One Last Hit (Joe Portugal Mysteries)

by Walpow, Nathan

  MTV did a feature on him in ’84. Their conclusion: He was most likely “jamming with Janis and Jimi.”

  “There was a sighting,” Bonnie said.

  “Really.”

  “He showed up at a club with his guitar, plugged into someone’s amp, and played a set.”

  “What club?”

  She pushed away from the table, stood, began clearing the dishes. “I don’t know.”

  “Who saw him?”

  “I don’t know that either. It’s all know-a-guy-who-knows-a-guy stuff. A lot of people in the industry have heard the stories.”

  “A lot of people have seen Elvis too.”

  “I know this sounds stupid. But I just have a feeling about it.”

  “Cosmic, man.”

  She smiled. “You could call it that. But what could it hurt to look into the stories?”

  “It probably couldn’t, unless you look in the wrong places.”

  “I don’t get you.”

  “A couple of years ago several people I trusted turned out to be murderers.”

  “I know. So?”

  “So it’s made me leery of going around poking into other people’s business.”

  “The only person’s business you’d be poking into is Toby’s. If he’s dead, it doesn’t matter. If he isn’t, we can at least tell him what we’re up to.”

  “What if he’s alive, but doesn’t want to be found? Which, given that he hasn’t been seen in twenty-odd years, seems a likely possibility.”

  “If he doesn’t want to be found, why did he show up somewhere to play?”

  “You really think he did?”

  “I really do.”

  “That old cosmic bit again.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why does it have to be Toby? There are a million guitarists in this town. You could use someone else.”

  “Would you want me to use someone else instead of Squig?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Instead of Woz?”

  “Jury’s still out on that one.”

  “Instead of you?”

  Pow, right in the dream. “No.”

  “Of course you don’t. The whole idea is to get the original band together and … shit, Joe, I can’t put it into words. Can’t you just file it under Cosmic and let that be enough?”

  “Please. Enough with the cosmic already.”

  She sat down opposite me. “Don’t you think there’s a reason you and Frampton started playing your instruments again right around when I got this lamebrain idea?”

  “Coincidence.”

  “You really think so?”

  I really thought so. At least ninety percent’s worth. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s assume it’s worthwhile looking for Toby. There are a lot of people in L.A. who’d be better than me at finding him. All those private eyes you’re always seeing on TV.”

  “Fictional characters, Joe.”

  “There must be real ones.”

  “We have to do this ourselves. Within the group.”

  “Why?”

  “We just do. Damn it, Joe, haven’t you ever done anything that wasn’t entirely logical?”

  “Not since I turned you down back in ’68.”

  “Bullshit.”

  She was right, of course. Everyone does things against their better judgment because they refuse to accept that they’re dumb ideas. Like picking up my electric guitar again just short of the half-century mark. And thinking I could be in a rock and roll band, one that actually made a record. “What if I find out he really is dead? What then? Do we give the whole thing up? Find someone else to play lead?”

  “We’ll cross that bridge if we come to it.”

  The basset hound got up, yawned, and came my way. He waited patiently by my chair. “What’s he want?” I said.

  “His ears scratched.”

  I did my duty. He seemed to like it. “What’s his name?”

  “Papa Cass.”

  “Why—”

  “Don’t ask.”

  I looked down at Papa Cass. He gazed up at me. Damn, his eyes were red.

  Still playing with his floppy ears, I looked across the table at Bonnie. “I’ll see what I can dig up.”

  “I thought you would,” she said.

  Head Out

  On The Highway

  Daily Records

  It was nearly one when I left. Bonnie and Papa Cass walked me out. Just outside the door Bonnie said, “Wait. I almost forgot.” Papa Cass gave me that look again. I gave him some more of the ear treatment and asked him what was happening. He wouldn’t say. Canaries notwithstanding, I’m not real good with animals.

  Bonnie came back out and handed me a cassette. “Give it a listen, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  We reached the truck. A short, tight hug, and the two of them headed back. The front door snicked closed. I got in the truck and turned on the radio. Stuck the cassette in the slot but didn’t push it all the way in. I wasn’t ready.

  I was tuned to Arrow 93. They were playing “Stairway to Heaven.” They run it once an hour whether they need to or not. I switched to KLOS where I could hear “classic rock that really rocks.” It was Jim Ladd’s slot. I started down the hill and listened to him meander. By the time I hit Sunset, Jim had decided some music was in order. My friends from Aerosmith. “Just Push Play.”

  “Good idea,” I said, and gave the cassette a shove.

  Nothing but tape hiss for ten or fifteen seconds. Then the electric sitar intro to “Loves Me, Loves Me Not” blasted from my cheap speakers. I adjusted the volume.

  Thirty years later, it still sounded fresh. Some songs are like that. “Time Won’t Let Me.” “Satisfaction.” You hear them a million times, they still kindle that thrill of the new.

  Except I hadn’t heard this one a million times. Not this version, anyway. The electric sitar was richer, fuller. The rest of the instruments were subtly changed. Bonnie’s voice was different. More mature. Like listening to Madonna now versus the Madonna of “Like a Virgin.” Except Bonnie could sing in the first place.

  Verse one, chorus, verse two, chorus, bridge, verse three, chorus, fadeout. Bonnie’s voice, clear, strong, sweet. The piping oboe near the end, stolen from Sonny and Cher.

  It wasn’t better than the original. It wasn’t worse. It was just different.

  Another song came on, one I’d never heard before. That Farfisa organ tone I’d heard Squig create a little while ago. An acoustic guitar, strumming simply. Bass and drums. And that new voice. The “Different Drum” theme, two lovers who were having a great old time, but one of them knew it would never work out. The organ dropped out on the chorus, leaving that simple guitar and that still-so-pure voice.

  The song drew to a close. I waited for more tunes. There were only the two. The second was good, but it needed something. It needed some lead guitar. It needed Toby Bonner.

  In the morning I walked to the Culver City library. They had computers there to provide Internet access to Luddites like me who didn’t have their own. I sat down at one of the screens, between a couple of nine-year-olds who looked like they hadn’t seen the sun in months. I did what Gina said should always be the first step in looking for something on the Internet. The obvious thing. I typed in www.bonnerandbonnie.com.

  The screen filled. A big photo of Bonnie and Toby, similar to the one from their album cover, hovered over a black background. Underneath it said CLICK TO ENTER. I clicked and entered. More black background, more yellow lettering. It was hard on the eyes. In the upper right a picture kept morphing from Bonnie to Toby—the 1968 versions—and back again. The verbiage said who Bonner and Bonnie were, why they were worth caring about even now, what happened to them. Whoever ran the site had decided it was cool to refer to them as B&B. B&B this, B&B that, B&B the other thing. It didn’t work for me. If you live in Culver City, B&B is a hardware store.

  There was a fan club. A mailing list. A bulletin board. I checked out the last, feeling tawdry, paging thr
ough the scrivenings of people with too much time on their hands, ones who named their daughters Bonnie and their sons Toby, ones who were upset over the exclusion of “Loves Me, Loves Me Not” from the VH1 list of the hundred greatest pop songs of the century. Several begged B&B to resume their careers. I wondered how they’d react if that happened.

  I turned up a few Toby sightings. Someone had seen him in a 7-Eleven in Helena, Montana. Somebody else found him working at a muffler shop in Atlanta. And there was a grainy picture from 1989, a couple of dozen ecstatic people chipping away at the top of the Berlin Wall, with an outline drawn about one of them. IS THIS TOBY? someone wanted us to know, in three-quarter-inch letters in a typeface straight out of Star Trek. I suppose it could have been. It could have been Elvis too. Or Amelia Earhart.

  I pushed away from the keyboard, thinking. Another youngster, this one a girl, same age, same pale complexion, said, “Are you done?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You look done.”

  “I said I’m not. Go away. Why aren’t you in school?”

  “It’s spring break.” Followed by an unsaid “you dumbshit.”

  “Kids on spring break are supposed to be outside. Go outside. Play soccer or something.”

  She stomped away, and I slid back up to the keyboard. There was a page of links. One was to the official Bonner and Bonnie page. I took a look. It was a perfunctory appendage on the Hysteria Records site. I went back where I came from.

  Next up: A reissue of Toby’s first solo album on Rhino Records. The CD had come out a year back. It was a special edition. They made just 1500, which had all been sold. There was a note to try eBay. I wasn’t that far gone yet.

  I visited a few more sites but didn’t find anything very interesting. More sightings. The amazing revelation that Bonnie Morgenlender, teenage rock star, was now Bonnie Chapman, record company president. They had a picture of her at the Grammys, shepherding one of her acts. I wondered if he liked little boys.

  I decided to try one more and give the little brat the computer. I went down the list. I came to Toby’s Minions. It seemed worth a click. It came up. It was astounding. It wasn’t quite clear what Toby’s Minions thought he was, but the words “second coming” came to mind. They thought he was going to “return to us” in the year 2007, bringing kindness, joy, love, and happiness to all. It was touching, in a way. They seemed so damned sincere. Like they really believed Toby was out there in Montana or Atlanta or Berlin, waiting for the appropriate time to come back and save us all.

  I’d had enough of the site and enough of the Internet. I slipped from the chair and the pale girl immediately took my place. “It’s about time,” she muttered. I frowned, she doled out a phony but endearing smile, and I went out the automatic door.

  I walked home, picked up the truck, drove to Guitar Matrix. I’d been back a few times to buy picks and strings, and to indulge my desire for a wah-wah pedal. I found Dex, the kid who’d sold me the amp and everything else.

  “Joe, dude,” he said. “What’s up.”

  “Got a question.”

  “Shoot.”

  “You ever hear of Toby Bonner?”

  “Course I have. Guy’s a god.”

  “Even after all these years, he’s a god?”

  “Gods are immortal.”

  “You think he is? You think he’s still alive?”

  He shrugged, and the mask of cool dropped away, and he was just a kid with dreams to spare. “Could be. I mean, no one’s ever seen him dead, have they? And I heard he showed up at a club a little while back, and played a set.”

  “I heard about that.”

  “It would’ve been something. Can you imagine seeing Toby Bonner play?”

  “It would be something, all right.”

  “Can you imagine playing with him? I could die after that.”

  Yes, as a matter of fact, I could imagine playing with him. Because a third of a century ago I had. “You don’t happen to know the name of the club where he played, do you?”

  “No. Some after-hours place, I think.”

  “How long ago?”

  “I don’t know. A while back.”

  “Define ‘a while.’“

  “Couple of weeks, maybe? I’m not really sure.”

  “And you don’t know the name of the place?”

  “Nah. The dude who told me, he’s kind of hard to get anything out of. I’m not even sure he remembered the place. Kind of fucked up, you know?” He mimed smoking a joint.

  “Then why did you believe what he said about Toby Bonner?”

  “I never said I believed it. I just said I heard it.”

  “How do I find this guy?”

  A flicker of suspicion. “How come you want to find him?”

  Great. The kid thought I was a narc. First Woz, now him. I leaned in, elbow on the counter. “I used to know Toby when we were kids. I’m trying to hook up with him again.”

  “You knew Toby Bonner?”

  “That so hard to believe? Chances are you know someone who’ll be famous someday. You just don’t know it yet. Or maybe it’ll be you who’s famous.”

  I hit a nerve. A goofy smile stole up his face. “Yeah. Maybe I will.” He came back to earth. “You can find Mott at Da Capo just about any night.”

  “Mott? Like in Mott the Hoople?”

  “What’s that?”

  That’s the trouble with kids. They’re so young. “A group in the seventies. ‘All the Young Dudes,’ that kind of thing. Where’s Da Capo?”

  “Hollywood Boulevard, a couple of blocks east of Vine.”

  “Thanks.”

  “No problem. Look, I gotta get back to work now. If my manager sees me standing around like this—”

  “Sell me some strings, then.”

  “The flat-wounds, right?”

  “You got it.”

  I paid Dex, thanked him again, walked out into the sunlight. It was another groovy Southern California day. I caught the 405 north, got off at Sunset, drove east to Amoeba Music in Hollywood. Supposedly the biggest record store in the world. They’d have Toby’s stuff if anyone did.

  The place was big as a football field. Half the floor was filled to the gills with used albums, the other with CDs old and new. Plus cassettes along the walls, with hundreds of framed posters and other rock esoterica hanging above them. I saw things I hadn’t seen in thirty years, at astonishing prices.

  A few dozen people were browsing. Most already had an album or two or six picked out. Little kids like the ones at the library, a couple of ancient black men, an obese woman in a nurse’s uniform. All intense or enraptured or wrecked.

  I went to the LPs and found the Bs. Bonner and Bonnie had their own divider. There were six copies of Loves Me, Loves Me Not, the album, one of them the U.K. version with the shiny cover. I already had the American and I didn’t need the British, even if it did include their cover of “Needles and Pins.” There were also two of the second album, the one with the ersatz Bonnie. $2.99 and $3.99. I took the cheap one.

  They also had a couple of copies of Toby’s first solo album, with the power trio, and one of the last, the one I could never find. The former were $4.99 each. The latter must have still been scarce. The cover was worn, the name Bobby Bastone written in green ballpoint grade-school handwriting on the back, and it still went for $13.99. I pulled the record out, tilted it toward the light. Last time I tried that Squig and Woz showed up. This time no one did. I added it and one of the $4.99s to my stash.

  I went back to the As and started going through semi-methodically. I found an LP by Earth Opera, another eight-track I’d never replaced. And one by Fat Mattress, the group put together by Noel Redding, Hendrix’s bass player. Their first album was fabulous. This one would probably suffer from sophomore suck, but for ninety-nine cents I could take a chance.

  I picked out a Manfred Mann and a Nazz. When I hit the Ss I spotted another copy of the Splinter album. It was $1.99. It added it to my hoard. You can never have
too many copies of your Splinter album.

  My bladder gave a call. I asked where the bathroom was. The answer was the burger joint across the street. I put my goodies on a card and held my water till I got home. While I was relieving myself I flashed on Woz picking my lock and standing right here doing the same thing. I wondered if he washed his hands when he was done.

  Woz. What a character. Squig. Another strange soul. Frampton. Bonnie. The rest of the band. Of my band. The concept hadn’t fully taken hold. Even so, I was a lot more excited about it than I’d ever been about acting.

  Excited? I was fucking euphoric. I was in a band.

  But only if I could find someone who hadn’t been seen in over twenty years.

  That night Gina and I were going to a play, then staying at her place. In the morning she’d be flying to San Francisco for a couple of days at an interior designers’ confab. I called and told her about Da Capo. She wanted to go. I mentioned her trip. She reminded me her flight wasn’t until eleven, and that was that.

  I hung up, sorted through my Amoeba finds, decided to pull the first album down from the shelf. They played the singles all the time on K-Earth and The Arrow, but I hadn’t heard the rest in fifteen years. The record was excellent, with perfect singing and guitar work throughout.

  The second LP, the one finished after Bonnie lost her voice, didn’t suck. That was as far as I could go. It wasn’t throw-across-the-room bad, but if I never heard it again I wouldn’t care. The fake Bonnie wasn’t within miles of the real one.

  I put on Toby’s first solo album next. I listened to half a song, raised the needle, and went looking for my headphones. They were in the canaries’ room, in the same box as my eight-tracks. I set them up and settled on the couch.

  The power trio was a far better showcase for Toby’s guitar skills than the pop-flavored songs Bonner and Bonnie did. On every song there was something to perk my ears up. His singing was better too, stronger and more confident.

  Somewhere along the line I checked the writing credits. The two instrumentals were credited to Toby alone. The others, all except one, to Toby and Spencer Sommers, the bass player. That last to Toby and Dee Knox, the chick drummer.