I pursued inspiration all the way across the country. And inspiration, I decided, lay in a cabin on the Oregon coast that I rented for purposes of staring meaningfully at the sea, feeling the salty breeze tangle my hair, and eating fresh salmon. After a lot of introspection, it finally dawned on me that what the world needed was a concept album about a soldier’s emotional journey as he walked from the bus station to his house upon returning from war. I didn’t even pick a war. It was to be a serious and somber affair. The production would be almost entirely acoustic and I’d play all the instruments. I would call the album st. agathe under low clouds, which had no connection to the material, and it would be written just like that, poetically forsaking capital letters in a way sure to make e. e. cummings claw away at his coffin.
Away I composed in that A-frame cabin of knotty pine. Once birthed, I christened the songs with achingly enchanting titles like “Does Your House Have Seasons?” “A Milliner’s Lament,” and “He Asked Whose Sheep They Were and I Said I Watched Them for Lord Wren.” Oh, how the critics would pant!
When it was complete, I decided I was too close to the project to render a fair critique. I needed someone else’s ears. Ears I trusted. So I stalked Sonny Rivers, the legendary producer behind the two Tremble records, at his LA studio. He wasn’t ecstatic to see me. I watched nervously as he listened, elegantly consuming cigarettes on his swivel chair for the full fifty-three minutes. When it was over, he said this:
“No, no, no. No. This is not you. I don’t know who this jack-off is, but it is not you. The fact of the matter is, this shouldn’t be anybody.”
“All right. Okay. So you don’t like it.”
“No, man, I don’t.”
“You know, I recorded it in only four days.”
“It sounds like it.”
“Understood. Any ideas how to make it better?”
“Toss it. All of it. Start from scratch. Did I hear you sing something about the dogs of enlightenment running through the meadow of your mind?”
“You might have.”
“That’s a shame.” He took an unhappy drag. “And shit—‘She questioned my Aquarius’? Come on, man—what the hell does that mean? And what’s with that Appalachian track you got in there? Just because you’re playing banjo and singing about somebody’s girl getting swept down the river, that doesn’t make it bluegrass. And why are you singing bluegrass anyhow? You’re better than this.”
Perhaps I wasn’t.
“I get it,” I said, taking a breath. “It needs some work.”
“And don’t you know how much concept albums suck? They suck a lot. They’re hokey, overly theatrical. They’re like medicine—at best appreciated, never enjoyed. Tell me, Teddy Lloyd Webber, do you want to write rock songs or do you want to dance across a Broadway stage in a costume? This is Cats, man! Don’t bring Cats into my house! Write a song. Don’t give me a three-part miniseries. Just sing me a goddamn song.”
“Okay, I hear you. I’m going to scale it back.”
“You’re not hearing me. I’m not saying scale it back. I’m saying get rid of it.” His features contorted in pain. “And who’s that lady singing soprano on that one track? No guest vocalists, man. You think you’re Carlos Santana?”
Lady? He must have been referring to the English murder ballad that I decided to chirp out in falsetto. I guess it did sort of sound like Joan Baez getting shot in the kneecaps.
“And one last thing: white boys don’t scat.”
“You don’t have to get racist about it.”
“It’s racist for you to scat. You enslave my people when you scat. You enslave them musically. It’s a civil rights issue, starting now.”
Sonny tapped out his cigarette into a dirty ashtray and got up. He gave me his signature bear hug and said, “I love you, motherfucker.” Meeting adjourned.
Right then I made a decision. I didn’t want to become a walking humiliation. I didn’t want to release crap music that I knew would be panned before I even recorded it. I didn’t want to get booked at Holiday Inn lounges where I shared the signage with “Happy Bar Mitzvah, Josh!” And I sure as hell didn’t want to drift downward into those desperate, what-strain-of-crack-were-you-smoking? collaborations. Def Leppard and Juice Newton with the London Philharmonic. Alice Cooper Sings Gershwin and Bacharach.
So I walked away. I was done.
I probably should’ve just died. Dying would’ve been the right play, for oh how the cultural whorehouse doth moan, pant, and keep eternal vigil for the artist who flames out young. Heroes and legends are born from our tendency to mistake the brief life for the inspired one. I would’ve benefited from that phenomenon.
I should’ve OD’d in a Vegas suite while a pasty stripper pounded on my chest. My private jet should’ve torpedoed into a cornfield. Some wacko should’ve shot me, and as I lay there struggling through my final bloody breaths, I should’ve winked and wryly uttered some kickass last words—“My ride’s here,” or “I’ll see you troublemakers downstream”—that would someday be silkscreened on T-shirts worn by disaffected youth.
None of that happened. I did not die. I’m still here. Reading memos about statutes of limitations. Arguing about the meaning of paragraph 41(b). Buying soy yogurt at Trader Joe’s and carpet cleaner at Rite Aid.
And plotting revenge against the dirtbag who rubbed my nose in my legacy.
* * *
As early as it was back home, I knew Metcalf would pick up. For him, the true stress of the day was that apprehensive no-man’s-land between waking up—the moment when it all came flooding back—and arriving at his desk, where the anxiety of all that lay before him was at least partially alleviated by the ability to begin chipping away at the load.
Metcalf answered halfway through the first ring. “Hey, Teddy. How’d the dep go?”
“Fine. Look—I need you to do me a favor.” I spoke loudly as I walked back over the Millennium Bridge, the rush of the river wind colliding in noisy sibilance with the speaker of my phone.
“Sure.”
“I need the phone number for a guy named Warren Warren somewhere in the Philadelphia area, possibly Jersey.”
“Did you say Warren Warren?” Metcalf was a nerd, but he was no geek. The name might have rung a bell or two for a geek.
“Yes. You’re going to have to hunt around a bit. It could be an unlisted number. I took a quick look and couldn’t find it. I need this fast. It’s an emergency.”
“Sure. No problem.” He drew out the words to accommodate his note-taking. “When do you need this by?”
“I just said it’s an emergency.”
“Okay. Well, I’m working on a brief for Yoshida today, but I suppose—”
I hung up.
Resting my forehead against the cold rail, I watched the Thames course by beneath the steel-latticed bridge. I had a vague notion that the years hadn’t carried Warren too far from our hometown. Last I heard, he was puttering around some high school way the hell and gone near Allentown, teaching band or something. The way it came together in my head, he was probably here on vacation, sauntering through the Tate with his family when he came across his old friend looking like an unmentionable slob. “I know that guy!” he surely cackled. But then he probably started shaking his head, glad he no longer knew the guy in the photo. He was glad it wasn’t his life. His legacy.
I considered two minutes a sufficient interval to wait before checking back in with Metcalf. “Any luck?”
“Not yet. Is this a name that came up in the dep? Did I miss something? He wasn’t on one of the transaction documents, was he?”
“Calm down. It’s nothing like that.”
“Okay, good. I’m going to need a little more time. It’s kind of tricky. You know, since his first name is the same as his surname.”
“Just do it, Metcalf.”
Surname. It was hard
for Metcalf to suppress his fine Boston breeding and Harvard polish. He used to ask “How would you characterize the immediacy of this assignment?” when I gave him something to do, an annoying relic of upper-crust that would prompt me to bark, “You mean, how soon do I want it?” He used to have shrimp for lunch and play squash and get calls from friends named Devon and Lanier. That Metcalf was long buried under the new one, the one with perspiration and pudge. And yet the vestiges of a refined upbringing occasionally burped to the surface. Surname.
I headed off toward the hotel. By the time I’d reached my room, Metcalf had tracked down the string bean percussionist, and I immediately dialed the son of a bitch without any thought of the early hour. There was no answer.
By the next morning, I’d gradually realized that I didn’t really have anything to say to Warren anyway. I’d found what he sent me here for. Had we actually connected, I probably would’ve just cussed up a storm and threatened to kill him. Which is what I was sure to do when we finally did catch up.
In the meantime, I had arrangements to make. I studied the geography of Switzerland on Google maps. There was someone in Unterseen I needed to have a word with.
CHAPTER 3
When Warren finally returned my call, I didn’t even hear the phone ring. In the fluid jumble of the Zurich train station, I was tearing a bite out of a baguette stuffed with tomato and mozzarella. It was just as well. His voice mail was a half minute of unbroken laughter, full throttle, like he was finding the whole thing freshly hilarious. “How about that picture? Right?” he finally managed to say.
How about it.
There was an irony here. I was setting out to confront an artist about his art, to register my disapproval of someone else’s creative expression, and in that act, I was changing sides. Maybe my songs had never inflamed violent passions in anyone or been sufficiently outrageous as to provoke a government ban somewhere, and maybe that rendered me an artistic failure. Perhaps it was the mark of a robust vision to piss a few people off along the way, and perhaps that made Heinz-Peter Zoot a superior artist. He could explain that to me while I was choking the life out of him.
I followed the river through the town and out past a row of gingerbread houses, soon arriving at a stone road that curved up a hill and through a light patch of trees. The road ended at a small, solitary triangle of a home set squarely in a clearing. The silence was smothering, as not a single voice echoed up from the town, not a single car hummed by. I couldn’t even hear the river’s peaceful babble. I was completely alone in Unterseen’s pastoral innocence. Just me and my blistering anger.
There’d been ample time to let my rancor rise. Back in London, I was sure that every face that met mine was in on the joke, that every smirk was a masked sneer from someone who had seen the exhibit. The journey into a world of unmolested Swiss beauty did little to douse my bitterness. The train had weaved past cozy clusters of houses on green hills, around idyllic ice waters, all of which fueled the illusion that this country was a timeless fairy tale, a place of magnificent terrain toothed with fierce jagged mountains. It seemed a land accessible only by plane crash. And yet when I gazed out at a stream, I saw only the rush of mango salsa. A shrub on a mountain face was but a wedge of cilantro besmirching an incisor.
Finally, I stood facing a house that may or may not have belonged to my nemesis. If this was, in fact, Zoot’s home, the seclusion could well work against me if things got out of hand. Fuck it. I once had Bret Michaels in a headlock. I could certainly handle some Swiss photographer. What was he going to do, yodel at me?
Slinging my Morris & Roberts travel bag over my shoulder like the tough guy that I was, I walked toward the house.
Five feet from the front step I stopped dead at the sound of a voice inside. It was a deep baritone calling out in German or maybe French or perhaps Dutch, some language I for sure didn’t speak. Before I could decide whether I recognized the voice as belonging to the lug nut I’d met a few years ago in the Amsterdam cantina, a large man pushed open the screen door. He saw me and froze.
It was him all right. Burly, bald, cutoff jean shorts and the same decaying white tank top from the exhibit bio photo. He stood there searching my face, looming over me from the raised porch, looking puzzled. Seeing him up close forced the image of that goddamn photo right back into my head, and I instantly understood why my scuffed saddle-tan loafers had carried me all this way.
“Heinz-Peter,” I said, dropping my bag onto the front walk.
His eyes lit with pleasant recognition.
I moved swiftly up the front steps. “Congratulations on the Tate, fuckbag!”
As I reached the top step, I swung hard and landed my fist on his chin. The punch knocked him into the screen door, which slapped against the side of the house under his crushing weight. Stunned, he touched his face, glared at me, and howled something foreign. He took one step in my direction—Christ, he was a bear of a man—and soon my field of vision was consumed by a meaty set of knuckles headed for the bridge of my nose. The blow sent me clear off the porch, and the next thing I knew, I was flat on my back looking up at the cloudless sky. It’s pretty, I thought. They do nice skies here, wherever this is.
My nerve endings got up to speed on recent developments, and raw sensation kicked in. A warm liquid trickled down my throat and my mouth flooded with a screaming pain. No, make that my whole head. Just as I began to process my wounds, that lovely view of the sky was eclipsed by a hulking figure. Like some kind of giant, Heinz-Peter straddled me with his massive legs, and I believed with great certitude that my life would end there. I die in Switzerland, I thought. That’s my deal.
He leaned down, his nose to mine, and with a roar that shook the sleepy countryside, bellowed, “Why you do dis?”
You started it, you fucking idiot, I wanted to shout, but I couldn’t seem to form words.
I lifted my head off the ground. My skull weighed a ton and the liquid sliding down the back of my throat was now gurgling in a puddle around my tongue and dripping down my chin, not unlike the mango salsa in that infamous photo. Once again, life imitates art, I thought, as my head thumped back onto the cool grass like a dropped bowling ball.
Heinz-Peter was massaging his jaw. He seemed to be awaiting my response to a question I hadn’t understood. An extraordinary wave of nausea washed over me, but I was too woozy even to sit up and puke. I got off one garbled “Fuck you, fucking mutant,” before everything went dark.
* * *
When I came to, the hazy blur cleared onto a pair of Cadillac-blue eyes. They belonged to a pretty, blond teenager. I was stretched out on a sofa, the girl perched in a chair next to me, holding something cold to my lip and studying my battered face. My mouth throbbed and an ice pick of a headache seared through my skull.
“Don’t worry,” the girl chirped. “I stopped the bleeding and the ice should keep you from getting too much of a bump.” She let out a giggle. Her English was crystal clear with perhaps a dollop of Germanic Eurospeak. She had pristinely smooth cheeks and eager eyes, a hint of a teen pout in the curve of her lips.
“I’m Tereza,” she said.
“Teddy,” I croaked.
She adjusted the ice pack. “I know who you are.”
Heavy footsteps suddenly began to hammer up a flight of stairs, and it dawned on me for the first time that I was in the photographer’s home. I righted myself and took in my surroundings. We were in a living room of sorts, rustically decorated, photographs of all sizes crowding the walls.
“I can’t believe you tried to beat up my father,” the girl said, amused. She nodded at the lower hemisphere of my face. “You lost a tooth, you know.”
“What?” I dispatched my tongue to explore my dental landscape and met an unfamiliar gap just right of center. “Jesus Christ.”
The thick bootsteps came to a stop and my enemy overtook the doorframe. He stood there with his arms folded, per
fectly still and perfectly huge.
The girl rose. “I’ll go get some medicine.”
“That’s okay. I’m fine. Really.”
Ignoring me, she disappeared, leaving me alone with the Jolly Green Giant.
Heinz-Peter lumbered over to the couch and dropped himself into the chair vacated by his daughter, perilously close to me on the sofa.
I took in the monster. Yeah, he could kill me. Though it would’ve been a lot easier to finish me off while I was unconscious. Unless he planned on nursing me back to health and then killing me. It was really his call.
This, I realized, had been a monumental act of stupidity, a true breakdown of rational thought on my part. Why hadn’t I thought to bring the other Faded Glory losers along with me? We could have come as a mob of salty has-beens intent on taking back our dignity. That would’ve been the stronger tactical move.
Heinz-Peter’s moon face hung over me, grinning with an impenetrable blend of menace and pity. “You are comfortable?”
I nodded cautiously.
“Tereza get you medicines.” Then his face twisted, as if he’d suddenly recalled how it came to be that I, a virtual stranger from thousands of miles away, was lying on his sofa one tooth shy of a full set. “Why you hit me?”
Before I had the opportunity to point out the obvious, Tereza glided back into the room and presented me with an oblong white capsule and a glass of water. I inspected the pill. It didn’t look familiar, nor did it have any word printed on it, much less a reassuringly familiar one such as Tylenol, Advil, Aleve.
“What is this?” I asked.
“Medicines,” Heinz-Peter replied.
“Aspirin,” Tereza said.
It was significantly larger than any pill I’d ever seen, prescription or over-the-counter, and, in fact, resembled a small lightbulb. I considered asking to see the bottle.
“Is good,” Heinz-Peter encouraged. “Eat.”
The pain was nearly unbearable, an unacceptable alternative to death, so I popped the thing into my mouth and chased it with a swig of water. It hardly mattered at that point that it was probably cyanide.
Thank You, Goodnight Page 4
