Whale Music

by Paul Quarrington

  “Okay, Presley,” said Danny, taking over on the machine. “Your lawn’s about to get mowed.”

  “My, my,” chuckled Presley. “Now don’t be letting your mouth write no cheques your ass can’t cash.”

  Danny slammed his loins against the machine, setting off the TILT light. Presley laughed heartily, he slapped Danny on the back. “You done premature ejaculated, sonny-jim.”

  “Ed Sullivan,” muttered the goon beside me, identifying the man on the television.

  “Yes, I know.”

  Presley wrapped his elegant hands over the flipper buttons. “Start polishing up that quarter, Dan-boy.”

  “Ed Sullivan!” said the goon a bit louder.

  “You tell Eddie to put a holt on that tee-vee show,” said Elvis as he worked the machine. “I’m augmenting my personal fortune here.”

  “They’re on,” said the goon.

  “Shit.” Elvis Presley abruptly abandoned the game. He slapped the flipper buttons uselessly and let the ball run between them. Then Elvis looked apologetically at Dan. “I got to watch these girly-boys here. The Colonel done said so.”

  “Who’s that?” asked Danny.

  “Them watch-you-call-it Beatles.” Elvis wandered over to the sofa, where the goons opened wide enough to allow him to sit down. “I sent a telegram wishing them luck. Eddie gone read it after they done playing. Sit down here, Danny, let’s watch these boys.”

  It was quite a snug little sofa, my brother and me, Elvis Presley, goons. On the television screen four uniformed men appeared. They wore their hair in Buster Brown style, bangs dangling over their foreheads. The screaming started before they even touched their instruments.

  “Shit,” marvelled Presley. “I have to give ’em a little of this here before they commence to screaming.” Even sitting on the sofa Presley managed a licentious wriggling of his crotch. “These boys just stand there looking pretty.”

  As the camera isolated each member of the group, lettering identified them, PAUL, said the screen. Paul oo’ed and shook his bangs. “Hot-damn!” said Presley. “You damn right she loves him, Paulie. You look like you keep your dick in your back pocket.” GEORGE, said the screen. “Hey, Georgie-porgie,” cackled Elvis. “Whyn’t you get a hair cut, son?” RINGO. “Well, what in the name of Heaven is that there?” JOHN. “He looks like he might could be all right. Looks a little bit mean, that one there.” Additional writing: SORRY, GIRLS, HE’S MARRIED. “Well, that’s your answer right there,” said Elvis. “Speaking of which, where is that Priscilla at?”

  “Shopping,” answered the goons in unison.

  “Well, what you think, Dan?” asked Elvis. “You think these Beatle-boys got anything there?”

  Danny shrugged. “I guess so, Elvis.”

  Elvis turned to me. “Desmond?”

  “I guess so, Elvis.”

  Elvis nodded glumly. “Reckon you’re right.”

  “We’ve just received a telegram,” said Ed Sullivan, “and I’d like to read it to you now. It says ‘Best of luck here in America,’ and it’s signed Elvis Presley.”

  The televised crowd applauded enthusiastically, but Presley seemed to neither notice nor care. “Daniel, my son,” he said quietly. “Y’all want to get hooched up and play pinball?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Yeah.” Elvis climbed to his feet. “Tell you what. It hurts to all the time be doing this shit”—Presley set his leg atwitching, he rotated his loins in huge, hormone-infested circles—“and them Beatle-boys just stand there like they’s waiting for an elevator.”

  Danny wandered over to the machine. “You’re still the King.”

  Elvis chuckled lightly. “Well, I don’t know about that, Daniel. But it’s right nice of you to say so. And now, as my daddy Vern likes to say, I’m gonna cork my asshole and set to drinking.”

  In the music room I pull down all the faders. When you mix, you know, you start with silence. Slowly I push up tracks four and six. The Beast begins to howl, only its lowest frequencies. A lioness warning away buzzards from the carcass of the kill.

  My mother appears. She stands perfectly still, and in the shadows she is young again. She is the seventeen-year-old Claire Graham, modelling a Kirby sweater. In fifteen minutes, big blustery Hank Howell will storm through the doors like a Hun, and in a moment of absent-mindedness he will pat what he thinks is a plastic fanny. When I look at it that way, my mother is as much a victim as anybody else.

  I power-off my machines, speak through the intercom. “Hi, Mom.”

  She jumps. My mother clutches her perfect small bosom. “Desmond?”

  “In the booth.”

  She enters the small room. My mother runs her fingers along the machines, although she takes care not to disturb any of the sliders. She is fascinated and frightened by the technology.

  “Des,” she asks quietly, “has Kenny Sexstone been to see you?”

  “Everyone has been to see me lately,” I answer.

  “And he told you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you mad?”

  “No. How …” I need something to do with my hands, so I pry open an effect box and clean the dust away with a tiny brush. “How is Maurice?”

  “Oh, you know.” Her hands flutter about in the air like crippled birds.

  The train of misery must make some stops along the way.

  “Mom, I’m going to sue you.”

  “Des, I didn’t mean to hurt you, I just—”

  I wave her silent. “I just threatened to sue you, correct?”

  “Y-yes.”

  “Okay. That should satisfy the evil creature Kenneth. Now, Mom, let’s eat some lunch.”

  The alien Claire—whoops, I mean, the Canadian Claire, which in some ways is even weirder—makes cucumber sandwiches. She quarters the bread and slices off the crusts. My mother appreciates this. She holds the tiny things twixt thumb and middle finger, she nibbles at them gingerly. A mouse could consume them at a quicker pace. I myself eat some soup, which is nourishing. Imagine that. Claire—wearing a dress today—putters about the kitchen. She makes tea, she makes more sandwiches, she pours me a glass of milk.

  And the two Claires talk. About nothing, seemingly. About the weather. They discuss the savage sun, they discuss protection against its power. They compare notes as to a storm that passed through Los Angeles. The conversation puts on weight as they become more comfortable. They discuss Maurice Mantle. His disease has a mind-boggling scientific name. The Canadian Claire mentions how several of her forefathers died. My mother mentions that my own grandfather died falling out of an apple tree. He was peckish, he was eighty years old, he climbed up a tree to fetch the fruit and tumbled out on his conk. There is a moment of silence, and then Claire laughs, like buttered popcorn. My mother laughs too, and so do I. My mother turns to stare at me, at first aghast at the sound that has blasted out of me. My mother reaches over and massages my fat hand. Then she and Claire are talking again, women’s talk, which involves the dust in the corner and the heavenly firmament.

  The father, the father, the great unruly man.

  I mean, surely it is better to be like me, an eccentric recluse, than to do what the father did, that is, put on a public display of such embarrassing emotionality that Tammy Faye Bakker would have cringed. The father sat in the courtroom and wept, and when he wasn’t weeping he was making a big production out of not doing so. The father didn’t weep on the few occasions that my mother attended the proceedings. At that point, my mother’s goal in life seemed to be to see just how tightly she could stretch the material of her dresses across her backside. When she entered the courtroom there was an audible intake of air. Reporters trampled each other to death. She declined to speak, her sole comment being this silent one, the material stretched tight as a drumhead across her buttocks.

  My father was charged with what in legalese was called copyright fraud, but was really cheating. He sat next to his lawyer—a very fat man named Jeb Lajoie—looking like a fiv
e-year-old who’d been up to pettifoggery in Go Fish (“Naw, I ain’t got no threes,” all the time clutching a pair beneath the table) only to find himself rounded up by the Gestapo, thrown into a cage and tortured. Jeb Lajoie was the perfect lawyer for the father, Lajoie’s main strategy being obstructionism. He wouldn’t allow three words to be spoken aloud without rolling on to his feet like one of those Popeye punching bags, sticking a tiny stump of a finger into the air and bellowing. Our lawyers were cool and dispassionate. They milled about like carpenter ants, each responsible for various small bits of paper.

  I had to take the stand. Agh. My own lawyers were relatively kind, they merely had me recount the circumstances under which I composed the tunes. They asked if the father had had any input. I replied that the father was a great influence upon me but had not actually contributed words or music to the songs in question. Very diplomatic if I do say so myself.

  Then Jeb Lajoie rolly-pollied up to the stand. “Desmond,” he said, “do you know what marijuana is?”

  “Er,” I replied, “yes, I suppose I do.”

  “A drug.”

  “Just so.”

  “Desmond, have you ever taken marijuana?”

  I expected one of our tiny lawyer ants to bound to his feet, but they sat there and examined the contents of their briefcases. Daniel, typically, seemed to find the whole thing amusing.

  “Could you please repeat the question?” I stalled.

  “Do you know what amphetamines are?”

  “God’s gift to the slothful.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Surely my lawyers had watched Perry Mason, didn’t they know how to stand up, breathe in heavily and say, Your Honour, I fail to see what relevance this has to the proceedings. No, not these yobbos.

  “Likewise a drug,” I responded to the question.

  “Have you ever taken an amphetamine?”

  “Only as part of a diet plan regulated by my personal physician.” I was rather proud of that one.

  “And he further prescribed cannabis?”

  “For glaucoma.”

  “Mr. Howell, do you in fact suffer from glaucoma?”

  “I take no chances.”

  “I put it to you, sir, that you are drug-dependant.”

  This at the tender age of twenty! The man should have seen me in my prime.

  “I deny the allegation. I defy the allegator.”

  “I put it to you that you have no idea of the circumstances under which these songs were composed, that you were flying high on beans and lulu!”

  “Beans and lulu?”

  “I put it to you that your father assisted you, that you then conveniently forgot his contribution, ingrate that you are!”

  “I think not. Daddy hates my music, he wouldn’t stay in the same room with it unless he had to. Furthermore, your allusion to my usage of drugs—which I am not at this time admitting to—is a mere canard, for it is surely not at odds with the creative process.”

  “Just respond to the question.”

  “Coleridge was smoking opium just before his composition of Kubla Khan and yet this did not prompt Mr. Coleridge père to step forward and claim to have written the thing.”

  “Shut up, Desmond.”

  “Your Honour, surely he is not allowed to say ‘Shut up, Desmond.’ ”

  The judge said, “Shut up, Desmond.”

  The father picked that moment to break into the most torrential sort of tears. “My own son!” he cried, if he could have rent his double-breasted worsted double-knit he would have. And then, as if all that wasn’t quite bad enough, my brother Daniel got up, crossed the courtroom, and gathered the father’s balding head into his arms. Danny pressed his lips to the father, the judicial hall became radiant with flashbulbous light, and the judge threw everyone out until the next day.

  I got extremely drunk that night. The sort of drunk whereby I woke up in the morning with only the vaguest notion of what I’d done the night before. I declined to get out of bed. Sometime during that long afternoon I resolved to marry Fay Ginzburg. Even here she beat me to the punch, because as I lay sprawled upon my sweaty sheets trying to think of romantic proposals, the door to my room burst open and Fay bounded in. She stripped naked in such a fashion as to suggest that she was a competitor in a rodeo. Fay spit in her palms and leapt upon me, and for the first time in our sexual relationship she got on top, and I groaned and toyed with the pendulous breasts. Even Fay seemed to enjoy it, she breathed heavily and said my name over and over. I screamed “Marry me!” sometime near the finish. She stopped her gyrations long enough to say, “Sure.”

  And in case you’re wondering, on the following day the jury decided that the father had absolutely nothing to do with the composition of the tunes, that his copyright was fraudulent, and the judge ordered him to turn everything over to me, which he obediently did. In a sense, the father even did me a favour—because he’d stolen both writers’ and publishers’ credits, the whole of the music was given into my care. Maurice Mantle cornered me outside the courtroom and asked that I reassign the publishing as per the previous, though unhonoured, agreement. Beside him my mother wriggled in her too-tight skirt, a butterfly trying to emerge from a cocoon.

  “By the way,” I told my mother, “I’m getting married.”

  She only nodded. She didn’t even ask the girl’s name, let alone make any inquiries as to my personal happiness.

  “We could do a fifty-fifty split,” said Maurice Mantle. “You can still keep some of the publishing.”

  Maurice Mantle looked like he had been sculpted by Madame Tussaud. My brain began to gnarl.

  “I can still keep all of the publishing, Mr. Mantle.”

  “Look—” he protested.

  “Everyone likes to play these business games, well, I can play this game as well as the next chap. Split publishing? Fuck you. I got it, I keep it, bend down and kiss my rumperoony. Ta-ta, Mother.”

  The father suddenly appeared. In a period of ten minutes he had become a bum. His clothes were old and tattered, he stank of Bay Rum. He was a spectacle of awesome, biblical misery, he wept, he gnashed his teeth, he smote him his grievous breast.

  “Daddy,” I announced, “I’m getting married.”

  “Good. You deserve it!” The father swayed in the quiet halls of justice. “Hey! Here’s Dan. Let’s have a frigging family reunion.”

  Danny merely took a bent cigarette out of his pocket and lit it. A photographer drifted by, circling like a vulture, his camera raised menacingly. Danny shook his head. “Private family matter,” he said. The photographer worked his finger, a flashbulb exploded, Danny was on top of the guy in a second. I suppose Danny learnt to fight in reform school, but I had no idea he was so practised and vicious. The photographer’s face was bloody pulp within seconds. Mind you, if you’re going to severely beat someone, there are better places to do it than a Federal Courthouse, which typically has hallways lined with peace officers. Danny was carried off, arrested, the case would drag on for months, seeing as the photographer would later claim that one of Danny’s punches had affected his eyesight, therefore his career.

  What a colourful family I have.

  Fay and I got married about a month after that. It was a small affair. Daniel was my best man. Karen Hoffman the maid of honour, the Professor and Mrs. Ginzburg the sole witnesses to our union. Then we went on our honeymoon.

  I should tell you, a month was how long it took for the royalties to be redirected my way. You likely have no idea how lucrative song-writing can be. Even a small hit, even the flip-side to a modest little number that never even grabbed A-rotation, even a downright flop can rake in the dough. Fay sat on my bed naked as a jaybird, tearing open the envelopes like a shark on a solo feeding frenzy. “Thirty-three thousand for ‘Stranger’?”

  “Covered by Johnny Mathis. Used as the theme song to a soft-core pornographic movie, ‘How to Love a Stranger’. I believe also it pulled down some airplay in the midwestern states, don’t ask
me why.”

  “This is great!” she shrieked.

  I could only nod vaguely.

  We banked much of this money, but it seemed that the leftover nickels and coppers still totalled several tens of thousands, and Fay and I went on the Grand Tour. That is to say, Fay did. I myself went on the Great Wine Tasting, the most exorbitant binge ever. Spiritually it was no different than sitting in a parking lot and drinking Ripple with an old woman named Sasha, but materialistically I set some sort of record. The whole thing remains cloudy in the memory banks. I remember Portuguese wine. I remember that somewhere in England Fay informed me that she would under no circumstances give me a bee-jay. She cited reasons of hygiene. As far as any power struggle within my marriage was concerned, I was a lost puppy, a dead duck. I was sent out for cigarettes in the Sahara, dispatched for diet soft drinks in the Himalayas. It worked out fine for a while, I had a ready supply of yellow pills, Fay was nightly sating my physical needs, and then suddenly—on one of the Greek islands—my pills ran out, Fay decided that we were over-sexed, she cut us back to once a week but never told me which day!

  And when we returned I discovered that in my absence a song called “The Great Blue,” which I thought was mere filler on the Drive album, had been released as a single and was racing up the charts, grappling with the Beatles’ “Help!” for the number one position. Yes sir, those were the good old days, grappling with the Beatles.

  We met the Beatles when we did that big concert at the Coliseum, the famous one, the only time the two biggest bands in the world shared a stage.

  The dressing rooms were side by side, inner sanctums, tables laden with cold cuts and salads, vats filled with chilled beer and champagne. Our dressing room was packed with hangers-on, groupies, four or five sideburnt goonies and various family members, for example my mother and my wife. (Fay and my mother did not get along, from the very beginning it was like dropping two toms with chewed ears into the same trashbin and throwing on the lid. What they found to argue about is beyond me. They certainly weren’t bickering over which were my most sterling qualities, neither one had much of a kind word to say in that regard.) Professor and Mrs. Ginzburg were there. The good lady, although not personally responsible for all the food, still took it upon herself to get people to eat, she had special praise for the potato salad. Fred Head obligingly ate about a mountain’s worth. Fred had pushed his heft up to the three-hundred-pound mark, he was a mass of Jello wrapped in strange velours. He wore mirrored sunglasses and had a tiny ruby imbedded in the larger of his two front teeth. Professor Ginzburg talked to Daniel over in a corner, the old man gesticulating grandly, his arms waving like he was going fifteen rounds with hefty sprites, Daniel nodding, occasionally laughing. Kenneth Sexstone was there, imperturbable. He sat on one of the food tables in an elfin fashion, his ankles crossed and swinging back and forth. I never saw Kenneth get angry or excited in all our days together, when catastrophe fell he simply nodded, as if possessed of a sorceror’s foreknowledge.