Dirty Beat

by Venero Armanno

  God, I was crazy about her. Anything she did or said was fine by me. Whenever we cooked for Michael, which was often, it gave us a break from our sexual proceedings. We’d get back to the real stuff soon enough. Near the end of one of Maree’s favourites, Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow, we’d start shaking one another like skeletons dancing over gravestones, and then we’d come, but it wouldn’t be an explosion but a sort of melting, young bodies dripping like wax.

  Later we’d dab our knees with Michael’s Mercurochrome. He stole things from the hospital; his medicine cabinet was like a well-stocked Emergency Ward. Our generation believed it was only fair that the world should give us whatever we wanted, and we took it all like greedy young dogs.

  Maree Kilmister, outlandish poets, neverending pleasures.

  That was 1973. Go on, try to tell me you had a better year.

  IV

  What’s this magic?

  It’s not nearly thirty-five years ago, but tomorrow. I might be dead, but a few walking rock-and-roll cadavers have come out of the woodwork. To tell the truth, I don’t think I could be looking as bad as some of these mummies no matter what’s been done to me. There’s not much that’s less attractive than musicians in their fifties and sixties still trying to look like teenagers, but it is funny to see how startlingly black or blonde or red their hair is; how wide their eyes; how taut the facial skin. How absolutely white and perfectly formed their teeth have become. A lot of expensive work has been done to hold Father Time in check, but He’s the one laughing; his children are comical and scary, surgically conserved testaments to His absolute claim.

  And now, oh God, listen to this.

  Some well-meaning soul has ordered up a dose of Pink Floyd for me. Here’s a bet: any minute now everyone’ll be getting misty to Wish You Were Here, perennial song of funerals, wakes and farewells to just-been-pensioned-off factory workers. People will be shaking their heads that I went too young. I did. For now we’re treated to the interminable suite called Shine On You Crazy Diamond, and it must be a little more a propos than I can imagine. People are smiling and nodding in recognition. I’m their Crazy Diamond.

  Oh well, if it makes them happy to think so.

  Truth is, I had more common sense than the lot of them put together. So many tried to hold onto the past, to keep their glory days going, or to reinvent failures as successes, miseries as triumphs. The rose-coloured glasses syndrome married to the natural human desire not to have to tell your children – much less yourself—what a waste your life turned out to be.

  Not me. My little hippie-chick Maree taught me the value of veracity early on in life. It went like this: she used to compose love poem after love poem in my name then read them out while I lay spent on the floor. Tears would well in her eyes as she declared neverending fealty. Her whole body used to respond to her appeal: eyes would shine, nipples would grow hard, colour would spread like a burnt-orange stain all across her sternum. She meant it all and it came from her heart, until the day I found her on the balcony of Michael’s flat tearing her love-poetry out of her special diary and burning the pages one by one.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Forgetting you.’

  Why, how? I never really understood, but I learned something else: some things you build just to watch fall down, there’s nothing you can do. Face the truth of that and life gets a little easier. At Michael’s door, on my way out, she saw the hurt in my eyes.

  ‘I love you so much, but I’ve changed,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to change, you must never do it. You’re perfect as you are.’

  Huh. It’s not you it’s me.

  Still, maybe if she’d known me all the way from that moment to my demise she would have been satisfied. It was almost as if I listened to her because I stayed as I was, I never became, never grew, never turned into a diamond, crazy or otherwise. The world didn’t crush me into some palatable shape. To the end I was the lump of coal I always was, true to whatever dirty roots I had. I never knew my biological father. He was a man who beat my mother the few months they lived together. Once he knew she was pregnant, bang, he was gone. Never heard of again and thank God for small mercies. A one-time nightclub dancer in a life-size budgie cage, my poor ma managed to work her way down the ladder of success to end as a backroom brothel-worker with matchstick legs and arms of wire. She knew what she was, but she kept an image of what I could be. Sent me to that Catholic school believing Christian Brothers and God-fearing boys would keep me off her road of danger and discontent.

  She tried hard but she came to an end somewhere between a balmy summer’s night and a warm Saturday morning. She was supposed to be taking me to sport. Soccer, for which I had little skill and less interest. I went to see why she wasn’t out of bed. Seaweed hair straggled over one blood-filled eye – that was where she’d found a healthy vein to shoot into.

  Years later, my new father, the man who joined in adopting me after he married my aunt, said, ‘You must shoot straight or you do not shoot at all.’ My first and only music teacher, I sometimes found his order strange, I never could quite divorce it from the style of my mother’s demise – but what he meant had nothing to do with shooting drugs or louche living. If anything he was telling me the opposite. Shoot straight, be true – and in music that means keep things simple, keep out the bullshit, be true to the beat and let the beat be your truth. I tried to listen to him. I think I stayed true. Never took on airs, just stayed me, for better or worse.

  My Maree gave me the same advice. So when she said goodbye, I didn’t. My actions would speak. I closed my eyes, turned my back on her and started walking.

  Didn’t stumble or fall. Not for a long, long time.

  V

  But I know where and how I took my final fall.

  Five nights ago while I was doing the sound for Dirtybeat. The boys were celebrating the news that they’d just got themselves a record deal, a great one, not a soul-eater. I left my post at the mixing desk to dance with a girl young enough to be my daughter. She told me her name was Ash. Final thoughts: how good Ash’s tits feel pressed against my chest; how perfect miniskirts are for girls with good legs; how impossibly small her feet look. Was I dreaming, or was she really showing every sign of wanting to come home with me?

  Then – the end.

  The attack shouldn’t have come as that much of a shock. My health went downhill after I got smashed up in my car just before my thirty-eighth birthday. It seems birthdays have been bad luck for me. After that I grew more sedentary; cooked and ate more; drank too much wine to go with my exotic culinary creations. I was always a drinker, but now I learned to end my nights with several big shots of vodka, best cure for the ongoing physical pain I lived with. Then eighteen months ago I had a balloon installed to expand the major cardiac artery just about choked tight with bad living.

  A long time before that, and before the car accident, my body had had to contend with the excesses doled out by my ma’s sister, Emma, when she took me in. They say you pay for the excesses of your twenties and thirties in your forties and fifties, but my excesses had started early, at nine years of age. Even before my ma was in the ground I started learning. Aunt Emma was not the world’s greatest cook; she fed me shepherd’s pie or spaghetti leftovers morning and night. Her idea of shepherd’s pie was to fill it with the cheapest, fattiest meats in the supermarket; her spaghetti was boiled pasta mixed with a full bottle or two of Heinz tomato sauce, seasoned with two good fistfuls of salt. Mop up the dregs with white bread and clear your way to the tomb. She never had milk in the house, not even for coffee. She’d never taken to breakfast cereal. At the start of the day we ate what was left over from the night before.

  She also didn’t think a small boy shouldn’t share at least a little of her nightly bottles of beer. I was the only kid I knew who was tipsy each of his pre-teen birthdays and falling over drunk on his thirteenth. No one saw; my ma was gone, I was living with my Aunt Emma, and the two of us we were an absolute is
land in a sea of beer and meat and tutti-frutti ice cream, just the way she liked it. It went like that until a little after my drunken first teen birthday. Things changed. A man with the unlikely yet mellifluous name of Concetto San Filippo, or ‘Conny’ as he liked to be called, came into her life. Into mine.

  But back to the fall.

  I was in a circle of sweaty dancers jumping up and down to a new original number by my boys. I call them ‘my boys’ even though I never was their manager or agent, only a sound man for hire. I didn’t like my PA and sound gear to be monopolised by any band in particular – but these kids, well, I couldn’t help loving them. They reminded me of everything my rock band hadn’t been back in the seventies and early days of the eighties. These boys had ambition and talent to burn. My group had lacked the former and enough of the latter to ensure that we were never going to go far past being a loud booking for a Saturday dance.

  Anyway, the members of Dirtybeat liked me too, liked me because I’d come up with the perfect name for their outfit and because I had a history, a history they could relate to: veteran of the days when music technology was all fat cables and valves. When sound was sound – the sound they wanted.

  Maybe that night I should have stayed at my post at the mixing desk, but the attack could have hit me anywhere, I guess. I was dancing with the prettiest girl I’ve seen up close in years, and it was as if she was really thinking she’d let me take her home and zip her out of her little black skirt, and unclip her bustier, and let her beautiful young breasts come gliding out.

  I think she was thinking, ‘This guy’s old, but not too old. He’s still got something. All of his hair for one thing. No tragedy of a middle-aged man’s ear stud. And at least he doesn’t use black dye.’

  She might have been wondering what it would be like to feel a forty-nine year old’s pounding heartbeat against her sternum, but what I didn’t know was why she should have been thinking these things, why she would contemplate letting something like this happen against the pristine white of her flesh. Yet I could read her readiness in the curl of her smile and the shine in her eyes.

  I count myself lucky. My adult life was book-ended by beauty. Maree at the start, Ash at the end.

  So, yes, it was going to happen and it was going to happen to me. Every sour-faced younger man in this place would have gladly traded places. Traded places, or dragged me outside for a beating in exchange for such good luck. I knew it too, knew how those faces glared with beery envy. I would have felt the same way, would have felt just as jealous of the fact that here was a kid maybe twenty-one or twenty-two, out with her friends for a sweaty night of loud, raw music, high from too much to drink and plenty of laughs, here was this stunner making up her mind to give herself to a man days shy of his half century.

  Lo and behold that man was me.

  Her perfume was sort of musky, sort of the scent of hair that’s been washed and dried in sunlight, and she leaned in during the song’s moody middle-eight and said exactly these words: ‘My name’s Ashley – Ash – and guess what, I know who you are. My dad’s got an album, all scratched up, but he still plays it for me, and I know you by your picture, you haven’t changed so much,’ and when she said this last bit she was close, and sort of laughed, but in a nice way, sort of shy, and her left breast touched my shirt. Then she pressed all the way to me and I could feel a wave of heat surge up my neck. ‘You played the drums. I love the violinist on that album too. What was her name – whatever happened to her?’

  The violinist, Debbie Canova. The last person I wanted to remember while I felt Ash against my chest.

  I shrugged as if to say, ‘People disappear,’ but Debbie Canova had never disappeared, not from this broken old heart. The strange thing was I’d seen her again, first time in two decades, just over a week back. I’d been in Sydney helping Dirtybeat get their contract and, out of nowhere, like a magician’s puff of smoke, there she was.

  Ash couldn’t have known that, and she couldn’t have imagined how seeing Debbie Canova after so long had broken me all over again.

  There was a first shudder beneath my breastbone, like a needle going in. Ash leaned closer and whispered, ‘You were a great musician,’ and I was moved, no preening lucky guy any more, no too-fortunate old fart, and so I stopped dancing, stopped dancing to better feel this girl Ash lightly yet indelibly against me.

  The pain went away and I smiled back at her.

  I hope it was a smile full of awe because that’s just what I felt, awe about her and awe about how extraordinary a world we can have when it’s filled with solid three-quarter beats and electric guitars and a growly voiced singer. Not to mention stages and amplifiers and roadies, and mixed drinks, and people who would prefer to dance than to fuss and fight, and the Ashes of the world who make gold of the ashes in our lives, and just like that I dropped, not to my knees in thanks but straight to the ground with an electric pain inside. It was a long piercing flash, then it was gone, and the luxuriousness of sleep overcame me, sent me into the dream that all this seemed to be. While the good people of this world worked on my expiring body, my heart fibrillated as if there was a chance that I would come back, that I might be able to rise up and take Ash by the hand and to my car, and drive her to my home, where I could explain why an old man like me should feel such wonder in the presence of a girl like her.

  It wasn’t to be. My heart only jerked long enough for the ambulance officers who then arrived to want to slap their paddles onto me, one below my right collarbone and the other against the ribs just below my heart.

  Don’t know how many jolts they ended up giving me, but the twitching and vibrating inside grew weaker, not stronger. When the movement stopped altogether they put a tube down my throat and attached a bag to it so they could get on with their resuscitation work. They injected their drugs into the dead rock of my heart, trying to get some movement back so they could hit me with the paddles again.

  Thing is, I was already sort of kneeling there with them, watching my own face turn blue, feeling sorry for the way their arms were getting tired and heavy from trying so hard to bring me back to life. Both officers took turns over me. Another ambulance was on the way. Heroic effort, but I wanted to tell them that it was okay: once the mechanics of going are done with, nothing is all that bad any more.

  When they finally gave up they seemed immensely disappointed. They didn’t really want to leave me to Heaven, Hell or in-between.

  I guess I got in-between.

  For I’m sealed inside my coffin, laid out comfortably, placed here to dream what people imagine is our communal dream of eternity. Instead I’m dreaming a little, but mostly I’m going back in time. If I had it in me to weep I think I would. Thing is, though, this is what I want. Father Death has smiled on me. Father Death has chosen that I should be aware. Good of Him.

  I might be laid out nicely, but in a sense I’m up on one elbow looking at the crowd gathered in this non-denominational chapel, where the celebrant will refrain from using the words ‘God’, ‘Jesus’, or anything with too much of a religious notion. My mother’s hopes for the Catholic school were in vain; not very much of its dogma permeated me.

  Here, people are squeezed into the rows of pews and the rest have had to gather at the back. So many good folk, I’m surprised. Some are forced to politely jockey for space outside the entrance doors. The predominant colour is grey. I would have preferred black, of course. Black is sleek, but grey is death’s drabbest colour, the tone of an accountant’s bad-news voice and the texture of the arithmetic ticking in his brain.

  And enough time has passed since the moment I dropped to make it my birthday.

  Happy fiftieth, old fellow.

  VI

  Ash is here and she’s brought her dad.

  They’re a mixed generation of rock fans, and I like it when you get that, the parents leading their kids to the music they liked when they were kids, and those kids not putting their fingers down their throats at the sound of rock bands already
three or four decades gone, but embracing it, really loving it, loving it enough to be twenty-one or twenty-two years old and want to go out to a dirty club to listen to some new band pound out a new song with a moody middle-eight, and then dance with a never-was of those golden days.

  It’s sort of a bitter pill to swallow, I tell myself, resting up on an elbow to watch the way her hair falls over her face as she puts her head down. The strains of Crazy Diamond wash over her in such a way as to make a tear run down from her eye, or maybe, just maybe, that music makes her need to bite down on the insides of her cheeks so that she won’t laugh out loud at the absurd tragedy of her position here. The last to see me, feel me, touch me, out of these musically oriented, middle-aged, public servants, teachers, accountants, bus drivers and so on. They’ve gathered here at the Holy Church of Pink Floyd to say goodbye to an old fart. I guess, more than that, most of them are mourning the passing of one crazy diamond shard of their own lives. That’s the hardest part of all: the death of a friend that chips away at your own sense of immortality.

  Ash gets to her feet after saying something to her father, who’s about my age but is nothing like me.

  I get a good whiff of the insides of him. He’s a fifty-two year old with a decent hair-cut and a sharp – if conventional – suit, the type Bernie Taupin or Charlie Watts might wear to some Hall of Fame Award TV show. He looks broad in the shoulders, tall, sort of solid and rangy all at the same time, as if in a lifetime of loving rock bands and working hard he’s also found the time for a lifetime of playing something healthy like tennis. I’d say he’s a three to four times a week man, and he plays to win, and rushes the net, where he’s no slouch, and forty years ago his dad or some semi-professional coach taught him how to punch away his volleys and he’s never lost the knack. That’s Ash’s dad, a man who learned good things a long time ago and never let himself lose sight of them.