City Fishing

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  “Ma, please! Ma!”

  When he finally heard her steps outside the door she still would not answer him. He thought it might be because after his long hours in the dark his voice had changed—now there were thrumm and clang and rough edges in it, a throat full of dust and a tongue crawling with bugs to rearrange the syllables his mouth tried to speak.

  “Rex …” he finally heard—a soft, hoarse voice tense and hesitant. “Rex, is that you?”

  His answer was lost in a dark explosion as his fingers tore apart the door and the jamb. His mother spent two months in the hospital and based on her information everyone said it had been a prowler that did it, maybe two or three. His mother didn’t lock him in the closet after that. Sometimes he put himself there for hours at a time, but he always took his radio.

  1958: He’d just turned eighteen and although he’d been too big for his momma to force into the closet for some time it still felt like he’d just gotten out, like this was the first daylight he’d seen in years. There was thrumm in his voice and a strong backbeat in his walk when he went to school or parties or just tried to get to know other kids his age. He knew he was wound way too tight for safety but he couldn’t see anything to be done about that except to pray for minimal hassles when the spring finally broke.

  A lot of the music he’d been hearing that year was pretty above-ground, walking-around-with-your-best-suit-on, take-it-to-meet-your-parents kind of stuff. And yet most of it made him feel like he wanted to kill somebody, slit them open and crawl inside for the winter just to keep warm. Baby pleaaaaasssse don’t go!

  That year he got his first strong trace of the sound he was looking for, in an instrumental by a fellow named Link Wray.,

  “Rumble.” A gravelly electric guitar growling out two minutes and thirty-six seconds of one of the meanest sounding tunes he’d ever heard. It was the first instance of that distorted, fuzz-tone guitar sound he knew of. Wray achieved the crackle and burr with a hole punched through one of his amplifier speakers. In the liner notes for Wray’s ’74 album none other than Pete Townshend would write about being made “very uneasy” the first time he heard it.

  Wray had a voice to match that guitar—years later Rex would describe it as Jagger and Captain Beefheart ripped open and then bleeding into Robbie Robertson—he had a voice with the thrumm in it, and Rex followed the rasp and chew of that sound through songs like “Super 88,” “It Was A Bad Scene,” “Walkin’ Bulldog,” “She’s That Kind of Woman,” and “I Got To Ramble” (dedicated to the memory of Duane Allman). Legend had it that his session men would stomp the floor and beat on pans for a drum beat while recording in Wray’s three-track shack. He believed it, and even in his middle-age years Rex sometimes found himself stomping and rattling the kitchenware while listening religiously to albums like “Jack the Ripper” and “There’s Good Rockin’ Tonight.”

  Sometimes Wray’s sound would grab him with the thrumm, and Rex would feel the need to lock himself up in his room like Lon Chaney in one of those old werewolf movies. What he felt at those moments wasn’t exactly anger, but a kind of manic, transforming high that made him want to get to the center of things, the center of people. He wanted to hold their still-warm hearts in his hands.

  He met Ellen at a car rally his senior year. She was one of those girls who always wore pastel sweaters with matching silk scarves around the neck. His friend Jim said it was to hide all the love bites the football team had given her, but Rex always pictured a deep slash across the throat. He imagined removing the scarf in the throes of passion, anxious to nibble there, and Ellen’s head falling off into his lap.

  “Turn off the radio, Rex,” she said and sighed, rearranging herself on his lap and squirming, pushing her chest forward. “It distracts me, honey.”

  But the DJ was playing “Rumble,” and the steady thrumm of it had him well caught up. “I can’t,” he mumbled, and moved his lips over her ear.

  “What do you mean you can’t?” Ellen voice shifted into her grating, thirty-plus-years-and-too-many-kids mode. Rex heard her mother and her grandmother, too. He reached over and switched it off. She sighed contentedly and leaned over his shoulder, rubbing her hands up and down his back. “Thanks, baby.”

  Ellen hummed tunelessly in his ear, reaching under the edge of his shirt and drawing her nails up his spine in a jerky back and forth rhythm. Rex felt that rhythm working through his flesh and into the bone, felt a fuzzy vibration shaking itself out of the tangles of distant memory, heard the strain and the thrumm of it backing his father’s voice Tell them! Tell them, son! singing with his eyes filled with the vision of dozens of naked and dead young girls. “Oh, Ellen,” he whispered, but it was his father’s voice, his father’s song on his lips as he pressed his hands on either side of her neck and started to press as hard as he could.

  “Jesus, Rex!”

  He stopped and looked at her, then jumped out of the car and ran.

  Rex ran up the hill as hard as he could, past the old mill and along the narrow edge of the ridge and despite the intense pain in his chest he felt no fatigue, only a growing exhilaration as the music built in wild abandon inside him, an oddly irritating, moronic tune which years later would remind him of Oingo Boingo and the way it made you want to snap your head back and forth idiotically as if the neurons were exploding. Tell them! Tell them! Tell them!

  Eventually he made his way back to his car and his radio. Ellen wasn’t there, no doubt gone off with some other guy from the rally. Rex switched the radio back on, but—unable to find Link Wray again, or any other tune angry enough to do the trick—he pushed the dial to the far end where disgruntled static and garbled messages from distant points on the globe reigned. In that region he found comfort for the burn in his head, an antidote for the other Rex who sang the blood songs he was so desperate to run away from, and he drove through that country until dawn.

  May, 1964: Rex had been using drugs since his freshman college year and it seemed to him now that the thrumm had become a bit more ethereal, a little more religious, both in the music and in the lifestyle. People talked about going back to Mother Nature, going back to the sea, going someplace else, and in that someplace else, Rex thought, there would be no secret other self fucking you up and causing you no end of nightmares.

  “Rex? Rex, honey, don’t!” the women would say when he cried watching them die from the chemicals they were throwing down their throats and pumping into their arms. Tell them!

  Link Wray had another, softer country-gospel side as well: “Fire and Brimstone,” “God Out West,” “Take Me Home Jesus,” the kind of music Rex had never much cared for, but he understood all too well how essential that periodic return to a safe and simple, funky philosophy was once you got within a nail-scratch of the sound. The thrumm could make you religious as hell. Look at Little Richard. Sometimes Rex wondered if Jimmy Swaggart had heard the thrumm, too, just like cousin Jerry, and found it too much to bear.

  Tell them what you heard! Tell them what you feel!

  The boys of Pi Kappa Alpha were a sadistic bunch, but they threw a good party. He didn’t fit in, but this seemed to be a fraternity for guys who didn’t fit in. After the initiations of the past few days—guys lying naked on the floor and farting directly into each other’s noses, guys with their jock straps full of mustard and hot sauce, guys paddled so hard their rectums bled, guys with their ears scraped raw from Brillo pad ear muffs—I believe in murder! I believe in love! I believe in torture! I believe in love!—vast quantities of illicit drugs seemed the only appropriate response.

  But some drugs cut out the music completely, leaving him alone in a silent world with only his father’s red face for company. Tell them!

  “Hey, man. Hey, man, you okay?” His friend said more—Rex could see his lips moving—but he couldn’t hear a word beyond the hiss and thrumm welling up inside him.

  “I have to hear the music,” Rex said, “but I can’t.”

  And then that other Rex came out, and his frie
nd’s face grew redder and redder, looking more and more like his father’s face, and by the time the cops got there many of his brothers wore his father’s wet, red face.

  You can’t hide me! You can’t avoid me! I am your sweet, red loverrrrrr …

  December 1969: Rex was twenty-nine, and the endless graduate student (English or History, depending on the year), and about to be kicked out into the real world. He had no marketable skills. He worked part-time at the local record store listening for the thrumm and pushing personal favorites like Wray off on younger college kids. It had been a year of demonstrations and local bands playing Gadda-Da-Vida endlessly in the park for seriously stoned audiences. It had also been the year girls at an all-women’s college in the next town were getting murdered in their beds.

  “Something else, is that you, cuttin’ up?” he’d ask in a haze of dope. Tell them! Tell them! Man you’re somethin’ else!

  Sometimes something else would answer. Sometimes not.

  Sometimes Rex would fervently pray that the music continued as long as he needed it.

  In the seventies the thrumm was buried in the precise guitar work of Roy Buchanan, but it was still there. It still growled.

  Now and again it occurred to him, of course, that the singers and musicians truly capable of producing the chord he was looking for were dead. Hendrix, aspirating his vomit in 1970. Morrison, dying of a heart attack in his bathtub at age 27, 1971. Janis, TRex, maybe even Mama Cass or Ricky Nelson. Others, no doubt, who had died before anyone had even known about them. Or maybe they had found the chord, worked to achieve it or stumbled across it by accident, and that was what had killed them.

  “Is that you, Daddy?” he said to his image in the mirror. The image sang Tell them! but Rex didn’t understand what it was he was supposed to tell. Tell them! Rex thought that the face in the mirror was the face of his own violent death.

  Through the eighties he traced bits and echoes of the sound through a variety of bands: Chelsea and Oingo Boingo, Athletico Spizz 80 and the Dead Kennedys. The vocalists in these groups all projected at least the shadow of the sound he was looking for, a shadow that could even be glimpsed occasionally in the simple-minded dementia and masturbatory self-indulgences displayed by such as the lead singer for the Cramps. Although he could never quite get into heavy metal, he had to admit there was a strong strain of the sound throughout Metallica’s “One.”

  Sometimes he’d trace the sound in and out of an Elvis Costello whine or the demented laments of Echo and the Bunnymen. Sometimes in the graveled voice of a singer like Joe Strummer, the shadow came very close to revealing itself. He always thought the Clash sounded their best when they were at their most distorted. Sometimes he’d tape and re-tape “Dictator,” “Dirty Punk,” and “We Are the Clash,” playing with the controls to maximize the distortion—sounding as if it might have been recorded at the bottom of a garbage disposal—while still maintaining some semblance of the original. He’d stop the tape at every hint of the thrumm, back it up, and play this isolated bit over and over, but the thrumm was a tease—it receded too quickly into the background to capture.

  Something was happening in the music, though. It was still Rock, still the same basic sound, but he felt the gradual evolution in it, a change that he was sure would someday bring his sound, his thrumm, out into the open. For a while he’d sneak into the clubs and stand at the back watching them pogo or slam dance. Then one morning he just shaved his head and that night he joined them down in the pit in front of the stage, circling and turning and slamming into people, shoving them away, crouched and ready as if he was fighting but it wasn’t fighting at all, at least not usually. After a few weeks people got to know you and helped you up when you took a particularly bad fall. With his head shaved he lost years, he actually looked almost the right age, but when he eventually tried jumping off the stage he couldn’t twist himself into those safer angles the young punks managed, and he broke his left arm. The next weekend he was back in the pit circling with a sling, but he never tried stage diving again.

  He hit his late forties with his head still shaven, but he’d kept his weight down and with just the right amount of makeup he didn’t look much older than the rest of them out on the dance floor. The best thing about it was that he could feel just the edge of the thrumm, go with it, crash into somebody and then feel as if he’d faced that something else without really hurting anybody else in the process.

  He got married, had three kids, but continued to follow the thrumm through the music and on the road.

  The face in the mirror grew steadily older, more like his father’s face. Tell them what, Daddy? But when the mirror spoke Rex didn’t understand the words.

  For a time during the late eighties Rex followed Stevie Ray Vaughan on the road, his anxiety rising steadily from the time he heard the first notes out of Ray’s ’59 Fender Stratocaster tuned to E-flat, crescendoing when the guitar master pumped the wah-wah pedal for the beginnings of Hendrix’s “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return).” When Vaughan jammed, or engaged in a cutting contest with a Clapton or a Cray or a Beck, Rex would leave the theatre shaken.

  When Stevie Ray’s helicopter dropped into the ground, Rex left the road and concert halls and eventually all the late nights prowling the record stores for hidden gems. He spent more time with his wife and kids, and kept the thrumm of his life to himself, in his head.

  Tell them, son. Tell them what it’s like.

  When Rex awakened it was as if from a dream that had lasted for years. He stood and saw himself in the mirror attached to the back of the bedroom door: his father looked out at him, but older than Rex remembered him: his hair hippie-cut long, streaked with gray, his grizzled beard eating away at the lower half of his face, his belly pushing out and spreading open his pajama top.

  In his head, the thrumm rang clearly, reverberating down through his bones. He didn’t need a radio; he’d mixed the sound in his dreams.

  The longer he gazed at the mirror, the leaner and meaner the image of his father became. Shadows ran up his arms and across his face, masking him in gray and black. His teeth grew long and curved. His eyes burned white with the glow of the other Rex’s passion, the intelligence of something else again.

  It just needed to be seen. Once heard in the song, it lost its danger. Tell them! Tell them, son. Tell them what they are.

  BOXER

  Joe noticed the kid right off. It wasn’t just that he was a new face—they got new faces in Chunk Willy’s Gym all the time. Pretty boys, mostly, just wanting to build up a little. And fat guys who’d decided for maybe the tenth time they just had to lose that flab.

  But those types never lasted long—a couple of months, three, four tops. Because Chunk Willy’s wasn’t no goddamn spa. It was a serious gym for serious meat. Boxers and wrestlers, a few weight lifters, and types like Old Paco, who had always just built themselves up because they liked it—it wasn’t meant for show.

  But the kid didn’t fit any of those types. Too skittish. Sweating like a boiled pig even though he wasn’t working out. Tall—he might get himself a pretty good reach someday—but skinny as hell. All gristle and no meat. Punch him in the belly and he’d fold up tight as a preacher’s asshole.

  The kid had been hanging around the fighters all morning. It was the boxers he wanted, looked like, although sometimes it seemed he couldn’t tell them apart from the wrestlers. He’d go up and talk to a wrestler like Bingo Butane or Gator George and they’d just laugh at him, put one arm around him and squeeze one of their blubbery titties with the other and laugh some more.

  Finally it looked like he’d learned the difference and he started hitting on the boxers. Going up to them one at a time and chewing at their faces like he was begging up his first meal in a week. Most of the guys looked at him like he was talking dog shit, and if he didn’t leave them alone they were gonna have to scrape him off their shoes. A couple of the guys—the ones who’d had their noodles powdered pretty good—listened to him at least, but
like they didn’t understand a word he was saying, which they probably didn’t. But Joe guessed they made the kid feel encouraged some, because he’d reach into his back pocket and pull out his wallet for them. Then he didn’t look like a beggar at least—he looked like a salesman. But the guys just stared at his money like they didn’t know what it was, which they probably didn’t.

  Joe was the last guy in the gym the kid hadn’t tried. And Joe listened. Joe had paid attention to all that money the kid had and Joe knew what money was. He never saw much of it, but he knew what it was.

  “You’re a boxer,” the kid said to him.

  “How’d you guess? Must a been the shorts.”

  The kid didn’t smile, just looked a little red. “I want to hire you.”

  Joe didn’t answer right away. He’d just noticed the scar on the kid’s face.

  Joe hadn’t seen a face wound that ugly since the Etchison-Wagner bout. At first it looked like it hadn’t healed: red and raw-looking, the skin spread a good half-inch, maybe even more. It ran down from the kid’s hairline past the bridge of his nose, cutting his forehead in half.

  “You oughta get that looked at, kid,” Joe said.

  “I’ll pay you fifty dollars,” the kid said.

  The kid raised his eyebrows a lot when he talked. Joe watched the edges of the wound wrinkle and fold when the kid talked. In the gap between the two lips of skin there was pinkish, soft-looking skin, like the skin on the kid’s cheeks, like a baby’s behind.

  “Okay, I’ll go seventy-five,” the kid said.

  Joe stared at the kid. He’d never talked anybody into a raise without opening his yap before. It made him nervous. “What’s worth that seventy-five?”

  “Sparring. I want to box with you.”

  Joe started laughing. “You’re kidding. Fellow like you? Might as well pay me the seventy-five to stick a gun in your ear.”

  The kid got red, looked pretty mad. Joe watched the wound. It was sweatin’ a river.