Apprehended

by Jan Burke

  “Those won’t help, you know.”

  He smiled and said, “Better than nothing.”

  “Cotton is not effective ear protection.”

  He picked up his keys by way of ignoring me and said, “Are you ready?”

  “You don’t have to go with me,” I offered again.

  “I’m not letting my wife sit alone in a sleazy bar. No more arguments, all right?”

  “If I were on a story—”

  “You aren’t. Let’s go.”

  “Thanks for being such a good sport about it,” I said, which made him laugh.

  • • •

  “Which apartment number?” Frank asked as we pulled up to the curb in front of Buzz Sullivan’s apartment building. The building was about four stories high, probably built in the 1930s. I don’t think it had felt a paintbrush along its walls within the last decade.

  “Buzz didn’t tell me,” I answered. “He just said he lived on the fourth floor.”

  Frank sighed with long suffering, but I can ignore someone as easily as he can, and got out of the car.

  As we made our way to the old stucco building’s entry, we dodged half a dozen kids who were playing around with a worn soccer ball on the brown crabgrass lawn. The children were laughing and calling to one another in Spanish. A dried sparrow of a woman watched them from the front steps. She seemed wearier than Atlas.

  Frank muttered at my back about checking mailboxes for the first of the three flights of stairs, but soon followed in silence. Although Buzz had moved several times since I had last been to one of his apartments, I knew there would be no difficulty in locating the one that was his. We reached the fourth floor and Frank started to grouse, but soon the sound I had been waiting for came to my ears. Not just my ears: I heard the sound under my fingernails, beneath my toes and in places my mother asked me never to mention in mixed company. Three screeching notes strangled from the high end of the long neck of a Fender Stratocaster, a sound not unlike those a pig might make—if it was having its teeth pulled with a pair of pliers.

  I turned to look at Frank Harriman and saw something I rarely see on his face: fear. Raw fear.

  I smiled. I would have said something comforting, but he wouldn’t have heard me over the next few whammified notes whining from Buzz’s guitar. A deaf man could have told you they were coming from apartment 4E. I waited until the sound subsided, asked, “Should we drop you off back at the house?” and watched my husband stalk over to the door of number 4E and rap on it with the kind of ferocious intensity one usually saves for rousing the occupants of burning buildings.

  Q: What’s the difference between a dead trombone player and a dead snake in the middle of a road?

  A: The snake was on his way to a gig.

  The door opened and a thin young man with a hairdo apparently inspired in color and shape by a sea urchin stood looking at Frank in open puzzlement. He swatted a few purple spikes away from his big blue eyes and finally saw me standing nearby. His face broke into an easy, charming smile.

  “Irene!” He looked back at Frank. “Is this your cop?”

  “No, Buzz,” I said, “that’s my husband.”

  Buzz looked sheepish. “Oh, sorry. I’ve told Irene I’m not like that, and here I am, acting just exactly like that.”

  “Like what?” Frank asked.

  “I don’t mind that you’re a cop,” Buzz said proudly.

  “That’s big of you,” Frank said, “I was worried you wouldn’t accept our help.”

  Buzz, who is missing a sarcasm detection gene, just grinned and held out a hand. “Not at all, man, not at all. It’s really good of you to offer to take me to the gig. Guess Irene told you my car broke down. Come on in.”

  Buzz’s purple hair was one of two splashes of color in his ensemble; his boots, pants and shirt were black, but a lime green guitar—still attached by a long cable to an amp—and matching strap stood out against this dark backdrop.

  There was no question of finding a seat while we waited for Buzz to unhook his guitar and put it in a hard-shell case. The tiny apartment was nearly devoid of furniture. Two empty plastic milk crates and a couple of boards served as a long, low coffee table of sorts. Cluttered with the several abandoned coffee mugs and an empty bowl with a bent spoon in it, the table stood next to a small mattress heaped with twisted sheets and laundry. The mattress apparently served as both bed and couch.

  There were two very elegant objects in the room, however—a pair of Irish harps. The sun was setting in the windows behind them, and in the last light of day, they stood with stately grace, their fine wooden scrollwork lovingly polished to a high sheen.

  “You play these?” Frank asked him in astonishment.

  Without looking up from the guitar, which he was carefully wiping down with a cloth, Buzz said, “Didn’t you tell him, Irene?”

  “I first met Buzz at an Irish music festival,” I said. “He doesn’t just play the harp.”

  “Other instruments, too?” Frank asked.

  “Sure,” Buzz said, looking back at us now. “I grew up in a musical family.”

  “That isn’t what I meant,” I said. “He doesn’t just play it. He coaxes it to sing.”

  “Sure and you’ve an Irish silver tongue now, haven’t ye, me beauty?” Buzz said with an exaggerated brogue.

  “Prove my point, Buzz. Play something for us.”

  He shook his head. “Haven’t touched them in months except to keep the dust off them,” he said. “That’s the past.” He patted the guitar case. “This is the future.” He laughed when he saw my look of disappointment. “My father feels the same way—but promise you won’t stop speaking to me like he has.”

  “No, what you play is your choice.”

  “Glad to know at least one person thinks so. Shall we go?”

  “Need help carrying your equipment?” Frank offered. I was relieved to see him warming up a little.

  “Oh, no, I’m just taking my ax, man.”

  “Your ax?”

  “My guitar. I never leave it at the club. My synthesizer, another amp and a bunch of other equipment are already at the club—I just leave those there. But not my Strat.”

  Q: How do you get a guitar player to turn down?

  A: Put sheet music in front of him.

  On the way to Club 99, Buzz talked to Frank about his early years of performing with the Sullivan family band, recalling the friendship his father shared with my late mentor, O’Connor.

  “O’Connor told me to come to this music festival,” I said. “There was a fifteen-year-old lad who could play the Irish harp better than anyone he’d ever met, and when he got to heaven, he expected no angel to play more sweetly.”

  “Oh, I did all right,” he said shyly. “But my training wasn’t formal. She tell you that she helped me get into school, Frank?”

  “No—”

  “It was your own hard work that got you into that program,” I said.

  “Naw, I couldn’t have done it without you. You talked that friend into teaching me how to sight read.” He turned to Frank. “Then she practically arm-wrestled one of the profs into giving me an audition.”

  Frank smiled. “She hasn’t changed much.”

  “Sorry, Buzz,” I said, “I thought it was what you wanted.”

  “It was!” Buzz protested. “And I never could have gone to college without your help.”

  “Nonsense. You got the grades on your own, and all the talent and practice time for the music was your own. But when your dad told me you dropped out at the beginning of this past semester, I just figured—”

  “I loved school. I only left because I had this opportunity.”

  “What opportunity?” Frank asked.

  “The band you’re going to hear tonight,” he said proudly.

  I was puzzled. “It’s s
till avant garde?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hmm. I guess I never thought there was much money in avant garde.”

  “Not here in the U.S.—locally, Club Ninety-nine is about the only place we can play regularly, and they don’t pay squat there. Our band is too outside for a lot of people.”

  “Outside?” I asked.

  “Yeah, it means—different. In a good way. You know, we push the envelope. Our music’s very original, but for people who want the Top Forty, we’re a tough listen. That’s the trouble with the music scene here in the States. But Mack—our bass player—came up with this great plan to get us heard over in Europe. We made a CD a few months ago, and it’s had a lot of airplay there. We just signed on for a big tour, and when it’s over, we’ve got a steady gig set up in a club in Amsterdam.”

  “I had no idea all of this was happening for you, Buzz. Congrats.”

  “Thanks. I’m so glad you’re finally going to get to hear us play—three weeks from now, we’ll be in Paris. Who knows when you’ll get a chance to hear us after that—Frank, it’s been awhile since Irene heard me play and—oh!” He pointed to the right. “Here’s the club. Park here at the curb. There’s not really any room at the back.”

  He had pointed out a small, brown building that looked no different from any other neighborhood bar on the verge of ruin. A small marquee read, “Live Music. Wast Land. No Cover Charge Before 7 P.M.”

  “Wast Land?” Frank asked. “Is that your band?”

  “The Waste Land. The ‘e’ is missing. And the word ‘The.’ ”

  “You named the band after the poem by T.S. Eliot?” Frank asked.

  “You’ve read T.S. Eliot’s poetry?” Buzz asked in unfeigned disbelief.

  “Yeah. I think it made me a more dangerous man.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  Buzz sat back against the seat and grinned. “Cool!”

  Q: What band name on a marquee will always guarantee a crowd?

  A: “Free Beer”

  As we pushed open the padded vinyl door of Club 99, our nostrils were assailed by that special blended fragrance—a combination of stale cigarette smoke, old sweat, spilt beer and unmopped men’s room—that is the mark of the true dive. I was thinking of borrowing Frank’s cotton and sticking it in my nose.

  Behind the bar, a thin old man with tattoo-covered arms and a cigarette dangling from his mouth was stocking the beer cooler, squinting as the cigarette’s smoke rose up into his own face. He nodded at Buzz, stared a moment at Frank, then went back to his work. We were ignored completely by the only other occupant, a red-faced man in a business suit who was gazing into a whiskey glass.

  “I thought you said the band was meeting here at seven,” I said as we walked along the sticky floor toward the stage. I glanced at my watch. Seven on the dot.

  “The others are always late,” Buzz said. He set up his guitar, then invited us into a small backstage room that was a little less smelly than the rest of the bar. It housed a dilapidated couch and a piano that bore the scars of drink rings and cigarette burns. The walls of the room were covered with a colorful mixture of graffiti, band publicity photos and handbills.

  “Is there a photo of your band up here?” Frank asked.

  “Naw. Most of those are pretty old. But I can show you photos of the other members of the band. Here’s Mack and Joleen, when they were in Maggot.” He pointed to two people in a photo of a quartet. Everyone wore the pouting rebel expression that’s become a standard in band photos. The man Buzz pointed out was a bass player, about Buzz’s age, with long, thick black hair. The woman, boyishly thin, also had long, thick black hair.

  “That photo’s about ten years old. Mack and Joleen were together then.”

  “Together?”

  “Yeah. You know, lovers.”

  “They aren’t now?”

  “No, haven’t been for years. But they get along fine.”

  Q: What’s the difference between a drummer and a drum machine?

  A: With a drum machine, you only have to punch in the information once.

  “Over here’s a photo of Gordon. He’s a great drummer,” Buzz said. “He hates this photo. He said the band sucked. Its name sure did.”

  He pointed to a photo of a band called “Unsanitary Conditions.” Buzz was right—I didn’t think too many club owners would be ready to put that on their marquees. The drummer, a lean but muscular man, wasn’t wearing a shirt over his nearly hairless chest. He had also shaved all the hair from his head. He held his drumsticks tucked in crossed-arms. He was frowning. It didn’t look like a fake frown.

  Live, updated versions of two of the band members arrived a few minutes later. Gordon looked pretty much the same as he did in the “Unsanitary Conditions” photo. He was wearing a shirt, and he had short orange hair on his head, but the frown gave him away.

  “Her royal-fucking-highness is late again, I see,” he seethed, then upon realizing that Buzz wasn’t alone, smiled and said politely, “Hi, I’m Gordon. Are you Buzz’s folks?”

  Frank snorted with laughter behind me.

  “Oh man!” Buzz said in embarrassment. “These are my friends. They aren’t that old!”

  “Oh, sorry,” Gordon said. “Buzz, did you listen to that tape I gave you?” He broke off as the door opened again.

  Pre-empting a repeat of Gordon’s mistake, Buzz quickly said, “Mack, these are my friends. Frank and Irene, this is Mack.”

  It was a good thing Buzz introduced us. Mack was now balding, and his remaining hair was very short, including a neatly-trimmed beard. I judged him to be in his mid-thirties, closer to our age than Buzz’s, with Gordon somewhere in between the two.

  “Hi, nice to meet you,” he said, but seemed distracted as he looked around the small room.

  “No,” Gordon said, “Joleen isn’t here yet. Shit, can you imagine what touring with her will be like?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Mack said placatingly. “She’ll be very professional.”

  Gordon didn’t look convinced.

  “Uh, Buzz,” Mack said, “the house is starting to fill up. Maybe you should find some seats for your friends.”

  I thought Mack was just trying to make the band’s in-fighting more private, but when Buzz led us back out into the club, a transformation had taken place. Taped music was playing over the speakers, a recording of frenzied sax riffs that could barely be heard above people talking and laughing and drinking.

  There was an audience now. The man in the business suit had left the bar, and the place was starting to fill up with a crowd that seemed mainly to be made up of young . . . as I sought a word for the beret-clad, goatee-wearing men and their mini-skirted female companions, Frank whispered, “Beatniks! And to think I gave away my bongo drums.”

  “Poetry and bongo drums?” I whispered back. “Did Kerouac make you want to run away from home?”

  “As Buzz said, I’m not that old.”

  Buzz wanted us to sit near the stage, but I knew better. I muttered something about acoustics and we found a table along the back wall, next to the sound man. Buzz sat with us for a few minutes, and I was pleased to see that Frank was starting to genuinely like him.

  Buzz might not be sarcastic, but he is Irish, and he was spinning out a tale about learning to play the uilleann pipes that had us weeping with laughter. Just then a woman walked on stage, shielded her eyes from the lights and said over one of the microphones, “Buzz! Get your ass up here now!”

  Q: What’s the difference between a singer and a terrorist?

  A: You can negotiate with a terrorist.

  The club fell silent and there was a small ripple of nervous laughter before conversation started up again. The sound man belatedly leaned over and turned off her mike. He shook his head, murmured, “Maybe I’ll remember to turn that on again, bitch,” and upped the vo
lume on the house speakers. I could hear the saxophone recording more clearly now, but I was distracted by my anger toward the woman.

  She was thin and dressed in a black outfit that was smaller than some of my socks. Her hair was short and spiky; I couldn’t see her eyes, but her mouth was hard, her lips drawn tight in a painted ruby slash across her pale face.

  “Joleen,” Buzz said, as if the name explained everything. He quickly excused himself and hurried up to the stage as Joleen stepped back out of the lights. The other members of the band soon joined them on stage. If Buzz had been bothered by her tone, he didn’t show it.

  The group did a sound check, only briefly delayed while Joleen cussed out the sound man and proved she might not need a mike. The members of the band then left the stage with an argument in progress. Although I couldn’t make out what they were saying, Gordon and Joleen were snapping at one another, the drummer looking ready to raise a couple of knots on her head. Mack was making “keep it quiet” motions with his hands, while Buzz seemed to be lost in his own thoughts, ignoring all of them.

  “I think I’m going to need a drink,” Frank said. “You want one?”

  “Tell you what—I’ll drive home. Have at it.”

  Frank spent some time talking to the bartender, then came back with a couple of scotches. He downed the first one fairly quickly, and was taking his time with the second when the band came back on stage.

  Q: How can you tell if a stage is level?

  A: The bass player is drooling out of both sides of his mouth.

  The sound man turned on his own mike and said, “Club Ninety-nine is pleased to welcome The Waste Land.” There was a round of enthusiastic applause. Joleen held the mike up to her lips and said softly, “We’re going to start off with a little something called ‘Ankle Bone.’ ” Amid hoots and whistles of approval, the band began to play.

  The music was rapid-fire and intricate, and quite obviously required great technical skill. Joleen’s voice hit notes on an incredible range. There were no lyrics (unless they were in some language spoken off planet), but her wild mix of syllables and sounds was clearly not sloppy or accidental.

  The rest of the band equaled her intensity. As Mack and Buzz played, their fingers flew along the frets; Gordon drummed to complex and changing time signatures. But at the end of the first song and Frank’s second scotch, he leaned over and whispered, “Five bucks if you can hum any of that back to me.”