by P. J. Morse
Then again, maybe Muriel was right about that daddy business. My own daddy tried to take care of me, usually with some advice I’d never follow, but he wasn’t exactly good at nurturing. And Harold was like a daddy, so why did I need a daddy type in my love life? I decided to stop analyzing myself and shift gears the best way I knew how—work.
CHAPTER 10
THE BEST LIBRARIAN IN TOWN
BACK IN SOUTH PARK, I let myself in the building and heard Harold’s soft snoring as I tiptoed upstairs. Even though it was late, I went to my CupcakeCity laptop and opened a new document, listing what I knew about the Buckners. Sabrina seemed to have it together on the outside, but her finances were shaky, and her husband and her shrink needed her money. Mr. Buckner was right—his wife was sheltered and open to suggestion. If she hadn’t been, she wouldn’t have landed in Dr. Redburn’s office.
But Mr. Buckner’s vision of his wife didn’t fit what I saw earlier that day. Sabrina was fragile, but she didn’t seem crazy. I knew crazy. I toured with one band whose lead singer thought a pink elephant was chasing him and who proceeded to throw himself out of the tour van.
Even my own band mates were a little nuts. One time, Wayne made a giant loaf of zucchini bread for an audience in Nashville. I remembered him yelling, “We don’t got no fishes, but we do have loaves!” as he cut out slices and threw them into the audience. Shane once got a DUI in Oakland for getting so drunk that he couldn’t even steer a push scooter in a straight line. Based on my evidence, Sabrina wasn’t crazy. She was befuddled, but not crazy.
Also, something didn’t feel right about Mr. Buckner. He tried too hard to impress me, for starters. Our conversation felt more like a job interview, only I was the employer instead of the detective-for-hire. Everything about him smacked of trying too hard.
I started browsing some online newspaper archives to learn more about the Nortons. I came across Sabrina Norton Buckner’s grandfather first. He was a real up-by-the-bootstraps story. He was a tailor who noticed more high-class hotels springing up in San Francisco, so he offered to produce uniforms for all the maids and bellhops at a few of those select hotels. More and more hotel owners noticed his attention to detail, and the better the uniform, the classier the hotel seemed. Eventually, Sabrina’s grandfather had the contract for all uniforms in the city, even those for the police and fire departments.
I heard a rumbling in Harold’s apartment, so I wondered if he was up. Now that Harold was retired, he had an irregular sleep schedule. He would nap in his lawn chair, or he would doze off while trying to meditate in the mornings. All this meant that he rarely slept straight through the night.
Picking up my guitar case, I knocked it three times on the floor. Three softer knocks replied. Those were from Harold’s broom handle, and they meant that he couldn’t sleep and was in the mood to chat, so I took my laptop downstairs.
Once I got there, Harold was in an old recliner that had been abandoned by a dot-com devoted to Scandinavian furniture. He was drinking a glass of warm milk, and he had on fuzzy white slippers. “How was the Seagull’s Nest?” he asked.
I plopped on the couch and opened the laptop. “Muriel is a party animal.” I didn’t mention meeting Mr. Buckner, as I wanted to focus on Mr. Buckner’s wife first. “I need some help from the best librarian in town.”
Harold laughed. “I respond well to flattery.”
“So, what do you know about the Norton family?” I asked.
Harold, ever the human computer, spit out the data. “They are a textbook tale of American capitalism. The first generation built the empire. The second generation maintained it. The third generation almost destroyed it—or were destroyed by it.”
“You’re good, Harold. That sings.”
“I know.” He sat back and stuck out his chest with pride. “I think the woman who was here today is Theo Norton’s daughter. She’s the third generation.”
“Who’s Theo Norton?” I asked. “Second generation?”
“Yup. And he was a real asshole. I have a little personal history with this one. Theo Norton inherited the company from his daddy and turned out to be a union-buster. My uncle worked at the factory, and I helped him make signs when they went on strike. Mine was a good one—‘No naked cops in my neighborhood!’”
I laughed.
“So we won, but you know what Theo Norton did? He moved production to Mexico. Hello, profit! Bye-bye, jobs! And bye-bye, quality! I was right about the naked cops. They were complaining that their pants seams were splitting—not so good when dealing with protesters, huh? But SFPD was locked in that contract with the uniform company.”
I was looking through an article from the newspaper archives about the production facility in Mexico. A business writer complained that the quality of Norton Uniforms had declined considerably, but “no one was going to argue with the bottom line.”
The business writer also referred to a family tragedy that happened around the same time of the strike and the move to Mexico. “Harold, what happened to Theo Norton’s wife?”
“Oh, that was bad. The union suspended striking a day because of it. He was driving on the Pacific Coast Highway, and his wife was in the car. There were bad rains that week. We were soaking wet. Marching isn’t always fun. Anyway, Theo Norton was driving and spun out, and you know what it’s like on the PCH. She died.”
It wasn’t too hard for me to figure out what happened next. As an apology for their mother’s death, Theo Norton spoiled his children silly. They were all over the gossip columns as traveling to this horse show or that auto race. “So, the kids took over the company?”
“Well, I don’t remember your client … what’s her face? … having anything to do with it. I don’t know anything about her.”
“She’s in the society pages a lot,” I said.
“Then I definitely don’t know anything about her,” Harold chuckled. “I don’t want to feel bad for her because she strikes me as a snot, but Theo’s kids lost control of the company. She has a few brothers, I think, and they took turns running it—badly. One of them—oh, yeah, now this is a good one—married a beauty pageant winner. He tried to make her the face of the company, but she was friends with Anita Bryant, and she was no friend of Castro Street.”
“Anita Bryant? I bet that went over well around here.”
“Protests galore! Men and women dressed up as pageant winners with protest signs! That was one of the best protests I’ve ever been to! My sign read, ‘You may be a beauty queen’ on the front and ‘but you’re ugly on the inside’ on the back. I didn’t dress up, though. I tried, but all the thrift stores were out of prom dresses that would fit me.”
I had stopped Web surfing and was laughing, thinking of Harold in drag.
Harold kept going, “The No to Norton protest was almost as successful as that one the Castro had against Coors. A big winner. That son found himself ejected from the boardroom because the company was completely in the toilet, and somebody else took over. Fresh blood. I guess they’re doing okay. They haven’t been in the news for years.”
I went back to the stock Web sites. “Their stock isn’t bad. It isn’t good, either. It’s been steady for a long time. Not exactly a growth company.”
Harold yawned. “You’re talking stocks, and now I’m bored. I think I have amused myself to sleep. Mind if I go back to bed? You can stay down here and surf a bit.”
I waved as he got up. “Thanks! I’m almost done.”
“Nighty-night.” Harold headed to his bedroom, the belt of his bathrobe dragging behind him.
I looked up a few final pieces of the puzzle that was the Norton family history. Harold’s memory was correct, as usual. Once the brother and his pageant-winning wife were out of the picture, a management group took over and had been running the company rather well ever since.
Sabrina Norton, meanwhile, apparently never learned anything about the family business. She stayed under the radar, getting married to Peter Buckner, who was an economics pr
ofessor at the time of the wedding. They met at a show-jumping competition that Sabrina Norton won.
Society writers described Sabrina Norton as “regal, quiet, a real class act.” She seemed to exist solely to host parties, most of which helped raise funds for the UC branch where Peter Buckner taught and eventually became chancellor. She often went to parties with her elderly father, who never remarried, so he would have a companion. She still rode horses occasionally, never had kids, and didn’t make trouble.
At least, there wasn’t any trouble until her father died. He set up a trust for all the children, but it was managed by the same group that took over Norton Uniform. The brothers were in the papers talking about how betrayed they felt and how the management group was stingy. Lawsuits were filed, but nothing came of them.
If the newspaper accounts were to be believed, Sabrina Norton Buckner was probably the most loyal child. The papers never indicated that Sabrina Norton crossed her father, but she was effectively cut out of Norton Uniforms, just like her brothers, and it wasn’t clear if she didn’t want to run the company or if her father didn’t think she could handle it.
Maybe Sabrina’s father’s end-of-life decisions made her so obviously dependent on her psychiatrist. She mentioned the shrink was the one who helped her when her dad died. That whole thing with the psychiatrist and the fuddy-duddiness of her husband screamed “daddy issues.” I could relate.
So absorbed in my research, I didn’t realize it was almost three in the morning. My body took over, and I sank down on the sofa. I slowly nodded off, pressing my face into the keyboard on my computer.
CHAPTER 11
NO FREAKS, NO DRAMA
I WOKE UP WITH THE IMPRINT of keyboard buttons on my face. I was late for auditioning a new bassist. After snarfing down the protein bar that Harold thoughtfully left for me on the coffee table, I drove Cherry 2000 down to the rehearsal space in Potrero Hill. Wayne had put an ad on Craigslist for the auditions, and I braced myself to listen to a bunch of people with no rhythm acting like they had some.
Wayne kept the ad for bassists simple. It read:
The Marquee Idols need a bassist. Our sound is indie with a little psychedelia, but not as far out as the Brian Jonestown Massacre. We practice in Potrero Hill. Listen to the songs on our Web site before you e-mail. No weirdoes. No freaks. No drama. Absolutely no Steve Miller Band fans. We mean it. Thank you.
We were going to find a bassist that day, I told myself, even though, judging from the bassists we’d seen at our earlier auditions, the pickings were slim. Most of them didn’t even bother to read the brief details of the online posting and ignored the memo about the Marquee Idols Web site, so metal heads who knew nothing about indie rock were streaming in. We even had to bounce a guy who showed up just to pick a fight with Wayne for taking the Steve Miller Band’s name in vain. Despite Wayne’s best efforts, he forgot one important rule of life: Most people who were weirdoes or freaks had no idea they were weirdoes or freaks.
My first priority was to find someone with talent, but that person also had to be willing to adapt to our habits. The Marquee Idols had been working with its original lineup for years. Shane and I had been playing together for longer than that. When we were undergrads at UC Santa Cruz, we joined with some particularly bitter graduate students to form the band Famine, Death, Pestilence, and War. I referred to myself as Pestilence since I caught cold around the time the band was formed. Shane called himself Famine, as a joke, since he always seemed to have a case of the munchies.
After the graduate students found jobs and left Santa Cruz, and Shane and I took some time off from music. I was pleasantly surprised when Shane called me up after I moved to San Francisco and asked if I wanted to join a band with him and two guys he worked with at Amoeba Records in the Haight. Wayne and Larry’s musical tastes fit right in, and we soon became familiar with each other’s quirks. We worked around each other’s lives, from my day job to Larry’s type-A attitude to Shane’s womanizing ways to Wayne’s mostly harmless chemical dependencies.
Once I arrived at the room we rented at the Echo Chamber, I spread out sheets of music. I started scribbling ideas for a new breakup song. It was full of legal language about decrees, injunctions, and a judge who built walls between the plaintiff and the defendant. I was proud of it. It needed a bassist. It needed Larry, but he was off worrying about all those lawyerly things.
Shane entered the rehearsal space. At first glance, it wasn’t clear why women loved him so. He had a budding paunch and a ruddy complexion. He insisted on wearing a mustache. But, when he talked to women, he was all confidence, and his attention was so laser-like that women soon forgot his flaws. When Muriel wasn’t furious with him, she once dreamily confided in me, “That Shane! He’s big everywhere!”
When he arrived, Shane was humming the tune from the TV show “Night Court.” He had a habit of trying to work TV show themes into songs, and he asked if he could work a little of that one into my new song. I had to give him credit for at least having the court system on his mind. He peered at me closely. “What’s that on your face? You sleep on your keyboard again?”
I rubbed my cheek. Larry usually put me to bed when I did that. “Muriel still hates you,” I said.
“She loves me,” he responded. He smoothed his hair and patted his tummy.
“I doubt it.” I started to feel cranky thanks to my lack of sleep. “You know, if you guys hadn’t had that … that thing, she’d be in our band by now.”
Shane mimicked my voice exactly. “And if you and Larry hadn’t had that … that thing, we’d have a bassist right now.”
I looked at the music, not at him, grudgingly accepting that I screwed up, too. I had a strict policy of never having a relationship with a fellow band member before Larry came along. Not with the grad students, not with Shane, and certainly not with Wayne because his one true love was his bong. If Shane had resisted the call of his loins and not had a dalliance with Muriel, we might have had a bassist who rivaled Larry. Then again, if I had resisted the call of my own loins, Larry might have stayed in the band, period. “You win,” I finally told him.
Shane smiled and shrugged. “We’ve both been very bad, Pestilence. I forgive.”
“I forgive, too, Famine,” I replied.
Wayne arrived with his guitar in tow. However, he seemed to have left his typical vaguely inebriated goofiness at home. He seemed grumpy, in fact, and the look on his face made Shane and me freeze. “Who sold you a bad bag?” Shane asked.
Wayne sighed and slumped. “So. I ran into Andy today. You know, Andy from the South of the Slot.”
I didn’t like the sound of it already. Wayne was the Marquee Idol’s official point person for all gigs, and Andy was the South of the Slot’s booking agent. Andy had power as far as struggling bands were concerned. If he didn’t like your band’s sound, thought you wouldn’t draw a crowd, or considered you flaky, your band was done at his club. “So?” Shane asked.
“He was irritated because he hadn’t been notified that we lost our bassist.”
Shane muttered, “Well, hell.”
I raised an eyebrow and put my hands on my hips. “And why does that matter? Did you tell him we’re auditioning? We can find a bassist before the gig—easy!”
“Andy’s not so sure. He thought Larry was good and thinks not having him will change the sound.”
“He was good, but it’s not as if we can’t play without him.” I didn’t know if that was entirely true since I missed Larry and his bass, but I wanted to convince Shane, Wayne, and myself. “And plenty of bands don’t have bassists! Critics wet their shorts at the White Stripes! And the Black Keys? Hello?”
Wayne waved his hand as if he were holding an imaginary surrender flag. “Don’t shoot the messenger, Clance! He said—I’m quoting—that it doesn’t look like we have our shit together and he doesn’t think we’re going to draw enough to open for Highbrow/Lowbrow.”
Shane went to his drum kit and started banging in
anger. Drummers always had the best method of letting off steam. Over the racket, he shouted, “That asshole knows how we sound! We played there before!”
I asked, “Did he say we were out for sure?”
“No. He said he was working the numbers, it’s nothing personal, and it’s just about the money.”
“As per usual.” I was trying to speak above Shane’s noise. “When do we find out?”
“He didn’t say. He had to be somewhere, so I can call him. But he said he was thinking of bringing in Hazmat Kiddie Pool. Shane, dude, please! I cannot hear myself!”
Shane abruptly stopped drumming. “They don’t even sound like Highbrow/Lowbrow. And their name is stupid.”
“Damn right it is, but people love a gimmick,” Wayne replied. The members of Hazmat Kiddie Pool took their name literally. They wore hazmat suits and did indeed set up a kiddie pool onstage. At least they were smart enough not to fill it with water so no one in the band got electrocuted. But that was the only nice thing I could say about them, since their ridiculous suits got in the way of their ability to play their instruments.
I picked up my guitar. I thought we may as well be ready for the show, even if we got bumped. “Okay. We’ll think this through. And we’ll find a bassist. Today!”
“Think we can convince Larry to come back?” Wayne shot a sideways glance at me.
I triangulated, bouncing that sideways glance toward Shane. “About as much chance as we do of getting Muriel on board.”
Wayne shook himself around a little to loosen up. Things were getting complicated for him, and Wayne didn’t do complicated. “I need some weed. Hold on a minute.” He left the room for a bit as Shane and I practiced on our own, and he returned with our first auditioner, a pimply guy with long, scraggly blonde hair. He had on a neck brace, and he was wearing a T-shirt for a death-metal band that favored umlauts. I was tempted to say that Metallica’s tour bus just left, and James Hetfield wasn’t interested, anyway, but I refrained.
After setting up to show off his skills, the aspiring bassist looked me right in the eye. “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”
