Daron's Guitar Chronicles: Volume One

by Cecilia Tan

  Martin laughed. "Think we’ll get the cover of MUSICIAN this time?"

  Remo smirked. "Maybe. Sting doesn’t have a new album coming out so maybe we have a shot. Martin, I think you ought to come along on that one." He looked around for any more comments, then went on. "If anyone else wants to tag along with me to these things, feel free. I’ve got the full schedule right here, and the promo people may be setting up even more. Other than that, you’re all on your own until soundcheck, four o’clock on Tuesday. Matthew, you staying with us?"

  Matthew shook his head. "No, I’m going to stay with family."

  I blinked and forced myself not to look at him over the tops of the sunglasses. I’d heard the microsecond of hesitation before the word "family." Or I’d imagined it. It didn’t matter. I knew it wasn’t blood relatives he was going to stay with. I felt myself sinking into the chair, absorbing without listening what else was being said.

  A few others also had people to visit. It wasn’t so many years ago that most of us lived in the same little town about fifty miles south. Remo passed out room keys. With all the absentees it worked out that I was alone. Matthew left right after the meeting without looking at me or speaking to me, still true to his word. No one would ever detect what passed between us. I didn’t want to think about why he hadn’t told me about this when he had the chance. So I didn’t.

  I went to my room, threw off the sunglasses and got in bed for a nap. When I got bored of tossing and turning I went down to the lobby and loitered. I watched dark-suited security men watch me without looking at me. I went back upstairs. I picked up the phone and dialed my old phone number. A recording told me it was disconnected. I dialed up New Jersey directory assistance. A woman told me that there was no Claire Marks listed in my hometown. I racked my brains for her maiden name. No, there was no Claire Underwood, either. "Well, good for you, Mom."

  "Excuse me, sir?" the operator buzzed.

  "Nothing. Thanks." I hung up the phone. There wasn’t anything I wanted to say to my mother, anyway. Even if I had gotten the number, I doubted I would have called it. I lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling, not feeling anything, thinking anything.

  Someone knocked at the door. I opened it without looking through the peep hole.

  It was Carynne.

  Moody Blues

  I left her standing in the open doorway as I turned back to the window, looking down onto the busy street. The afternoon sun glared off the windshields of passing taxis.

  "What are you doing?" she shut the door and sat on the edge of the bed.

  "Nothing." That was true.

  She sat there waiting for something, for me, but I didn’t move. She straightened her dress. It looked like a doll’s dress or maybe a maternity dress from the sixties, covered with a dizzy paisley swirl of olive green and orange. It was the ugliest thing I’d seen her in yet. She batted her thick eyelashes in a sort of matter-of-fact rather than flirty way and said "I’m going to go out clubbing tonight. You wanna come?"

  I shrugged like my arms were too dead to do anything else.

  "You okay?" She stood up and touched my shoulders. I was too numb to throw her off. "What’s wrong?"

  "Nothing," I said again. "I feel terrible."

  She tapped her chin. "It’s all the traveling. Jet lag. You want to get something to eat?" She made a vague toward-the-outside gesture with one hand. "I’ve got it covered. I’m sick of hotels. And they don’t need me for anything right now."

  "Yeah." I turned away from the window and looked at her. She was being too nice, it ruined my bad mood. Maybe my disappearance in Madison had given her the hint, too. I could hope.

  She took me out the back way from the hotel, through the alley where the tour bus was parked. I followed her into the subway. It was too noisy in the train to talk so it wasn’t until we came to a station and she stood up that I asked "Where are we going?"

  "I dunno," she answered, pulling me along, up the stairs and across the street by the hand. "Someplace that’ll cheer you up." We stepped between street vendors’ blankets covered with used books and records on the sidewalk. We crossed another wide street and I began to recognize where we were: The East Village. Carynne stopped to examine the concert bootlegs sharing a table with sunglasses in front of a used clothing store. Two men with identically sheared hair and leather jackets that still smelled new brushed past me, pausing to embrace at the bottom of the next steps. One went into the building, the other continued up the street without looking back. A dog barked at me from the terrace of a cafe. The sun was behind the buildings now, and the day’s heat was beginning to rise up out of the streets, stewing up the evening. I watched two more men cross the street, hand in hand. I tied my denim jacket around my waist and waded through the heat, gripped by the feeling that if I stayed too still, I’d solidify where I was. You don’t belong on this ground, I thought to myself, get away while you still can.

  Carynne was following me now, I could feel her eyes searching my back for clues. I kept my own eyes ahead, trying not to stare at the graffiti splashed across the steps ("Queer By Choice") trying not to hear the conversation of the two men coming the other way, trying to shut it all out. My hands felt damp as they brushed against my jeans. Everything here was a signal, a secret handshake, a subliminal image, and I wondered how long it would take Carynne to see right through me. What would I do that would give myself away? Even I had no way of knowing.

  "Hey, where are you going?" She plucked at my arm.

  I forced a smile. "Italian place this way, good pasta, didn’t you say you wanted something to eat?"

  "Yeah, but..."

  "We can shop later."

  "Okay, but are you sure it’s this way?"

  I let her catch up to me, I let her hold my damp fingers in hers. "I’ve been here a couple of times." Maybe three, four times, on the train into Penn Station, underage, looking for trouble or something of that nature. Not that different now, I guess.

  We ate and she talked, and sometimes I listened. Wherever Matthew was, I was sure he wasn’t playing this masquerade like me. A few hours later we were working our way west past NYU. Carynne went into a clothing shop on 8th Street and I told her I’d meet her in the record store, but I didn’t. I went back east and down where no one knew me.

  I lost myself in the sea of people crisscrossing the park, stopping to listen to two guys busking with a guitar and a tambourine before I hurried on. I tossed a loose dollar into the open guitar case. They weren’t that good, but maybe someday that dollar would come back to me. I drifted back toward the East side, the night crowd flowing around me like I wasn’t even there. I walked until my feet were tired of doing it and started looking for a place to go. I followed three outlandishly dressed men up one street and down another. They disappeared through the darkened doorway of a club on Avenue A. Through the walls I could make out a pulsing beat. There was no sign indicating the club’s name on the door, nothing painted overhead. I pushed the heavy wooden door open and stepped into an even darker space, walled in by looming mannequins on one side and the door person’s station on the other. The door person, I couldn’t tell if it was male or female, nodded to me.

  "What’s the cover?" I put one hand into my pocket.

  A throaty male voice replied from under a Barbizon model’s face, "No cover tonight."

  I nodded and stepped forward toward the main room.

  "Not so fast, sugarbuns." An enameled fingernail snagged me. "ID?"

  I smiled back. "You really don’t want to see it."

  Rosy lips returned the smile. "Why would that be, sweetmeat?"

  My heart skipped a beat as I let my voice go soft. "Because I’m jailbait and I’m vain," I said. I could not work up the nerve to toss my hair.

  Painted lids half-closed as the perfect head shook slowly so as not to dislodge the curls piled high atop it. "Spare me the sob story, Miss Lonelyhearts. Let me stamp your hand." I held it out. "Just don’t get into any trouble and promise me your dadd
y won’t come through here with a shotgun looking for you."

  I froze for just an instant as the unlikely but ugly image flashed through my mind. "Thanks."

  The place was just as small as it looked from the outside, a main room that was smaller than my hotel room with a bar along one side, and one dance floor room out of which wild lights and heavy beats spilled. I stood in the doorway between the two rooms, watching the tightly packed passel of half-naked dancers glisten with sweat and groove to the music. The song wasn’t anything I recognized. No one paid me any mind while I stood there watching. I picked out a few women from the drag queens, but most of the crowd were disco boys of one kind or another.

  A handful of the dancers crowded onto a riser in the middle of the room, gyrating wildly, but not wildly enough that any of them were knocked off. The one nearest to me wore only combat boots and tight black short-shorts, his black hair shaking in sweaty spikes. His bare back undulated. The dancers in front of him shifted then and he turned to face me. A purple diagonal stripe crossed his face, enveloping one eye and his lips. He shook his chest at me, and winked before he turned back around. My heart caught in my throat.

  I couldn’t dance over to him without looking like a fool. I rolled up the sleeves of my t-shirt and leaned back in the doorway, trying to keep an eye on him. He’d have to come up for air sometime.

  I don’t know how long I stood there before the music faded and a voice announced a special performer. I hadn’t realized there was a small stage at the far end of the room until a tall, gaunt man wrapped in white cloth stepped onto it. He did some sort of lip-synch performance art — I wasn’t really watching as I realized my black-haired punk boy had slipped out of my view. I pressed forward into the crowd, trying to peer around shoulders, looking for him. I was in the midst of a knot of drag queens in spike heels when the room went dark and the music started again. I watched from the side for a long time, but he never reappeared. The next thing I remember is the lights came up and they started throwing people out.

  As I passed by the door again, I asked for the time. The door person looked at one gilded wrist and proclaimed "Three AM, honey. Past your bedtime?"

  Something like that. At this point I wasn’t sure what to do other than hang around in front of the building, trying to look casual. A bunch of the dancing crowd was out there, milling around in the still-hot night air, flagging down cabs and talking animatedly with one another. I was jailbait and I was vain, and none of these guys would have anything to do with me, it seemed.

  I saw them coming before anyone, maybe because I was the only one in the crowd not engaged in conversation or at least some heavy eye contact: three men walking in that rangy-tough territory-marking way. My guess was they were Puerto Rican, or some flavor of hispanic, with bandanas tied around their heads and basketball shoes on their feet. I pressed back against the wall of the club and watched the trio of them spearhead through the crowd on the sidewalk, but not everyone noticed them, or cared. Two bare-chested club boys who were leaning on each other and laughing stepped back at the wrong moment and caught the leader’s foot. There were shouts: "Fuckin’ faggots!" "Don’t you touch me...!" and something in Spanish, and one of the two guys from the crowd went down with his hand on one side of his face, while the other took a swing at one of the guys in bandanas. Then the three of them were running away, not stupid enough to get caught in the middle of a hostile crowd, I guess.

  I started walking the other way before I could find out if the guy who went down had been hit or knifed or what. Everyone else had clustered around him, and noises were made about the police being called, and I knew that wasn’t anywhere I wanted to be just then. My heart was up in my throat and swallowing wouldn’t make it go back down. I caught a taxi as soon as I thought I could give the name of the hotel.

  Back in my room I lay awake for a long time. I watched a square of light on my ceiling from the street lamps below flicker as cabs went by and listened to the sound of old hotel plumbing occasionally whooshing.

  I could not sleep. Jet lag. All the traveling, you know.

  The Logical Song

  I was in a pretty foul mood when Remo knocked on the door the next day. I had been awake for hours, watching TV and staring out the window.

  "Want to sit in on the Musician interview?" he hollered through the door.

  I went and sat in the suite and kept my mouth shut while Remo and some guy with elbow patches talked into a tape recorder. I listened to it all, listened to Remo try to explain music, things about style, his playing, all kinds of bullshit. It went on for hours and he never repeated himself. If it had been me, the interview would have been a lot shorter. That night we went to some music business reception at the Hard Rock Cafe. We returned to the hotel around ten pm and I paced around my too empty room until I was giving myself static shocks on everything I touched. I opened the window to let in some noise but it came from so far away I felt more isolated than before.

  I went into the hallway and stood there for a moment, my mind blanking. I went to Carynne’s door. I stood there for a while, trying to get up the nerve to knock.

  Then I heard her laughing, giggling, that special high-pitched laugh reserved for flirting. She wasn’t alone. I retreated to my room again. I thought about going back to the place I had been last night, but even if I hadn’t been afraid of getting fag-bashed, I didn’t have the stamina to spend another night alone in a crowd, pretending to be someone for the sake of sex, always under the shadow of rejection and disappointment. I thought about going down to the hotel bar and getting smashed, but I didn’t want to make trouble for the entourage, their underage pet roadie running up a huge tab and then probably doing something stupid. This crew was too clean for my own good—even Martin had given up pot. I needed to soak my head in something, though, I needed something bad.

  I knocked on the door to the suite. Waldo pulled it open like he was getting ready to slam it. "Remo here?" I said.

  "Naw. Try again later." And he started to close it.

  I put a hand on the door. "Where’s his Ovation."

  "His what?"

  I pushed past him and searched the floor for the telltale curved outline of the acoustic guitar’s case. It was at the foot of Remo’s bed. He always kept it handy in case he got an idea. I hefted it in my left hand and went toward the door.

  "Where you going with that?" Waldo stood in front of me, his jaw mashing his gum like an industrial piston, never stopping, never breaking rhythm.

  "Matt’s gone, that leaves me in charge of the guitars."

  Waldo didn’t look like he bought that, but his brain wasn’t giving him a way to stop me. I brushed past his pot-belly through the still open door and went back to my room.

  This was not just any guitar. Ovation makes a bunch of different models, but the primo tasty ones they had just come out with were a roundback acoustic with the electronics for live sound wired in. They sound bright like a polished knife blade, and it sinks into your gut and sticks there. And talk about fucking beautiful, instead of one round soundhole in the center, these have a series of small holes in the sound board along the top curves of the guitar, flanked by sweetly carved wood of varying browns in the shape of leaves. Remo played this one through most of the show. In the encore he often played this one and I played a twelve string version, similar model but with a traditional round sound hole.

  I let my fingers fly up the neck and back down, the fingerboard silky to the touch and the strings so close to the frets that it was easier than falling down stairs. I started to play.

  I wrote a song without any verses, just a fragment of a chorus about fire and flight, and I played it over and over until I couldn’t sing anymore and I fell asleep with the guitar still in my hands.

  You Gotta Look Sharp

  I came to life about an hour before soundcheck, soaked myself in the shower and went down to the suite to see who was around.

  Carynne was there, the per diem book in her lap while she took not
es from someone on the phone. I heard her give some complex-sounding details about tour logistics. She jotted something down. After a few mintes of listening I figured out she was double-checking stuff with the Boston promoter, including details about our accomodations, the concert hall, even some kind of promotional party. She finished the call with the words "I’ll take care of it." I’d heard her use a pseudo-professional voice a bunch of times on the tour, but this was the first time I’d heard it for such a sustained period of time. She put down the phone, looked up at me, and smiled a professional smile. She tapped the book. "Need your allowance?"

  "Sure."

  She counted out some cash for me and made a note. "You and Martin are the only two not over there, yet," she said as she picked up the phone again.

  "Who are you calling now?"

  "Bunch more reservations to confirm," she said as her eyes scanned the page in front of her. "I’ll be down there soon. You guys should catch a cab together, probably."

  Martin was in his room caught up in some sporting event or other on television. "Hey buddy." He snapped it off with a theatrical sigh and a doorman got us a cab at the lobby.

  We arrived at the venue to find Matthew and Remo on their hands and knees under the stage. Remo crawled out and brushed himself off. He shouted to John behind the PA board, "Try that!"

  A nasty buzz filled the room. Remo threw up his hands. "Kill it!" A loud pop crackled through the PA and the noise stopped. "I haven’t got time for this."

  Waldo muttered from the stage. "I’ll say you don’t. They want you down at the radio station in fifteen minutes." He exchanged glances with a guy I’d never seen before. "Ain’t you got enough roadies to handle this without you?"

  Remo nodded and the guy looked relieved. Remo handed me a screwdriver. "Here, I might miss the check, don’t wait for me. After all, this is why I hired you, right? Find that hum and kill it." He left with the stranger.