Dirty Beat

by Venero Armanno

  I pulled away from the hotel and didn’t like the fact that everything I’d experienced in there would soon fall under wrecking balls and jackhammers. Just before I left 2602 Laetecia had fallen asleep in the big bed. I didn’t want to wake her, but didn’t want to leave her like that either. Looking at her lying there naked wasn’t enough. I wanted her. Again and again and again. I put my mouth on her breast, then moved down and parted her legs, lapping at her cunt. Reckless. Every single thing I’d done with her. Reckless. I thought of all the men who’d paid good money to be allowed to get on their knees and bury their faces in her; I thought of my mother strung out on smack, a skinny, scrawny, rag-doll of a toy for men full of wrath and self-justification, probably not so much unlike me.

  So what? Laetecia tasted like honey and gold. What she’d done before was over and what was now was me.

  I left her sleeping, but she would go on sleeping and when the demolition teams turned that place into memories she’d become only a memory too. Room 2602 was my door into another world and when the suite was gone there’d be no more door and Laete-cia would be gone with it.

  Too late a night, too much champagne, too much exertion. I shook my head. Crazy thoughts. Get yourself straight, Max. We’ll meet again soon enough; she promised as much.

  It was good there wasn’t too much traffic around. The day was grey and those low thunderclouds made the city seem unreal, like the flats of a film set without depth or texture. The storms would continue, but I’d be home, showered and clean, and asleep in bed. But when might I see Laetecia again? What was the time I might least expect her? At my door, or in a club while I was playing another show, or would she contrive some accidental meeting in a supermarket, our trolleys banging into one another like those of absolute strangers?

  A car horn resounded behind me. I’d let a red light turn green and then red again and I hadn’t even moved. Jesus. Could have killed somebody.

  I lifted my hand in apology to the yellow taxi in the rear-vision mirror. The driver might or might not have seen the gesture. When the light changed again he powered his vehicle past me with an angry slide of tyres. They kicked up muddy water that covered my windscreen. I didn’t want to hold anyone else up, and as I fumbled at the wiper control the stupid things wouldn’t work and, too late, I saw that I’d managed to drive straight through a stop sign. I was in an intersection and a truck of some sort was already swerving to avoid me.

  Before it hit I saw Conny’s neck snapping. Then the impact threw my head backwards and to the side. I felt a crunch go through my body as the driver’s door crumpled in against me. My mouth filled with a rubble of teeth. The Holden slewed left, driven by the direct sideways smack of the truck, which could not stop, and without traction my car aquaplaned on and on, to finally bend with a shriek of metal around a power pole. The passenger seat where I’d wanted Laetecia Sparks to sit while we kept our story going just a little longer more or less ceased to exist. A secondary crash of what I didn’t know smashed all the glass around me. The windows and the windscreen were gone, rain and glass were blinding in my face, and the Premier’s roof caved in.

  Whatever was happening I no longer understood any of it, and was pulled down like a flagging swimmer into the limitless black below.

  XVII

  Buddy Bettridge looks up into all the waiting faces. These good folk want to hear more of the Chronicles of Max, and he likes that, so much so that sometimes he thinks he’s less the high priest of funerals and more a storyteller of old, fashioning tales that make sense of the peaks, troughs and blank, awfully bland spaces in people’s lives. Maybe that’s all any priest ever did anyway: Friends, it all didn’t mean nothing, your good times and bad added up to something worthwhile. Trust me and I’ll tell you how.

  He hasn’t needed to consult his notes and now folds them into his hand. When he was fourteen he broke his right arm falling out of a tree, so has no idea what it must have been like to be so – demolished. Now there’s an interesting choice of word, he thinks, and what the hell made me come up with it? Demolished. Yes it’s true, I tell him: people can believe that their emotional troubles can leave them in such a way, but it’s not till you spend a couple of years in and out of hospitals, dealing with therapists, medicos and specialists of various types, and even the tea ladies who bring you meals made of cardboard and plastic, that you realise the true meaning of a word like that.

  I wish I could make Buddy see something that actually does hurt as much as the physical agonies of being mended. A fully loaded bread delivery van was coming, and in blinding rain it T-boned my Holden Premier, pushing it diagonally down a city street until the car wrapped around a telephone pole. There was an agonising screech of metal made by a sedan skidding and slamming into the dead Premier, and actually jumping on top of the cabin, crushing it down like an eggshell. I was half-crushed, trapped inside, but what hurt more was the small voice that drifted through an endless drug-delirium – Are you there, Max? Are you there? – and the way I could never quite open my eyes to see her. Later, the answer from the nurses in the ward was that Laetecia visited on a number of occasions, maybe three or four, then they never saw her again.

  Buddy, that was it. She’s not even here today. I’ve been looking and hoping, believe me.

  He arranges his features into a friendly smile and contemplates his next words.

  Wait, Buddy, wait. You’ve been doing a sterling job, but listen to me a sec. It’s no wonder she’s not here. Once I was out and free you should have seen the way I petitioned Joseph and Roland Sparks. Really, with all my heart, but they didn’t want to help. Said Laetecia was gone, whereabouts unknown. Sometimes I hung around university campuses. Psychology, remember? History, nineteenth-century literature. Nothing. Sometimes I went to jazz gigs and stayed up the back, looking for a young woman with her hair up, wearing heavy makeup and lots of kohl around the eyes, dressed in black.

  The one thing I learned by being with so many men is that there’s a price for being with any man.

  And what about women, Laetecia, that’s what I would have liked to ask her. What price am I paying for the fact of a woman like you? The only answer I ever got came out of the mouths of therapists: ‘Come on Max, let’s make it nine, let’s make it ten. Wow, that’s enough for today. Eleven – just an unbelievable effort.’

  They did their best all right, but I wasn’t a drummer any more. Right shoulder and right elbow just couldn’t be repaired to that extent. Physical therapy went on forever, but I stopped taking their pain-killers. That was my one sacrifice for the lucidity I wanted to keep. Go on, Buddy, tell them that. Tell them that Max said to himself, If I’m going to stay on this planet and live, then I’m not gonna be drug-fucked. I will be here.

  On the anniversary of the crash, the first card arrived. A handprinted Halloween card with no name and no return address. God sighed and a decade passed and now I had ten of them.

  In the meantime, I could drive, I could walk, I could even run for a bus, if required. The problem was the shoulder and elbow, trying to lift them. The rest I could deal with. I couldn’t drum, but I knew a few styles of music. I knew sound and there was a perfectly good studio under the house that musicians and bands could use to practise. I remembered how I envied Misty Blue’s equipment and their van. Every up-and-comer in the business knows how that feels. In my bank account, all my years of gardening and frugal living had accumulated into something. I went to see six bank and building society managers in a row until I found one stupid enough to give me a fat loan. The repayments were okay. This would work.

  My own van and hand-picked sound equipment. Spent a fortune, really. I took out ads and became a fixture of every good and bad club in the city, hiring out my new mixing desk and stack of PA equipment to anyone who needed them. They make up a fair portion of the people here today in the church. For bands I liked, I also made sure the lighting they were getting would show them off to their best advantage, that their instrument set-up was good enough, and ga
ve impromptu music lessons and advice when needed. The business thrived. No more mowing. Young musicians just referred to me as ‘the drummer’ even though I only sat in on rare occasions, and when I did, could only manage simple time signatures and very little adornment. Maybe a minute’s drumming, that was it. Anything else hurt too much, but sometimes it was worth the effort to try, especially when all some kid needed was a quick demonstration of what he should be doing.

  None of the playing hurt as much as each and every Halloween. Whenever my next card arrived in the letter box I would let out a string of curses and wish she’d at least delivered it by hand. The postal stamps revealed nothing. Then I’d slit open the envelope and there would be a Jack O’Lantern, or a hand-drawn picture of a twelve-year-old witch with an eight-year-old werewolf, or a blurry doorway opening this world into the next. She had a sense of humour. Most times I managed to smile too. She wrote things like, I don’t forget you, or, a couple of times, Thank you, Max.

  Yeah, some thanks.

  Well, Buddy, it’s going fast now, and isn’t that the way the last bits of a life go – fast?

  So tell them we’re on the road to that dance with a girl named Ash.

  XVIII

  No one was making much money or getting worthwhile work in the live music business. Jazz clubs were history and rock venues were becoming as rare as drive-in theatres. Their replacements were cheap and it made my teeth ache just to be inside their chintzy walls listening to the new corporate rock sound of computer-processed three-chord tunes. Weird how it all sounded alike to me, as if some factory in LA was using a cookie cutter to create rock group after rock group that relied on heavily overproduced riffs recycled from everything you’d ever heard before. In the Sixties Phil Spector created the wall of sound but the Nineties and the new noughts were all about some executive’s idea of a slab of sound, and it was as exciting as getting pounded by a side of beef.

  So now I was a dinosaur.

  Most of my work went into setting-up in low-rent pubs with musicians who wanted the opposite of the new sound. Young bands heard about me and saved up their dollars to get the dirty feel of old. My equipment was good, it didn’t much rely on the silicon chip and I knew what I was doing. Before long I was more than just ‘the drummer’ but a middle-aged guru – business took off. The truck and the gear even went interstate, often without me. If I trusted someone enough, I took their money and handed them the keys.

  I told these kids, Shoot straight or don’t shoot at all. Got it?

  My hair thinned; my skin wrinkled. My legs lost meat and my belly got bigger. If musicians had kids I’d spend hours playing with them at sound-checks, fascinated by things like full cheeks, chubby arms, small white teeth – everything that’s the opposite of decay.

  When I hauled equipment I puffed a lot; tests found the problem. Atherosclerosis. Back into hospital I went, but they didn’t even consider the procedure a major surgery. The surgeons gave me a balloon angioplasty because one of my arteries was strangulated by gunk. I got a lesson in bad living and the price you pay, but I went back to work feeling better than I had in years. My GP, Dr Bailey, told me I could live a normal life with normal exertion, no blood-thinning medicine required. Maybe lose a bit of weight; well, a lot.

  I resumed work and forgot about it, because one of the new bands I was doing sound for was pretty good. They were called BeerGoggles but I pulled the manager aside and asked him if he was trying to kill them before they even started. Give them something catchy to be known as, let it ring in people’s minds. Try Dirtybeat or maybe – no, it stuck. Dirtybeat’s sort of raw rock-and-roll melded well with my anti-technology equipment so it was a marriage that just worked, then down the line an opportunity came when they needed my truck and PA in Sydney for a record company showcase. I told them to pay me a security deposit and look after the whole thing themselves, but no, they wanted me to travel with them and be there twiddling dials at the show. At the last minute their hassled and harangued manager came down with pleurisy and there was no one else to nursemaid them through their big shot at impressing the impresarios. It was time to give in.

  I set off down the highway while they flew economy. When we met up in Sydney at the Sacré Coeur Theatre, which wasn’t a religious auditorium, but a large, run-down music venue, the band played a monster of a show. It was good to have been there to see it after all. The record company plus its one hundred invitees went wild.

  At the end of the night I left the Dirtybeat boys to the new, loving arms of the recording and management corps that had just discovered them. The lines of coke were running too long for my liking. In the darkness of the empty car park, while I unlocked the truck and climbed in, I couldn’t help wondering if these so-called impresarios would turn out to be the real deal or just some modern incarnation of the likes of Iron John. I guess because of the record company attentions Iron John Tempest kept coming to mind. Maybe my job with the boys wasn’t to nursemaid them through but to nursemaid them the fuck out.

  Nah, I wasn’t a manager. The boys had performed a great show and with luck they’d be stars one day. They’d have to grow up and think for themselves, fast.

  The energy and excitement of their playing had rubbed off on me, but even though my blood was up it was time to get back to my hotel room. I was still about twenty kilos heavier than I’d been before the accident and these days my poorly mended body needed plenty of rest. My fingers touched the ignition key, but didn’t turn it. I rolled my window down and enjoyed the quiet and solitude of the late hour. Music drifted from the back of the Sacré Coeur, as did the unmistakable odour of hash. Funny, that sound and smell hadn’t travelled into the car park before. A minute ago the place had been closed up tight, all its doors shut, however the theatre’s rear exit was now open – and someone was framed in that doorway, looking across the otherwise empty car park towards my truck and me.

  Was it a woman? None of the boys had brought their girlfriends. None of the record company people was female. The bar staff had long since packed up and gone home. The theatre owner himself had been doling out the drinks and the drugs, some French guy by the fancy name of Etienne. I squinted, trying to see; something was up.

  She crossed the gravel, footsteps crunching until she stopped in a sliver of yellow light. My mind went into a sort of spiral. Through the windscreen I saw she was thin and had a bird-like quality. Her hair was dark instead of blonde, not quite black but laced with strands of grey. She still liked it long. I could barely understand that there were lines etched around her eyes and mouth, and loose skin under her chin and jaw, but it was her, she remained unmistakable. Debbie Canova had lost her youth, but hadn’t we all?

  I got out of the cabin and climbed unsteadily down, keeping firm hold of the hand-grip. She stepped closer. I wanted to find someone who could explain why it should be that after decades of wishing for her, we had to meet in a car park that stank of last week’s garbage and the unhappy marriage of human and animal urine. I’d been thinking about Iron John and who should be here but her.

  ‘Hey, Max. How are you?’

  I might have nodded a reply, unable to speak or let go of the side of the truck. Finally I said, ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Here? Etienne is my husband.’

  ‘That guy inside?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘You’ve been here all night?’

  ‘I stayed in the office,’ Debbie replied, reaching into her handbag and taking out a fat and exquisitely hand-crafted joint. ‘Shall we go up there?’

  She meant the truck. I pulled myself back up as if entering a dream. When I looked behind me I saw the way worry lines in her forehead and between her eyebrows grew deeper. She was frowning, having noticed my weight and how painful the effort to get into the cabin. She climbed up after me and sat in the passenger seat. I was behind the wheel. We weren’t going anywhere, but she pulled the door shut. I didn’t like the way she noticed my crabbed way of moving, the obvious lack of motion in m
y right shoulder and arm.

  ‘I was in an accident,’ I said. ‘Got a bit banged up.’

  She used a lighter to get the weed going, then passed it to me. ‘It’s good to see you, Max, banged up or otherwise.’

  My hand was shaking. Perspiration broke out on my forehead. My face was hot. I wondered if she could tell.

  ‘Yes,’ was all I could reply. ‘Yes.’

  We sat smoking in silence. With so much to say neither of us could get a word out. I swivelled around to look at the side of her face. How much despair had she caused me, how much heartache – and all I could do was wish I still had the right to touch her. Fuck it, why not. I’ve waited long enough.

  The joint helped. She didn’t flinch, so I caressed her thin, lined cheek with the backs of my fingers. In fact, she leaned into the touch, pressing to me. It was the best thing I could have done because she closed her eyes and then she spoke.

  ‘Three children. Two girls and a boy. Eighteen, sixteen and eleven. The eleven-year-old is Jason, the light of my life. The girls too, but they’re so independent now.’

  ‘How – what happened?’

  She rubbed her face against my arm, like a cat. She cuddled in to me, still keeping her eyes closed. ‘I met Etienne when I was still playing. He was a musician a bit like you, very talented but unfocused. He found his forté in business. He runs three venues like this one and I do some of the accounts. I’ve heard you’ve done well too. You’re a legend with these bands. The smashed-up drummer who’s the audio man, the story keeps coming up. I knew you’d get here one day. I’ve been expecting you.’

  ‘You’ve been expecting me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Don’t you think you could have just called?’