Whale Music

by Paul Quarrington

  “So,” surmises Mandy, “the Howl Brothers are getting back together?”

  “My brother is dead!! We cannot get back together. He drove his car through a guardrail at a very high speed. The force of impact rendered him mush. It particulated him! The car exploded, licks of flame touched the clouds. Whales crowded around.”

  “I loved Danny!” shrieks Beth. “How can you say those things?”

  “Does this mean,” says Monty Mann, “there isn’t going to be a reunion?”

  Mandy grins cannily. Aha! They have played me for a fool, but now I see what’s up.

  I stick a finger in Mandy’s face. “Let me guess. Personality?”

  “Bingo.”

  “Are you ready for an invasion of privacy suit?”

  “Absolutely, Desmond. Are you ready to be locked up? Are you ready for them to throw away the key? Bellowing and talking gibberish, I mean, really.”

  “A man can bellow and talk gibberish in his own home if he feels like it.”

  “I’ll be fair. Your mental state is obviously due to your brother’s death.”

  “All I know is,” says Monty Mann, “Kenneth thought that maybe there was going to be a reunion.”

  “Kenneth? You’ve been talking to Kenneth?”

  “He’s, you know, phoned.”

  “I spy the hand of Kenneth Sexstone behind this. It all makes sense.”

  Beth Mann, young and pale, continues to weep.

  I believe Danny married Beth Mann just to illustrate a point. The point being that life is such a complicated and gnarly thing that sometimes the only solution is to reduce it to a joke. Hoot and holler, kick up your heels, laugh until you shit your pants. At least, that was Daniel’s philosophy. Monty Mann got Beth out of a drug-addled young woman who went by the name Starflower. They were married, briefly. When Beth was five, Starflower committed suicide, in tandem with the boy who was her lover. They left behind reams of bad poetry. Beth was sent away to be raised by her grandparents in Spokane.

  When she reappeared, at age sixteen, the Howl Brothers had ceased to exist as a group. I was here, in the house. Danny had made a solo album, which had its moments, but he was too far gone with the booze and pharmaceuticals. Dr. Tockette got his hands on Danny. He slapped his face and threw him into a clinic. They kept Danny there for three weeks, and he emerged bright-eyed and rosy-cheeked.

  And then, of course, Danny did the most outrageous thing he could think of. He upped his intoxicant intake and took as a bride the sixteen-year-old virgin daughter of one of his best friends. He had affairs with several well-known female singers and actresses at the same time. Indeed, no less than four of these women showed up at his wedding! Danny was denounced from every pulpit in the country. When reporters caught up to him, or found him passed out in some honky-tonk, engulfed in the fumes of cheap wine and cheaper women, they often asked just exactly what he was up to.

  “Me?” Danny would mumble. “Working on new material.”

  “Where’s Claire?” I demand.

  “Who’s Claire?” asks Mandy.

  “Never mind who she is, just tell me where to find her.”

  Mandy lights a cigarette. “I think she ran out the front door about half an hour ago.”

  I’m giving the Beast a proper Celtic death knell.

  I am Celtic by heritage. Indeed, the profession I am best suited to, according to many tests administered by psychiatrists and social workers, is that of Druid. Can’t you see me wandering the hills, my sackcloth robe rustling, warm moonlight shining on my fat face? Can’t you hear me singing to the ocean, can’t you hear my lamentations for the lost souls of sailors, poor men misled by the errors of high priests and mathematicians?

  But no, I had to be a rock star.

  I am corked. I drank the entire bottle of nouvelle pap, then I found half a bottle of Irish whiskey secreted in a cookie cupboard. With the Irish whiskey I mourn the passing of the Beast. The Yamaha 666 was poleaxed, scuppered by a boot to the electronic giblets.

  I am in the kitchen now. Claire apparently never heard of dish-doing, stacks of plates and bowls tower everywhere, the place is full of china skyscrapers. Good riddance to number twenty-one is what I say, although it’s really the Irish whiskey that says it. That, after all, is the purpose of consuming Irish whiskey, so that those spurious words good riddance can vault through your lips.

  Have I ever shown you this, an automatic card shuffler? We take the deck—Tarot cards and Swedish nudies—we put them in this little compartment here and flick this button. Zapparama, a new alignment. The top card is from the Tarot deck. I’m going to flip it over, see if it is an augury of any kind. The Fool. Bingo, first shot out of the box.

  Do you think the argument we had could result in her actually moving out? It certainly didn’t seem at the time to be that serious. Mind you, I accused her of stupidity, thwack-thwack, I drive the heel of my hand against my already lumpy brow. The ringing in my ears is overwhelming, a convention of Quasimodos has rented all the space available in my brain.

  Ssh. Listen. That sound, I recognize that sound. The brain is not pulling its weight around here (it would require antlike strength and determination, an ant can move something five hundred times its own mass) but the brain finally does the job, that sound is a telephone ringing! And I’m so drunk that I’m going to answer it. The phone is near the couch, Claire sometimes spoke into it—Claire, never mind Claire, she is gone, she is a phantom. I haul up the receiver and bellow out a hello.

  “Des?”

  Now this is interesting. Guess what we have on the other end of the line here, are you ready for it, an ex-wife.

  I say nothing. I breathe laboriously.

  “Des?”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Howl passed away early this morning. It was a pitiful death. He was all alone. The angels came but could not lift his carcass.”

  “Des. It’s me.”

  “Oh.”

  “How are you?”

  “Other than dead, very well thankee.”

  “I’m not doing so good myself.”

  “Doesn’t surprise me.”

  “I miss him,” she says.

  “What, did Farley O’Keefe fly the coop?”

  “Farley? What has this got to do with Farley?”

  You got to be a football hero! Go deep, go for the long one! I rip the telephone out of the wall, my man eludes a block, into the endzone, I rear back, pump, and let loose the throw of my career. The picture window breaks into a thousand little pieces. Touchdown! Touchdown!

  One morning Fay was puttering back and forth between the bedroom and the bathroom. She was naked as she did this. Fay was putting on earrings, and it became one of life’s mysteries to me, why the putting on of earrings should necessitate this roaming nudist behaviour. Isn’t it theoretically possible to sit still, dressing-gowned or slipped, and put on earrings? The sight of my wife all in the buff-bare was a bit straining. We were very infrequent in our love-making, as infrequent as thunderstorms in the Sahara. I lay between the sheets, watching Fay Ginzburg-Howl putter in her birthday suit, I balled up my hammy fist and discreetly dug it into my groin.

  “By the way,” she said, fastening her brassiere—now that she had earrings on, she could put on her underwear—“there’s a reporter coming over today to interview us.”

  I hadn’t achieved my present status as Howard Hughes protégé, but this news unnerved me. “A reporter, my sweet?”

  “From this new magazine, Skylark.”

  Now Fay got into her underpants, but I couldn’t see why she bothered, they were small and flimsy and served none of the functions of underpants as I understand them.

  “I do not wish to speak to a reporter, honey-bunch.”

  “Des, we’ve been married almost a year, and they haven’t mentioned me once in any newspaper or magazine.”

  “You want to be mentioned?”

  “Sure.” Fay put on tight black pants and a tight black turtleneck sweater. “Sure I want to be me
ntioned.”

  “Kenneth told me to avoid contact with the popular press unless he himself arranged it.”

  “You’re not married to Kenneth Sexstone, Des. You’re married to me.”

  I didn’t mention it, but I think it would have been easier to get laid by Kenneth Sexstone.

  “Hey,” said Fay pre-emptively, “it’s not like you have a choice.”

  Wearily I rose, pulled on my clothes. I was quite a spiffy dresser in those days, I wore madras shirts and clam diggers. I wandered into the kitchen, had coffee and ignored the ringing of the phone. For some reason I knew who each unanswered call was from. “That’s Daddy,” I’d say. The father was regrouping, he’d found four brothers and was trying to turn them into stars. The Pennylegion Brothers they were named, The Fabulous Pennylegions, and between the four of them they had enough talent to make one lousy crooner, the kind of guy who’d play the Stardust Lounge of the Biltmore Hotel in Cleveland. “That’s Mommy,” I’d say as the phone rang once again. My mother was not talking to me since my betrayal of her true love, Maurice, but that required constant phone calls. If I ever answered the phone (not likely) she’d scream, “I am not talking to you, Desmond!” and burst into tears. “That’s Kenny Sexstone,” up to more of his intrigues. Kenny phoned daily to tell me how we were charting, what sales were doing. Our so-called Battle with the Beatles had been huge news, it had forced the young people to take sides, and many had come over to the Howl Brothers camp, so sales were booming. Pallets to Pago Pago. “That’s Danny,” I’d sigh sadly. You wonder why I didn’t feel like talking to my brother, the being I loved most on the planet? I’ll tell you why, because the telephone would be ringing at 10:17 in the morning, and Danny would be pissed as a newt! Dan-Dan was pumping back J.D. at seven in the morning while I was just noticing my tendency to imbibe one or two beer over my limit.

  That is what I was doing that morning, anyway, sipping coffee, smoking Salem Menthols, listening to the telephone ring. Fay was in the living room watching television when the doorbell rang.

  “Could you get that, dorkums?” sang out Fay. I rose from the kitchen table, ambled down the hallway. Already it was adorned with gold records. (No platinum, though, they didn’t have those until the seventies.) I pulled open the front door and saw Geddy Cole.

  “Oh!” It was even a pleasant surprise. “Hi.”

  Geddy Cole was getting stranger. His greasy hair now spilled in gleaming little ringlets onto his shoulders. He wore spectacles, tiny ones this time, round and antique, as if he’d mugged his own grandmother. Geddy was still doing battle with heavy-duty acne, and trying to cultivate whiskers and a moustache. Approximately seventeen hairs, valiant and stalwart all, had broken through the pustules. Geddy Cole wore a white T-shirt and bluejeans. The T-shirt was painted with a crude representation of a Mercedes-Benz hood ornament, the jeans were patched and repatched until none of the original denim existed.

  “Hi, man, how’s it going?”

  “Enter,” I said. “Are you now working for Skylark?”

  Geddy nodded.

  “Honey-bunch! It’s the man from the magazine!”

  Fay bounded in and alarmed poor Geddy Cole. She grabbed his hand and pumped it up and down. “Let’s go into the living room, which I decorated myself, and we’ll have some Colombian coffee flavoured with cinnamon and talk.” She pulled the man after her, and despite the hatred which courses through my bloodstream, I can’t help but feel sorry for Geddy Cole. He was thrown onto a sofa, my wife bounced down beside him, and for the next three hours Fay talked, gibbered and jabbered, prated and prattled. Geddy Cole sat there, bug-eyed, like Lucifer was mooning him, spreading his fiery cheeks. No one noticed when I slipped away into my rudimentary music room (a small acoustic piano, a prehistoric Revox tape recording machine) and started work on a song called “Matinee.”

  Let’s go to a matinee,

  Let’s you and me while away the day

  at the matinee.

  Double entendre, you see. I was a horny fellow back then.

  Geddy Cole slipped into the music room, he looked like a rabbit at a hound dog convention, he slammed the door shut and peered at me over the top of his spectacles. “Des,” he said, “you want to do something really neat?”

  Remember, this is the same man who introduced me to marijuana and speed. I’m sure my fat face lit up. “Really neat?”

  “Really, really neat.”

  “Absolutely.”

  Geddy Cole reached into his pocket and withdrew what looked like a scrap of pale blue Kleenex that had gone through the wash cycle and then been dried into a hardened bit of lint. “Eat this,” he told me.

  He had never steered me wrong before. I popped it back.

  “I got to go, man,” said Geddy. “Your wife is like real zesty.”

  I knew what he meant.

  Geddy Cole left, and I turned back to the piano and got to work on this tune, “Matinee.”

  Perhaps you know the song, it is the second cut on the first side of my classic Grin.

  Indians painted like the sky

  Cowboys with their guns on fire

  Mr. Marlowe with his cigarette

  Chalklines on the wet cement

  Native girls in waterfalls

  Following the bouncing ball the bouncing ball …

  Uh-huh, uh-huh, you guessed it. Meet the original Mr. Acid Head.

  I may have been the original, but I was not the supreme.

  Look at him sitting at my kitchen table. He is eating doughnuts, they’re hard as rocks, but that doesn’t bother him. He wears his hair long, grey and greasy. He wears sunglasses, earrings, every single tooth imbedded with a small jewel. The clothes … tsk tsk … the clothes are too small, but it’s understandable, they are military garb, fatigues, there are few soldiers that weigh four hundred-plus pounds. He has painted orange and purple slogans all over his body, LOVE is crudely lettered across his vast back. This gives a good indication as to when Freaky Freddy Head short-circuited his brain.

  Fred is not surprised to see me, he doesn’t even slow his chewing. Fred has to concentrate on mastication, not that he’s doing a good job. Fred is neglecting to close his mouth and is producing repulsive noises.

  “Hi,” I venture.

  Fred waits until he swallows and then responds. “Hi.”

  “Good to see you.”

  Fred has no response to this, other than to grow suddenly tired of his doughnut. He carefully lays it down on the table, covers it with a napkin.

  Talk about your awkward silences, I mean, I’m garrulous compared to Fred the Freak. Fred is making a big production out of lacing his fingers together, setting this glob of knuckles down in front of him.

  MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR is scrawled across Freddy’s breast. He took all that stuff seriously. I remember we played an outdoor concert somewhere near San Francisco. It took place in a huge cow-pattied field. Freddy Head (still veloured in those days, Brylcreeming his newly grown-out hair into a duck’s ass, wearing shades and, to achieve an effect of breathtaking silliness, smoking his cigarettes in long ivory holders) thought he’d died and gone to Heaven. There were naked girls running about! That was when we first heard about Free Love, heralded by a group called Geist, an inept quartet fronted by two lead singers, a girl and a boy. The girl was the first seriously braless female I’d ever seen. The male singer was a Christlike figure, slender and bearded, he had a rapturous manner about him, closing his eyes and weaving back and forth, his hands extended, tweaking invisible buttocks. In between songs, this Messiah would announce the Era of Free Love.

  Dewey Moore, sipping from a bottle of Old Crow, said, “Sounds okay. It’s been costing me a fortune.”

  The singer from Geist exhorted the people to be as children, and many of them pulled off their shirts and bluejeans, couples even lay down in the grass, locked their bodies tightly together.

  Monty Mann, erstwhile surfer-boy, pulled off his clothes too, lay down beside our trailer, cradled his head
and smiled blissfully.

  “Mann,” muttered Danny, “we could do without seeing your dick.”

  “Get with it, Danny-boy,” said Monty. Some semiclad female wandered over, knelt beside Monty, laid a flower over his heart as if he were dead.

  Danny ran his fingers through his pomaded hair. Danny was a greaseball through and through, he stared at the dawning of hippiedom and scowled.

  Fred was a convert. I believe he washed the Brylcreem out of his hair that very day. For him, Free Love and Drugs went hand-in-hand. He started gobbling acid, then got into other things—mescaline, peyote, opium. His mind got trampled underfoot, but Freddy stuck to it, popping back illicit substances and revelling in the Era of Free Love. Fred never seemed to notice that, despite the numbers of frolicking females, he himself was not getting laid. That sort of thing is easy to overlook when your brain is on constant broil.

  Then there came—it was inevitable—that sad day when the Drugs and the concept of Free Love mixed in a horrible fashion, and I’m afraid that a ten-year-old girl paid a very high price for Fred Head’s confusion. Kenneth Sexstone worked his wonders, the story was kept off the front pages, Freddy was quietly led away. But when the next issue of Skylark came out, Fred’s fat face—rouged and war-painted, I shudder to think of some of the things he got into—was on the cover.

  The article concentrated on Fred Head’s problems and his incarceration, but the rest of us didn’t get off lightly. The story catalogued Danny’s run-ins with the law, the article followed Sally Goneau from leather bar to leather bar, and, boy, the vulture of journalism feasted on me, the fat recluse in his mansion, the windows boarded-up, the door never opened. The only one who came off at all well was Monty Mann, who was too busy being a Babboo Nass Fazoovian to get into any trouble. Also, it has long been a suspicion of mine that it was Monty who fed all this information to that kite Geddy Cole.

  Please don’t get me wrong. I think all that Free Love stuff ultimately did some good. I mean, there are tax auditors out there who are a little less zealous to have people drawn-and-quartered, and this is because they were hippies, because they attended love-ins and sunburnt their dinkies. But there are also some casualties, as in any revolution, and one of them is currently sitting at my kitchen table, making a big production out of folding his hands together. I wish Claire was here. Claire, I think, could make this fellow relax, she would tap him on his flabby shoulder, say, “How’s it going, man?” and I think Fred would unclench his teeth, I think he might even smile.