Emerald City

by Chris Nickson

  “You really believe shit like that can be explained?” Dani finished her cigarette, grinding out the butt in a metal ashtray and tracing patterns in the dust.

  “I don’t know,” I answered honestly, “but I want to try. There are a lot of people around here who cared about Craig’s music. People believed in him. You know the kind of crowd the band drew when they played.”

  “Even if you find an explanation, what does that do?” she asked guardedly.

  “It tells the story.” I answered. “It rounds everything out. I don’t know, maybe Craig had some more things recorded. They’ll come out and that’ll be it.”

  “And some kid’ll be put off shooting up?”

  “Who knows?” I looked at her and shrugged. “I’m not trying to offer him up as some big moral lesson. But maybe he just deserves something, nothing more or less than that. That’s not too bad, is it?”

  “I guess not,” she agreed slowly. “Are you still living in the same place?”

  “We’re still up on Queen Anne, yeah.” She knew it, she’d spent quite a few evenings there in the past.

  “I’ll talk to Sandy.” Her voice turned dark and serious. “It’s up to her, though, Laura. I’ll give her your number and see if she wants to call you. But I need you to promise me one thing.”

  “What?”

  “That you won’t try and track her down some other way. I mean it.”

  What did she think I was? “I promise,” I told her.

  “Good deal.” She nodded and gave me a small, noncommittal smile, hair bobbing in front of her face. “I’ll tell her and see what she wants to do.” She stood up. “I’d better finish cutting the onions. Say hi to Steve for me.”

  It was still barely eleven. If I hurried I could reach the market and find Mike, Snakeblood’s drummer, before the lunchtime rush began. Sometimes it seemed as if half the aspiring musicians in the city worked there or for the Muzak Corporation.

  I walked by the Josephinum and glanced up at the top floor, where Elvis had stayed when he was in town filming It Happened at the World’s Fair. Having the King here had been a huge deal, all over television and the newspapers. My dad believed it would put Seattle on the map and dragged me and my mom to see it when it came out. We all left disappointed.

  Then I was at Pike Place, one of Seattle’s great landmarks, almost as well known as the Space Needle. It was right in the heart of the city, part working market, part tacky tourist trap. Back in the early Seventies the city council had planned to pull it down, but people had said no. Instead they’d raised the money to keep it, buying bricks with their names on that lined the floor of the entrance. It was an odd building, overlooking the Sound, the only place I knew where you entered at the top then worked your way down, floor by floor, finding odd little restaurants, kitsch traders and strange little shops that didn’t quite seem to belong in this world. Even after a lifetime here I still didn’t know my way around it properly. In the right mood I could spend half a day there, coming out after lunch overlooking the water with a bag full of produce and some dusty little items I didn’t need that had caught my eye.

  There was the usual gaggle of sightseers in town too early in the season clicking cameras and taking joyful video of the guys at the fish stall tossing whole salmon around. I threaded my way past them and through to the sandwich stall, where the stools were already filled and a line of people waited for food and coffee. Mike was busy in the back, chopping up lettuce and tomatoes for later.

  He didn’t look much like a musician, but maybe that was the trick of it. In Seattle the real musicians never looked like they should be playing instruments. Instead they seemed as if they’d be happier fixing holes in the street.

  Mike was tall, with thickly muscled shoulders and arms, probably not too surprising in a drummer. His hair was long, hidden under a net to protect the food, and his beard was thick. Under a plaid shirt he wore a long sleeve t-shirt, with a waffle undershirt beneath that.

  “Hey Laura, you want coffee?” he yelled. I knew he’d been out here a long time, but I could still hear a trace of New England in his voice.

  “I’m looking for you,” I told him.

  He raised his eyebrows in surprise, then he smiled and said, “Give me five minutes, okay? Over by the bakery.”

  That made sense. The bakery was where his girlfriend Deb worked, and she’d stoke him up with free pastries during the day to sugar-rush him through his shift. I pushed my way back through the crowds.

  The bakery was on a little side corridor that went nowhere except to some stairs. They did a good line in cakes and some excellent cheese bread I didn’t dare eat too often. I bought one for later and ordered a mocha. There was no sign of Deb. Maybe it was her day off.

  Mike trotted over about fifteen minutes later, five minutes in Seattle time. Without a word the barista pulled an espresso, put it in a paper cup and handed it to him.

  “Deb off today?”

  “I guess you haven’t heard,” he said with a dark, embarrassed frown. “We split up. She moved out a couple of weeks ago.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” I was, too. I liked her, funny, pretty and bubbly. And Mike single meant he could be a bit flirtatious.

  “Shit happens.” He shrugged and gave me an appraising look. “You want to talk about Craig, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  I followed him down the main stairs to the concrete landing. He leaned on the railing, lit a cigarette and looked out at the container ships moving along Puget Sound. A busker was playing, guitar case open for money, his performance of Paul Simon classics more hopeful than good.

  “I couldn’t believe that shit,” Mike said slowly, smoke curling upwards from his mouth. “I loved that guy. It’s like losing family.”

  “And you were close to a deal.”

  “Close? We had the deal,” he said angrily. “But fuck that, man. Yeah, it would have been good and everything.” He exhaled slowly. “Craig, though, I cared about him more than any record deal.” I could see his eyes beginning to glisten, and he turned his face away from me.

  “Did you know he was using again?”

  He turned back and shook his head. “I know he wasn’t using,” he insisted. “That’s the truth. Yeah, I know what happened last year, he never tried to keep that quiet. It caused enough grief in the band, but he’d kicked it. Seriously, he hadn’t touched any of that shit in months. We all told him, do it again and we’re out of here. And he listened.” He looked across at me. “I mean it. The guy wasn’t using.”

  The breeze brought the smell of salt air off the water. Mike finished his coffee and scrunched up the cup, then stomped out the cigarette butt and lit another.

  “So how come you’re interested in Craig?” he asked.

  “I’m writing about him for The Rocket,” I replied.

  He raised his eyebrows. “What, like an obituary?”

  “An article. Trying to figure out why he died.”

  He snorted. “Good luck. He pulled some stupid shit. That’s your answer right there.”

  “He ODed,” I said, although I was beginning to think that wasn’t true. But I wanted Mike’s opinion.

  “That’s my point.” There was a mix of anger and pain in his voice. “I guess he thought he could shoot up and it would be cool. Just one time, maybe. I don’t know.”

  “But he was clean, you’re sure of that?”

  “Yeah, I’m certain he was. You can’t play in a band with a guy and not know that. No track marks, nothing.”

  “Some people take heroin and maintain regular lives.”

  He shrugged his broad shoulders. “Maybe they do. All I know is that Craig wasn’t using any more. He’d still smoke weed and drink and that was it. He just fucked up big time, that’s what it is. You want to know more you’d better talk to Sandy. She knew him better than any of us.”

  I let the silence fill the air for a long minute, watching seagulls swoop for the crumbs tourists dropped. Traffic swooshed alo
ng the raised levels of the Alaskan Way Viaduct before disappearing into the mystery of the Battery Street tunnel. Mike seemed willing to talk and there was more I needed to know.

  “What was the story with the record label?”

  “It was all set,” he answered, his tone full of vanished dreams. “ARP had flown us down to LA, they’d come to see us play at the Central a couple of times, and they liked what they saw. They loved Craig’s songs. We’d made a demo tape for them, all the stuff that would be on the album. We’d got a lawyer and all that shit, man, and it was going to be big time. We were due to sign next week. Tickets booked. Done deal.”

  “So why would Craig want to shoot up now?” I asked.

  “That’s what I’d like to know,” Mike said. I could hear the frustration tight in his voice. “You think I haven’t asked myself that a million times since Saturday?”

  “What now?”

  “I don’t know. I mean it, I really don’t know.” He looked at his watch. “Hey, I’ve got to get back.” Mike gave a sour smile. “Better keep the boss happy. Looks like I’ll be working there a while yet. If you ever want to meet up for a drink...”

  I smiled and said nothing, watching as he walked away.

  Six

  He left me there, looking down on the traffic and the sound of the busker switching to Cat Stevens. People passed, happy and animated, on vacation to grab everything we had to offer here. After being way off the beaten track we’d turned into big business. Seattle was a destination now; businesses rubbed their hands, talking eagerly of tourist dollars. New hotels were opening. But it was all cosmetic. Scratch the surface and Seattle was still the same place it had always been. Stroll around anywhere and there were panhandlers on the corners with their big-eyed dogs and pleas for spare change, and all the winos and junkies. At night the missions were all full and people were asleep in doorways. Get past the new gloss on the city there was plenty of grit underneath.

  There were still two other members of Snakeblood to talk to: Tony and Warren, brothers who’d moved up from Texas a couple of years before to escape the heat and the conservatism of Dallas. They’d arrived with some money inherited from their grandfather and used it to open a small record store on Capitol Hill. One or both of them would be around, and the weather was fair enough to walk up there.

  I headed up Pike Street as it stretched past the crumbling glory of the Paramount Theater and welfare apartments that surrounded it, then into the businesses on the lower part of the hill, garages, gay bathhouses, and a few chic little places near the top of the slope. I cut over to Pine Street and then along Broadway.

  Heaven and Hell Records was in the tidy block near the big Fred Meyer market, across from the QFC supermarket, surrounded by trendy restaurants and boutiques, a place to see and be seen. Everyone was cool here, as if it was a prerequisite written into the rental agreements.

  Capitol Hill was also Seattle’s main gay area; if anyone didn’t like the sight of two men or two women holding hands and kissing, they could move on. Businesses all along the strip catered to the powerful gay dollar. I’d lived up here once in my early twenties. For three months I’d loved the constant bustle, but by the time my lease ended I’d had enough and moved somewhere quieter. Now I came here for a meal at the Deluxe or for meetings of my feminist group.

  Heaven and Hell wasn’t like its neighbors. It stood out defiantly among the chic designer shopfronts, dark posters filling the windows and heavy, clattering music banging from inside.

  Tony and Warren loved the heavy barrage of industrial music. Ministry were their gods and the daily soundtrack in the store was heavy on the bass, thick drums and wailed vocals. The Butthole Surfers were playing loud when I arrived. Tony was deep in conversation with a customer while Warren was rearranging stock.

  It was a small place with a tiny stockroom in the back, most of the music out or in racks, used LPs and tapes upstairs on the balcony. I’d found a few bargains here before, and it was sometimes a good place to trade in all those promotional discs I received but didn’t want to keep.

  “Hey, Laura, you got some stuff for us?” Warren asked. He kissed me on both cheeks in that French way that seemed at odds with his Texas accent. He was taller than me, skinny as wire, good-looking in a very American way with hair that looked wild but was artfully, expensively cut. Underneath it was a surprisingly gentle face, blue eyes twinkling, mouth always on the edge of a smile. I liked him; he’d always accepted me as a writer and my interest in music as genuine.

  “Not today,” I told him. “You got a minute?”

  “I guess,” he said dubiously. “What do you need?”

  “I want to talk about Craig.”

  “Oh, man.” He glanced over at his brother and held up five fingers. Tony nodded and we headed out on to Broadway. The sun was trying to break through and people were parading around in tight t-shirts that showed gym bodies, even as goosebumps showed on their arms.

  “What’s with this shit?” he complained as we walked. “I thought it was supposed to rain here until July.”

  “Don’t worry,” I assured him, “it’ll get wet again. Tomorrow, if you’re lucky.”

  We stopped at an espresso cart and I ordered a couple of lattes. There was a restaurant down the street where we could have sat and talked, but Warren seemed eager to be moving.

  “I’m sorry about Craig,” I said as we headed down towards the reservoir. It was a curious space, not quite a park, not quite a lake, set back from the street and surrounded by a chain link fence with gates. People were walking their dogs, a few joggers shed sweat as they ran laps around the water.

  “It’s wrong,” he said, glancing at me. “I mean it, honey, it’s wrong.” His voice played over the word, stretching it into something large and long.

  “Wrong how?”

  He shook his head quietly as if he didn’t have the words to describe it. “So why do you want to talk about him?” he asked instead. A pair of girls wandered by, both of them staring at him. He didn’t even notice.

  “I’m writing about him,” I explained. “For The Rocket.”

  “Okay,” he said finally. “I guess that’s cool. What are you going to write?”

  “Whatever I find. Hopefully the truth.”

  He shook his head. “There’s not a fuck of a lot of truth around anywhere, you know that, right?”

  “Then I’d better try and find some,” I told him. “It’s why I’m here.”

  “Ah, who the hell knows?” He finished his coffee and pitched the cup into a garbage can, a perfect three-pointer. He held his thumb and first finger a quarter of an inch apart. “We were that close. That fucking close to making it. And the shithead has to go and start sticking a needle into himself again.”

  “I don’t think he wanted to die,” I said.

  Warren’s anger deflated. “Yeah, I know. I’m just mad at him. And it hurts to have a buddy do that, it hurts like fuck. I can’t figure it out. You know Craig came by the store on Saturday afternoon? He’d been visiting someone over here and he stopped by. He was happy, he was joking. He was psyched about signing the deal; we’d made it.”

  “Who’d he been to see?” I asked, suddenly wondering how he’d spent his last day, whether he’d talked to the brothers when he already had the smack in his pocket.

  “I don’t know. Somebody. I don’t think he ever said.”

  “How long did he stay?”

  “Not long. He just checked through the used stuff and took an old Leonard Cohen album. He didn’t have any money on him so Tony said he could pay us at rehearsal.”

  “What happens now?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. The funeral,” he replied slowly, pushing a hand through his hair. “I guess his family will be in touch or something. Maybe Sandy. Fucking dick.”

  “And after that?”

  He looked blank for a moment then sadness filled his eyes. “Shit, I don’t even know if there is an after that. It’s not like the label’s going to w
ant us. Craig wrote the songs, Craig sang the songs, Craig played lead guitar. We were just the band. Take him away and you’ve got nothing anyone’s going to want.”

  I started to speak but he held his finger to my lips.

  “Don’t even say it. Craig was something special. I know it, you know it, the label knew it. He was the golden boy.”

  “What about Tony?”

  “Tony? He doesn’t even want to talk about it. He’s just been shutting himself in his room and banging his fucking head since we heard. We were going to be there, man, all of us together, walking into that office right behind Craig. You know what that means? I’ve been playing bass since I was thirteen. I used to dream about stuff like that, ’cause I knew it never really happened in the real world. Craig gave it to me, and then he took it away again. I love him, I don’t know why he did it, but I hate him for it, too.”

  He turned and walked away with long, angry strides, just leaving me standing there.

  I caught the bus back to Queen Anne, stopping at Safeway at the top of the hill to buy food for dinner. We’d developed a system; I’d buy the food one month, Steve would purchase it the next. When I had money I preferred Thriftway with its yuppie selection and prices, but right now I was feeling poor. There was money due from magazines, some of it months late. Until it arrived I was scraping by; fifty cents less on a frozen pizza seemed like a good deal. Steve paid his share, but money was still tight. I loved what I did but I wouldn’t have complained if it paid a little better.

  The apartment was stuffy, so I opened the sliding glass door to draw in the breeze and settled down to write. I started with an assignment I’d begged from The Rocket, a review of a debut cassette by a local band called the Posies. I’d gone out with a girlfriend one night back in January and chanced into Squid Row just as they began to play. I’d only planned on sticking around for two songs. I was still there when the last note had died away. They had energy, and a songwriting style that was pure, glittering pop, capping it all with a driving version of the Hollies’ King Midas In Reverse, the harmonies breathtakingly note-perfect.