Daron's Guitar Chronicles: Volume One

by Cecilia Tan

  I wasn’t any happier with this pop psychology than I had been back in Providence. But I kept a smile on my face so he wouldn’t think I was angry. "You’re full of shit."

  "Yeah, you’re probably right." He laughed again and I wondered how many he’d had down in that bar. "Where the hell’s that food?"

  I wondered the same thing, wondered how much longer I could keep up talking to him without mentioning Carynne, my father, or any other subject I wanted to avoid. I wondered what Matthew was doing now.

  "So how’d Matthew become a guitar techie?" I asked.

  The phone rang. Remo picked it up. "Yeah? This is me. Who do you have on the line?" He looked at me, then.

  I stood up, motioning toward the door. "Business?" I mouthed.

  He shook his head and I stayed there, but his eyes never left me.

  "Son of a bitch," he said to himself in surprise. "Yeah, yeah put the call through."

  I moved toward the door. If it was an old flame or some such, I wanted to leave him alone.

  He opened his mouth to say something to me but then someone came onto the line. "Yeah, hey! Where the hell are you?" He motioned for me to come back, but put a finger to his lips. I moved as silently as I could.

  "Las Vegas! How the hell did you find me in cheese country?"

  I sat down across from him, trying to hear what the voice on the other end was saying, but I could only make out a garbled male buzz. Until I heard my name.

  Remo twitched a little, too, as if a shock had come from the receiver. "No, I haven’t. I don’t have it. But what about you?"

  Remo nodded as the voice went on for a while. There was a knock at the door.

  I answered it. The damn sandwiches. I took the tray and sat back down on the bed. Remo was saying "Yeah, will do. Let me know when you get settled. You know the LA office number. Take care." And then he hung up the phone.

  I knew what he was going to say before he said it, but I still didn’t want to hear it. I’d begun to have this fantasy that Digger had, oh, made some con man deal with the wrong mobster and had skipped the country, or, living it up with no wife or kids to weigh him down he’d cracked up his car in a drunken accident and was in a coma somewhere. But it was neither.

  "That was Digger," Remo confirmed. He was staring at the carpet and shaking his head like he wasn’t sure the phone call had really happened. I handed him a plate and he set the cover aside and ate a potato chip. "He’s in Las Vegas."

  "I heard." I wasn’t hungry anymore.

  "He wanted to know where you were and if I had your address. He said the school doesn’t have it and that you’ve got no phone."

  I nodded. "The school won’t show me until I pay the bill. And the phone is in my roommate’s name." I ate a potato chip, too. "But you have my address."

  "I know." He looked at me. "But something told me maybe if he hadn’t gotten your address before he dropped out of sight, maybe you didn’t want it known." I couldn’t meet his eyes. He went on. "I hate to say it, I mean, I’ve known Digger for years, but..."

  "But what?"

  "He’s been a good friend. But I never know if I can trust him."

  I said the second thing that night I’d never dared to admit about Digger out loud. "Me either. Thanks, Remo, you did the right thing."

  He grimaced. "I had this feeling about it. I guess it’s a good thing we’re not playing Vegas."

  I nodded, setting the cover of my own plate aside and then examining the underside of my sandwich bread.

  He started eating. "But you can’t hide from him forever."

  "Why not?" I felt dizzy. "Why should I ever see him again? You know what I thought that night you told me he’d gone? I thought ’good riddance.’" I put the cover back on the plate. "If he wants to go his own way, then I’m pretty fucking well going to go mine."

  "Don’t be too hard on him, Daron. He’s proud of you."

  I couldn’t stop myself. "Like fucking hell he is. The only thing he liked about me going into music was that he didn’t have to pay for it. He never lifted a goddamn finger, not even when Claire refused to take me to lessons, even to the fucking audition...! Fuck him." Shit, I was crying. "Fuck him."

  "Jeezus, Daron, it wasn’t that..." He reversed quickly when he realized what he was saying. "Was it that bad?"

  "I don’t know. I don’t fucking know. It’s not like I have anything to compare it to."

  "It’s not like he beat you or something."

  I laughed, but not because I was happy. "You should have seen the shiner he gave me on my fourteenth birthday."

  "What do you mean? I was there for your fourteenth birthday."

  "Not all of it," I said. Not when we got home and found Claire waiting up for us. But then I’d gone out of my way to hide the bruise from everybody, so what did I expect from Remo now? The only person who’d seen me was Martin, because I’d ended up at his house that night, and I’d sworn him to silence. "I don’t want to dig up all that old shit, Reem." More tears were threatening to spill and felt like a, well, like a fucking sissy about it.

  "That was the night he took you to the club, wasn’t it."

  "Uh huh." I pressed my lips into a line like I wasn’t going to say anything more.

  Neither was Remo. He put his sandwich down and looked at it while I composed myself. I got up to leave and he said, "Take your sandwich for later."

  I did.

  Heart of Glass

  The first time I sang on stage was one night at Maddie’s in 1980, when I was thirteen. Let me revise that. First time I sang lead on stage. This was before Remo had put me into the regular gig; I was just getting up there once in a while for a thrill. At the time there were maybe two dozen songs on the radio that I could sing and play note for note, not all of them strictly rock. I had learned "Another Brick in the Wall" and "Rock and Roll Fantasy," but also "The Pina Colada Song." (I don’t know why that one, don’t hold it against me.) At home I had a transistor radio that only got AM stations so I listened to a lot of hit radio, which was all there was left on AM by that time besides all talk stations and one or two oldies stations. So I was hearing Blondie and The Police and The Cars, the Knack and Billy Joel. At Remo’s I tuned to FM and picked up Styx, Aerosmith, Supertramp, and ZZ Top. They claimed disco was dead but you could still hear Anita Ward’s "Ring My Bell" every place you went, and "Funkytown."

  Somehow it was decided that that night I’d do this thing I’d arranged that was a cross between "It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me" and Queen’s "Crazy Little Thing Called Love." I was sort of secretly hooked on Buddy Holly at the time—I’m not sure why it was a secret—and the medley was my way of doing a kind of ’50s thing without ever saying that was so. I remember having to adjust the mic way down to my height and all the regulars at Maddie’s clapping and whistling for me as I stepped up with my guitar. I don’t remember most of the performance—it was a long fucking time ago—but I do remember what it felt like to really lead the band, determine the changes, play some tricks. I remember running the ending off into a long jam session and no one seemed to mind, and at the end, control switched back to Remo and we went on with the set. I was feeling pretty good about myself.

  I suppose I’ll never know what made Digger angry that night, but at the time I thought it was something I’d done. He had been drinking with some guys he was trying to get to go in with him on buying a stake in an ostrich farm or something. I could never remember exactly what get-rich-quick scheme he was on at any given time. Anyway, those guys had left. I was helping the band to pack up when he whistled from the doorway, "Come on, kiddo, let’s get a move on."

  Remo said something to him like "What’s the rush? We can drop you guys off."

  "Gotta get going, sorry." He shot me an impatient look and I hesitated a little before going over to him. "Catch you on Tuesday?"

  Remo gave him a goodbye shrug and we turned away.

  It was maybe a forty-five-minute walk from Maddie’s to our house, so it really did seem
sort of dumb not to take the ride if he was in some kind of a hurry. But he wasn’t in a hurry to get home, he had just been in a hurry to leave. He didn’t speak for a long time and we walked in silence, our breaths fogging a little in the air.

  At the time he and I were still pretty chummy and eventually I asked him if everything was okay. He didn’t answer. What I really wanted to ask was what he’d thought of my song, of course. But if the answer was going to be worse than the smoldering silence, I didn’t want to hear it. Why did I think he hadn’t liked it? Why did I think his moods were all my fault?

  I didn’t bring it up, and when Remo asked me to do it again I said no.

  Shortly thereafter the AM radio station I liked went all talk and John Lennon was killed. All a coincidence, I’m sure.

  One Thing Leads to Another

  Matthew was under the covers reading when I came into the room. I rushed toward the bathroom to wash the salt off my face before he could see me, but I was still carrying the sandwich. I put the plate on the dresser and turned back to the bathroom as fast as I could. But before I could shut the door, Matthew was out of bed.

  "Are you all right?" He was coming toward me to put his hands on my shoulders. I backed away, sure my distress showed on my face.

  "I’m fine." Suddenly I didn’t have to force myself to smile. The whole thing struck me funny. "My dad’s a shit, did I ever tell you that?"

  He stopped short of touching me, unsure how to reply to that.

  "It’s okay," I said, wiping my face. I should have let him hold me. I should have cried on his shoulder and told him about all the times Digger had screwed with me. But I didn’t. I noticed he was still wearing socks, though nothing else. "If my father wasn’t such a shit Remo and I wouldn’t be friends and I’d probably be a shoe salesman right now." I laughed and Matthew laughed with me. The certainty of what we were about to do clashed with a sudden squirt of fear in my stomach. My voice became hesitant. "Matthew..."

  This time I let him put his hands on my shoulders. "Yes."

  "You have to promise me you’ll never tell another living soul about me." I shook under his touch. His socks were wearing thin in the toes.

  He forced me to look at him. "I promise."

  I had never really looked into his stone grey eyes before. I pulled the denim jacket from my shoulders, turned away from him to hang it up. I let it fall to the floor as he pressed up behind me. There would be no more waiting. I turned and he kissed me, with the bristles of his mustache on my cheek and the scratch of stubble as his chin touched my chin.

  As I felt my hands travel over his back, I said, "And you have to promise me something else, too."

  "What’s that?"

  "The next time you catch me and Carynne alone, don’t back out the door." I stripped down to my socks and he smiled.

  In the morning, our automated wake up call jangled me right out of bed. I slid out from under Matthew’s arm and went to take my morning piss. The other bed, I realized, looked like it hadn’t been slept in. Well, it hadn’t. As Matthew struggled to sit up, I tore back the bed spread and crumpled the sheets. Then I went into the bathroom.

  I was brushing my teeth when he stumbled in. He turned on the shower and sat on the toilet seat while he waited for the water to get warm. I rinsed out my mouth and spat into the sink.

  His hand was warm against my ass. I got a rush as I leaned forward onto the sink and thought how easy it was to get hard in the morning. I reached down and touched his nipple with my wet hand and watched it contract against the cold water.

  "Let’s get in the shower," he said.

  By the time we climbed, dripping, out of the shower, we had to hurry to dress. I was just throwing the pile of yesterday’s clothes into my bag when Waldo pounded on the door. "Let’s move!" he bellowed.

  I opened the door. Carynne was standing next to him, her ankles crossed under the umbrella of her short dress. "We’re coming," I said.

  "We’ll do morning paperwork on the way," he said, his eyes flickering over me. He nodded as if saying I-told-you-so to himself. I’m sure he’d said it to Remo already. I wondered if he was going to repeat the babysitter comment or mention the vagrancy to me, but he didn’t. "That flight won’t wait for a bunch of derelict burnouts such as yourselves." He cracked his gum and moved on to the next door. Carynne lingered a moment, then hugged her clipboard tight to her chest and followed him.

  I closed the door. "Ready?"

  Matthew hefted his bag and put on a pair of sunglassses with round lenses. "I can’t see a damn thing." He took them off and stuck them on my face. "You wear them. I’ll lead the way." I followed him to the elevator.

  Everyone was hungry by the time we arrived at the airport. The gear had gone ahead of us the night before, it would be waiting for us in DC. After check-in, we descended on a coffee shop that had a kind of Amelia Earhart motif, propellers on the walls and stuff like that. Matthew sat with our dedicated roadies, at a comfortable distance from me.

  I sat between Martin and Carynne. Martin stared at the bottom of his coffee cup.

  "There’s something seriously wrong here," he said.

  "What?" I looked into the cup.

  "There’s no coffee in this cup."

  Carynne put hers down in front of him. "Here, drink mine."

  Martin made a face. "Yuck. Half and half."

  She shrugged. "Ingrate."

  I stood up. "I’ll get some more. I could use a refill, too." I took his cup.

  As I made my way toward the counter I heard him shouting "Black! Black coffee, man! Black coffee for manly men!" and beating his chest. I turned back to see Carynne rolling her eyes in mock disgust. I paid the cashier. When I looked over the sunglasses I could see the whole group, spread out over a few tables. Such an unlikely bunch of people, I thought. No one would mistake us for a family group on vacation. Three women and eight men in the trappings of our trade, satin jackets, promotional t-shirts, laminated tags around our necks, sunglasses. Like a circus troupe who missed their train. Matthew was laughing about something. He was keeping his promise—he’d hardly spoken to me since we’d left the room. I pushed the sunglasses up on my nose again, glad they were there. I emulated his act of indifference.

  Remo stood up. "Let’s get back to the gate." Leading us, he walked this cowboy walk, slow and bowlegged, back to the waiting area. We made a new clump among the rows of seats.

  The flight was delayed.

  It’s Only A Northern Song

  I slept most of the way to DC and woke up on the East Coast. We were trucked straight from the plane to a soundcheck. Before I knew it, I was pacing around backstage, waiting for the lights to dim. It didn’t seem possible that just this morning we’d been halfway across the country. As I sat down to check my tuning again, I realized that the performances were beginning to blend together in my mind—this was the fourth show in as many days. I remembered moments, catching the eye of someone in the audience, feeling a new lick come crawling up out of my fingers, everything working good, making eye contact with Martin behind the drum kit. The flashes had pasted themselves together into one long concert in my head.

  But that night things were a little different. Matthew was working the backstage monitors in the wings. If I turned my head I could see him behind the black console, one earphone pressed to his head, the other dangling. He looked up at me once, nodding his head in time. And in that moment I felt a surge of electricity go through me. From then on, I wasn’t playing just for me, to hear the notes going around in my head and coming out through the PA and off into the air like some soap bubbles, pretty but then gone. Music was coming up through me and going straight to him, because he could let me under his skin. I played that show for Matthew and it wasn’t like any show I’ve ever played before.

  When we were lying in bed later, I tried to say something about it, but I can’t talk about music any more than I can hear smells or taste colors. I said, "Matthew, what do you hear when you’re listening from backstag
e?"

  "A little bit of everything," he answered. "I vary the output so I can get everybody at different times."

  "No, I don’t mean technically, I mean, what do you ’get’ out of it?"

  He sat up on one elbow, looking down at me and my tangle of hair. "This sounds deep."

  "It is." I was losing the thread of what I wanted to say. "I mean, when I play, I know what I mean by it, but how can I know if anyone else does?"

  He smiled. "You can’t. Not for sure. But you can make some good guesses." His hand crawled across my belly.

  "What do you mean?"

  "You can only guess, like you can guess what I’m doing now."

  "I see your point," I said, although I wasn’t sure that I did. I shut my mouth and let him touch me wherever he wanted. I was sure about that; I do some of my best talking without words.

  Owner of a Lonely Heart

  We were done with airplanes now and travelled to New York in an honest-to-god tour bus, with a giant mural of some tropical island painted on its side. Inside were bizarre little berths adorned with stickers warning "Do Not Sleep With Head Toward Front of Bus." I was sure Carynne could tell me all the rock stars who’d ever died from broken necks and concussions when their bus slammed on the brakes or into something else. We weren’t sleeping in this bus, though. It was taking us through the last leg of the trip, New York, New Haven, and Boston, but we would be sleeping in hotels. Remo convened a meeting in the hotel suite as soon as we arrived in the city.

  "We’re going to be in New York three days, hit New Haven on Wednesday night and go straight to Boston from there, where we’ll be for another two days before the last show." He looked into a notebook on the table in front of him. "I’m meeting with some East coast record reps and doing a lot of publicity interviews. There’ll be press in Boston, too."