Whale Music

by Paul Quarrington

  Now strange music fills the room. This sounds like the Shriners’ Parade on goofballs, an idiotic bass drum thumping at half speed, a strangely strident organ, lush but nasty, the sort of timbre that I have only heard emanate from the Yamaha 666. “Claire,” a fairly pleasant voice sings, “the way the moonlight bounces in your hair …” Ah yes, now I remember, and it comes as no surprise that Claire is climbing into the ring, dressed in what appears to be Saran Wrap. She does not see us, way to the back and shrouded in shadows. Her eyes are closed as she twists her body in time with the music. Claire doffs the Saran Wrap in nothing flat. She is an inexperienced peeler, the idea is to drag that moment out, we are not even into the second verse before Claire is lying down on the bearskin rug.

  The time comes for action. I stand up, make an outraged bellow, and storm the wrestling ring. Surprising myself, I haul my bulk up and squeeze through the ropes. Claire is on her back, her legs sticking straight into the air. She turns her head sideways, sees me.

  “Go away,” she says. She lowers her legs, spreads them.

  “Come with me,” I tell her.

  “Here comes the bouncer,” she says. She flips over on to her stomach, assumes the same position a ten-month-old infant would for a Kiddy Photographer.

  “I don’t fear bouncers,” I say, and I truly don’t, I am not alarmed as a thick arm wraps itself around my neck. A hand takes my left wrist, buckles the arm behind my back.

  “Okay, buddy,” a voice whispers in my ear. “That’ll be enough of that.”

  There is something about the voice, though, that causes me concern.

  “Unhand me,” I tell my unseen captor. “I’ve come to take this young lady home.”

  “Des?”

  “Don’t listen to him,” says Claire. “He’s lunched-out.”

  “Des Howl?” the voice whispers in my ear.

  “That is my name. Unhand me.”

  The arm loosens off my neck, my wrist is released. Claire is carrying on with her act. I place my hands on my sides, am about to say a stern “Now see here, young lady,” when I realize that, although I was previously quite famous, there is no way in the world that the fellow behind my back simply recognized me. Claire is doing push-ups on the bearskin rug. I turn around, see a horribly muscled body contained by too-tight pants and a T-shirt. There is the big moustache, the tiny head. I form my hammy paws into fists, I start to circle the perimeter of the ring. “All right, you,” I say, “put up your dukes.” The patronage sends up a huzzah, they would rather watch fisticuffs than live naked women any day of the week.

  Claire sits up on the bearskin rug, crosses her legs. “Des,” she says, “what the fuck are you doing?”

  “I am fighting,” I inform her. “Please get dressed. I’ll be with you as soon as I’m through.”

  “Desmond,” says my opponent, “you know how much I detest violence.”

  “I know no such thing.”

  “It’s okay,” says Claire. She has stood up, placed a tiny hand on my shoulder. “Come on, Des. You’re drunk or something. Let’s go home.”

  “This is unfinished business,” I inform her. “This lout has it coming in spades.”

  “Des—” they say simultaneously. I charge in, my right arm helicoptering above my head in preparation for a mighty blow. Before that happens, Farley O’Keefe pops me right in the nose. I hear a gruesome crunching sound, I begin to teeter, I think I’ve lost the fight already, a piss-poor showing on my side. My right hand lands ineffectually on Farley’s cheek. I’m timbering, Claire tries to catch me, the two of us hit the canvas hard. Still, my punch seems to have packed unexpected power, Farley is screaming and hollering in excruciating pain. I am quite proud of myself until I spot a dangling Barney, the pooch’s fangs dug deeply into O’Keefe’s backside. Then a huge fuzzball appears on top of Farley’s tiny head, which I momentarily recognize as Babboo Nass Fazoo. Stunned by my own ingenuity, I begin to roll towards Farley’s feet. I hit like a bowling ball. Yahoo! The Whale-man makes Life’s seven-ten split! I employ a wrestling maneouvre made famous by Man Mountain Calhoun. I clamber to my feet, take a couple of steps and then lift-off. I spread out in the air as if about to make a beautiful splash in the pool. There is a small oof as I land upon Farley O’Keefe.

  He is out.

  The crowd applauds furiously, some even get to their feet. They cheer and wave fists in salute.

  Put briefly, the carriage of my life broke under all the baggage. The straw that broke the camel’s back—although the camel was a crippled, blind swayback long before—was Daniel’s suicide. Accident, I mean. A slip of the brain.

  I could not catalogue chronologically the events that have led up to me being here, in this place, this police station, being interrogated by a man who fearsomely resembles Broderick Crawford. The man seems to be ingesting cigarettes, he has gone through seventeen in the brief time he has spent questioning me. Myself, I have quit. I decided just now. I tossed my Salems into the wastebasket, all seven packages that I had distributed around my bloated carcass. A filthy habit, cigarette smoking. I feel better already.

  The Broderick Crawford clone takes off his jacket, rolls up his shirt-sleeves. He’s got me on disturbing the peace and, chuckle-chuckle, public drunkenness. It’s as if they found Josef Mengele and charged him with littering. Farley is not filing a complaint. I seem to have put the fear of God into that moustachioed lout. I am concerned about my friends, though, Barney, Bob, and especially Claire.

  The detective tries to trick me. He leafs through my folder—I had no idea there was so much information on me—and asks, “When was the last time you saw Eddie Joe Keillor?”

  “I am not acquainted with the man.”

  “He stayed at your house for three months.”

  “So?”

  “So when was the last time you saw him?”

  “I am not acquainted with an Eddie Joe Keillor.”

  “You’re not making it any easier on the girl.”

  Why should I admit knowing Eddie Joe, a man who is to drug abusers what Santa Claus is to little children? Besides, I never knew that he lived at my house for three months. I stay hushed up—I wished I still smoked, so I could ram a butt into my mouth with punkish resolution—but then I make a quick ack-ack and demand, “What do you mean, not making it easier on the girl?”

  “Well, I mean, the shit comes up to here on her already”—he draws an imaginary line just under his wattles—“and now I’m finding out that Claire has been spending time with a guy who hangs out with Eddie Joe Keillor. Not to mention Quenton ‘The Geek’ Curso.”

  “Mr. Curso was in my employ. We were not friends.”

  “You know where Curso is now?”

  “No.”

  “Curso is el morto, Desmond. He got fuggin hung!!”

  “Hanged.”

  “It says here that you even know Jerry Lee Lewis.”

  I search the Broderick Crawford clone’s face for twitches of levity. There are none. The Los Angeles Police are mad at me because I know Jerry Lee Lewis. It may be time to vacate the planet.

  “Mr. Lewis and I are both musicians, I have encountered the gentleman professionally.”

  “He played on some fuggin record of yours.”

  “Yes.” This man is a moron. “You see, sir, we needed that sound.”

  “What sound?”

  “A sound like the piano keyboard is a huge dimpled keester and the fingers sailors on shore leave.”

  “You couldn’t get anyone else to do it?”

  “When one wants that sound, one needs must have the Killer himself.”

  Jerry Lee Lewis is called The Killer I think as a joke, although there is a disconcerting similarity in the tragic deaths of two of his wives, both found drugged and drowned in the swimming pool. It is true, he played on one of our records, he played the piano on “Big House,” track four, side two of Reems Street. That album cooks, oh boy, it features many special guest stars, Mooky Saunders, um, Keith Richards, er, Di
zzy Gillespie (has Dizzy’s head exploded yet?), and for the song “Big House” we needed that distinctive piano sound. So Daniel got on the telephone—an instrument he loved as much I despised—and a few hours later Jerry Lee Lewis stumbled into the studio.

  Jerry Lee had been into the amphetamines. He had the speed-induced dental gnash, the grinders meeting with a pressure of several thousand pounds per square inch. He was also drinking Wild Turkey, wrapping his lips around the bottleneck and pumping like a puppy at the teat. “The Killer has arrived!” he announced, unnecessary heralding considering he entered the studio like a tiny hurricane. He spied the piano and shot the boots, catching one of the corners and sending wood chips every which way. In a single move he devalued the Steinway by about five thousand dollars. “You got show these things who’s boss,” he explained. “They’re just like women, all tits, no ass, if you see what I mean.”

  Jerry Lee Lewis chuckled, lit a smoke, collapsed onto the piano stool. He polished off the bottle, laid his cigarette down on the keyboard (it burned into the ivory not many moments afterwards), and then the Killer unleashed some music. It was as if he’d unlocked the door of a musical insane asylum, the crazed futzzies stormed into the world defiantly. “This thing’s in tune,” he told us, “but don’t worry, I can work around it.” Jerry Lee raised a leg and did his patented playing-with-the-heel. This caused both him and my brother Daniel to laugh very loudly. Daniel had found a soulmate. The engineer (Fred had been locked up some time back) placed earphones on Lewis’s head, then returned to the console and started pushing up the levels. Jerry Lee popped a thumb upwards and kept it popped, the engineer obediently upped the volume until it matched the exhaust of a Lear Jet. We played the tracks to “Big House.”

  Big House, on the hill,

  I don’t live there, I never will.

  But I can stand outside the gate,

  I’m not worried, I can wait

  Outside

  The Big House.

  Jerry Lee did it in one take, which was fortunate, for the booze and pills in his system conspired immediately afterwards to completely befuddle him.

  “I went to Elvis’s place,” he mumbled. “We’re friends, for fuck’s sake. Guy wouldn’t talk to me. Wouldn’t talk to the Killer. So I took out my gun, waved it around, I got thrown into the hoosegow for that. It’s not like I wanted to kill the King. I just wanted to shoot his ass. That fat man would have looked good with a bullet between his cheeks.” Jerry Lee Lewis laughed and wept in the space of a breath. “Hey, y’all see my cousin Jimmy on the news? What’d he say now, he said that Jews can’t get into Heaven. Well, I believe he’s right. You want to get into Heaven, you got to live on the right side of the line, man, you got to embrace Jesus Christ and walk with the Lord hand-in-hand. I know that for a true fact. But you do that, and guess what happens. You can’t sing for pigshit. Start singing like Jimmy does.” Jerry Lee did an imitation of his cousin Jimmy Swaggart. “Shall we gather at the river … Tell you one thing, man. Once I got strung out bad, my ass was hung up like the wash, I was playing some dive somewhere. I believe I would have been one dead Jerry Lee but Jimmy come into that place, and he goes up on the stage and picks me up, and people are beating on him and telling him to leave me alone, and he tells them, Jimmy say, you don’t care about this man. Y’all watch this man die. Y’all watch this man consign his immortal soul to hell-fire and you don’t lift a finger. Shame on you, he says, shame on you. Jimmy took me home and dried me out. He say, cousin, I can’t watch you do this to yourself. I say, Jimmy, don’t watch, ’cause I’m doing it. All I care about is the music, man, and if you want to sing it right, you got to damn yourself. That’s gospel. I ain’t going to no Heaven. I am going to Hell, but hey, it may be hot and there may be eternal suffering, but I believe the music should be righteous.”

  Jerry Lee Lewis rose from the piano bench, collapsed on the floor and fell into a fitful sleep.

  Daniel stared at him thoughtfully.

  The Broderick Crawford clone’s name is Hogan. I know this because every few minutes the telephone on his desk rings shrilly. The man tears the receiver from the cradle, throws it into the loose folds around his neck and clamps head to chest. “Hogan,” he croaks, fishing around in his pockets for smokes and matches.

  He did this shortly after the remark about Mr. Jerry Lee Lewis. The phone rang, he tore it up and barked, “Hogan.” Hogan lit a cigarette. “Yeah? Well, what’s the, you know, age of whatever up there? Right. Well, if she left the hospital without her parents’ permission, then I guess she goes back. Crime? What crime, we don’t need no fuggin crime. Flashing the trim, ain’t there some law against that? Yeah. We can think of—Hold on, somebody’s here.”

  Dum-da-dum-dum.

  “Desmond!” says Kenneth Sexstone as he curvets into the room. “Have they beaten you?”

  “Kenneth,” I tell him urgently, “I need to talk to you.”

  Sexstone’s entourage files in. First there is the moustachioed cop, who proffers a sheriff’s badge under Hogan’s nose. Hogan, not to be outdone, fishes out his wallet and flips it open to his I.D. The sheriff still holds, in his other hand, the official-looking piece of paper, the writ. He waves that in the air, which sends Hogan scurrying for my arrest sheet.

  That woman Mandy enters. She holds a tiny tape recorder up to her mouth. “Dank and dreary,” Mandy whispers, “the halls of justice do not seem to have changed since the days of Dickens. In one of the darkest corners, Desmond Howl, former glamorous rock star, sits quietly, awaiting the fall of society’s gavel.”

  Then there’s Dr. Tockette, who has fetched along my entire file and is flipping through the pages for the juiciest bits. “What do you want?” he asks Kenny Sexstone. “Sexual aberrations?”

  “I want nothing,” says Kenneth. “I want Desmond to tell me if he’s been mistreated in any way.”

  “Shortly after his psychotic episode,” Mandy whispers into her machine, “Howl entered a downtown strip joint and went berserk, leaping on stage with a dancer and fighting with security.”

  “Soundly trouncing the bouncer,” I suggest.

  “Or this,” says Dr. Tockette, pulling out a sheet of foolscap. “Still in the note stage, but pretty ginchy, if I do say so. ‘Refusal to Acknowledge Same Sex Sibling as Betrayer and Felodese’.”

  “Kenneth,” I repeat, “I really need to talk to you.”

  “Oh, yes? We’ve been associated for more than twenty years, I can’t recall an antecedent. You need to talk to me. Imagine that.”

  “What goes on?” Hogan barks, but he has lost control.

  The sheriff unfolds the writ, holding it aloft as if it were a Royal Decree and he the Town Crier. He clears his throat and the first word is almost out his mouth when Kenny Sexstone touches him on the arm, silencing him. Kenny is staring at me, his eyes the brightest thing in the room. “All right,” says Kenneth Sexstone. “Desmond and I must talk. Alone.”

  There is resistance from everybody—they’ve never had so much fun—but Kenneth Sexstone wags his fingers and shoos them out of the room.

  “Much of what I do,” says Kenneth—I’m in for a dose of the famous Sexstone earnestness—“I do for your benefit, Desmond. An example. I dispatch Monty Mann to your residence. Why? To suggest a reunion. This is not evil. No malevolence there. I wish only to induce you back into the world, Desmond. I send along a journalist. She reports strange claxons. Hideous barks and stridulations. Your personal doctor tells me of retrogression. Your life is informed by squalor, autointoxication and tergiversation. You refuse to seek treatment for your drug dependency, your alcoholism. So. After years of trying to help—of having my offers of friendship rejected, and most recently of being threatened with death—I take drastic measures. I am decidedly in control now. You say you need to talk to me. I can’t say that I need to listen, Desmond.”

  “Kenneth,” I say, “you have to help her.”

  “Her?”

  “The girl from Toronto. They want to pu
t her back into a mental hospital. But there’s nothing wrong with her.”

  “I hardly think you’re fit to judge.”

  “I’m fit to judge because I know her. And I’m fit to judge because I’ve been in those places. You know what happens, Kenny? People break other people—sometimes on purpose, sometimes by accident—and they just throw them away. Into those places. And the doctors try to fix them with Krazy Glue. And I don’t want Claire to go there, and I’m asking you please to help me.”

  Kenneth exhales a bewildered snort. “What do you know? A universe at the centre of which is someone other than Mr. Desmond Howell.”

  “And I’m sorry if I, um, misinterpreted some of your intentions.”

  “Hmm!” Kenneth does a little turn about the room. “Desmond!” he calls. “Here’s a riddle. What am I not?”

  “You’re not the, um—”

  “Suggestions: ogre, monster, fiend.”

  “Monster. You’re not the monster I take you for.”

  “Very true. For example: the rectification of our problem with Howl mater. I purchased Mantlepiece Records. At a very fair price. Extremely philanthropic, enough to ensure poor Maurice of adequate care. Mind you, I like Moe and your mother. They have always treated me civilly.” Kenneth Sexstone gathers in his lapels, adjusts his clothing vigorously. “In your case, it may be a little late in the day.”

  Sexstone opens the door to the room, the rest of them come tumbling in. Kenneth singles out the sheriff with his index finger. “Read,” he commands, and the man unfurls his writ and begins.

  “Whereby, in the State of California and on this day, it has been determined by licensed professionals that Desmond Henry Howell is not …”

  Kenneth snatches the paper away, tears it neatly into many pieces. “Not that. Read this.” Kenny reaches into his jacket pocket, removes more official-looking papers, hands them to the sheriff.

  “What the fuck is going on?” demands Hogan.

  “Oh,” explains Kenneth, “Mr. Howl is in violation of his contract. He is supposed to have handed over master tapes months ago.”