ll treat the girl like so much odourless gas.

  (Such reflections are big danger in Dreamland, because now we have Danny appearing, water-logged and puffy. Danny wants us to know that he was never as bad as all that. Nod politely, smile like an idiot and wait until he goes away.

  (He was, you know. He was every bit as bad as that, and here in Dreamland we see him at his worst. Open up that door, sneak a peek inside, what do you see?!)

  I’m certainly pleased to see the Professor and Mrs. Ginzburg again. Mrs. Ginzburg has become a rabid Howl Brothers fan. The mansion is decorated with posters and buttons and eight-by-ten glossies. She even has an autographed picture of Fred Head, can you believe it? Mrs. Ginzburg greets me with a hug, she pats my ballooning belly appreciatively. “Good, Desmond,” she says. “I’ve been worried. Fay has given up eating.”

  “Mom,” says Fay sternly.

  “Let’s go to the kitchen and eat soup,” whispers Mrs. Ginzburg conspiratorially, perhaps not conspiratorially enough.

  “You don’t bring a person into the house—especially not so famous a person as Mr. Desmond Howl—and drag him into the kitchen to eat soup. You sit him down in the living room, we get cozy, we cross our legs, we hem and haw, maybe have a little fruit juice, then you say, Desmond, how’s ’bout soup?” The professor seems to have lost a little weight, he’s hard to pick out against the white of the carpet. He’s saddled with a lethal-looking oaken cane, and he uses this to tap my leg affectionately. “Desmond, where’d you get them ears? That chorus in ‘Kiss Me, Karen,’ boy oh boy, I think that would have confused Mr. Johann Sebastian Bach!” The professor grabs me by the arm, hauls me towards the living room. “I bet you play chess,” he says.

  Mrs. Ginzburg gets ahold of the other arm and makes for the kitchen. “Who could play chess on an empty stomach?”

  “What, you need strength to pick up the pieces?”

  “Brain work is hard work!” returns Mrs. Ginzburg.

  Fay stands back and watches the battle. Part of her new image involves a stinginess as regards energy and emotion.

  “We’ll play chess, you keep an eye on us. Just when it looks like we’re about to keel over from exhaustion, rush in with the refreshing soup, save our lives, my darling. Desmond, follow me.”

  Mrs. Ginzburg lets go of my arm, retreats into her kitchen. The professor and I sit down on either side of an elaborate board, the pieces intricately carved ivory. “You be white,” says the professor. “I fight best when I’m fighting back.”

  (But this is Dreamland, don’t forget, the pieces resemble the father, the mother, Maurice Mantle and Kenny Sexstone, the pawns are all tiny replicas of Dr. Tockette, him and his legion of impersonators.)

  I can play chess, you know, rather well. Many weird people can play chess (although I don’t for a minute buy this Sexstone Response to the Queen’s Pawn Gambit business). Freddy Head was a keen player, he and I had quite a few memorable games, we would even play in the truck as we journeyed from bad hotel to bad hotel in the early days. Fred Head and I would imagine the board, we had no need of the actual pieces. We would call out moves to each other and chortle appreciatively. The other lads were mystified by the process. Danny often pretended to be mystified, although if one of us should make a bad move, Danny would blow a raspberry. Then he’d catch himself and pretend to be mystified once more.

  Professor Ginzburg’s opening moves are crude and clumsy. He has no concept of the subtleties, the intricacies of the game. He’s tough, though, I’ll say that for him, he plays like a Mama Grizzly, ferocious in his protection of even the lowliest pieces. It takes me more than an hour to do away with Professor Ginzburg, an hour in which we speak of composers, an hour in which Mrs. Ginzburg ferries out any number of vittles.

  Fay and I descend into the basement, ostensibly to listen to records. Fay puts an album on the phonograph, and then she removes her sweater and bra and bounces on my lap. Her breasts are rather impressive, more than enough for a boy to fool around with for an hour or two. There is much kissing, Fay is a great one for kissing. In fact, if sex consisted solely of French kissing and breast caressing you’d get no argument from Fay Ginzburg. I blame Dr. Tockette for changing her mind. I think he convinced Fay to get into more sophisticated satisfactions as a political move.

  (Don’t forget we’re in Dreamland, though, which explains the presence of the alien Claire, who just slipped through a doorway and started pulling off a pair of bluejeans.)

  As content as I am with Fay’s breasts in my hot little hands, our tongues duelling as in a Saturday matinee, I find myself growing distracted by the music coming from the phonograph. It features two voices, one sweetly resonant, the other strident and nasal. This combination shouldn’t work, the voices should repel each other, but instead they come together like swans in love. The music is odd, twangy guitars (a twelve-string here and there?), a bass that is not content to lurk in the bottom registers but romps up whenever it feels like it, a huge and friendly sheepdog, and in the background the most cretinous sort of drumming, a persistent hammering at the wash cymbal, covering the music in metallic clouds. Even as I toy with Fay I listen to the music, my efforts on the breast front become somewhat desultory.

  “Play with my tits, Des,” whispers Fay.

  “Who,” I ask, “is playing this music?”

  “Who?” This is apparently a funny question, because Fay laughs, which adds a bit of sport and spice to the breast fondling. “It’s the Beatles,” she says.

  And I say, “Oh.”

  You’ve likely heard stories that what drove me to my present state was the weirdest kind of jealousy as regards the Beatles, that I was embittered by the Sergeant Pepper album, which predated the release of my so-called concept album, Grin, by a scant two weeks. People like to claim that I was tinkering with the mixes too long, throwing out perfectly good tracks only to start again, that my eccentricity was my undoing, and there is a tiny grain of truth somewhere in there. There is even more truth, though, to the assertion that it was Kenneth Sexstone’s fault, that man has all the artistic courage of a football, he delayed release for months on end.

  Things are getting interesting here in Dreamland because, if you’ll recall, the alien Claire is pulling off her jeans. Underneath she wears no panties. Her buttocks are firm. Don’t mind me, this is what dreams are for. And now she pulls off her number twenty-one Maple Leafs sweater. She has small breasts, sporty models as opposed to Fay’s Sherman tanks. The alien Claire is brushing her hair now. I study her body, her flesh bounces with animation, with life. Look what happens in Dreamland! The loins stir, the penis rears its head, a grinning little brute. Only in Dreamland. Dr. Tockette can tell you that I have certain quote-unquote hang-ups, that erections do not happen my way under the normal course of events. But in Dreamland I appear to be unafflicted, this boner is a biggie. The alien Claire bounces this way, over to the bed. Do you think I should attempt a spiritual, astral-type coupling? Claire jumps onto the bed, and, my, how lifelike, the little vibrations, the aftershock of her landing reverberates in the mattress. I appear to be fully sensate here in Dreamland, good news indeed.

  “Hey, babe. You finally went to bed, eh?”

  Peachy, a naked dream figment that wishes to converse. Such is my lot in life. Let’s see how I do. “Yes.” That was easy enough.

  “I went out, bought some f
ood and stuff.”

  Food. Again we are reduced to physical tediums. I can only take so much. “Excuse me,” I say, “but here in Dreamland I seem to be possessed of an erection, a veritable chub. I’d appreciate it if we could elevate the level of our concerns.”

  “A hard-on? Let’s take a gander.” The blanket is peeled back, a sudden rush of cooling air, aha, I see you’ve figured it out long before the befuddled Whale-man. I have drifted back to the realm of Wakey-wakey without realizing it.

  “Yo!” exclaims Claire.

  I smile sheepishly. “I was sleeping,” I explain.

  “Well, you ain’t sleeping now.”

  “So I see.”

  “Oh, Desmond.” What she means by this, I’ve no idea.

  “This often happens to men upon waking,” I explain. It doesn’t to me, but there’s no reason to mention that. Danny was often roused from slumber by his own member tapping him on the chest. Danny would grab hold of the thing and it would lead him into the washroom.

  “Well, man, I think I can help you out.”

  “It will wither and die.”

  “Too many things wither and die, Des.”

  “You speak truth.”

  “You want me to, you know, give you a blow-job?”

  A bee-jay! If memory serves, a truly delightful experience.

  “Well, yes, please.”

  “Okay. But don’t, you know, touch me. Just lie there. And don’t say anything.”

  “May I grunt inarticulately?”

  Claire giggles. “Yeah.” She lowers her head. Her hair spills onto my belly.

  The Howl memory, so faithless in the past, has this time served me well.

  How does this sound to you? I’m going to put in eight hours down in the music room, then Claire is going to prepare me some spicy Mexican food, which I shall eat with all the grace I can muster, then perhaps we shall sit around and watch television (I hope things are still basically all right up on “Love Mountain”), and then it’s back to bed, where, with any kind of luck, I can inspirit Wee Willy. And you know what else I just realized? A whale, for all his majestic insouciance, has never had a bee-jay! This may not be a lot—I mean, it hardly balances the scales—but it’s nice to know that God didn’t put all the picture cards into the cetacean deck.