Whale Music

by Paul Quarrington

  Why, if it didn’t involve going outside, I believe I might even go for a walk on a day such as today. However, I’ve too much to do.

  Down to the music room.

  Ignore the face pressed against the glass doors leading to the flagstone patio. It is ghastly sight, a swarthy visage gutted by the most savage of diseases. No self-respecting ghoul would dress so foolishly, a satin smock, leather pants, gaudy jewellery the length of the withered body. Have no fear, this is merely residual pharmaceutical after-burn, quite common in a brain such as mine.

  Mind you, this vision is banging against the glass door—weakly, barely audibly—and also seems to know my name.

  “Desmond,” it says.

  It might be the ghost of Post-Holocaust Christmas.

  “Desmond …”

  “I’ll change my ways, I’ll change my ways. Watch. Here, lad, do you know the turkey in the shop around the corner? Yes, that’s right, the one as big as you. What a remarkable lad, what an intelligent lad!”

  Agh. The creature is demanding that I let it in, and I suppose I must, if only because it bears a very slight resemblance to Sally Goneau. I slide the glass door open. The sun is bright today, it tweaks my cheeks and I feel like a favourite nephew.

  “Um, I’m sorry, I’m extremely busy today.”

  “Too busy to talk to me?” The creature puts on an enfeebled display of happiness, it stretches a loose mouth into a clownish grin, it opens grey eyes widely.

  “Is this a vision of things as they must be? Is it too late to change?”

  The ghost walks by me, thankfully without the accompaniment of chain-rattling, although the jewellery sends up quite a racket. “Too late to change, Gertie. It was always too late to change.”

  “Your hair finally tumbled off your head.”

  “Well, you know, I’ve had wigs, but Christ, are they ghastly. And I don’t wish to discuss my appearance, thank you very much, because it’s out of my hands. But you, my dear, you are looking more than a little porcine. Excuse me for saying so, but your Aunt Sally cares. Aren’t you going to offer me something? A coffee, maybe?”

  “Coffee?”

  “Yes, thank you. And don’t bother. Just show me the kitchen.”

  “This way.” I lead the creature—it is my friend Sal Goneau undergone some hideous transformation—down the gold and platinum record hallway.

  “I’m sorry I missed the funeral,” Sal says. “I was in the hospital at the time.”

  “The mourners wailed for seven days and seven nights. The golden hills rang with jeremiads.”

  “I read the article in Personality magazine. Really. That bitch Lee saying how much she still loved Danny. Give me a holiday, Lee-baby, buy me a ticket on the bus out of town. And if you don’t mind me saying, you looked horrid at the funeral. You have got to take pride in your personal appearance, Desmo. Your Aunt Sally cares.”

  “The towns became empty places, no flowers bloomed. There has been naught but desolation since.”

  We are in the kitchen. Sal putters around the coffee pot, putting grounds into a filter.

  “So,” he says, “what’s new, Petunia?”

  “Nothing much. I’ve been working on the Whale Music.”

  “Kenneth told me. That man, I swear, he’s been varnished or something. I mean, is he well preserved or what, not that he was ever anything worth preserving.”

  “You talk to Kenneth Sexstone?”

  “I work for Galaxy Records. I’m the head A and R man. You remember that, don’t you?”

  “Are you here to talk to me about the Whale Music?”

  Sal merely grins. “What’s this I hear about a female in the house?”

  I suppose I blush.

  Sally lets out a squeal. “Tell me everything.”

  “She’s from Toronto, which is a planet in the Alpha Centauri galaxy—”

  “Hold it right there, Minerva.”

  “I could be wrong about the galaxy.”

  “Toronto is a city in Canada. It’s even kind of a nice city, very modern and fashionable, although every few blocks they have these fur-traders and hockey players who like to beat you up.”

  “Canada?”

  “We played there, some time in the seventies, a concert in some soccer stadium. There was us, let me see, Sly and the Family Stone, The Band, Van Morrison—”

  “And Stevie Wonder.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Is Stevie all right these days?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “Good.” I should talk to him one of these days, give him a few pointers on Yamaha 666 training. The fact that he’s blind leaves him particularly vunerable to surprise attacks.

  “So. Toronto is a city in Canada, this we know. What else can you tell me about this female?”

  “She’s pretty.”

  “That’s good.”

  “She can be very sad, sometimes, but when she laughs I feel a bit better.”

  “What do you take in your coffee?”

  “Drugs and liquor, thank you, Sal.”

  “Uh-uh. Not while Aunt Sally’s here, you don’t.”

  If Aunt Sally wasn’t here I probably wouldn’t have this longing for intoxicants. This is one of God’s crueler jokes, what He’s done to Sal Goneau. I think I should take it lying down. “Who do you think you are?” I demand a bit petulantly. “Farley O’Keefe?”

  “What the what is a Farley O’Keefe?” A cup of coffee is set down in front of me. I empty the sugar bowl into it, anything for a little buzz.

  “Well, that’s watching your diet,” says Sally. “Are you in love with her?”

  “I don’t think love is an option, Sally.”

  “Nonsense, child.”

  “Do you want to hear the Whale Music?”

  “That’s what we’re here for.”

  In the music room I crank up all the knobs, I shove the faders, I pan the pods, there is horripilant zizz and cackle leaking out of the speakers as we wait for the music to begin. I have spliced the tunes together, put them in the right order, done a very rough mix, and first out into the world is the “Song of Congregation”. The Yamaha 666 howls into the abyss. I busy myself making minute adjustments, I’ve really no time to waste on simply listening to the Whale Music. I tentatively alter the sounds, shading, adding nuances, programming morsels of information into the computer. The “Song of Congregation” ends. I let the last chord ring, I extend its life electronically, I milk that baby for everything it’s worth before I slide down the fader and allow the sound to escape. The next movement begins. It is odd, I’ll admit that, Dewey Moore’s voice buried in there like an old gold watch under a pile of manure. I have added some horns, trumpets and things, and I even overdubbed a small bit of accordion music. This piece has a strange kind of beauty, fragile and doomed. If I wasn’t busy making these minute changes—pan the echo-send four degrees to the left!—I think I might weep. It ends, though, the music ends. I certainly don’t milk this last chord, though it seems like whole minutes pass by before Mooky Saunders’s dolphins start leaping through the crest of waves. The “Song of Flight” is exhilarating, even Sally Goneau feels better. The next movement starts. I cannot remember creating this. I was in radical shape. I’d seen something very bad. It is the “Song of Sadness”. Whales are capable of the most enormous grief, are you aware of this? What do you think drives whole pods to beach themselves, to commit suicide upon our public beaches? Do you believe, as some so-called scientists do, that they simply lose their sense of direction? This does not sound very reasonable to me. If a human being suddenly turned tail and lumbered into the ocean, would you say he’d lost his sense of direction? No, whales off themselves, they do away with life in this hugely pathetic manner, their great carcasses shivering and twitching in our fouled air. That is what this song is about. It is about the sadness that breaks even the greatest of hearts.

  When the music ends I brace myself. “All right, Sal,” I sigh wearily. He is head A and R man at Gala
xy, how could I have forgotten that, he is the Joseph Goebbels of popular music. He will tell me how wonderful this music is, then he will evoke the name of the great god Mammon, he will speak of demographics and marketing strategems, if you don’t want to hang around to hear it I can certainly sympathize.

  First of all, though, like any good record executive, he has to pull at his chin and pretend to be deep in thought.

  “It’s even better than I thought it would be,” Sal announces, a novel prelude, not that I’m fooled. Beware the high praise of A and R men, it means more savage damning. A tear is rolling over Sal’s sallow face. He seems to be at a loss for words.

  “But,” I remind him.

  “But?”

  “But it’s not commercial, but the kids won’t like it, but it won’t get airplay, but record stores wouldn’t stock it if it came with a free gram of cocaine. Don’t make me do your job for you, Sally.”

  Sal nods, stand up, wanders a bit aimlessly in the gloom of the control room. I check my computer, make sure that it has glommed all the information I’ve fed it recently. It is a long while before Sal’s voice ventures hesitantly into the air. “Desmond. I’m dying.”

  “I know.”

  “You likewise know that I haven’t done anything particularly worthwhile in my forty-three years upon the earth.”

  “I don’t know that. You were a very good drummer. Steady as a rock.”

  “I’m not leaving anything behind. Nothing that says Sal Goneau was here, which is a damn good thing.”

  This ploy is unnerving.

  “But here’s my chance, Desmo. They’re going to try to kill this music. I won’t let them. I can press half a million units, I can package it so that it gets into the stores, I can come up with some sort of promotional gimmick that will get the radio programmers to spin the thing once. If it dies, it dies, Desmond, but I won’t let it be killed.”

  “Half a million units? Are you crazy, Sal?”

  “Maybe a million, what the hell. Do not go gentle and all that poop.”

  “And you’re not going to want to add back-up vocals or strings or something? Are you sure your courage won’t desert you when the blood begins to flow?”

  “Mix it. I’ll master it, no questions asked.”

  “Hot dog.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “Mixing is an awesome task. It could be weeks. Even months.”

  “I don’t have months. I don’t even have weeks. Isn’t there any way to speed things up?”

  “No. Yes. But they won’t let him out.”

  “Fred?”

  “Freaky Fred.”

  “Leave it to Aunt Sally.”

  Claire comes into the living room. Sal and I are talking, and you’ll never guess what, I’m rather enjoying it. Sal is a huge gossip, and he’s telling me about some of our erstwhile cohorts. Do you know, I’m not as bad as I thought I was! Fancy that. At the very least, I’m still alive, which is more than some people can say. I don’t like to brag, but facts are facts. Claire sits beside me on the couch, puts a hand on my leg. She powers-on the television, flips through the channels, rubs my thigh with her soft fingertips.

  “See if you can find,” I suggest, “ ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’.”

  Claire and Sally explode into laughter.

  Guess where I was when the Beatles did that historic telecast away back when, just see if you can guess where I was, who I was with. I was with Danny, I’ll tell you that much, but I was often with Danny in those days (no points for that!), so guess where I further was. At Graceland, absolutely, give the man a cigar. (Someone out there knew, a short-circuited, pimpled wormboy, one of those bespectacled geeks who would have no joy in life if not for the tiny tinny pleasures of rock’n’roll.) Yes, Graceland, visiting with Elvis Presley, the former King. You see, I believe we had tallied six number one hits in a row, we were the biggest thing that had ever hit except for a meteorite in Africa and Mr. Presley himself.

  (Behind the scenes, much trouble. Danny and I—although I was responsible for none of the machinations, I held no command over the horde of lawyers that crawled out of the woodwork—had brought a suit upon the father. The father was sequestered in the house on Whitman like a drunken Texan defending the Alamo. I was not talking to my mother, which brought daily telephone calls full of tearbursts and shrieking. The band was receiving our first little snippets of bad press. Compared to what was to come they were mere bagatelles, but enough to alarm Kenneth Sexstone. For example, Dewey Moore threw up onstage someplace in Oregon. Paternity suits flew at Danny and Monty. Sal Goneau was often spotted with beautiful blonde women hanging off his arm, but these women were so beautiful and blonde that suspicion was immediately aroused. And Fred Head, well, poor Freddy, he was arrested in Des Moines. It wasn’t a very serious thing, he was just acting suspiciously in a schoolyard. For one thing, Fred was an odd, a startling, nay, a disgusting sight. He’d bloated obscenely. He had found velour of colours never before seen on our planet, he wore sunglasses and smoked cigarettes in long ivory holders. Freddy was talking to the schoolgirls mostly because he only felt comfortable talking with people four and five years old. Who could blame a policeman for scraping that mess off the sidewalk? Kenny Sexstone flew to Des Moines and pulled his Moses act, the Red Sea of Justice opened and the Israelites walked to freedom. As for my personal life, Fay and I had consummated our relationship, it was an unsatisfactory thing, especially for Fay.)

  I had written a song called “You and the Dog”, a whimsical little ditty. It had no inspiration, other than the sighting, through a hotel window, of a tall woman with an Afghan hound, both precious and regal, looking as though their brittle existences could be shattered if you informed them of beerfarts and toejam. So I wrote “You and the Dog”, it was the flip-side of “Hunger in the Moonlight” (Danny’s great angst-ridden vocal, the song he is most identified with)—and we thought nothing more of it, until word was received that Elvis Presley was interested in recording the thing. Further to this was an invitation extended to Dan and myself to visit Graceland whenever we wanted. We happened to have two or three days off, and although I had intended to use them to visit the Ginzburgs, Dan persuaded me to board a plane and fly to Memphis, Tenn. The limousine that met us at the airport needed three or four sideburned goons to operate it. Mind you, Danny and I were packing a couple of sideburned goons ourselves, so the stretch limo was packed full as a sardine can. No one said a word for the duration of the drive.

  At Graceland we were hustled inside like a couple of serial killers under guard and deposited in a large room full of fun things, televisions and pinball machines. One or two goons assumed lounging position on the sofas and tried to look inconspicuous. The rest retired to a special goon room. Then nothing happened for a long time. Danny played the pinball machines. I flicked on the television set and gazed at the dots of light. It was maybe an hour before Elvis was escorted into the room.

  Presley was still in good shape back then, thankfully I don’t have to bore you with stories of his sad deterioration. (I hate such stories, they are the stock and trade of rodents like Geddy Cole, journalists apparently ignorant of the fact that deterioration is the normal course of events in this vale of tears. Besides which, it seems to me that Elvis did nothing more than grow a little plump, allowing his insides to go fatty and soft.) The Presley organism was not complete without five or six goons clustered around him. “Gemme a Fresca, please,” he’d intone to one. “Let’s go sit down over there, please.” The multi-limbed Hindu god would move across the room ceremoniously.

  Elvis caught sight of Danny playing on the pinball machine. “Hey,” he said softly—all his words were soft—“hey, you’re pretty good at that there.”

  Dan was a hustler at heart, he bit his tongue and said nothing, he launched a silver ball with too much force.

  “I used to be good at that,” said Presley. The goons nodded half-heartedly. “You want to go up against me?”

  “Sure,” s
aid Dan.

  “You want to play for quarters?” asked Elvis.

  Dan nodded, bashed at a flipper button, caught the ball off the end and sent it spinning.

  “Y’all let go of me now,” Elvis advised his entourage. “Me and this gemmin gone play on the pinball machine.”

  What the goons feared was any show of autonomy. They backed off reluctantly. Presley shifted like a newborn colt, unsure on his pegs after having been so long supported. Danny allowed the ball to drain through the flippers, then he turned and grinned at Elvis. He held out his hand. “Danny Howl,” he said.

  “Nice to meet you, Dan,” said Elvis. He pointed at me. “That your brother there?”

  “Des,” acknowledged Danny.

  “I don’t have no brothers nor sisters neither,” said Presley. “I was the onliest one. Tell you what, though, I had a brother, Jesse Garon. He was my twin brother but he died when he got borned. Now, lemme see if I remember how to play on this machine.” He placed his hands on the contraption. “Yes,” he said. “I believe I do. Y’all spit and go first, Dan.”

  Danny launched a ball and set the machine ringing. He racked up a sizable number of points before sewering.

  Presley grinned broadly. “Man oh man,” he said. “You is a humdinger.” Elvis moved forward, pulled out the plunger and let a silver ball fly. Behind him, the goons murmured uneasily. I don’t know what they were afraid of. Presley was easily a match for Dan. Before long his hips were going, he was kicking out with his legs, Presley was filled with the most natural kind of grace. “Hey, hey!” he’d sing. “Keep it going, mama, the baby needs new shoes!”

  The goons settled in beside me on the sofa. They needed to be beside someone, even a slug like Desmond Howl.